Gazing on Borrowed Time

America is divided into two camps, and the two have almost nothing in common. No, not the red states and blue states. America is divided into the rubberneckers and the squeamish. When there is a dreadful pile-up on the freeway, rubberneckers will contort themselves in painful ways to catch any glimpse they can of the twisted steel and spilled fuel and carnage. The squeamish, meanwhile, tighten their grip on the steering wheel and stare straight ahead, creeping along until the suffering is out of sight.

I confess, I look. But I don’t look as hungrily as I once did, and I’ve worried that I might be losing my voyeuristic edge. But it turns out I’m not alone in this metamorphosis. New research is showing that we all use the way we gaze at the world as a precision psychological tool to amplify our mood, whether cheerful or doom-and-gloom. And what’s more, our tendency toward rubbernecking or squeamishness is closely connected to our sense of where we are in life’s journey--and of our growing or shrinking possibilities.

This emotional reckoning all begins with the eyes. It may seem like our gaze flits around capriciously, but apparently our eye movements are not as random as one would think. Scientists use sophisticated machines to track the eyes’ darting and stopping, and can tell when someone has “fixated” on something out there. We’re talking milliseconds here, but these fleeting fixations are a good proxy for a lingering gaze—or for avoidance.

In a series of laboratory experiments at Brandeis University, psychologist Derek Isaacowitz tested the connection between gaze and mood and motivation. He used a standard personality test to separate optimists from pessimists, and then had both look at pictures. Some were photos of emotionally neutral faces, while others were images of skin cancer, unpleasant and graphic in detail. The sunnier volunteers fixated on the cancer images much less than their gloomier peers, suggesting that they were using their gaze as a tool to avoid going over to the dark side. This was true even if the subjects had a family history of cancer, and therefore a reason to be preoccupied with the disease.

So, nothing but blue skies do I see. If Isaacowitz had stopped there, the study would have done little more than confirm some song lyrics. But he decided to explore the gaze-mood connection in more detail. In another experiment, for example, he compared older and younger adults, measuring their gaze as they looked at happy, sad, angry and fearful faces. The older participants had a clear preference for the happy facial expressions and avoided the angry faces. The young people lingered on the fearful faces. Isaacowitz speculates, in the April issue of the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science, that older people’s gaze may reflect an underlying motivation to regulate their emotions and feel good. As people age, they may increasingly feel like they’re living on borrowed time, and so pursue emotionally meaningful, uplifting experiences. They don't have time for car wrecks.

Isaacowitz wanted to make sure his results weren’t being queered by a general cognitive decline in the elderly. So he ran another experiment comparing two groups who were both young but had very different time perspectives: college freshmen and college seniors. He reasoned that the seniors, with graduation looming, might have a more constrained sense of the future. And indeed, the seniors spent less time gazing at negative images than did first-year students.

There is a theory in psychology that humans are motivated by a desire to control their world. As people age, they tend to focus on goals that are attainable, and to disengage from unrealistic goals, which can lead to failure and unhappiness. In a final experiment, Isaacowitz compared childless women over age 40 with those under 40. Though there are exceptions, 40 is generally accepted as the time when a woman’s biological clock stops ticking, and Isaacowitz wanted to see if gaze and mood were intertwined with age and life planning. He showed both groups pictures of babies, and also (to control for cuteness) pictures of puppies and kittens. The women who were past child-bearing age averted their gaze from the babies more quickly than the younger women, suggesting that they were conserving their emotional resources for realistic life choices. (They all fixated on the puppies and kittens.)

So it’s too simplistic to conclude that happy people gaze at happy images just to stay happy. After all, cute babies make most of us feel good, so we turn away from them at the expense of our own momentary happiness. It appears that gaze is much more complex and powerful than that, a tool for nothing less than goal achievement and control in life. Now that's something for aging rubberneckers to ponder.

For more insights into human nature, visit the Association for Psychological Science website at www.psychologicalscience.org.

Revenge of the Innumerates

There isn’t much good comedy that deals with mathematics, so a funny scene from Peggy Sue Got Married has stuck with me since that movie came out way back in 1986. The middle-aged Peggy Sue, distraught about her failing marriage, has been improbably transported back to her high school days. But she is completely aware of everything in her future life, so when she finds herself sitting in algebra class once again, she can't even pretend she cares. She blows off the exam, and when the disgruntled math teacher demands that she explain, she says dismissively: "I happen to know that in the future I will not have the slightest use for algebra."

