We're Only Human...

How to quit smoking? Think about smoking

2010-08-06T10:34:00.003-04:00

I quit smoking many years ago, but even today I can recall the unpleasantness of that time—the cravings, the obsessive thoughts. My strategy was to keep my mind and body busy all the time, in order to keep my thoughts of cigarettes at bay. Sometimes it worked, and sometimes it didn’t. I relapsed a few times before I finally quit for good.

There were quitters’ support groups available at the time, but the idea didn’t make sense to me. Why would I want to sit around with other dreary addicts and talk incessantly about the very thing I was trying to banish from my mind? Wouldn’t that just undermine my willpower and leave me more miserable?

Well, no, as it turns out. New science now suggests that the worst thing smokers can do is try not to think about cigarettes. Banishing cigarettes and matches and ashtrays from your neurons may lead temporarily to less smoking, but the banished thoughts quickly rebound—nudging smokers to light up even more than they do usually.

The research is from the University of London. Psychological scientist James Erskine and his colleagues knew from previous experiments that people find it nearly impossible to suppress any thoughts for very long. This is the famous “don’t think about white bears” research, which showed that even random thoughts take on power once we decide we want them gone. But Erskine and colleagues wanted to take this a step further—to see if banishing thoughts actually shapes our actions as well as our thinking.

Here’s the study. The scientists recruited a large group of regular smokers, both men and women in the 20s and 30s. None of the smokers were trying to quit at the time, and indeed had no intention to quit; but the researchers did ask them how many times they had tried to quit in the past. They also measured their general tendency to suppress thoughts, which varies from individual to individual.

The volunteers were then given diaries and told to record how many cigarettes they smoked every day for three weeks. They also made notations about their stress levels every day during the three weeks. Finally, they were instructed—this is important—not to alter their normal smoking patterns in any way.

After doing this for a week, some of the volunteers were given this additional instruction: “Try not to think about smoking. If you do happen to have thoughts about smoking this week, try to suppress them.” Others were told nothing, while still others were told basically the opposite—to actively try to think about cigarettes as often as possible. They all did this for a week, and then spent the third and final week again simply recording their smoking and stress.

The results were intriguing. As reported on-line in the journal Psychological Science, those who tried to banish thoughts of cigarettes smoked significantly less than the others during the time they were actually suppressing their thoughts, but their puffing rebounded with a fury the following week: They smoked much more than the controls and—the most interesting finding—more than those who were indulging in thoughts of smoking. What’s more, the suppressors experienced much more stress during the time they were trying to control their thoughts—but this stress vanished in the final week as their smoking spiked.

Remember that these smokers were explicitly instructed not to change their normal smoking patterns. Yet the suppressors smoked less when they were actively controlling their thoughts. This suggests that, in the short term, suppression may really work. But that’s not necessarily a good thing for this reason: Smokers may perceive the strategy as beneficial—when in fact they are unwittingly triggering a relapse in the not-so-distant future.

Remember also that these volunteers were not even trying to quit. But when the scientists looked more closely at those who had tried to quit in the past, they tended to be those who habitually suppress unpleasant thoughts. This makes sense. The paradoxical rebound effect is no doubt even stronger in those who really, really want the craving to stop.

Wray Herbert’s new book, On Second Thought: Outsmarting Your Mind’s Hard-Wired Habits, will be out in September. Excerpts from the “We’re Only Human” blog appear regularly in Scientific American Mind and in The Huffington Post.

Why (some) people drown their sorrows

2010-07-28T12:33:00.002-04:00

Imagine that you just lost your job. The bad news came without warning—a company downsizing. You’re one more casualty of the recession. So naturally you’re feeling lousy, and what’s more, you need to go home and tell the family. But maybe, before you do, you’ll stop by your favorite watering hole for a martini—or two or three. You’ve got the time, after all.

That’s called drowning your sorrows—or, in psychological jargon, self-medication. It’s quite normal, really, to try to regulate intense negative emotions in whatever way possible, and liquor is a quick and effective strategy. But it’s not a healthy strategy—and the fact is, not everyone does it. While some of us turn to alcohol or drugs to cope with life’s curveballs, others seem to muddle through their travails in other ways.

So what’s the difference between those who use booze to cope and those who don’t? What’s going on in the mind or your co-worker, who also got a pink slip but drives right past the tavern? Doesn’t he feel bad, too?

No doubt he does, but new research suggests that you and your co-worker may have very different cognitive styles—different ways of appraising the same blunt negative emotions. While you may know that you feel “bad” and leave it at that, others may parse that global negativity: I feel angry at the boss; disappointed in myself; scared for my family. Simply knowing that one feels bad is not very useful, but more precise and fine-grained analysis conveys a richer understanding of bad feelings—and that understanding may actually lower risk of using (and abusing) alcohol as a coping mechanism.

