American restlessness, American unhappiness?

Imagine you are a high school basketball player, and a pretty good one. You are a senior, and right now you are the starting point guard for the Rochester Eagles. Last year you started for the Lexington Cougars, in a different state, and the year before that you played the same position for yet another squad, the Flyers of Pottsville. Your family moves a lot because of your father’s work, but you’ve managed to win a spot on the local team wherever you land.

So how do you think of yourself at the moment? Do you identify yourself as a proud Rochester Eagle? Or do you think of yourself as simply a talented point guard?

Well, if you’re like most people, you think of yourself primarily as a journeyman point guard, not as a member of the Eagles—or of any local team for that matter. That’s because you’ve learned from experience that group membership doesn’t last; teams and communities are fleeting. What endures are your grit, and your leadership skill, and your fast hands. In short, you.

This example comes from the work of University of Virginia psychological scientist Shigehiro Oishi, who has for some years been studying the mental and emotional consequences of residential mobility. America is one of the most mobile societies in the world, which means that lots of people are living different versions of the itinerant hoopster’s experience. Surprisingly, psychologists have not paid much attention to this common American experience. But as Oishi’s studies are showing, mobility shapes everything from our sense of identity to our friendships—and even our happiness.

It all starts with basic sense of self. Oishi studied a large sample of American college students, some of whom had moved around a lot before college and others of whom had pretty much stayed put. When he asked these students to describe themselves—their most important attributes—the itinerants were much more likely to mention personal traits, while less mobile students were more apt to mention important group affiliations. In fact, the mobile students didn’t belong to many groups; they weren’t joiners. And this tendency weakened their overall sense of community identity.

Mobility appears to affect the nature of friendship as well, in a variety of ways. In one study, for example, college freshmen who had moved around a lot reported having more friends—as measured by their Facebook friendships—and they also added more new friends after arriving on campus. But it’s not just the size of the social networks, Oishi has found. Mobile Americans are more likely to form “duty free” relationships, without the deep sense of social obligation that characterizes traditional friendships. Duty-free friendships are based on more on shared interests and similarities of personality, rather than group membership.

So who’s happier, those who ramble or those who stay close to home? One would guess that more mobile people might be happier, since that’s why many people move—to find a new life, perhaps a better job or a safer community. But the results are more mixed than that. As Oishi describes in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science, adults who move often for work feel they have more interesting lives and are more satisfied with their marriages and family life. But itinerant adults also report more frequent health issues, like stomach aches and shortness of breath, than do less mobile adults. It’s possible that when people pull up stakes for a better life, they overestimate the novelty and opportunity of moving, and underestimate the social disruption and its consequences.

The stomach aches and other ailments may be the tip of the iceberg. When Oishi analyzed a decade of data from 7000 adults, he found that those who moved frequently in childhood were more likely to have died during the course of the study. Perhaps unsurprisingly, introverts suffered more from the negative consequences of mobility, including increased mortality. In short, the American pattern of residential mobility may have a dark side that has yet to be fully revealed.

When the French social critic Alexis de Tocqueville traveled in U.S. in the 1830s, he was struck by Americans’ restlessness, even in the midst of their prosperity. He was also struck by the “cloud” that darkened many American faces. This sadness, he believed, was explained by the fact that Americans are constantly thinking about the good things they might be missing.

Tocqueville didn’t have the advantage of modern genetics to help him understand the paradoxical American character. Today we know that nations founded by immigrants—like the United States and Australia—have much higher rates of mobility than older nations, such as China and Germany. Population geneticists now believe that these national differences might be explained by the genetic distribution of personality traits, and indeed a cluster of novelty-seeking genes has been found in populations that have migrated long distances. It’s possible that these genes were adaptive when Americans were a migratory people. Whether or not they remain adaptive is an open question.

Versions of "We're Only Human" appear in the Huffington Post and Scientific American Mind. Wray Herbert's book, On Second Thought: Outsmarting Your Mind's Hard-Wired Habits, will be published by Crown in September.

Fast food, racing thoughts

Fast food is unhealthy.

I know, I know. Few of us need convincing of that fact any more. But as unassailable as it is, the brief against fast food has for years focused almost entirely on the food in fast food—the high fructose corn syrup and artery-busting fats and nutritional bankruptcy of burgers and French fries and soft drinks. But what about the fast in fast food?

