"Hey, You're Wearing Me Out!"

I used to jog a fair bit, and when I did I loved having a regular running partner. It’s not that I’m undisciplined, but his company nudged me to run just a bit farther or faster than I might on my own. And some days it worked the other way. It’s like we drew motivation and stamina from each other’s presence.

This will come as no surprise to anyone who has ever enlisted a friend to go on a diet or joined a group to quit smoking or drinking. We have this intuitive sense that our minds and bodies are intertwined with those of others, that we can use these deep neural connections to improve discipline and enhance performance. And it often appears to work.

But is there a downside to such psychological cohesion? Is it possible that we might also be emotionally and physically depleted by others’ efforts? In other words, can your self-discipline literally wear me out?

Psychologists are very interested in the power of vicarious thoughts and feelings, because they have clear implications for everything from public health campaigns to personnel management. What if cohesion and camaraderie are actually taking an unseen toll on workers and dieters and recovering addicts?

Yale University psychologist Joshua Ackerman and colleagues decided to explore this idea in the laboratory. They wondered if we might automatically and unconsciously simulate the behavior of others around us—and if such internal aping might lead to real mental exhaustion and breakdown of discipline. They devised a couple clever experiments to test this theory of vicarious depletion.

In one study, they had a group of volunteers read a story about a waiter at a fancy restaurant. The waiter arrives at work hungry, but he is prohibited from eating any of the restaurant food. The story describes in mouth-watering detail the meals that the hungry waiter must serve: Imagine cold poached salmon, roast chicken and fresh asparagus, chocolate mousse cake. Some simply read the story, but others were told to put themselves in the waiter’s shoes, to imagine his thoughts and feelings.

Then all the volunteers played a game sort of like The Price Is Right. They estimated the value of goods like watches and cars and major appliances and bid on them. The idea was to see if vicariously experiencing the waiter’s self-discipline would deplete the volunteers' own self-discipline—and if that depletion would affect their behavior in a completed unrelated realm, namely shopping. Would the torture of denying oneself all that delicious food turn the volunteers into spendthrifts?

And it did, dramatically. Those who suffered along with the fictional waiter spent a full $6000 more than the others on imaginary luxury items. The psychologists did a separate test of mood just to rule out the possibility that they were squandering their cash because of grumpiness. They weren’t. It appears they exhausted their reserve of self-discipline in the restaurant and that the exhaustion carried over.

The psychologists wanted to double-check these findings using a more realistic and complex scenario. Some of the volunteers did the same hungry waiter exercise, but others read about a well-fed waiter who worked in a mediocre fast-food joint. Afterward they had them complete a difficult and time-pressured word problem—one known to tax a host of executive skills like concentration, motivation and information processing.

The results, reported in the March issue of the journal Psychological Science, were interesting and not entirely expected. Again, those who took the part of the hungry waiter became cognitively depleted—leading to inferior performance on the problem-solving task. But those who merely witnessed the waiter’s self-control were better problem-solvers than those who witnessed the well-fed waiter. That is, seeing someone exert control sparked the idea of discipline and reinforced the goal, but actually experiencing the denial led to vicarious exhaustion.

This raises an intriguing possibility. It’s well known that dysfunctional groups don’t perform well, but these findings suggest that group coordination can also work “too well.” That is, if group members—workers, exercisers, addicts—are too tightly synchronized with each other, the exhaustion of one group member can spread to the entire group. Despite its name, self-control is a social enterprise, which means that our own successes and failures may be shaped by others more than we like to think.

For more insights into the quirks of 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 http://www.sciam.com/.

How to Handle the Math

I used to play chess with an excellent chess player, far superior to me. But he had this maddening habit in the endgame. He would start uttering, softly but aloud: boom, boom, boom-boom, boom. And with each boom, he would gesture in the air, kind of like a conductor with an invisible baton. Whenever he started this ritual, I knew it was over. It meant he saw the inevitable chain of moves that would lead to checkmate.