At least that’s the theory, which George Mason University psychological scientist Todd Kashdan has been testing out in the lab. He suspected that people who are unskilled at differentiating their bad feelings would be more likely to dwell on those feelings and misinterpret them—making them worse—and that this would lead to self-medication. Here’s how he tested that idea.

He recruited a large group of social drinkers from the community, and had them monitor their drinking for three weeks using a hand-held electronic diary. They also kept track of their emotions during this time, recording when something made them feel angry or fatigued or anxious or distracted—and rating the intensity of those emotions. They did this when they were randomly prompted, and they also paid special attention to their feelings right before and after drinking. Kashdan used all this data to rate all the volunteers on how coarsely or finely they analyzed their emotions.

The idea was to see if those who were more precise in analyzing their own emotions were also less apt to drown their sorrows. And they were, clearly. As reported in the journal Psychological Science, those with intense negative emotions during the three weeks drank less if they thought about those feelings in more nuanced ways. It appears that people who can deconstruct their bad feelings in times of distress have more self-understanding—making it easier to manage problems and plan real coping strategies—not just numbing.

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

Are women shunning science?

2010-07-20T10:46:00.003-04:00

In 2005, Harvard University president Lawrence Summers got himself into hot water. Speaking at a national conference on Diversifying the Science and Engineering Workforce, the former Clinton treasury official suggested that the relative scarcity of women in science careers might be explained—at least in part—by a gender difference in intrinsic aptitude for the sciences.

Summers mentioned other possible explanations as well, most notably the clash between high-power jobs and family life, but it was his remarks on science ability that grabbed all the attention. Actually, “attention” doesn’t fairly summarize what followed. Summers’ remarks ignited a firestorm of angry dissent—a reaction so intense that it led to a faculty vote of “no confidence” and, ultimately, to the Harvard chief’s resignation.

So where are the women in science and engineering and math? The question remains as politically and emotionally charged as it was five years ago, and it’s still begging for an answer. Even if Summers’ critics are entirely correct—and there is no real evidence that men and women differ in scientific talent—what then is the explanation for the disparity in careers? Is it indeed that the pressures of childbearing and parenting preclude high-intensity careers for women? Is it early socialization and stereotypes? Discrimination at the highest levels of science? All of the above?

Or something else entirely? New research is now pointing to a novel explanation for the discrepancy. According to an emerging theory, there is indeed a gender difference at work, but it is a difference in values rather than ability. What’s more, it’s not that women can’t cut it in math and science; it’s that they reject these fields as too ego- and power-driven for their sensibilities.

According to Miami University psychological scientist Amanda Diekman, women may be opting out of science careers because they perceive these careers as lacking in communal values like intimacy, altruism, and connection with people. If correct, this theory might illuminate another mystery: Why is it that the gender gap has almost entirely disappeared in other demanding careers like medicine and law—but stubbornly persists in science, math and engineering. Medicine is especially puzzling, because it requires the same scientific mastery as careers in research and engineering.

Women embrace communal values more than men, who tend to value individuality and power. That gender difference has been well documented over many years. Diekman and her colleagues wondered if this basic difference in values might shape women’s career choices—leading them away from the lone ranger image associated with laboratory science and toward more nurturing careers. They decided to test this out in the laboratory.

The study was straightforward. They recruited a large group of young men and women from the university’s science classes. They were about 19 years old on average—so just the age to be thinking about career choice. The researchers asked them about their career preferences, and also about their values and goals—whether they were driven by a desire for power and success or by intimacy and altruism. They also asked them to rate a whole list careers according to these values. Finally, they measured their math and science ability—and their confidence in these abilities.

When they crunched all the data together, the results were unambiguous. As reported on-line in the journal Psychological Science, the more strongly the students embraced values like intimacy and human connection, the less interested they were in science and math careers. And these communally-oriented students were mostly women. In other words, young women did see science and engineering careers as isolated and individualistic—and what’s more, as obstacles to finding meaning in their lives. This was true regardless of their past performance in math and science or their confidence in their ability to succeed in these fields. In short, the women were taking charge of their lives by making a values choice.

Here’s the ironic part, though. There is no real evidence that scientists and engineers are selfish rogues, nor that scientific work is bereft of spiritual values. Indeed, science and engineering careers could be seen as highly communitarian, since many scientists do dream of improving the human condition. But that’s not the perception.

And that’s good news, in a way. If science and engineering have a perception problem, perceptions at least can be changed over time. The image of the isolated lone ranger simply needs to be displaced by a new image of the scientist as connected, collaborative and humane—at the earliest levels of schooling.