New science is now suggesting that fast food may be doubly unhealthy—not only nutritionally damaging but psychologically detrimental as well. Indeed, the Colonel and the Golden Arches and the rest of America’s fast-food culture may be unconsciously triggering a general impatience with life that leads to wrongheaded decisions going way beyond food. In short, fast food may lead to fast and frenzied live-for-today lifestyles that may be just as unhealthy as bad cholesterol.

At least that’s the theory, which psychologists Chen-Bo Zhong and Sanford DeVoe of the University of Toronto have been exploring using an idea called behavioral priming. This is just a jargony way of saying that cues in our everyday world subliminally spark ideas, which in turn shape our behavior. The Toronto scientists wondered if symbols of our ubiquitous fast-food culture might spark thoughts of time pressures and efficiency—and cause us to act urgently and impatiently.

Here’s an example of how they tested this notion in the laboratory. They recruited a large group of volunteers to perform a computer task. The task involved an image at the center of the screen, but other images also flashed very rapidly on the periphery of the screen—so rapidly that the conscious mind could not possibly notice them. Some of the volunteers “saw” familiar fast-food logos—KFC, Taco Bell, McDonald’s, and so forth—while others simply saw neutral images.

After this priming, all the volunteers were told to read a short descriptive prose passage. Unbeknownst to them, the researchers were timing them—in order to see if the unconscious thoughts of fast food caused them to read faster. And they did. Even though they were told to take as much time as they liked, those thinking of fast food read much faster than the controls—and faster than they did without any unconscious priming. In other words, the Golden Arches and similar symbols made they feel time pressure where there was none.

Now let’s be clear. Sometimes urgency and deadlines are appropriate and needed. We read quickly when we are taking a timed exam, for example, just as we walk quickly when we need to be somewhere soon. So speed is not in itself bad. But this was like speed-reading Emily Dickinson; it doesn’t make any sense. And in fact it’s unhealthy: One measure of Type A personality is speed and impatience in leisure activities like eating and walking and reading.

These findings were intriguing, but the psychologists wanted to reexamine the question a different way. So in a second experiment, they again used fast food imagery to prime volunteers’ unconscious thoughts of time and urgency. But this time they rated the desirability of common household products, only some of which were time-saving products. For example, the volunteers might choose a four-slice toaster or a single-slice toaster; a two-in-one shampoo or a regular shampoo. And so forth. The idea was to see if those primed with fast food imagery were more likely to pick an efficient product than were the others. And that’s exactly what they found: Memories of Big Macs sparked a generalized impatience which in turn increased desire to complete household tasks as quickly as possible.

I don’t know about you, but I find this alarming. And it gets worse. In a final experiment, the scientists went far afield, testing whether our fast-food culture might actually determine whether or not we save for the future. As they explain it, saving requires delaying gratification, denying one’s needs today for a bigger payoff later on. Failure to save is impatience writ large—over the lifespan. Like the ethos of fast food, lack of financial planning is all about immediate gratification.

And the experiment’s findings were unambiguous. As reported on-line last week in the journal Psychological Science, the volunteers primed with fast-food logos were much more likely to accept a smaller amount of money now rather than wait for a larger payment in a week. In short, mere exposure to fast food symbols made people impatient in a way that could threaten their future economic security.

It’s hard not to savor the irony in these findings. Fast food was invented to save us time—to get us away from the drudgery of the kitchen so we could enjoy more leisure time. But today, the mere idea of fast food automatically triggers our unconscious sense of haste and urgency and pressure—feelings that shape not only the way we eat, but nearly every aspect of the way we live our lives, including our leisure.

Wray Herbert also writes regularly for the Huffington Post, where this article first appeared.

The power of gratitude

Like most parents, I drilled my young kids on the importance of saying “thank you” to others. Nagged them, really. After all, words of gratitude are an important social convention, a way of letting others know you value and appreciate them and their support. Plus saying “thank you” is the right thing to do.

What I didn’t teach them—because I didn’t know it at the time—was how they themselves might benefit from saying “thank you.” An emerging body of research is now showing that genuine expressions of gratitude can be tonic not just for the recipient, but for those who are saying “thank you” as well. Indeed, being grateful—and saying so—can change the very way we think about our closest relationships.