He was always right, though there was nothing triumphant about his gestures. It was more like he was searching for the solution rather than announcing it. Indeed, at times I had this bizarre sense that he was observing his own hands to extract the answer.


Well it may not have been so bizarre, as it turns out. Psychologists have recently become very interested in how we embody meaning in our movements. Why gesture at all? Do we use hand movements to convey information to others, as a kind of rudimentary sign language? Or are we really gesturing to ourselves, perhaps as an aid to memory or learning? What is the link between gesture and sound and words and meaning? Or to put it more scientifically, what was all that boom-boom-booming about?

University of Chicago psychologist Susan Goldin-Meadow and her colleagues decided to investigate these questions in their lab. They wanted to see if gestures might help with learning new ideas—and if so, what kinds of gestures. Most important, they wanted to find out how gestures might enhance learning. What’s going on in the gesticulator's mind?

They studied third and fourth graders, and selected only kids who had not yet learned this specific math operation: 6 + 3 + 4 = __ + 4. This seems simple enough to us, but it actually requires that kids master the concept of “grouping.” That is, they have to learn to group 6 and 3 (and not 3 and 4) to get the correct answer to the equation.

All the kids were told that the challenge was to make the two sides of the equation equal. But some kids were also taught to gesture as they solved the problem: Specifically, they formed a “V” with two fingers (like a peace sign) and pointed to the numbers that needed to be grouped. Then they pointed to the answer with a single finger, the index finger. So the gesture aped the mental operation: Two numbers became one.

Other kids also gestured, but inaccurately, pointing to the wrong two numbers with their two fingers. Still others used no gestures at all. After some practice sessions, the teacher taught a traditional math lesson, explaining in words the meaning of equivalence. Importantly, the teacher never used the word “grouping” in the lesson. The idea was to see if the kids who gestured meaningfully actually learned better—and also if they added the word “grouping” to their spoken repertoire on their own.

And they did. They not only solved more problems correctly later on, they did so only if they had verbalized to themselves what the gesture symbolized—its meaning. This is quite remarkable, since at no time was “grouping” mentioned. The kids had to extract that abstract idea from their own hand movements.

These findings, reported in the March issue of the journal Psychological Science, leave one important question. Were the kids movements—the peace signs and pointing fingers—really gestures? After all, they acquired them through rote learning, at a teacher’s request—not spontaneously. But the researchers point out that kids who do know this mathematical concept actually use these same gestures on their own. This raises the intriguing possibility that kids start off making meaningless gestures, which then take on meaning in the context of learning. In other words, it may be a general intellectual progression, common to all childhood learning.

If gestures are indeed an essential part of learning new ideas, then it may be possible to recruit the body as a tool in learning—and not just rudimentary arithmetic. Why not calculus, or chemistry—or for that matter, chess?

For more insights into the quirks of 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 http://www.sciam.com/.

Nature at a Glance

Imagine that you arrive by bus at a vacation spot you’ve never been to before. You get out and look around. What do you notice at first glance? Well, you can’t miss the large lake right in front of you; should be some good water skiing there. There’s a snow-capped mountain rising in the distance, and a copse of hemlock trees just to the left. The lodging must be in that chalet down to the right. The screened porch looks inviting, and the weather’s perfect.

Now imagine you’re a criminal on the lam, and you step off the same bus. What do you see? Well mostly you see a vast open space. Other than that small stand of trees, there is very little place to hide. You feel exposed, vulnerable. The water is simply an obstacle between you and freedom in that mountain beyond. Is there a path? You notice a man-made structure, always a threat. At least it’s not cold.

Same landscape, yet two very different perceptions. And this is not a matter of interpretation or judgment; a glance is way too rapid for that. It’s what the vacationer and the criminal actually see. That’s because even something as basic as vision is intimately rooted in our fears and in our ancient strategies for survival. Our brains evolved when there were threats everywhere, so we are highly tuned to extract the most meaningful information with even the first fleeting glance. A long lingering glance might prove fatal. The escaped convict (like our ancient ancestors) doesn’t have the luxury of noticing details like hemlocks and verandas or even lakes and mountains. The need and desire for safety trumps all other detail in the mind’s eye.