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

Pack Up All Your Cares and Woes

2010-07-12T13:12:00.004-04:00

Many healing traditions make use of jars—variously called God jars, or resentment jars, or worry jars. The idea is that you can—literally—compartmentalize your troubles, and by doing so take away their emotional power.

If this sounds like a lot of New Age gobbledygook to you, read on.

The practice is a form of metaphor therapy, which sees psychological truth in common metaphors like “bottled-up anger” and “buried sorrows.” These figures of speech are not arbitrary, a growing number of psychologists believe; instead they are examples of the way abstract psychological states overlap with physical experience. Psychological scientist Xiuping Li and his colleagues at the National University of Singapore wanted to explore these ideas in connection with emotional regulation—specifically the possibility that the physical act of enclosing bad feelings might facilitate psychological closure on a difficult emotional experience.

The first experiments were quite simple. In one, the researchers asked a group of volunteers to recall (and write about) a recent decision that they regretted. Half of them sealed the written memory inside an envelope before handing it in, while the others simply handed it to the experimenter. Then they all reported their feelings about the event, including guilt, worry and shame. In a second similar experiment, volunteers wrote about a dream that had gone unfulfilled. Again, only half sealed away their recollections, and again they all later described how emotionally upset they were. The results were unambiguous, and identical in each study: Those who physically sealed away their bad experiences—even though it was just in a common envelope—had many fewer negative emotions afterward. The simple act of containing the emotionally charged memories appears to have defused them.

At least that’s one interpretation. But the scientists wanted to be sure that it was specifically the act of enclosing negative memories and emotions that was alleviating distress. So they ran another experiment to clarify the findings. In this one, volunteers read a news account of a child’s tragic death, and wrote about their emotional response to it. Then they wrote about something neutral—their plans for the weekend, for example. Half the volunteers sealed up the tragic story and their reactions, while the others sealed up their weekend plans, before doing the same kind of emotional inventory.

The purpose here was to see if simply sealing up anything would have the same tonic effect. It did not. Only those who sealed up their shock and sadness about the tragedy got relief from the act. The scientists did one more version of the study where some of the volunteers paper-clipped the distressing memory rather than sealing it up; and again this act failed to alleviate emotional upset. Apparently psychological closure really means closure—not clipping. As reported on-line last week in the journal Psychological Science, only the act of enveloping the emotional content worked.

So how does it work? It’s not known for sure, but here’s a hint. The scientists finished the study of the tragic news study by giving all the volunteers a pop quiz at the end—to see how much of the story they recalled. And guess what. Those who had gone through the act of sealing away the event and their feelings remembered fewer details of the event. That is, sealing up the emotional content appears to have diminished the actual memory of the upsetting event, contributing to the psychological closure necessary for putting the pain in the past.

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

No Exit: Living With Walls and Fences

2010-07-09T14:22:00.005-04:00

The right to move around is a fundamental human right. Back in 1948, in the wake of World War II, the United Nations declared that all men and women have the right to roam freely in their homeland, to leave, to return if they choose, and to exit again. That political vision recognized a basic psychological truth—that it is a violation of human nature to fence people in.

Even so, the global reality never matched the ideal. Citizens of many nations are still denied the basic liberty to pack up and leave for a better place. What are the psychological consequences when this human liberty is violated? When borders are closed and exit papers withheld?

One would think that being penned in would spark resentment at the least, and perhaps even rebelliousness and political unrest. But some new psychological research is suggesting this may not be the case, that indeed the opposite may be true: Denying citizens their fundamental freedom of movement may ironically transform those citizens into passionate defenders of the status quo—including unfair policies totally unrelated to emigration.

A team of psychological scientists at the University of Waterloo—Kristin Laurin, Steven Shepherd and Aaron Kay—wanted to see the lengths to which people will go to rationalize such political repression. They suspected, because restrictions on emigration often lead to all sorts of other punitive policies, that trapped citizens will rationalize the existence of a repressive regime and all its practices. They tested this idea in some interesting laboratory experiments.

In one study, for example, the scientists primed volunteers’ thoughts about either unfettered movement or confinement by having them read futuristic depictions of Canada. Some read of a future with unrestricted travel beyond Canada’s borders, while others read that it would be increasingly difficult to leave and settle elsewhere. Afterward, all the volunteers read an account of gender inequality in their country—including the fact that men earn much more than equally qualified women. They were given the option of explaining such unfairness by either blaming the system or by attributing it to genuine differences between men and women.

The researchers studied only women in this experiment, on the assumption that the gender issue would hit closer to home for them. They suspected that women who felt confined would be more likely to rationalize the negative aspects of their lives at home, even something as emotionally powerful as gender inequality. And that’s exactly what they found. As reported on-line in the journal Psychological Science, the women who felt free to leave home were more critical of their lives at home, blaming gender inequality on an unfair system. Those who felt “stuck” were much less likely to acknowledge the hypothetical Canada’s flaws; they were more tolerant of their underclass status, viewing it as a legitimate result of natural differences.