One scientist who has been rigorously deconstructing gratitude is Nathaniel Lambert of Florida State University. In a recent study, he and several colleagues decided to explore whether the simple act of expressing thankfulness might be linked to a deeper sense of commitment and responsibility toward someone else. To find out, the psychologists recruited a large group of young men and women and gathered information on their most intimate relationships, including the frequency and manner in which they expressed their gratitude toward their partner. They also questioned them about the strength of their relationship, focusing especially on feelings of responsibility for their partner’s happiness and welfare.

They wanted to see if there was any connection between thankfulness and the quality of the partnership. And there was, clearly. Those who were more expressive of their gratitude toward their partner saw their commitment as deeper and the relationship as more mutually supportive. They also measured these perceptions six weeks later, to see if gratitude was linked to an increase in relationship quality over time. And, again, it was.

These findings are intriguing—but limited. They don’t say anything about whether expressing thanks actually leads to improved feelings about a relationship. So Lambert and his colleagues decided to run another experiment to sort this out. In this study, they actually manipulated gratitude. They had a group of volunteers deliberately increase their verbal or written expressions of thanks toward a close friend. They were instructed to “go the extra mile” in really demonstrating their feelings of gratitude. For comparison, other volunteers merely thought grateful thoughts—without expressing them—while others focused on positive memories of time together. At the end of the three weeks, they compared the volunteers’ attitudes toward their relationship.

There was no doubt about cause-and-effect this time. As reported on-line in the journal Psychological Science, those who more frequently spoke or wrote their words of thanks saw their relationship as more mutual and cooperative as a result. Importantly, merely thinking about being grateful did not improve relationships. So words count.

What’s going on here? The scientists believe that saying “thank you” sends a message not only to one’s partner but to oneself as well. It changes our self-perceptions. The very act of saying “thank you” reinforces one’s desire for a mutually supportive relationship and increases dependency, which triggers trust and in turn deepens a relationship. In this way, saying “thank you” initiates a spiral of kindness and appreciation in relationships. And what's more, it’s not complicated.

For more insights into the quirks of human nature, visit the “Full Frontal Psychology” blog at True/Slant. Excerpts from “We’re Only Human” appear regularly in the magazine Scientific American Mind.

Emotions by the roomful

I have a friend who sucks the air out of the room whenever he comes around. He is so blustery and self-absorbed that people don’t interact with him; they capitulate. I also have friends who by their mere presence light up the room, raising the spirits of everyone gathered. I know people who cast a pall over the group and drag it down; others who have a calming effect on gatherings.

These are all caricatures, of course. Nobody can sway the emotions of an entire room, energizing or subduing or infuriating every member of the group. After all, each of us has his or her own emotional make-up, which is surely more powerful than the mere presence of another person. A roomful is not a human entity, with collective emotions.

Or is it? It may be humbling to know, but new research suggests that there may be some truth to these caricatures. Each of us is autonomous, of course, with temperament and personality, but some people may have a powerful emotional presence that can indeed influence the feeling of an entire room.

That’s the idea being explored by two business professors, Noah Eisenkraft of Penn and Hillary Anger Elfenbein of Washington University in St. Louis. The scientists wanted to explore this phenomenon with naturally occurring groups, so they recruited an entire class of first-year MBA students. These 239 students were randomly assigned to work groups, most made up of five students, which were diverse for nationality, gender, and work experience. The group members took all the same classes, worked on group projects, and even socialized frequently outside class. In other words, they spent a lot of time in the same room.

The idea was to track these group members’ emotions—and emotional interactions—over an entire semester. So the scientists gave a personality test to start, then after the groups had worked together for a month, they questioned each member about both positive and negative feelings they experienced for each of the other group members—boredom, stress, anger, enthusiasm, and so forth. They also observed the networks that formed over the semester, to see if any one group member was becoming the emotional center of the group.

The results were mixed and intriguing. The students’ upbeat emotions were largely accounted for by individual emotional make-up—but not entirely. The presence of others also shaped the students’ feelings, with the most dominant group members having the most power to lift others’ spirits. But the big surprise came with negative emotions like sadness and anger. As reported on-line this week in the journal Psychological Science, downbeat emotions were shaped more by others than by individual temperament, and these effects were traceable to individuals with the most extraverted and disagreeable personalities. Importantly, the scientists ruled out emotional “contagion” as an explanation for the phenomenon: It’s not simply that miserable people were dragging others down with them, but something about them was affecting the entire room in the same way—and not in a good way.

