Xenophobia, For Men Only

Very few people fear dandelions. Or violins or sparrows. Or even dangerous things—like Hummers. We may object to outsized automobiles on principle, but the mere sight of them doesn’t make us tremble and sweat and run away. On the other hand, even toddlers show an automatic and powerful fear of snakes, even harmless snakes.

That’s because of eons of evolution among both dangerous and benign things. There is probably no snake phobia programmed into our genetic code, but we do have an evolved mental readiness to be fearful of certain things in our world. Scientists can make you afraid of almost anything—even dandelions—but these conditioned fears rapidly vanish. The mind rejects silly phobias.

Does this cognitive readiness influence our relationships with other people? Psychologists have been studying this question, and the preliminary answer is yes. What they do is condition fears of a variety of other people in the laboratory, and see which fears disappear quickly and which persist. The ones that persist over time are deep-wired—and therefore a potential concern for human society.

Here’s an experiment of this kind, the work of Michigan State psychologist Carlos David Navarrete. Navarrete used mild shocks to make black and white men and women fearful of black and white men and women, each of each. That is, white men were conditioned to be fearful of black men and white men as well as black women and white women, and so forth with the others. Then he observed to see if these fears lasted or not.

The findings, reported in the February issue of the journal Psychological Science, were intriguing and unexpected. It’s known that people are more fearful of “out-groups”—that is, people who are different from them, and this fear of “the other” has been clearly demonstrated with race. But Navarrete found that volunteers’ most persistent fears were reserved for men—that is, male members of the out-group. So white men and women feared black men, and black men and women feared white men; all the other lab-induced fears, including any conditioned fear of women, evaporated into the air.

This is interesting in itself, but Navarrete ran a number of other tests to clarify the results. He tested for blatant racism (Example: "Generally, blacks are not as smart as whites”) and for more subtle, unconscious racism. He also gathered histories of the volunteers’ interracial contact—friendships, colleagues, romantic involvements. It was only these histories that mattered: Those with close relationships outside their own race had less persistent fears than did those with little interracial experience.

Why would gender influence these ingrained fears as much as race? It may be that men were more often the aggressors over evolutionary time, so that male faces became a potent cue for danger. So xenophobia is not an equal-opportunity emotion. Racially different men—and men only—are in this sense like snakes. All the rest are like dandelions and SUVs.

For more insights into human nature, visit “We’re Only Human” at www.psychologicalscience.org/onlyhuman. Selections from this blog also appear regularly in the magazine Scientific American Mind and at http://www.sciam.com/.

The Paradox of Temptation

There is a saying in many addiction recovery programs that goes like this: “If you keep going to the barber shop, eventually you’ll get a haircut.” Translated that means, stay away from temptation. Hanging around saloons or chocolatiers or raves or racetracks—name your poison—just increases the odds that your self-control will fail you someday.

But is this true? Does the mere availability of something tempting weaken the will to resist? The answer is of more than theoretical interest to public health experts, and the problem goes far beyond serious addictive disorders. Just think of all those Christmas cookies in your office recently. As our national obesity crisis shows, difficulties with discipline and self-control are widespread and harmful.

Let’s focus on sweets, just because these are a common and familiar temptation. Every self-control challenge is a tradeoff of one kind or another, and here it’s a tradeoff between satisfying a sweet tooth and commitment to good nutrition. Although it seems intuitively obvious that one should not keep bonbons in every room of the house, psychological theory argues the opposite. According to the so-called “scarcity principle,” we value things that are rare—gold, for example—and don’t much care for things that are common or readily available. This is the theory behind the folk wisdom that “forbidden fruit” only sharpens desire.

Three psychologists recently decided to test a paradoxical view of self-control based on the scarcity principle. Kristian Ove Myrseth and Ayelet Fishbach of the University of Chicago and Yaacov Trope of NYU predicted that increasing the availability of sweets would indeed deflate desire for them. They further speculated that this happens because availability of sweets is threatening to the loftier goal of good health, and so causes the mind to damp down desire to protect the greater good. In short, by making a tempting sweet readily available, we make it less tempting.

Here’s how they tested this notion. They stood at the exit door of a gym and buttonholed young women as they were leaving. They offered them a choice of power bars or chocolates, and had them rate their desire for each. Simple enough, but here’s the twist. Some rated their desire before choosing, and others right after—but before eating. The idea was to compare desire for chocolate when it was readily available, and when it was made unavailable.

The psychologists figured that young women at a gym would tend to be health conscious—and thus conflicted over the choice. They found that the women did indeed prefer the healthy power bars—that is, they devalued the chocolates; but this preference disappeared as soon as they made their choice, and the unhealthy temptation was no longer an option. So it appears that self-control does in fact operate paradoxically, by actually diminishing desire for what’s tempting and accessible.

But what if you could just change your mind? What if you had the option to ditch the health food and scarf down the chocolate instead? Does the mind keep desire flat for as long as the temptation remains an option? The psychologists decided to test this, but not with chocolates. Instead they created a self-control tradeoff involving work and play. They studied a group of graduate students in the University of Chicago’s school of business. Unhappily, these MBA students were enrolled in a really boring class—but one that they really needed to complete. They had these students rate the desirability of a number of leisure activities, like going to movies and partying and so forth.