Many people would no doubt applaud Peggy Sue, as a few did in the theater 20 years ago. Beyond basic arithmetic, isn’t math useful just for future math teachers, to torment another generation of high school students? Unhappily, such disdain for numbers has left a lot of Americans mathematically illiterate—or “innumerate” in the coinage of experts. And new evidence suggests that inept everyday mathematicians make unwise judgments and regrettable decisions in everything from personal health to con games. What’s more, those of us who are bad with numbers appear more likely to make bad choices because we are under the sway of our own misplaced emotions.

Psychologist Ellen Peters works at Decision Research, a company in Eugene, Oregon, that studies, well, how people make decisions. She is particularly interested in a phenomenon called “framing”—an idea in decision science that basically means how information is presented, how life’s questions are posed. So for example, people rate a hamburger as tastier and less greasy if it is labeled 75% lean rather than 25% fat. No, they really do. This is a good example of everyday innumeracy.

Peters and her colleagues decided to do a laboratory test of the connection between innumeracy, framing and emotion—emotion because choosing 75% lean over 25% fat is obviously not a purely logical choice. They did a set of experiments comparing mathematically savvy people with mathematically challenged. Let’s call them the nerds and the dimwits, just to save space. In one experiment, Peters asked volunteers to judge whether a mentally ill patient, recently released from the hospital, posed a danger to others in the months ahead. Sometimes they were told that 10 of 100 patients “like Mr. Jones” tend to commit acts of violence, while at other times they were told that 10% do so. The result? As reported in the journal Psychological Science, the dimwits were less fearful of the released patient if they were given a percentage rather than a number. One of Peters’ colleagues, Paul Slovic, has shown in a separate study that more abstract percentages conjure up benign images in the mind, whereas real numbers create frightening images: ten, count them, ten crazy people on the loose. The nerds, on the other hand, since they are facile with changing fractions and percentages back and forth, were not fooled by the ruse. Peters suspects the same dynamic is at work in her study.

Peters did a couple more tests to get at this dynamic in more detail. People are known to differ in how they make decisions, she explains, some being more deliberative and others more experiential and emotional. Peters wanted to explore these decision making styles, and whether numbers might have emotional meaning that influences people’s choices. To test this, she used jellybeans: In a large bowl, there were 100 jellybeans, nine colored and the rest white. In a second smaller bowl, there were ten jellybeans, one of which was colored. The bowls were clearly labeled 9% colored beans and 10% colored beans, to give the dim-witted every chance to make a smart choice. Yet they didn’t. When told they could win money by blindly picking a colored jellybean, they were way more likely to pick from the larger bowl despite the poorer odds of winning. Also, when asked about their feelings, they were much less precise about what motivated their choice, suggesting that the emotional “hit” from the vision of nine winners was just to irresistible to pass up. The nerds were too focused on the numbers to get sidetracked by irrelevant emotional images. Or, alternatively (and this is going to be hard for many of us dimwits to compute), they may actually get their emotional kicks from manipulating the numbers.

Now here is where it gets really entertaining. In a final experiment, Peters made up two wagers, and asked people which was the better bet. If these numbers seem a bit arbitrary, it’s because they are: In one wager, there was a 7-in-36 chance of winning $9 and a 29-in-36 chance of winning nothing. In the second, there was also a 7-in-36 chance of winning $9, but a 29-in-36 chance of losing a nickel. The point of this was to make the probabilities vague, not readily available even to the number lovers. What does it mean to win $9? Is that excellent, or unremarkable? Is 7-in-36 attractive? Interestingly, it was the nerds who made the worse decision in these somewhat murky circumstances. They chose the win-loss wager over the no-risk wager. It’s possible that the possibility of losing a nickel, as trivial as that is, provided context for understanding a $9 win, making it more appealing. Whatever the mental and emotional dynamics involved, the take-home message is one we innumerates have always known: Nerds can sometimes be too smart for their own good.

For more insights into human nature, visit the Association for Psychological Science website at www.psychologicalscience.org.

No Money-Back Guarantees

Fans of the long-running TV sitcom Seinfeld will remember the episode in which Jerry discovers he is “Even-Steven.” When he misses out on a coveted job, a new opportunity unexpectedly presents itself. He loses a $20 bill, and before he can wallow in his disappointment he lucks into a $20 windfall. Everything in his universe balances out. The episode ends with his girlfriend breaking up with him. She expects hand-wringing, but instead she gets an unfazed shrug: “That’s fine,” he says cheerfully. “Someone else will come along.” He likes knowing what the future holds.