We usually call these people “bad apples.” But if we’re not simply “catching” their bad vibes, what is happening? It’s not entirely clear, the scientists say. It could be that people with an emotional “presence” express themselves differently—with most body-language, for example—or they may convey dominance or warmth or creepiness in very subtle ways.

Excerpts from “We’re Only Human” appear regularly in the magazine Scientific American Mind. Wray Herbert’s book, On Second Thought, will be published by Crown in September.

A tool for predicting suicide?

Suicide is both disturbing and perplexing to survivors, in part because it is so unpredictable. People who are intent on killing themselves often conceal their thoughts—or outright deny them—so family and friends are left puzzling over warning signs they might have missed.

Even experienced clinical judgment often misses the mark. As a result, suicide experts have long hoped and searched for a clear behavioral marker of suicide risk. Now they may have found one. Harvard University scientists are reporting that a tool widely used for probing unconscious thoughts might be used to spot suicidal intent—even if the suicidal mind is in denial—and offer new hope for timely intervention to keep people alive.

Psychologist Matthew Nock (working with colleagues at both Harvard and nearby Massachusetts General Hospital) decided to adapt a decade-old test called the Implicit Association Test, or IAT, to plumb for warning signs of suicide. Specifically, he wanted to see if people who are suicidal might have stronger implicit associations between themselves and death—associations that might point toward self-destructive intentions. To find out, he tested 157 people seeking treatment in a psychiatric emergency room. The patients were all emotionally distressed, but only some were in the hospital because of attempted suicide. The scientists wanted to see if the IAT could distinguish those who had attempted suicide from those who had not.

The IAT is a reaction time test. During their hospital stay, often while sitting in bed, the patients very rapidly classified words on a computer screen, words like: lifeless, thrive, myself, deceased, they, theirs, survive, breathing. And so forth. The idea is to see how rapidly patients connect identity-related words to either life or death words. And the findings were unambiguous. As reported on-line this week in the journal Psychological Science, patients who had attempted suicide prior to admission had much stronger unconscious associations between self and death.

But the study didn’t end there. Nock followed all the patients for six months to see how they fared, and he found that the patients with a powerful self-death association in the hospital had a six-fold increase in later suicide attempts. Six-fold is a dramatic difference, and what’s more, the unconscious associations were a much better suicide predictor than depression, previous suicide attempts, or the intuition of the attending clinician.

What about the patients’ own predictions? Fourteen of the emergency patients attempted suicide within six months of leaving the hospital. Their self-evaluations were an indicator of their future risk, but an imperfect indicator. The IAT results were a better prognosticator even than the patients’ self-evaluations. This suggests that unconscious thoughts might be a useful detector and predictor of intentions that patients are reluctant to discuss—or intentions of which they themselves are unaware.

Excerpts from “We’re Only Human” appear regularly in the magazine Scientific American Mind. Wray Herbert’s book, On Second Thought: Outsmarting Your Mind’s Hard-Wired Habits, will be published by Crown in September.

A willingness to wonder

Willingness is a core concept of addiction recovery programs, and a paradoxical one. Twelve-step programs emphasize that individual addicts cannot will themselves into recovery and healthy sobriety, indeed that the ego and self-reliance are often a root cause of their problem. Yet recovering addicts must be willing. That is, they must be open to the possibility that the group and principles are powerful enough to trump a compulsive disease.

It’s a tricky concept for many, and must be taken on faith. But now there may be a little bit of science to back it up, too. Psychologist Ibrahim Senay of the University of Illinois—Champaign figured out an intriguing way to create a laboratory version of both willfulness and willingness—and to explore possible connections to intention, motivation, and goal-directed actions. In short, some key traits needed for long-term abstinence.

He did this by exploring self-talk. Self-talk is just what it sounds like—that voice in your head that articulates what you’re thinking, spelling out your options and intentions and hopes and fears and so forth. It’s the ongoing conversation with oneself. Senay thought that the form and texture of self-talk—right down to the sentence structure—might be important in shaping plans and actions. What’s more, self-talk might be a tool for exerting the will—or being willing.

Here’s how he tested this notion. He had a group of volunteers work on a series of anagrams—changing the word sauce to cause, for example, or when to hewn. But before starting this task, half the volunteers were told to contemplate whether they would work on anagrams, while the others thought about the fact that they would be doing anagrams. It’s a subtle difference, but the former were basically putting their mind into wondering mode, while the latter were asserting themselves. It’s the difference between “I will do this” and “Will I do this?”