This is cognitive dissonance writ large. Cognitive dissonance is the theory that humans will rationalize even the most aversive conditions—if they are forced to live with them. These results go even further, suggesting that denial of one liberty can lead victims to rationalize another kind another rights violation altogether—even something as basic as equality under the law—and indeed an entire system. Interestingly, when the scientists reran this experiment with a depiction of Germany rather than Canada, the rationalization of the repressive system vanished. That is to say, the volunteers were motivated not by some abstract belief in freedom, but by the prospect of very personal restrictions on their liberty, at home in Canada. The researchers ran another version of the study, this one involving both men and women, and found the same phenomenon at work.

So how much repression will citizens “make okay”? There may be limits, the Waterloo scientists say. When the former Soviet Union refused to grant exit visas to its Jewish citizens, many of them did the opposite of what these lab results suggest: They formed dissident groups and unrelentingly attacked the repressive regime—not just the Soviet emigration policy but the entire system. Despite the remarkable human ability to rationalize, it may be Soviet repression was too dreadful and immoral to justify.

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

'To suffer is to suffer': Analyzing the Russian national character

2010-06-30T12:35:00.003-04:00

The 19th-century Russian scholar and war hero Boris Grushenko had this to say about human suffering: “To love is to suffer. To avoid suffering one must not love, but then one suffers from not loving. Therefore, to love is to suffer, not to love is to suffer, to suffer is to suffer. To be happy is to love, to be happy then is to suffer but suffering makes one unhappy, therefore to be unhappy one must love or love to suffer or suffer from too much happiness.”

Pretty heady stuff—and pretty depressing.

There is no Boris Grushenko. Woody Allen fans will recognize Boris as the cowardly anti-hero of the 1975 film Love and Death, the director’s parody of Russia’s brooding national character. Boris represents all Russians in his deep distrust of happiness and his eagerness to indulge his every distressing thought and melancholy emotion.

Woody Allen is not alone in stereotyping the dark Russian temperament. But is this caricature accurate? Are Russians really more self-absorbed than their Western counterparts? Do they ruminate more on the negative, and is such brooding impairing the country’s collective mental health?

Two University of Michigan psychological scientists had some doubts about this caricature, and they decided to explore it in the laboratory. Igor Grossmann and Ethan Kross suspected that, even if Russians as a group are more self-reflective and more preoccupied with negative thoughts, this trait may not necessarily be a bad thing. In other words, all self-reflection may not be the same, and some styles of rumination—including the Russian style—might actually be healthy rather than maladaptive. They tested this theory in a couple of simple experiments.

The first study aimed simply to test whether the stereotype was accurate, and whether or not self-reflection was related to depression. The scientists recruited large groups of both Russians and Americans, and gave them a battery of psychological tests, including tests for depression, for rumination, and for a tendency to self-analyze negative thoughts. The results were clear: The Russians were much more likely to identify themselves as self-reflective, but this group trait was not linked to depression. In fact, the opposite: The self-reflective Russians had fewer symptoms of depression than did the less analytical Americans.

These results raised more questions than they answered—like why? It appears that something about the Russian culture or character or cognitive style reduces distress, but what is the mechanism? Grossmann and Kross had an idea, which they tested in a second experiment. In this study, volunteers—again both American and Russian—were instructed to recall and analyze their “deepest thoughts and feelings” about a recent experience that made them angry. Afterward, the volunteers answered questions about their self-analysis: Did they actually re-experience the distressing events? Or did they see the events as a detached observer, from afar? Did they simply narrate the emotional experience to themselves, or were they looking for insight and closure on the event?

These questions were meant to identify the volunteers’ style of self-reflection. Some people tend to immerse themselves in past negative events, to relive them, while others distance themselves. Some want to put bad things in perspective more than others. These different ways of construing negative experiences determine whether self-reflection is healthy or harmful.

The scientists suspected that the Russians would be more detached than the Americans in their self-analysis—and that’s just what they found. As reported on-line in the journal Psychological Science, the Russian volunteers were not only less distressed while recalling a bad experience, they thought about the event in a healthier way, keeping more psychological distance from the emotional details. They analyzed their feelings, but with detachment, and this detachment buffered them from depression.

.
So is there something about Russian culture—and American culture—that leads to these healthy and unhealthy styles of self-indulgent thinking? Grossmann and Kross believe it has to do with the basic nature of Russian and American societies. Russians tend to be more communal, more focused on interpersonal harmony, and this allows them to see their own personal needs in larger context, from an outsider perspective. Americans, by contrast, come from a tradition of rugged individualism, and tend to focus on the personal. With less of a community perspective, they immerse themselves in the emotional details of negative events, and this self focus leads to distress and depression.