And who wouldn’t like such certainty? But Seinfeld is fiction, and in real life few of us have the luxury of confidently knowing the future. Indeed, the opposite is usually true. When we experience a major disappointment, we’re more likely to envision the future as bleak, and ourselves as supremely unhappy. And we likewise expect that our good fortunes will make us feel terrific. But most of the time, argues Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert, we’re wrong. As he explains in his new book Stumbling on Happiness, we constantly err in our forecasts of future misery—and future happiness. In short, we’re lousy at imagination.

But that doesn’t stop us from trying. In fact, Gilbert says, one thing that distinguishes the human brain from lesser brains is its ability to predict—to conjure up scenarios and situations that don’t yet exist. Our neurological wiring has programmed us to read “the hearts and minds of the people we’re about to become,” but unfortunately we’re not programmed to do it well. As with eyesight and memory, imagination is an imperfect talent, yet we make decisions and choices every day based largely on this cognitive “stumbling.”

Gilbert and his colleagues have run many experiments to explore emotional forecasting and its mishaps. For example, in one experiment volunteers were given a plate of potato chips to contemplate; nearby was another plate, containing either a very good chocolate or a tin of sardines. When the volunteers were asked to imagine eating the chips, and to rate the experience, those with chocolate nearby reported much less enjoyment than those with sardines nearby.

That in itself is not surprising. They were obviously comparing the imaginary chocolate with the imaginary canned fish, and it’s not a shock which won out. But here’s the interesting part: When they actually ate the chips, they liked them equally well whether there was chocolate or fish nearby. In other words, the predicted disappointment was illusory. It was based on a meaningless comparison. The reality of actually munching chips trumped the imaginary version that had been conjured up.

Such failures of imagination happen all the time outside the laboratory, Gilbert says, and they affect our life choices and our happiness. Consider this hypothetical in which people have a choice of jobs: One job pays $30,000 the first year, $40,000 the second, and $50,000 the third. Not bad. The other offers $60,000 at first, but then only $50,000, and finally $40,000. Inexplicably, most people choose the first job, even though in the long run they will make less money. Why? The simple answer is that people hate pay cuts. The more complicated answer has to do with perversity of the human mind, which for unknown reasons favors relative numbers over absolutes. In order to avoid the psychological discomfort of taking a pay cut, people fail to imagine themselves three years hence, when their actual (and completely avoidable) loss of 30 grand will almost certainly make them very unhappy.

Here’s one more example from the entertaining abundance that make up Stumbling. Why is it, Gilbert asks, that most of us would drive clear across town to save $50 on a $100 radio, but wouldn’t consider the same inconvenience to save $50 on a $100,000 car? The answer, again, is that we think in relative terms, not absolutes. Getting a good radio at half price is a bargain. Getting that fancy car for $99,950 is not a bargain at all; the savings is trivial. Such reasoning and behavior drive economists crazy, Gilbert says, because to an economist $50 is $50 is $50. But paradoxically, it takes an act of supreme imagination to get to this obvious truth.

Gilbert has shown in other experiments that he can train people to avoid making emotional forecasting errors. But then one is left with a larger question, whether we want to make the most rational decision every time, even if it maximizes personal happiness. On this Gilbert is ambivalent. It could be that our distorted views of future happiness—or misery—serve some larger social purpose, as yet unknown. Maybe we really don’t want a world full of Even-Stevens.

For more insights into human nature, visit the Association for Psychological Science website at www.psychologicalscience.org.

"OK, Now for the Boxspring ..."

Moving a couch into a third-story walk-up is one of those everyday miracles that isn’t celebrated nearly enough. The couch is heavy and unwieldy, the staircase is steep and angular, and the banister is always in the way. There is no way you can manage this job by yourself, but the cousin who agreed to help out is surely more trouble than he’s worth. Yet somehow you do it. Grunting, not speaking, often without eye contact, the two of you nudge and jostle and heave and just when the threshold seems impossibly narrow . . . it’s in! A miracle. Next time, before you reach for that cold one, sing hosannas.

Men and their cousins have presumably been performing these feats for centuries, eons probably. But how do we do it? How do we get two complex, independent nervous systems to work together on such a complex task? Northwestern University’s Kyle Reed put together a team of psychologists and engineers to explore this phenomenon in a laboratory, to see how perception and touch combine in everyday acts of cooperation.

