A (Very) Brief Interlude

I first learned about “speed dating” by watching the sitcom Sex and the City. Frustrated with her less-than-exciting romantic life, the red-headed Miranda Hobbes decides that she’s going to skip all the usual dating rigmarole and trust her first impressions. That’s basically all you can do with speed dates, which typically consist of one-on-one encounters lasting just three or four minutes. Miranda’s dating experiment ends badly, in large part because both she and her date, Harris, lie about themselves from the get-go. Not white lies, whoppers. He pretends to be an emergency room doctor, and she tells him she’s an airline stewardess, rather than the hard-driving Harvard-educated lawyer she really is.

Now I'm no expert on romantic attraction, but I have this theory that lying is not the best way to start a relationship. Not only because lies tend to catch up with you, as they did with Miranda and Harris, but also because people can detect so much about another person in just a few minutes: authenticity, confidence, fear, desperation.

Psychologists are very interested in first impressions, and in the nature of romantic attraction. What makes a date attractive, very quickly and in a romantic way? And what turns people off? Is falling in love just a subset of liking? It’s well known that we tend to like people who like us, and people who are generally friendly tend to be well liked. Does this hold for romantic attraction as well? Do amorous people attract the most attention? Or is it more appealing, as the old saw has it, to play “hard to get”?

A team of psychologists decided to explore some of these questions experimentally, and the tool they used for their research was—that’s right—speed dating. Paul Eastwick and Eli Finkel of Northwestern and Daniel Mochon and Dan Ariely of MIT had about 150 eligible men and women, about 20 years old, go on four-minute “dates” with about a dozen people of the opposite sex. For each of their dates, these men and women said thumbs-up or thumbs-down. But they also completed a set of questions, meant to take measure of both their romantic attraction and how much “chemistry" they experienced in each encounter. Finally, they asked everyone to answer this question about their dates: To what percentage of the other people here today will this person say “yes”? They wanted to see who was perceived as picky and who was, well, easy.

The scientists did allow those who were mutually attracted to one another to hook up again if they wanted to. That was not part of the experiment. It was just a nice thing to do. Then they crunched the data, and as they report in the April issue of the journal Psychological Science, the results were intriguing: If someone found just one of his or her dates especially attractive, but was not particularly interested in the others, the partner tended to reciprocate—with both desire and feelings of shared chemistry.

But if someone was indiscriminate, falling for everyone in the room, that was a big turnoff: Their dates felt neither sexual desire nor chemistry. These were also the people who were perceived as not at all picky—or, to put it another way, as desperate. And they were somehow broadcasting this attitude in these briefest of encounters.

The technical word for this is “loser.” But why, really, are these people sitting home alone on Saturday night? Why are amorous men and women unattractive? The scientists believe it goes beyond dating, and even beyond romantic attraction. People have a fundamental need to feel special and unique, they say, and this basic motivation may cut across all of our social interactions.

Other speed dating studies, by the way, have shown that people make up their minds about potential partners not in minutes but in seconds. This means that Miranda was probably wasting her time reinventing her resume. At that speed, that’s almost certainly not what Harris was sizing up.

For more insights into the quirks of human nature, visit “We’re Only Human . . .” at www.psychologicalscience.org/onlyhuman.

The Smiley Face Gambit

Anyone who has watched the movie An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore’s documentary about global warming, is familiar with the concept of a “carbon footprint.” Your carbon footprint is your personal contribution to harmful climate change, based on what kind of car you drive, how often you crank up the AC, and so forth. You can go on-line and actually calculate your carbon footprint, so you can see your share in the blame for all those beautiful calving glaciers and melting ice caps.

I plead guilty. The national average is 7.5 tons of carbon a year, and I am spewing out a whopping 11.2 tons. I also plead surprised. It must be the AC. Or maybe the bathroom light. I know I should be better about that. Whatever my failing, I confess I felt some shame when I first saw this number. What it said, graphically and undeniably, was this: Some Americans are responsible citizens, and you are not one of them.

I adjusted the thermostat.