So it appears that the stereotype of the brooding Russian may contain an element of truth afer all, but the caricature of the Russian suffering and loving to suffer is a mere fiction from the American cinema.

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

Can negativity save a failing marriage?

2010-06-28T14:20:00.005-04:00

Newlyweds are almost always advised to be upbeat—to have positive expectations for their relationship, to put the best spin on their partner’s actions, and to forgive and forget. Marriage counselors also take (and preach) the view that positive attitudes and actions will strengthen a struggling marriage, even when a little negativity might be well-deserved.

So why do half of all couples in therapy fail to save their marriages? Is it possible that this rose-tinted advice is bad advice, that positivity isn’t the cure-all for ailing unions after all? New research seems to suggest that indeed, for rocky marriages, false positivity may actually gloss over issues that need attention, exacerbating rather than solving problems.

James McNulty, a psychological scientist at the University of Tennessee, has been studying newlyweds, following their marriages over years, through thick and thin. He has examined couples’ expectations, their tendencies to blame one another, their problem solving styles, and their readiness to forgive. His overall conclusion is that, while positivity is in fact tonic for couples who are doing okay, it is detrimental for couples who are already on the skids.

Here’s a closer look, as spelled out in the latest issue of the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science. The received wisdom among marriage experts is that having a bleak outlook is a self-fulfilling prophecy—leading to destructive interactions that undermine the partnership. But McNulty found a more nuanced view when he followed 82 newlywed couples over four years of marriage. Being hopeful about the future only helps if those hopes are confirmed by experience, he found. But for many couples—especially those lacking problem-solving skills—those early high hopes are dashed, leading to disappointment. For such couples, realistically anticipating some rough patches may not be a bad thing—and in fact can result in greater satisfaction over the long haul.

Or consider the blame game. Everyone who has ever been married has screwed up sometime, and it seems obvious that cutting your partner some slack would be good for the marriage. And that’s true—for happy couples. Husbands and wives in solid marriages look for alternative explanations when their partner blunders, instead of blaming the blunder on a character flaw. But McNulty found that this strategy—benevolently looking for excuses—can also cause couples to overlook important issues in the marriage, which then go unresolved. Which strategy is best depends on the relationship and the problems. In another of his long-range studies of couples, McNulty found that, when the problems were most severe, holding one’s partner responsible—blaming them—led to greater satisfaction, presumably because a little negativity forced the couples to confront issues.

Partners who routinely blame one another are often rejecting and controlling as well—traits that make for ineffective problem solving. Accordingly, therapists usually counsel couples to avoid these negative behaviors when they’re trying to work something out. Yet again, McNulty found this to be simplistic advice—inapplicable to all couples. Couples who had mostly minor problems did indeed benefit if they were less rejecting and controlling, but couples with knottier and more frequent problems actually did better if they were more negative during discussions. Why? Presumably it’s because rejection and demanding behavior—as toxic as they seem—can actually be effective strategies for forcing a partner to make the changes needed for a marriage to survive.

Wouldn’t a healthy dose of forgiveness trump all the problems that plague marriages? Isn’t that the simplest answer to most of the travails that undermine relationships? Well, yes and no, says McNulty. In his studies, the psychologist found that forgiveness only works for relationships that experience rare marital misdemeanors. In marriages where one’s partner is frequently unkind or insulting, being unforgiving appears to pay off. In such troubled couples, too much forgiveness simply increases the likelihood that the cruelty will continue—and lead to more disharmony over time.

So two cheers for negativity in marriage. McNulty found one notable exception, however—sarcasm. The tendency to be snide is linked to unhappier and less successful marriages, no matter how difficult the problems that couples faced initially. The benefits of negativity appear to require directness; direct negativity provides concrete information to both partners about what changes are needed to save the marriage. Indirect, snarky negativity just creates ambiguity about how to get from here to there.

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

Does believing soothe the worried mind?

2010-06-23T14:35:00.006-04:00

Religious beliefs date back at least 100,000 years. That’s the time when our Neanderthal cousins began burying their dead with weapons and tools—presumably prepping them for the world beyond the grave. And such beliefs persist today, with the vast majority of modern humans in every corner of the globe espousing some kind of religious conviction.

But why? The antiquity and universality of belief suggest that it serves some fundamental psychological purpose, but what would that be? A small but growing number of psychological scientists have been exploring these questions, focusing on the idea that religious belief may be a natural consequence of the human mind at work. According to this view, belief emerged to satisfy a basic human need to comprehend and explain a complex and unpredictable world. By allowing us to impose some sense of purpose and order on the randomness, believing in God and an afterlife helps us cope with uncertainty—and thus relieves anxiety.