The scientists didn’t dare ask volunteers to move a stranger’s couch. They would be unethical. So they simulated that challenge by devising an elaborate task that demanded accurate eye-hand coordination. Basically, they had two participants hold two ends of a crank; they couldn’t see each other or talk, but together they had to manipulate the crank to play a rudimentary video game. They could also do the task alone, which each of them also tried.

The findings, from hundreds of trials, were intriguing. As they report in the May issue of Psychological Science, each of participants worked harder when coordinating with someone else, exerting more force on the crank than when they worked solo. But interestingly, the extra exertion was used to work against the partner, not with him. And the participants sensed this: Some actually complained afterward that the partner was more of an impediment than a help.

Or so it seemed. But in fact this perception was wrong. When the actual times were tallied, the participants consistently did better working together than either of them did working alone. The physical resistance that they felt the other exerting was real, but it was somehow contributing to their shared success. The researchers speculate that the two participants’ physical contact, even though it was by way of a mechanical device, acted as an effective form of communication. They used this tugging and pulling to come up with a cooperative strategy that even they were unaware of.

Now before you break into song, know that none of this will make hauling the next couch up all those stairs any easier. But at least you might have more generous thoughts about your hapless cousin as you struggle to the top.

For more insights into human nature, visit the Association for Psychological Science website at www.psychologicalscience.org.

Going, Going ... Up a Hill

The great Yankee slugger Mickey Mantle, when asked about his uncanny ability to blast home runs, famously replied: “I never really could explain it. I just saw the ball as big as a grapefruit.” It’s not surprising really that the Hall-of-Famer couldn’t explain his experience in the batter’s box. What he was describing was one of the fundamental mysteries of human perception, one that has intrigued psychologists for more than half a century.

Psychologist Dennis Proffitt took The Mick’s comment and ran with it. A perception expert at the University of Virginia, Proffitt wondered if other, lesser athletes had similar experiences. So he went to a local softball game, and at the end of the game he asked the players to estimate the size of the ball. The bigger they perceived the ball to be, the higher their batting average, and vice versa.

What this small study suggests, according to Proffitt, is that human perception is much more complex than simple vision. It includes vision—what’s actually recorded on the retina—but the brain mixes that imagery with all sorts of mental and emotional baggage. For poor hitters, the ball is perceived as tiny and distant because it is “out of reach”—beyond their ability to connect with it, emotionally and actually.

Ultimately, Proffitt believes, such perceptual “errors” may be beneficial. Indeed, a distorted view of our surroundings may be crucial to the way we navigate through a dangerous world. Proffitt and his colleagues have run a whole battery of experiments to demonstrate this idea, none having to do with baseball, all reported in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science. In one series of experiments, they had students stand at the bottom of various hills and estimate the angle of the slope. They were very bad at this. For example, state law in Virginia prohibits any roads with a grade greater than 9 degrees; the students consistently estimated steep roads to be 25 degrees or more.

This universal tendency to distort steepness can probably be traced back to our ancient ancestors, who constantly had to conserve energy. They did this in part by choosing to (or choosing not to) climb a particular hill. This wasn’t a conscious calculation, of course; they didn’t estimate each hill’s slope in degrees and weigh it against their stamina. But that’s in effect what they were doing day in and day out on an unconscious level. And what we still do today. Proffitt showed this in several experiments: He deliberately fatigued some participants (by having them jog); he made others wear a heavy backpack; he compared fit and unfit students; and he observed the elderly and frail. In every case, the participants' fatigue (real or anticipated) made them overestimate the slope of the hill in front of them.

And it’s not just energy. Proffitt also had participants stand on the top of a 30 degree hill. That’s a very steep hill, almost impossible to descend without falling. He found that people consistently saw the hill as steeper when they were at the top of it than when they were at the bottom. Why? Probably an ingrained fear of falling, Proffitt speculates. The top of a 30 degree hill is a dangerous place, he notes. People likely see steep hills as even steeper because part of the mind is imagining a skull-cracking injury—or death.

Happily, all of these calculations take place instantaneously outside our awareness. Imagine trying to get through a day if you had to considers risks and benefits of every footstep. As Proffitt says, “A principal function of perception is to defend people from having to think.” Or as another famous Yankee, Yogi Berra, once quipped: “You can’t think and hit at the same time.”

For more insights into human nature, visit the Association for Psychological Science website at www.psychologicalscience.org.