We all have a bit of the escaped convict’s vigilance deep-wired into our neurons. At least that’s the theory, which a pair of MIT scientists decided to test in the lab. Psychologists Michelle Greene and Aude Oliva wanted to explore how we see the natural world in the split second of a first encounter. What information is so essential and so privileged that it’s processed instantaneously? And what’s mere gilding that can be added later, as we continue to scope out the new territory?

The psychologists had volunteers look at hundreds of color photographs of various natural scenes, and very rapidly categorize them. Sometimes they were asked to categorize the landscapes according to common physical features like oceans and forests and fields and rivers. Other times they classified the landscapes according to fundamental survival features—ease of navigation, openness, naturalness and temperature. The researchers timed how long it took the volunteers to categorize each vista, down to the millisecond.

It’s remarkable how fast the mind “sees” what it needs to see. As reported in the March issue of the journal Psychological Science, the survival features were processed almost instantaneously—as quickly as 19 milliseconds, much faster than a finger snap. The common geographical features were also processed quickly—but almost as an afterthought compared to the automatic perception of things like open space and escape routes. This makes sense, since categories like mountain and lake came much later to humans, as the slow and analytic mind evolved.

The brain was at its fastest when categorizing landscapes simply as natural, as opposed to manmade. Eons of evolution appear to have linked the brain intimately to the natural world—but not yet to the civilized world, which still requires some (relatively) slower analysis to comprehend. This raises the intriguing possibility that we can know a landscape is natural even before we “see” the mountains and meadows and waterfalls that give it its nature.

For more insights into the quirks of 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 http://www.sciam.com/.

"I Feel Like a Different Person"

Who hasn’t spoken those words at one time or another? Usually when our mood lifts dramatically—following an illness or personal travail, for whatever reason—we feel not just upbeat but fundamentally different. We have a “new outlook on life.”

But what exactly is changing during these transformative emotional experiences? And what does it say about who we are? Does our thinking change? Our personality? Core values? We think of our identity as something stable and enduring, but how much of our “self” is subject to the vagaries of our moods?

Scientists have long been interested in the interplay of emotions and identity, and some have recently zeroed in on cultural identity. One’s heritage would seem to be especially stable and impervious to change, simply because it’s been passed down through generation after generation and is deeply ingrained in the collective psyche. But how deeply, exactly?

Psychologist Claire Ashton-James of the University of British Columbia decided to explore this intriguing question in the laboratory, to see if even something as potent as culture might be tied to normal mood swings. She recruited international students hailing from Germany, Ireland, England, Taiwan, Korea, China and Japan for a series of experiments. European cultures are known to value independence and individuality, whereas Asian cultures prize community and harmony. This fundamental East-West cultural difference is well established, and so offered Ashton-James an ideal test.

She guessed that people in an upbeat mood would be more exploratory and daring in attitude—and therefore more apt to break from cultural stereotype. That is, Asians would act more independent than usual, and Europeans would act more communitarian. Dispirited people of all cultures would be more cautious—and stick closer to cultural expectations.

She had to fool around with people’s moods to test this idea, and she did this in a variety of ingenious ways. In one study, for example, she played some upbeat Mozart on the stereo to lift the volunteers moods, or some Rachmaninov to bring them down. In another study she had the volunteers hold pens in their mouths: Some held the pen with their teeth, which basically forces the face into a smile, which improves mood. Others held the pen with their lips, forcing a frown. The idea here was to unconsciously raise or lower mood.

Then she gave all the volunteers a variety of tests, each designed to measure the strength of their values—either self-reliance on the one hand, or community harmony on the other. In one test, for example, she offered the volunteers a choice of five pens, four blue and one red. In keeping with cultural values, Asians typically pick from the more common blue pens in this test—to be part of the group—while Westerners usually take the one red pen. Or she asked them to think about the question “Who am I?”—and list 20 answers, much like the parlor game circulating on Facebook. She analyzed the content of all the lists to see if they reflected predominantly individualistic or predominantly group values.