Some rated leisure activity while they still had the option of dropping the boring class. Others did the rating after the deadline had passed for dropping the class. In other words, for some the decision was a done deal, while for others it was reversible. They found that, as long as they had the option of blowing off work for play, they continued to dampen their urge to play. It appears the mind protects itself against succumbing to temptation for as long as it must, and it does this by devaluing what’s most available.

These findings, reported in the February issue of Psychological Science, are a bit puzzling, and the authors raise some intriguing questions: Would dieters actually benefit from the sight of the dessert cart rolling by? Should alcoholics keep liquor in the liquor cabinet—paradoxically to help with self-control? The intuitive answer to such questions is no, but the evidence from these studies suggests that it might not be a resounding no.

For more insights into human nature, visit “We’re Only Human” at www.psychologicalscience.org/onlyhuman. Selections from the blog also appear regularly in the magazine Scientific American Mind and at the website http://www.sciam.com/.

Witness for the Prosecution

When aviator Charles Lindbergh’s baby son was kidnapped from his crib and later found murdered in the spring of 1932, the nation was transfixed by the crime and the two years of police work that followed. Bruno Hauptmann, a German carpenter, was eventually arrested, tried, convicted and executed for the crime. He never confessed. But more than 200 other people did.

What is it with false confession? It seems crazy on the face of it, to take the blame for a crime you didn’t commit. And indeed experts believe that many false confessors—including those in the Lindbergh case—are mentally disturbed attention seekers. Others are taking the fall for someone else, while still others may have been illegally coerced into confessing. According to one estimate, fully a quarter of convictions later overturned by DNA evidence involved a false confession.

Confessions are powerful evidence in court. But in our legal system, confessions are supposed to be just one more piece of evidence, weighed along with fingerprints and alibis and eyewitness testimony and so forth. But is this possible? Are judges and juries capable of weighing evidence fairly when they’re faced with someone proclaiming: I did it? Indeed, are eyewitnesses themselves immune to the persuasiveness of a confession? Or is a confession so potent that it trumps everything else?

Legal experts are obviously very interested in this question, and psychologists have been working to piece together an answer. In a recent study, Lisa Hasel of Iowa State University and Saul Kassin of John Jay College actually created a crime scene to explore the mind of the eyewitness and the integrity of eyewitness testimony. Put yourself in the position of a witness:

You are one of several people sitting in a university laboratory, waiting to participate in a study. At some point, a white man walks in, picks up a laptop from the desk, and leaves. You don’t think anything of it, but a few minutes later, a woman enters the room and announces, with obvious distress, that her laptop is missing. It’s been stolen, and you’re the eyewitness. The police recruit you to help solve the crime.

The first thing you do is look at a line-up of white men, to see if you can identify the thief. Once you’ve fingered the thief (or not), you go home, but you’re summoned back a couple days later. The crime is still unsolved, although all the men in the lineup have by this time been interrogated. You learn that the person you identified as the thief has in fact confessed. Case closed.

But wait. What if you learn instead that one of the other men has confessed? Or that they are all swearing up and down that they are innocent? And what if you had fingered nobody on the day of the crime, and you learn now that one of the men has confessed?

These are all among the scenarios that Hasel and Kassin created for volunteers in their experiment. They wanted to see if eyewitnesses would be swayed enough by a confession to change their mind about their memory of the crime. Would they retract their original statement, fingering the confessor? Or stick to their guns?

The results, reported in the January issue of the journal Psychological Science, are a bit unsettling. None of the men in the lineup was in fact the real thief, so the only reliable testimony came from those who fingered no one. That is, the vast majority did identify an innocent man as the criminal, and many with confidence. That’s disturbing in itself, but it gets worse. While few were persuaded by claims of innocence—that happens all the time—a disturbing number changed their mind when a suspect confessed. An astonishing 60 percent who had fingered one suspect flip-flopped when a different man confessed. Even those who had been very sure of their original identification experienced a steep drop in confidence. When asked to explain their change of heart, most said they had been mistaken earlier, that their memories had fooled them.

How about the rare ones who (correctly) refused to finger any one of the original six in the lineup? These witnesses would seem to be especially cautious about falsely accusing someone of a crime. Yet fully half of these eyewitnesses also changed their minds when told that a specific suspect had confessed. That particular suspect’s face was now familiar to them as the face of the criminal, where it had not been before.

Remember that these were all false confessions. The guy who actually walked off with the laptop was never seen again. Mock jury studies have shown that jurors will ignore all sorts of exculpatory evidence if it does not fit with what they believe. This study suggests that false confessions can corrupt criminal evidence before the jury ever gets to weigh it at trial.

For more insights into human nature, visit “We’re Only Human” at www.psychologicalscience.org/onlyhuman. Excerpts from the blog also appear regularly in the magazine Scientific American Mind and at www.sciam.com.