Sleeping with the Enemy

All romance comes with some rough strife. So we try to let the petty quarrels slide, and trust our relationships will become less adversarial over time. But will they? It's looking more and more like the tensions and conflicts over commitment and fidelity and trust and jealousy are such primitive evolutionary adaptations that they are wired into our very DNA. Indeed at the genetic level men and women appear more like combatants than lovers.

This unwanted valentine comes from a relatively new branch of science called evolutionary psychology. The basic premise of evolutionary psychology is that when early humans were evolving on the savannah millions of years ago, much of their behavior was shaped by pressures to survive. Not to survive as individuals (as in staying clear of the mastodon stampede), but to survive as an ancestral lineage, which meant propagating one’s genes into the next generation. The behaviors (and attitudes) that maximized sexual “fitness” over time became ingrained in the genes themselves, and remain with us today.

We should be happy about these adaptations. They are the reason we’re here today. But what worked on the savannah doesn’t always work exactly the same way in the modern bedroom. Three University of New Mexico psychologists—Steven Gangestad, Randy Thornhill and Christine Garver-Apgar—have been studying the female menstrual cycle as an example of our Darwinian legacy gone awry. More specifically, they have been studying the way men and women’s feelings and attitudes fluctuate along with a woman’s hormonal cycle.

Ancestral women basically wanted two things in a mate: They wanted good genes, to make their offspring (and their offspring’s offspring) more fit for long-term survival, and they wanted a good partner, who would stay around to help raise the kids. But here’s the rub: Those things don’t always come in the same man, so women developed a strategy (on an unconscious level) to hedge their genetic bets. The New Mexico psychologists hypothesized that vestiges of this ancient strategy (and of men’s counter-strategy) might be seen in a modern couple’s behavior when a woman is ovulating.

Not to put too fine a point on it, they hypothesized that women tend to choose good, solid husbands to marry, but that they desire sexier men when they are most fertile. Why sexier men? Because women’s tastes in men also have ancient roots, and what we think of as sexy today equates with genetic fitness. Symmetrical build and features, good scent, deep voice, competitive personality—those traits all signal stable genes, as they did three million years ago.

The scientists have done several studies to test this idea, and the results, as reported in the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science, powerfully support the theory. For example, in four experiments women were asked to smell men’s unlaundered T-shirts: In every case the women, when they were ovulating, preferred the T-shirts of men with symmetrical features. When they were not fertile (80% of the time), they had no preference. (The scientists suspect a hormone mediates such preferences, but none has yet been identified.)

In another experiment, women watched videotapes of various men. The researchers found that fertile women prefer men who are confident, even condescending toward other men. And in yet another study, ovulating women were more attracted to creativity than to wealth. Indeed, women’s interest in traits typically associated with good life partners—financial success, kindness, intelligence, good parenting—did not fluctuate at all over their cycles. And so much for devotion: Men judged to be faithful were actually seen as less sexy by fertile women.

But hold up. Men are not just passive dupes in this mating game. If women are wired for infidelity a few days every month, then it stands to reason that men might be wired to avoid being cuckolded. And in fact that’s what the studies show: Not only are men sensitive to signals that women are ovulating (again, scent is a big cue), they also become more vigilant, proprietary and monopolizing when their wives are ovulating. It was the wives who reported both their own wandering desires and their husbands’ hovering. So one of the perverse legacies of our distant past seems to be that men are attentive precisely when women most want to be left alone with their fantasies. Perhaps future studies will reveal the gene for clueless.

For more insights into human nature, visit the Association for Psychological Science website at www.psychologicalscience.org.

In the Form of a Question, Please

It’s Final Jeopardy, and you’re in a dead heat with the two other contestants. The category is American History (yes!), and Alex reveals the Final Jeopardy answer: George Washington was elected president of the United States in this year. Uh-oh. You don’t know for sure. There is a lot of money at stake, and you have two kids in college. You’re going to have to make an educated guess. Doo-doo-doo-doo . . .

So how do you come up with your best guess? Believe it or not, psychologists have been studying how we make educated guesses longer than Jeopardy has been on TV, so by now they have a fairly sophisticated theory about the mental strategy most people use. It’s called the “anchor-and-adjustment” strategy, which translated means this: When we don’t have the precise answer we need stored in our memory, we use the next best thing, a factual “anchor.” None of us knows when the father of our country was actually elected (whew!), but most of us have memorized some other facts. We probably know, for example, that the Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776.