I have since learned that this is a fairly typical human response. Without knowing it, I had been exposed to the power of what psychologists call a “normative message.” Most people want to be normal. We’re not comfortable being on the fringe. (There are deeply disturbed exceptions to every law of human nature, of course.) So when we are given information that underscores our deviancy, the natural impulse is to get ourselves as quickly as we can back toward the center.

Marketers know about this impulse, and a lot of marketing makes use of social norms. This is especially true of campaigns targeting some kind of public good: reducing smoking or binge-drinking, for example, or encouraging recycling. The problem with these campaigns is that, well, they often don’t work. Indeed, they sometimes appear to have the opposite of their intended effect.

Why would this be? Psychologist Wesley Schultz of California State University has a hunch about why. Despite the fact that we want to be normal, most people are very bad at estimating what normal human behavior really looks like. For example, many people probably think it’s typical to spew 11 tons of carbon into the world every year, while others might think that a couple tons is probably closer to the mark. I frankly had no clue what my carbon footprint was, or anyone else’s. So when Al Gore tells us that the national average is in fact 7.5 tons, he likely is sparking two very different reactions: Some, like me, feel guilty for being so gluttonous. But others probably react: whew, did something right for a change.

So I adjusted my thermostat out of guilt, but those feeling self-righteous are not going to do that. It wouldn’t make any sense. Indeed, Schultz and his colleagues suspect that people who are already performing better than the norm may also adjust—but in a socially undesirable way. That is, they also move toward the center, seeking out the average, but in their case by increasing their energy use. This boomerang effect could in theory offset any greening of behavior, such as mine, and account for the overall ineffectiveness of such marketing strategies.

Schultz decided to test this idea in the real world. He enlisted nearly 300 residents of San Marcos, California, who agreed to let him monitor their home energy consumption. He measured their energy use once to start, again soon after, and once again several weeks later. Throughout the experiment he gave them information about their actual energy use and how it compared to typical energy use in San Marcos.

Schultz wanted to test one additional idea. With some of the households, he didn’t just deliver straight information. He attached an emoticon to the information sheet. If the homeowners were below the community average in energy use they got a smiley face; if they were consuming more than their neighbors, they got a frowning face. He wanted to see if social approval or disapproval—conveyed by the emoticons—might moderate people’s behavior, for better or worse.

The results were clear. As reported in the May issue of the journal Psychological Science, the residents who got just straight information changed their behavior as predicted. That is, wastrels became more conservative, and the frugal became more licentious. There was a boomerang effect in other words. However, the greener consumers who also got praise, in the form of a smiley face, did not become more wasteful. The message they were getting was something like: “You’re doing better than most on the environmental front and society applauds you for this. Keep it up.” And they did.

How about the frowning face, the stinging symbol of society’s disappointment with you? Well, people who earned a frown did moderate their consumption, but no more than those who simply learned of their excessive energy consumption. When you know you’re misbehaving, you may not need finger wagging to get you to adjust your thermostat. Who knows what it would take to make you trade in that SUV for a socially responsible hybrid.

For more insights into the quirks of human nature, visit “We’re Only Human . . .” at www.pscyhologicalscience.org/onlyhuman.

Survival of the Steadiest

When I first studied psychology some years ago, personality typing was really big. Students would fill out batteries of tests and inventories and come away with tidy answers to the Big Question: Who Am I? One popular personality test, based on the thinking of the Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung, told me I was The Protector, which meant that I tended to let my feelings trump my reasoning. As an angst-ridden young adult, I was okay with that identity. I wasn’t quite as happy with being a Type A, which meant I was driven and competitive and hostile and would probably die young.

A lot of this was just parlor game. What did it mean that I shared my basic temperament with Louisa May Alcott and Robert E. Lee? But the clear message we all took away from this constant labeling was unmistakable: Who you are—your identity, your essence—is a crucial, one-time roll of the dice. Childhood experience might do some tinkering around the edges, but by early adulthood the collection of traits that defined you were pretty much fixed for life—or death, as the case may be.