At least that’s the theory of Michael Inzlicht and Alexa Tullett of the University of Toronto Scarborough, who study the cognitive aspects of religion. Inzlicht and Tullett have been testing the notion that belief quells anxiety by looking at the brain in action. The brain has a built-in monitor that is constantly on the lookout for mental mistakes, and when any such error occurs, this monitor sends off a neural distress signal. It’s an important job, because it helps us detect and correct bad thinking, but too much vigilance leads to an overly active distress signal—in short, a worried mind. The researchers wanted to see if religious thoughts might dampen this cortical alarm.

So they ran a couple experiments. In one, for example, they recruited a group of volunteers who were all strong believers in God, though they came from varied religious backgrounds. They “primed” religious thinking in only some of the volunteers by having them write about the meaning of their own religion. Others, the control subjects, wrote about their favorite season—also a positive topic, but less meaningful. Then the volunteers attempted a very difficult cognitive task—one deliberately chosen to produce a lot of mental errors. They hooked all the volunteers up to an EEG to monitor their brains’ neural activity while as they monitored these errors.

A milder signal would mean that the religious thinking somehow muffled the natural alarm, in effect calming the brain. And that’s just what they saw on the EEGs: As reported on-line last week in the journal Psychological Science, those prompted to reflect on God were noticeably less anxious than the control subjects.

The scientists reran the experiment in a slightly different way to compare believers and atheists. This time, they had all the volunteers—believers and atheists alike—complete a word task designed to unconsciously prime religious thinking. As before, the religious thinking (even though it was out of conscious awareness) had a palliative effect on the believers, dampening the distress signaling in the brain. But here’s the interesting part: It had the exact opposite effect on the atheists, who actually showed a heightened distress signal. Even though the religious priming was unconscious, the atheists reacted defensively, as if the thoughts of religion were challenging their system of meaning.

This cortical alarm system fires off within a few hundredths of a second following a mistake. But might these finding have long-range mental health implications? If thinking about religion causes this instantaneous calming effect, might religious people live lives of greater equanimity? Might religious people be better able to cope with life’s curve balls?

Yes and no, the scientists say. It certainly appears from these studies that strong beliefs have positive, calming effects, but that doesn’t privilege formal or traditional religious beliefs. Indeed, affirming any cherished values—even atheism—should allow believers to see their world as more stable, understandable and predictable.

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

Does Botox impair human understanding?

2010-06-16T17:16:00.009-04:00

Hollywood film directors were among the first to recognize the downside of Botox. Several years ago, Martin Scorsese, whose works include Raging Bull, Taxi Driver and The Departed, became an early and outspoken critic of the anti-aging treatment. The Academy Award-winning director complained that it was becoming increasingly difficult to find an actress who could use her face to express the range of human emotion, especially anger.

It may be worse than the famed director susepcted. New evidence is now suggesting that Botox may harm not only the expression of emotion, but also its comprehension. The facial paralysis that does away with unwanted frown lines may cripple a crucial ability to mimic and process emotional language.

That’s the conclusion of David Havas, a psychological scientist at the University of Wisconsin—Madison. Havas and his colleagues did not set out to study the unintended consequences of the controversial cosmetic treatment. Their goal was to study the role of the nervous system in normal language processing, specifically the idea that people comprehend emotional language in part by involuntarily simulating emotions with their facial nerves and muscles. They used injections of the neurotoxin to disable certain facial nerves as a way of testing this theory.

The scientists studied first-time patients who were scheduled for Botox treatment to get rid of their frown lines—a treatment that works by paralyzing a particular set of facial muscles. Since frowns are an important element in anger and sadness, they wanted to see if disabling the frown muscles impaired comprehension of sad and happy sentences—but not happy ones. They had the patients read dozens of sentences of each kind, both before Botox treatment and two weeks later, timing them to see if there was any slowdown in reading speed as a result of the treatment.

The results were unambiguous. As reported on line this week in the journal Psychological Science, the scientists not only verified their theory of language processing, they also showed that getting rid of frowns selectively impairs the ability to understand angry and sad sentences. In other words, it’s normal to frown—undetectably—when we try to process anger and sadness. If we can’t frown, our emotional understanding breaks down.

The popularity of Botox has of course spread far beyond Hollywood since Scorsese first sounded the alarm about the acting biz. Indeed, the director might now be worried about the emotional depth of his viewing audience as well.