Okay, 1776, so that’s at least a starting point. But you know it’s not a game winner, and the clock is ticking. So beginning with that mental anchor, you start adjusting. Was it the next year, 1777? Five years later? Could it have been as much as 20 years later? What the hell was going on in those years anyway? In your mind you come up with a range of plausible answers, moving away from the anchor, and as time runs out you jot down the best of the possibilities.

This basic idea has been studied and reworked for decades, and is holy writ for most cognitive psychologists. But it still leaves a lot of questions begging for answers, most notably: Why are our educated guesses wrong a lot of the time? Two psychologists—Nicholas Epley of the University of Chicago and Thomas Gilovich of Cornell—ran a couple experiments recently to refine the theory and see if they could answer this question.

They had students reason out George Washington’s election date, and they also had them ponder other Jeopardy-like facts. For instance, in the category of Animal Mothers: the number of months a pregnant elephant carries her baby before birth. In the Potent Potables category: the freezing point of vodka. What they found, and report in the April issue of Psychological Science, is that the anchor exerts a kind of cognitive drag on the mind as it tries to adjust, so that the farther one gets from the anchor, the harder it is to keep adjusting. As a result, what the students did was adjust as far as they could, until they reached a date plausible enough to settle for. Researchers call this “satisficing”—as in, satisfying enough to suffice.

Epley and Gilovich did a few more experiments to see if they could explain satisficing. In one, they used a standard psychological test to sort out the most reflective students from the least, figuring that the ones who tended to mull things over would do better at guessing. In a second experiment, they asked the same questions of students who had spent the day boozing (Cornell students, no comment) and compared them to sober students. Finally, they did the laboratory version of Jeopardy with some students who were distracted and others who were not. They found, not surprisingly, that the reflective students did better at adjusting their guesses and approximating the actual date, as did the sober students and the less distracted students. Bottom line: Making education guesses takes a lot of mental effort, and many things can sabotage that effort.

But, hey, this is Jeopardy. You’re a reflective type, or you wouldn’t be even be up there. You sure didn’t need a psychologist to tell you not to have a martini before testing your wits on national television, and the only thing competing for your attention this moment is George Washington’s election. You anchor, you adjust, you take your best shot: What is 1788?

We’ve got a new Jeopardy champion.

For more insights into human nature, visit the Association for Psychological Science website at www.psychologicalscience.org.

"Une Petit Yogurt, S'il Vous Plait"

Americans typically eat yogurt out of 8-ounce containers. By contrast, the typical yogurt in a French market weighs just more than half that, about 125 grams. This seemingly pointless fact may hide a fundamental psychological truth about how humans make all sorts of choices in life.

That at least is the theory of University of Pennsylvania psychologist Andrew Geier and his colleagues, who are studying what they label “unit bias.” The number one, they argue, is a “natural unit,” and in the realm of food and diet that means one serving. The French don’t double up on their tiny yogurts to get the same volume of food or caloric intake as Americans. Instead, they simply stop eating after one serving, and therefore eat less overall, and therefore are more slender and healthier than overweight Americans.

That’s a heavy social burden for a simple yogurt container to carry. So Geier and colleagues decided to test the power of one in everyday settings. They did three similar experiments: In one, they put out a bowl of Tootsie Rolls for public consumption; some days the Tootsie Rolls were large, and other days they were small. They did the same test with Philadelphia-style soft pretzels; some days they put out whole pretzels, while other days they cut them in half. Finally, they put out a large bowl of M&Ms, alternating a tablespoon-sized serving spoon with a spoon four times that size.

The results, as reported in the June issue of the journal Psychological Science, were unambiguous. Whatever their junk food of choice, people helped themselves to substantially more when they were offered supersized portions. Put another way, offering small portions effectively controlled how much people ate.

Why are snackers so mesmerized by the number one? The scientists don’t know for sure, but they speculate that unit bias may result from a combination of learning and culture. Many American children are indoctrinated from early on to “clean their plates,” reinforcing the notion that a plateful is the appropriate amount to eat at a meal. And people may also limit themselves to one serving so as not to appear greedy or gluttonous.

Whatever the dynamic at work, the researchers believe that unit bias affects many choices we make every day. We typically go to one movie, not two, whether the movie is 90 minutes long or three hours. We only ride the roller coaster once at the amusement park, regardless of the ride’s length (there are deeply disturbed exceptions to every rule, of course).