The wondering minds completed significantly more anagrams. In other words, they were much more goal-directed than were those who declared their intentions to themselves.

This is counterintuitive. Why would asserting one’s intentions to do something undermine that goal? Senay wanted to double-check these surprising results, which he did in this way: He recruited volunteers on the pretense that they were needed for a handwriting study. Some wrote the words I will over and over, while others wrote Will I. The idea was that self-posed questions about the future are fundamentally different than self-declarations. Questions should inspire thoughts about autonomy and motivation to pursue a goal—and in the end make the questioners more successful.

To test this, Senay again had the volunteers work on an anagram task. And again, the willful volunteers performed more poorly than the questioners. He ran another version of this experiment, but he changed the goal to exercise rather than anagrams, and got the same result: Those primed with the words Will I had greater intentions to exercise regularly than did those primed with I will. What’s more, when the volunteers were asked why they had decided to exercise more, the quesioners said things like “Because I want to take more responsibility for my own health.” Those primed with I will offered explanations like “Because I would feel guilty or ashamed of myself if I did not.”

This last finding is crucial. It indicates that those with questioning minds were more intrinsically motivated to change. Those asserting their will lacked this internal motivation, which explains their weak commitment to future change. Put in terms of addiction recovery, those who were asserting their willpower were closing their minds, narrowing their view of the future. Those who were questioning and wondering were open-minded—and therefore willing to see new possibilities for the future.

Selections from “We’re Only Human” appear regularly in the magazine Scientific American Mind. For more on overcoming addiction, visit "The Science of Recovery." Wray Herbert’s book, On Second Thought: Outsmarting Your Mind’s Hard-Wired Habits, will be published by Crown in September.

Vieux, en bonne sante . . . et bilingue

In French, that means old, healthy . . . and bilingual. I could just as well have used Google Translate to put that phrase into Finnish or Spanish or Chinese. The fact is, I don’t speak any of those languages fluently—any language except English really. Which puts me in good company: When Senator Barack Obama was campaigning for the presidency back in 2008, he told a crowd in Dayton, Ohio: “I don’t speak a foreign language. It’s embarrassing.”

It is embarrassing. But worse than that, it may be unhealthy. New research suggests that bilingualism may convey previously unrecognized cognitive benefits—benefits that appear early and last a lifetime. These benefits may go well beyond language itself. Indeed, speaking two languages may shape the mind and brain in fundamental ways, creating mental reserves that help stave off the ravages of dementia.

That’s the surprising possibility emerging from an ongoing research project at York University in Ontario. Cognitive psychologist Ellen Bialystok has for years been testing and comparing people who speak one or two languages, including children, adults and the elderly. Her overall conclusion is that bilingualism enhances the brain’s “executive control.” That’s a catchall term that encompasses the ability to pay attention, to ignore distractions, to hold information in short-term memory, to do more than one task at a time. It’s mental discipline, and it typically emerges in childhood and declines in old age.

Bialystok has tested this many different ways. Here’s one example: She had 4- and 5-year-old kids do a card sorting task. The cards show circles or triangles, some red and some blue, and the kids are told to sort the deck by color. Later they are told to switch—and sort the same cards by shape. Young children usually have great difficulty making this mental switch, but when Bialystok ran the experiment, bilingual kids were much better with the rule change. This indicates heightened executive control.

This advantage appears to persist into adulthood. Bialystok (working with various colleagues) compared bilinguals and monolinguals on various lab tests that require mental discipline. The Stroop test is one such test. That’s the one where you have the word R-E-D printed in blue, and you have to rapidly name the ink color rather than read the word. It’s hard—and again the bilinguals consistently did better than subjects who only spoke one language. Or looked at another way, monolinguals had a cognitive deficit—and this deficit appears to increase as adults get older.