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

The Paradox of Idleness

2010-06-15T12:13:00.003-04:00

Would Sisyphus have been happier just sitting in a jail cell, twiddling his thumbs? After all, the punishment Zeus meted out to him was nothing more than make-work: rolling that boulder up the hill again and again and again, without purpose or sense of accomplishment. It couldn’t have been very satisfying. What if Zeus had softened, and granted him a reprieve—and eternal idleness?

An interesting new study suggests that the mythical prisoner would not have liked it in the least. Indeed he would have longed for his days of rock pushing. Make-work may be pointless and demeaning, but at least it’s work; it’s an activity. And people prefer activity—even when they’re forced into it—to sitting around with nothing to do.

That’s the conclusion of University of Chicago psychologist Christopher Hsee, who has been exploring idleness in the laboratory. In one experiment, for example, he had volunteers complete part one of a two-part task. They had to wait a short time before beginning part two, and Hsee gave them two options: They could drop off their work nearby and then wait, or they could drop it at a distant location that required a short stroll. They would receive a piece of milk chocolate, regardless of which option they chose.

Most people chose to stay put. They really had no incentive to walk, so they sat and waited. But here’s the interesting part: If Hsee offered different incentives—a milk chocolate nearby and a dark chocolate if they strolled—most of the volunteers took a walk. Which chocolate was where didn’t matter; they switched them around. Hsee was simply offering them the flimsiest of reasons to opt for activity over idleness—and they grabbed it. What’s more, those who strolled during the down-time reported being much happier afterward than those who sat around.

This is paradoxical. People choose idleness if activity seems pointless, yet they’re less happy when they do sit around. And it’s not that people don’t know this in advance. They do anticipate that being active will be more satisfying, but they apparently are swayed by wanting to make a reasonable choice—not an emotional one. They would feel foolish if they walked just to walk.

Hsee ran another version of this experiment, but this time he eliminated choice. That is, some volunteers were ordered to walk to the faraway location and back, while others were told to sit and wait. The results? As reported on-line this week in the journal Psychological Science, those who walked—even though they were forced to do so—were happier than those who sat waiting.

So people don’t always choose what’s best for them. No shock there. But why this confusion over business and idleness? Hsee believes it is rooted in human evolution. Idleness made a great deal of sense for our ancient ancestors, because conserving energy was crucial to survival. We no longer have the same survival demands, so we’re left with a lot of excess energy—which we like to spend in activity, business. Yet that idleness bias still lingers way down deep. Hence the mixed feelings.

Idleness is not always a bad thing. And being busy isn’t always productive, and indeed can be unsavory. Remember that Sisyphus was a real bad apple—scheming, deceitful, murderous. We wouldn’t want him hanging around with lots of time on his hands. That’s what Zeus concluded—and he found something to keep him occupied.

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

How lucky charms really work

2010-06-11T13:29:00.005-04:00

Wade Boggs, the former Red Sox slugger and third baseman, was very ritualistic about his warm-ups. For night games, he took batting practice at precisely 5:17 and ran wind sprints at exactly 7:17. He fielded 150 ground balls before every game, never more nor less, and always ended his infield practice by stepping—in the same order—on third, second and first base, then the baseline, followed by two steps in the coaching box and four more steps into the dugout. He ate chicken before every game, and even though he was not Jewish, he scratched the Hebrew word for “life” in the dirt before every at-bat.

Boggs had a career batting average of .328, earning him a spot on the Hall of Fame.

Coincidence? Most scientists dismiss superstitions as inconsequential fictions, the creations of irrational minds. Yet many people—and not just ball players—firmly believe in lucky charms and rituals, from rabbits’ feet to crossed fingers to expressions like “break a leg.” Boggs may have been more elaborate in his magical thinking, but his belief in the supernatural was far from unusual.

Psychologists have long been fascinated with such thinking, but most research so far has focused on the sources of superstition—where magical beliefs come from. Recently, however, a few scientists have begun to explore the heretical idea that lucky charms may actually work. Is it possible that such irrational thinking really does improve performance? And if so, what is the psychological mechanism at work?

Psychologist Lysann Damisch of the University of Koln, Germany, is among those who believe that lucky charms may indeed be effective, and she has an idea about why. She suspects that the activation of superstitious thinking directly prior to a task may boost a person’s confidence in his or her ability to succeed—what’s known as self-efficacy—which in turn boosts expectations and persistence, thus improving performance. She decided to test this idea in a series of experiments.

The first two experiments were similar. In one, Damisch had a group of volunteers putt golf balls about four feet into the hole—so not hugely difficult but definitely missable. But before they attempted this, she told about half of them that they were playing with a “lucky” ball, while the others just got a regular golf ball. Similarly in a second experiment, the volunteers attempted a difficult hand-held dexterity game; but before they did, half were told: “I’m keeping my fingers crossed for you.” In other words, in each study, only some of the volunteers had their superstitious thinking sparked, while the others simply performed the task. And the results were the same in both tests. Those “feeling lucky” did much better than did those with no magic on their side.