But the most obvious implications of these snack-food experiments are in the public health arena, where overeating and obesity increasingly threaten Americans’ well being. Interestingly, food marketers appear to have picked up on this bit of psychological insight. A couple years ago the Nabisco company started selling junk food in 100-calorie "snack" units. Weight-conscious Americans loved then to the tune of $100 million a year, and many other food companies soon followed suit. Now we can get everything from Pringles to Sprite to Chips Ahoy! in prepackaged 100-calorie snacks. Chips are still chips, but it's better than pigging out on a family-size unit.

For more insights into human nature, visit the Association for Psychological Science website at www.psychologicalscience.org.

Don't Think About WMDs

The leaking of privileged information is commonplace in human affairs. Such everyday leaks rarely make the evening news, of course, because most of these plumbing mishaps don’t involve wars, and most leakers aren’t leaders of the free world. What’s more, unlike some newsworthy leaks, the vast majority of everyday leaks are unintentional.

Still, they are leaks just the same, and psychologists are very interested in why we all find it so difficult to keep secrets—even when motivated to. In a recent experiment, psychologists at the University of California—San Diego tested subjects to see how often (and under what circumstances) they betrayed knowledge that only they were privy to.

For the purpose of a laboratory experiment, the privileged information was not controversial. Indeed, it was kept simple and mundane: The subjects had information about a set of geometrical shapes that, if they weren’t careful, they could accidentally reveal in conversation. The researchers—psychologist Lianne Wardlow Land and colleagues at UCSD-- told some of the subjects to be careful not to reveal the private information. Others got no such instructions. Somewhat surprisingly, as they report in April issue of Psychological Science, those who should have been more guarded in conversation actually were more likely to leak the experimentally “classified” information.

Why would this happen? It’s possible that focusing attention on the classified information boosts its salience in people’s minds, overwhelming the knowledge that it is supposed to remain hidden. In this sense, the researchers say, the slips are like “Simon says” errors. The study builds on the well known psychological fact that most people have a great deal of trouble suppressing any thoughts: The classical experiment told people not to think about something—white bears, for example, or pink elephants. Most people are simply not able to keep such contraband thinking out of their consciousness, as hard as they might try—and indeed when they try, the suppressed information rebounds with a fury. The current study extends this notion from thinking to speech. The bottom line appears to be that most of us can’t be trusted to censor ourselves, whether the privileged knowledge is trivial or a matter of national security.

For more insights into the human mind, visit the Association for Psychological Science at www.psychologicalscience.org.

Thinking at Jet Speed

There is a psychology lesson in the new film United 93. This is the first major release about the horrific events of September 11, 2001, and it focuses on the doomed United Airlines flight that ended in a fiery crash in a Pennsylvania field. It concludes with the passengers’ failed attempt to overpower the Islamic terrorists who have commandeered the jet. All in all, a very somber story, and what’s worse, one depicting innocent victims of real-life evil.

So why did I feel so upbeat exiting the theater? It wasn’t because of the passengers’ brief act of desperate heroism at the end. That was too-little-too-late and really only added to the film’s depressing fatalism. No, United 93 was uplifting despite its content, and psychologists have an idea why this might be the case.

In an experiment at Princeton University, psychologist Emily Pronin studied manic thinking. At the extreme such rapid-fire mental processing can be a symptom of a debilitating psychological disorder, but we’ve all at one time or another experienced “racing thoughts” and what Pronin calls the accompanying “sense of wild exhilaration.” She and her Harvard colleague Daniel Wegner wanted to study this connection between pressurized thinking and mood.

To do so, the scientists experimentally manipulated the pace at which participants read a series of statements, some of which were depressing and others of which were upbeat. Then they assessed the subjects’ mood using a standard psychological measure. They found that, regardless of the content of the statements, the participants experienced more elation themselves when they processed the thoughts more quickly. In other words, the speed of cognitive processing overrode the actual meaning of the message.

What this suggests, the authors write in a forthcoming issue of Psychological Science, is that people literally “feel” their own rapid thinking. Pronin believes that such “cognitive feelings” could indeed explain my reaction to United 93: Despite its relentless negativity, the film is a constant bombardment of images, with no time out for rumination. It’s a filmmaking style that might be described as, well, manic.

For more insights into human nature, visit the Association for Psychological Science website at www.psychologicalscience.org

"I Need Some Distance."