Right into old age. Bialystok wanted to explore whether enhanced executive control actually has a protective effect in mental aging—specifically, whether bilingualism contributes to the “cognitive reserve” that comes from stimulating social, mental and physical activity. She studied a large group of men and women with dementia, and compared the onset of their first symptoms. The age of onset for dementia was a full four years later in bilinguals than in patients who had lived their lives speaking just one language. That’s a whopping difference. Delaying dementia four years is more than any known drug can do, and could represent a huge savings in health care costs.
Is there any downside to bilingualism? Yes. As reported on-line in the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science, Bialystok’s studies also found that bilinguals have less linguistic proficiency in either of their two languages than do those who only speak that language. They have somewhat smaller vocabularies, for example, and aren’t as rapid at retrieving word meanings. But compared to the dramatic cognitive advantages of learning a second language, that seems a small price to pay. Plus you can travel to Paris without the embarrassment of constantly thumbing through your dog-eared French for Dummies.

Wray Herbert’s “We’re Only Human” column appears regularly in the magazine Scientific American Mind. His book, On Second Thought: Outsmarting Your Mind’s Hard-Wired Habits, will be published by Crown in September.

Casting light on cheating and greed

Louis Brandeis was already one of America’s most famous lawyers when Woodrow Wilson appointed him to the Supreme Court in 1916. He was a tireless and prescient critic of big investment banks—including bankers’ excessive bonuses—an argument he spelled out in his influential book of essays, Other People’s Money and How Bankers Use It. His solution for the problem of concentrated financial power was unfettered public scrutiny, a belief he summarized in his famous statement: “Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman.”

Justice Brandeis was an intuitive psychologist. When he said that the “broad light of day” would purify men’s actions, he was anticipating a field of research that is just now beginning to illuminate the intricate interplay of the mind, the body, and morality. Light, it appears, does much more than distinguish day from night; it takes away our illusion of anonymity and, in doing so, literally keeps us honest.

This seems obvious on one level. Streetlights were most likely invented to deter crime, and big power outages are almost inevitably followed by looting. But darkness in that sense is actual cover for criminals, like a mask. The new research suggests that even non-criminals may be influenced by the metaphorical meaning of light and darkness, becoming more dishonest and self-centered as light diminishes.

Here’s the science. Three psychologists—Chen-Bo Zhong and Vanessa Bohns of the University of Toronto and Francesca Gino of the University of North Carolina—wanted to explore the idea that metaphorical darkness leads to illusory anonymity, and in turn to moral transgression. In one experiment, they had a group of volunteers perform a complicated mathematical task—so complicated that it was impossible to complete in the time allotted. When they ran out of time, the volunteers were told to pay themselves only for the work they were able to finish. This was all done anonymously, although secretly the scientists were monitoring the volunteers’ actions.

Half the volunteers did this sham exercise is a brightly lit room, with twelve overhead light bulbs, while the others did it in a room dimly lit by just four bulbs. The idea was to see if those in the darker room were more likely to cheat than those working in bright light. And they were, indisputably. They not only lied about their performance on the difficult task, they also paid themselves more cash for work they had failed to do. In short, they lied, cheated and stole money.

It’s important to note that, while one room was darker than the other, neither room was actually dark. That is, the lack of illumination was not enabling the cheating; and indeed, the task was (ostensibly) anonymous anyway, so there was nothing really to hide. It’s not like they were tip-toeing out of the room with cash. Yet the dim lighting gave volunteers the psychological license to behave unethically.

These findings were bizarre enough that the scientists wanted to double-check them. So in a second experiment, instead of dimming the room, they had only some of the volunteers wear sunglasses to dim their view. Then all the volunteers participated in a laboratory exercise called the dictator’s game. The dictator’s game is a test of fairness and greed; one volunteer (the initiator) has a given pot of cash, and is allowed to give away all, some or none of it to another, who can accept or reject it. In this experiment, all the volunteers were initiators; the scientists simply wanted to see how generous or stingy they were, depending on whether they were wearing sunglasses or not.

Shades corrupt. As reported on-line in the journal Psychological Science, those with a slightly darkened view of the world gave away considerably less money—less than what’s fair and less than the volunteers not wearing shades. Darkness gave them the sensation that they were more concealed, and that in turn made them greedier people.

Think about this for a minute. The researchers were not manipulating light and darkness so that some actually had more cover. They were the ones perceiving a darker world, and that perception was enough to license their transgressions. What’s going on here? Well, the researchers believe that dimming the lights or wearing sunglasses is a kind of egocentric mental “anchor”; because they see the world as somewhat darkened, they assume that others have an obscured view of them as well. They act not as if they have sunglasses on, but as if there has been a widespread power outage that has darkened everyone's world.

