The Science of Cramming

I went to a very nerdy college. This school was so nerdy that the “mascot” was an engineer, and at football games students would chant: “Tangent, secant, cosine, sine. Three point one four one five nine. Go Engineers!”

I'm not kidding.

So how is it possible that today I do not even know what a secant is? Or a sine. To be truthful, I don’t think I really know what trigonometry is, though I’m pretty sure I did back then. My recollection is that I studied all the time, but I seem to have retained almost nothing from my early immersion in math and science.

Was I studying the wrong way during all those wee hours? Well, as it turns out I may have been. The fact is nobody talked much about how to study back then. You just went to class and did homework and took quizzes and complained about it. But you never thought about how long to study or when take a break or call it quits. But psychologists have been thinking about studying and memory and long-term learning, and it appears that some strategies really do work much better than others.

Consider “overlearning.” That’s the term learning specialists use for drilling even after you’ve mastered something. Say you’re studying new vocabulary words, flash-card style, and you finally run through the whole list error-free; any study beyond that point is overlearning. Is this just a waste of valuable time, or does this extra effort embed the new memory even deeper for the long haul?

University of South Florida psychologist Doug Rohrer decided to explore this question scientifically. Working with Harold Pashler of the University of California, San Diego, he had two groups of students study new vocabulary in different ways. One group drilled themselves five times; these students got a perfect score no more than once. The others kept drilling, for a total of ten trials; with this extra effort, the students had at least three perfect run-throughs. Then the psychologists quizzed all the students, once one week later and again three weeks after that.

The results were interesting. When the students took the test a week later, those who had done the extra drilling performed better. So it would work for something like cramming for the SATs, because you really don’t care if you forget those obscure words once you’re in college. But whatever edge the more effortful students had at one week had completely disappeared by four weeks. In other words, if students are interested in learning that lasts, that extra effort is really a waste. Go watch some TV or get some sleep.

Rohrer and Pashler also wanted to see if the scheduling of study breaks might make a difference in learning. It did. When the students took breaks ranging from five minutes to two weeks, those who had taken a one-day break performed best when they were tested ten days later. But if they were tested six months later (the laboratory equivalent of long-term learning), the optimal break time was a full month. In other words, as reported in the August issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science, “massing” all the study on a single topic together diminishes learning. It’s better to leave it alone for a while and then return to it, and indeed the longer you want new learning to endure, the longer the optimal break between study sessions.

All these experiments involved rote learning, but Rohrer and Pashler have also found similar effects with more abstract learning, like math. This is particularly troubling, the psychologists say, because most mathematics textbooks today are organized to encourage both overlearning and massing of study time, which means students are wasting a lot of precious learning time.

All we were taught about study skills at my nerdy school was to keep a clean, well-lit work space and eat a good breakfast, and most of us ignored that advice. I suspect there are a lot of reasons why I have forgotten everything about sines and secants over the years. But some scientifically-grounded learning skills couldn’t have hurt.

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

But I know you know that I know . . .

Your boss is in today, but he has a nasty case of the flu. What’s more, you heard in the corridors this morning that his supervisor is on the warpath. And everyone knows that his life outside the office hasn’t been great recently. He’s been on the phone all morning and rumor has it that his teenage daughter is in some kind of trouble.

It’s probably not the best time to ask for that raise.

I know, you could probably have figured that one out on your own. But why is it so obvious? After all, it’s not rational for your boss to take his travails out on you. You didn’t do anything wrong. Yet we are all constantly making social calculations and gauging others’ moods in order to guide our own choices, and we assume a certain measure of irrationality in others when we do this. If we are hoping for generosity of spirit from a boss—or a parent or a husband or anyone else for that matter—it makes intuitive sense to wait for a sunny day.

But let’s make it more complicated, like real life. What if your boss knows you are making that calculation? What if he knows that you know that he just won the lottery and fell in love? Say he overheard his secretary telling you. Will he still be an easy touch? Or will he redouble his irrationality, treating you unfairly just to avoid being duped?

Two Berkeley psychologists decided to test this particular brand of irrationality in the laboratory. Eduardo Andrade and Teck-Hua Ho used a modified version of what’s called the “ultimatum game”: In this well-known psychological experiment, volunteers are told that they have a pot of money that they must divvy up for themselves and a stranger. They have two choices: They can choose to divide the money evenly, 50-50, or to keep the lion’s share, 75 percent, for themselves. Those on the receiving end in turn decide the size of the pot, so those with the money know there may be a quid pro quo.

The idea is to see what emotional calculations make people act either fairly or selfishly. So before they actually played the game, the psychologists manipulated the volunteers emotions in this way: Those with the cash were told that the strangers had just seen a film. Some were told that they had seen a sitcom, and were in a fun mood as a result; others were told that a provocative film had left the viewers feeling angry.