We’ve all said it many times, or at least thought it. We feel the need for ‘psychological distance’ from a person or an event when we get bogged down in the clutter of details and need some meaningful perspective on things. Put another way, we feel “too close” to an experience to sort out what’s important and what isn’t.

Scientists have been studying this gut level feeling, and now believe that our perception of psychological distance may actually be closely related to how we think about geographical distance. New York University psychologists Kentaro Fujita and Marlone Henderson performed a couple simple experiments, in which they asked people to imagine an ordinary event. Specifically, they were to imagine helping a friend move into a new apartment. In some cases the event took place nearby (“outside of New York City, about three miles away from here”) and in other cases at a distance (“outside of Los Angeles, about 3000 miles away from here”).

Leaving aside the fact that one should never get roped into helping friends move, the researchers then asked the participants to imagine (and describe) a series of behaviors related to helping their friend move: locking a door, for example, and paying the rent. As they describe in the April issue of the journal Psychological Science, they found that when people were close to an event, they tended to think in rudimentary, mechanical terms: So locking a door would be “putting a key in the lock” and paying the rent would be simply “writing a check.” By contrast, those who had some distance from an event tended toward higher level interpretations that emphasized a behavior’s meaning: Thus locking the door was construed as “securing the house” and paying the rent was “maintaining a place to live.” This striking difference was seen even with seemingly irrelevant behaviors: For example, those close to the imagined event described climbing a tree as “holding on to branches,” while those at some remove thought in terms of “getting a good view.” (Clearly the former group couldn’t see the forest for the trees.)

So distance gives us meaning. Other studies have shown that time has the same effect as geography. That is, a recent event is interpreted in a much more pedestrian manner than a distant event, which is seen as more abstract and purposeful, suggesting that different kinds of distance are closely intertwined in our minds. So the word ‘travel’ for some may mean merely purchasing a ticket and boarding a plane, while for others it may conjure up something psychologically grander, more akin to “getting away from it all.”

For more insights into the human mind, visit the Association for Psychological Science at www.psychologicalscience.org.

Call it the 23-Across Phenomenon

I, like a lot of people, spend a chunk of most Sunday mornings puzzling over the New York Times crossword, often with friends. Anyone who likes this particular diversion knows that, while you do in fact “puzzle” out some answers painstakingly, many others come in a flash, effortlessly and seemingly out of nowhere. A friend once suggested that some enterprising neuroscientist ought to study our Sunday morning brains, to plumb the mystery of those eureka moments.

Well, scientists have pretty much done that. John Kounios of Drexel University and Mark Jung-Beeman of Northwestern scanned the brains of people as they solved a series of word puzzles--not a crossword precisely, but close enough. Like crossword puzzlers, these people were sometimes methodical but at other times they got the solution in a flash of insight. The scans revealed different patterns of brain activity underlying the different mental strategies. What’s more, it appears from the scans that the brain actually prepares itself for the possibility of an “aha! moment” even before the puzzling begins.

It’s the brain’s temporal lobe, more specifically. Just prior to a flash of insight, the brain momentarily revs up this brain region and dampens down the visual cortex, almost as if the puzzler were closing his eyes to allow the answer to pop into consciousness. It’s as if the puzzler is focusing inwardly, perhaps actively silencing irrelevant thoughts to get ready for the new, less laborious, mode of problem solving.

Kounios, who will publish this study in a forthcoming issue of Psychological Science, hopes that such insights into creative thinking may someday lead to techniques for comandeering the more inventive parts of our brain for important social purposes. The great medical scientist Louis Pasteur, he reminds us, said that “chance favors only the prepared mind.” Very well. But I for my part will be happy to imagine my temporal lobe clicking in when I beat everyone else to that six-letter answer to 23-across.

By the way, savor those eureka moments, but don’t delude yourself that those hours puzzling over the crossword are going to keep you sharper in your twilight years. In a report just published in Perspectives on Psychological Science, the University of Virginia’s Timothy Salthouse debunks the popular use-it-or-lose-it view of mental aging. He did a series of studies that showed, while the elderly do get better at a particular mental task when they practice it, such cognitive gymnastics have no general long-term benefit. Despite the idea’s intuitive appeal, and the strong desire to believe we can control our own destiny, says Salthouse, the mental-exercise hypothesis is “more an optimistic hope than an empirical reality.” What’s an 11-letter word for bitterly disappointed?

For more insights into human nature, visit the Association for Psychological Science website at www.psychologicalscience.org.