Kids are notoriously egocentric in this way. They’ll close their eyes when they play hide-and-seek, thinking that they can’t be seen if they themselves can’t see. Apparently, adults don’t outgrow this egocentrism entirely. But what’s cute in a childhood game of hide-and-seek isn’t nearly so cute in grownup games with other people’s money.

For more insights into the quirks of human nature, visit the “Full Frontal Psychology” blog as True/Slant. Excerpts from “We’re Only Human” appear regularly in the magazine Scientific American Mind. Wray Herbert’s book, On Second Thought: Outsmarting Your Mind’s Hard-Wired Habits, will be published by Crown in September.

An angry voter is an ignorant voter

Imagine this scenario: You lost your job at the lumber yard early in 2009. Nobody is building new homes these days, and this slowdown has trickled down to suppliers all over the country. What’s worse, you’re dipping into savings just to make your own mortgage payments—on a house that has lost a big chunk of its value. In short, your American dream is in shambles.

It’s a dreary but all too familiar scenario. Now imagine further how you feel about this. Is worry your primary emotion? Are you anxious about your wife’s health, and the possibility of an expensive hospitalization? Are you fearful about depleting your kids’ college funds? Where will you all live if you lose the house?

Or are you mostly angry? After all, this situation is totally unfair, given how hard you have worked all these years. Who’s to blame? Those fat cat bankers are still drawing their obscene bonuses, while working guys like you are barely eking out a living. Someone’s got to pay for this mess.

Both fear and anger are understandable under these dire circumstances. But what are you going to do? Well, there‘s an election coming up later this year. Here’s your chance to at least take some action, to raise your citizen’s voice and be heard. How will you exercise this civic responsibility when you go to the polls in November?

We like to think that our democracy is rational, that as voters we educate ourselves on the issues and choose the candidate who best represents our views. Emotions, while natural, would seem to undermine this civic ideal, leading to cynicism and confused thinking and wrongheaded choices. But is it so simple? New research suggests that emotions can indeed skew voting behavior—but in surprising and nuanced ways.

University of Massachusetts scientists Michael Parker and Linda Isbell rigged an election to explore the interplay of specific emotions and voting. Not a real election, of course, but a hypothetical Democratic primary election for the Massachusetts state senate. They created two candidates, John Clarkson and Tom Richards, each with detailed positions on a dozen important public issues. The candidates’ positions are spelled out on the candidates’ Web sites, along with general information on each aspiring senator.

The researchers recruited a large number of volunteers, all Massachusetts residents, to act as voters in this election. They were directed to the Web sites, and told to peruse as much information as they liked, in any manner they wanted—and to consider whatever they needed to make an informed voting decision. Clarkson and Richards actually agreed on most of the issues, though they stated their views differently. The general information was vague, but made clear that each candidate was well qualified.

But here’s the rub: Before the voters started researching the issues and candidates, some were primed for fear and others for anger—much like the scenarios above. The idea was to see if these two basic human emotions shaped civic behavior in different ways. That is, did angry citizens size up candidates one way, and anxious voters a different way? And did these thinking styles translate into different behavior at the polls?

The answer is a resounding yea. As reported on-line in the journal Psychological Science, the worried voters were much more deliberate and organized in their thinking than were the angry voters, spending significantly more time exploring the candidates’ Web sites. What’s more, the anxious citizens actually voted for the candidates whose positions they agreed with; in other words, democracy worked the way it’s supposed to work. This may seem obvious, but it wasn’t to the angry citizens, for whom there was no apparent connection among issues and positions and ballot-box choices.

So what was influencing the angry voters, if not the issues of the day and the candidates promises? Apparently it was the vague general information that guided their choices. In the real world, that means things like basic name recognition, party loyalty, and simplistic political labels. The angry voters didn’t take the time to really concentrate on the issues and positions, and instead let these skimpy generalities guide them. It appears their anger was switching their brain from deliberate mode to automatic mode—to gut feelings more than rational analysis. The worried citizens had too much at stake to trust their gut.

For more insights into the quirks of human nature, visit the “Full Frontal Psychology” blog at True/Slant. Excerpts from “We’re Only Human” appear regularly in the magazine Scientific American Mind. Wray Herbert’s book, On Second Thought: Outsmarting Your Mind’s Hard-Wired Habits, will be published by Crown in September.