The researchers thought the volunteers would more likely be stingy if they thought they were dealing with a happy person than if they expected someone angry. They would in effect calculate that they could get away with a self-centered act because the strangers’ perceived happiness would have them in a generous mood. That’s the laboratory equivalent of picking a good time to ask for a raise.

And this is exactly what happened. As reported in the August issue of Psychological Science, the money handlers were very strategic in their behavior, gauging the strangers’ moods and acting accordingly. However—and here’s the perverse part—this strategic thinking completely evaporated when those with the money knew that the strangers knew in advance about their mood. In that situation, the money handlers did not try to get away with anything. They knew intuitively that their manipulation would be transparent—and ineffective.

These two psychologists work in Berkeley’s business school, and their findings have obvious implications for high-stakes negotiations in the corporate world and in international diplomacy. But for most of us the stakes seem pretty high even in our own families and workplaces, where the same psychological lessons and insights apply. It may surprise some to know just how manipulative we are in the first place, when we think we can get away with it.

For more insights into the quirks of human nature, visit “We’re Only Human . . .”

The Aging of Loneliness

Many poets and philosophers confront loneliness as an essential and inevitable fact of human existence, and indeed this particular brand of aching appears to afflict everyone: children, adolescents, adults, the old and very old. But why does the loneliness of old age seem somehow different, sadder and more painful? Is it the social isolation that so often accompanies it, or perhaps the physical wear and tear of the twilight years?

Scientists have wondered about this as well. Loneliness may be universal and constant through the lifespan, but isn’t it possible that the subjective experience of loneliness in old age is somehow unique, and more harmful? Two University of Chicago psychologists have been trying to disentangle social isolation, loneliness, and the physical deterioration and diseases of aging, right down to the cellular level.

Louise Hawkley and John Cacioppo suspected that while the toll of loneliness may be mild and unremarkable in early life, it accumulates with time. If that’s so, they say, one would expect the cumulative effects of loneliness in old age to hasten disease by contributing to such things as stress, coping, rest and recuperation, and more. To test this idea, the scientists have been studying two large groups of people for many years, the first college-age and the second in their late 50s. This allows them to compare the untoward health consequences of loneliness in youth and old age.

Their findings, reported in the August issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science, are revealing. Consider stress, for example. The more years you live, the more stressful experiences you are going to have: new jobs, marriage and divorce, parenting, financial worries, illness. It’s inevitable. And indeed when the psychologists looked at the lives of the middle-aged and old people in their study, they found that the lonely ones did not differ from the others in this regard. They did, however, differ in how they perceived these events. They recalled more childhood adversity (with more enduring pain) and identified more of the normal rites of passage as sources of chronic stress in their lives. Faced with the same challenges, the lonelier people appear more helpless and threatened. And ironically, they are less apt to actively seek help when they are stressed out.

Over time the lonely pay a clear physiological price for their lousy coping skills. The psychologists measured something called TPR, for “total peripheral resistance.” This is a measure of how much the small arteries constrict and hamper blood flow; the end result of too much constriction is high blood pressure, a risk factor for stroke and other disorders. Interestingly, they found that lonely young adults had elevated TPR, even though their blood pressure was normal. By their 50s, however, lonely people were more likely to have high blood pressure as well. What this means is that, as the natural resilience of youth declines, the cumulative toll of loneliness can turn a relatively benign vascular symptom into a life-threatening condition.

Loneliness wreaks havoc with the body’s basic stress response system as well. Hawkley and Cacioppo took urine samples from both the lonely and the more contented volunteers, and found that the lonely ones had more of the hormone epinephrine flowing in their bodies. Epinephrine is one of the body’s “fight or flight” chemicals, and high levels indicate that lonely people go through life in a heightened state of arousal. As with blood pressure, this physiological toll became more apparent with aging. Since the body’s stress hormones are intricately involved in fighting inflammation and infection, it appears that loneliness contributes to the wear and tear of aging through this pathway as well.

There is more bad news. When we experience the depletion caused by stress, our bodies normally rely on restorative processes like sleep to shore us up. But when the researchers monitored the younger volunteers’ brain activity during sleep, they found that the lonely nights were disturbed by many “micro awakenings.” That is, they appeared to sleep as much as the normal volunteers, but their sleep was of poorer quality. Not surprisingly, the lonelier people reported more daytime dysfunction. Since sleep tends to deteriorate with age anyway, the added hit from loneliness is probably compromising this natural restoration process even more.

Loneliness is not the same as solitude. Some people are just fine with being alone, and some even see solitude as an important path to spiritual growth. But for many, social isolation and physical aging make for a toxic cocktail. A 1985 survey found that the typical American had three confidants; in 2004, that number had dropped to zero. That’s sobering arithmetic for our rapidly aging society.

For more insights in human behavior, visit “We’re Only Human . . .”