Most psychologists don’t think so fatalistically about personality anymore. Indeed, quite the opposite, and for good reason. Many studies over many years now have shown that personality is quite malleable, and that it changes—or at least can change—not only in childhood, but in young adulthood, middle age, even when we are old and supposedly set in our ways. Psychologists still believe—more than ever--that personality is related to health and mortality. But most now contend that age-related shifts in our sense of identity are just as important as our genetic legacy. Here’s how it works.

First, forget those old categories. There is broad consensus today that personality is an amalgam of traits called the “Big Five”: Extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability, and openness to experience. Each of these broad measures can be broken down into smaller ones, but in general this taxonomy appears to take in most of what we think of as personhood. When you think of someone as basically “steady” or “flaky” or “gloomy” or “daring,” what you’re really doing is unconsciously taking a measure of these five traits and crunching them together.

So what makes a healthy personality? Psychologists have been studying this important question, and at least two of these five traits appear to be directly related to physical well being and longevity: Emotional stability and conscientiousness. More to the point, wellness is linked to changes in these traits over time.

Consider emotional stability. Or, rather, its polar opposite, which psychologists call neuroticism. Neuroticism is the tendency toward hand wringing and negative thinking. People with a heavy does of neuroticism don’t handle stress well at all, and are often anxious and moody. Such negativity has been linked to increased mortality in a number of studies, but for Purdue University psychologist Daniel Mroczek this finding raised as many questions as it answered. Does it follow that this inherited trait is a death sentence? Or can people with this propensity change their destiny?

Mroczek decided to explore this idea. Using a standard measure of neuroticism, he tracked more than 1600 men over 12 years, recording not only how neurotic they were at the start but also whether they got more or less neurotic over time. He also looked at mortality risk for these same men over an 18 year span. As reported in the May issue of the journal Psychological Science, being more neurotic than average was not enough in and of itself to predict an early death. But being a worrier and getting more stressed out over time was a ticket to an early grave. In other words, these men—all middle age or older to begin with—didn’t grow old gracefully. They got more and more fretful, and this downward spiral increased their risk for dying, mostly from cancer and heart disease.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that men with a fretful temperament, if they managed for whatever reason to chill a bit over time, had survival rates similar to those of emotionally stable men. This finding jibes with other life-span research on conscientiousness and health. Brent Roberts of the University of Illinois has done several studies showing that the cluster of traits comprising conscientiousness—orderliness, industry, reliability, conventionality, and so forth—not only can and do increase over the entire lifespan, but these changes are directly related to improved health and longevity.

Why? Well, there are a couple likely reasons. First, conscientious people create life paths for themselves that contribute to better health. That is, they are more successful in their careers, earn more money, have more stable families, and socialize more—all factors known to be linked to health. For example, Roberts tracked college-educated women from age 21 to age 52, and found that women who had been more conscientious in college were less likely to divorce and had more children than women who had been less centered. Other studies have linked conscientiousness to job stability and job satisfaction.

In addition, industrious and reliable people simply do fewer stupid things. They don’t smoke as much, drink as much, drive as fast, have sex with the wrong partners—all those things that we know kill us. This may seem self-evident at first, but what’s not is the link between healthy living and changes in personality. It appears that young adults especially start trying on certain roles—parent, reliable employee—and “watching themselves.” If they like what they see (and they often do), they in effect add a trait to their psychological repertoire that wasn’t there before. They change their opinion of themselves. So in a sense, conscientiousness shapes experience, which in turn helps people mature and become more solid. This is hopeful news for those parents despairing over their slacker teenager.

The effect of conscientiousness on longevity is not trivial. Indeed Roberts estimates that being a responsible person is as powerful as cardiovascular disease in determining how long we live. Psychologists have long suspected that a single common psychological trait may underlie all healthy choices, and conscientiousness is emerging as a strong candidate for that H factor. If so, simply acting “as if” you are solid and centered may be one way to a long healthy life.

For more insights into human nature, visit “We’re Only Human . . .” at www.psychologicalscience.org.