No matter how she manipulated mood, and no matter how she measured cultural values, she always got the same result: Feeling good did indeed encourage the volunteers—both European and Asian—to explore values that are inconsistent with their cultural norms. And elevated mood even shaped behavior, allowing volunteers to act “out of character.” Feeling bad did the opposite: It reinforced traditional cultural stereotypes and constrained both Western and Eastern thinking about the world.
These findings, published in the March issue of the journal Psychological Science, suggest that emotions may serve an important social purpose. Positive feelings may send a signal that it’s safe to broaden one’s view of the world—and to explore novel notions of one’s self. Negative feelings may do the opposite: They may send a signal that it’s time to circle the wagons and stick with the “tried and true.” But the findings also suggest that the “self” may not be as robust and static as we like to believe. Indeed the self may be dynamic, constructed again and again from one’s situation, heritage and mood.


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

Delusions and Confidence

Winston Churchill was exultant about war, which he once described as “glorious” and “delicious.” As England’s leader during the darkest days of World War II, he inspired a fearful nation with his almost delusional optimism and confidence in victory over Germany. Indeed, some historians have argued that a man of more realistic and sober judgment would have simply given up.

The wartime prime minister’s delusions of control may have been a symptom of his mental illness, but his exaggerated example raises some interesting questions about the normal connections among power and control and confidence. Does power in itself breed a false sense of control, a belief that we can shape events in impossible ways? And could illusory control in turn shape our confidence in ourselves and our optimism about the future?

Psychologists have been studying this dynamic. Stanford University’s Nathanael Fast and his colleagues ran a series of experiments to see if powerful people have a distorted notion of their own ability to shape events, including random events. Here’s an example of the work:

They asked volunteers to recall and write about a specific incident from their past where they had exerted power over someone else—or had been at the mercy of someone else. The idea was to prime either feelings of power or powerlessness. Then them gave each of the volunteers a standard six-sided die, and asked them to predict what number would come up. They could either watch as someone rolled the die, or they could choose to roll the die themselves. The actual prediction and outcome were irrelevant. What was important was the volunteers' choice to roll the die—an indicator of their belief that they actually control the outcome of a random event.

The idea was to see if those “in power” also felt they had control over life’s randomness. And they did. In fact, each and every volunteer primed for power—100 percent—opted to roll the die rather than sit by while someone else did the rolling. This is obviously irrational; no one can control fate. But feeling powerful created the illusion of being in control of fate. Only a fraction of the powerless volunteers insisted on rolling the die.

This is interesting in itself, but the psychologists want to take it a step further. People in power—the wealthy, the educated, those in the ruling majority party—tend to be more upbeat, to feel better about themselves than the powerless do. Does power itself shape these emotions, or is it the illusion of control that comes with power? To find out, the scientists again primed volunteers’ thoughts of power and impotence—this time my assigning some to the role of manager and others to the role of worker. Then they read a short vignette about a company, and answered a series of questions about the company’s prospects and their part in the company’s future.

The results were clear. As reported in the March issue of the journal Psychological Science, those in power felt that they had more control over the fictional company’s success or failure—and they were much more optimistic about the company in general. What’s more, it was the perception of control that triggered the feelings of optimism. That is, the illusion of control was the link between feelings of power and upbeat emotions.They ran another similar study, and found that perceived control also boosted volunteers’ self-esteem.

Keep in mind that the scientists were measuring perceptions, not reality. Power creates the illusion of control, which in turn leads to good feelings. Is this a good thing? It depends. It can lead some to take insane risks, to bet on markets and relationships with no possible future. In those cases, the psychologists say, power creates its own unraveling. Or it can let others dream the unimaginable—and to pursue noble goals against seemingly impossible odds.

For more insights into the quirks of 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 http://www.sciam.com/.