So good luck charms did clearly improve performance, but how? Damisch ran a couple more experiments to test her ideas about confidence, expectations and persistence. She again had volunteers perform difficult tasks—in this case memory and anagram tests. And again, she made only some of the volunteers “lucky”--now by having them bring their own personal charms to the test site. But in these studies she also measured the volunteers’ confidence and effectiveness; their expectations for their performance; and how long they persevered before giving up.

The results were unambiguous. As reported on-line last week in the journal Psychological Science, those with their personal lucky charms in their possession were much more confident going into the performance. This confidence in turn caused the players to set higher personal goals and expectations and to persist longer at the task—all of which added up to excellent performance. In short, nothing magical about it.

Lucky charms are prevalent in most world cultures, and have been for eons. This evidence for their potency may help explain why this is so. All-Star performances no doubt require much more than talismans. Wade Boggs combined exceptional talent and years of hard work, but apparently those chicken dinners and wind sprints at precisely 7:17 didn’t hurt.

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

The perils of 'having it all'

2010-05-21T13:41:00.005-04:00

It’s fair to say that Thurston Howell III doesn’t savor the little things in life. One of seven castaways on an uncharted Pacific island, the WASPy billionaire never stops scheming to get back to his money. While the others often seem content in their tropical paradise, Howell mostly likes to talk and dream about his assets, which include a coconut plantation, a railroad, an oil well, a diamond mine and all of Denver, Colorado. He never seems to understand that his wealth won’t buy him happiness on Gilligan’s Island.

Okay, so Gilligan’s Island isn’t real. I get that. But is it possible this old TV fantasy contained a grain of psychological truth? Can “having it all” undermine the ability to savor common, everyday joys? And if so, does wealth diminish pleasure enough that it trumps the plusses of having plenty of money?

An international team of scientists has been exploring these questions. Psychologist Jordi Quoidbach of the University of Liege, Belgium, and his colleagues wondered if wealth, because it promises abundant pleasure, might actually weaken the internal sense of scarcity that makes small pleasures possible. They decided to test this idea in the lab.

They recruited a large group of university employees, ranging from deans to janitors. The idea was to get a range of incomes and financial comfort, which they did: Some of the volunteers had socked away 75,000 euros or more, while others had a mere 1,000 euros in savings. They gave all of these volunteers a test that uses vignettes to gauge positive emotions like pride and awe and contentment. For example, they might be asked to imagine going on a hike and discovering an amazing waterfall. Would they be visibly emotional? Reminisce about the waterfall later? Tell others about the experience? And so on.

The scientists also measured the volunteers overall happiness, using a standardized scale, and also their desire for wealth. They measured desire for wealth with this kind of question: How much money would you have to win in a lottery to live the life of your dreams?

Then they crunched all these data together to sort out the links between money and savoring and happiness, and here’s what they found: The more money people have, the less likely they are to savor things like waterfalls or blooming flowers or quiet weekends. What’s more, cause-and-effect was clear from the data. That is, the ability to savor life’s small pleasures was not diminishing the need or desire for money; it was the other way around.

And overall happiness? That’s the really interesting part. There is a modest relationship between wealth and happiness; that’s not all that surprising. But the inability to appreciate waterfalls undercuts money’s blessings. That is, any positive effects of wealth on happiness were offset by wealth’s deleterious effects on ability to savor life’s pleasures.

These findings, reported this week in the on-line version of Psychological Science, were provocative enough that the researchers wanted to double-check them in a different way. So in a second experiment, they used photographs of cash to prime thoughts of money in some of the volunteers. And just in case the volunteers were unintentionally distorting their feelings about waterfalls and honeysuckle and other small things in life, the scientists decided to actually observe them. So instead of using hypothetical vignettes, they gave all the volunteers a piece of chocolate to eat, and they had dispassionate observers rate the chocolate savoring experience: How slowly did they eat the chocolate? Did they close their eyes, or makes sounds of pleasure? And so forth.

Mmmm. The pleasure was unmistakable—but only for those without money in mind. The moneyed volunteers rushed through the chocolate like it was celery, and showed about that much pleasure in the experience.

All of this suggests that being rich—and having access to the best things in life—may actually queer our ability to enjoy the small, sweet things in life. What’s more—as the priming study indicates—just knowing we have access to the trappings of wealth is enough to make us take small pleasures for granted—and not appreciate them. And as Thurston Howell III can testify, being filthy rich can even take the joy out of an island paradise.

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

The New Phrenology?

2010-05-12T14:57:00.006-04:00

Phrenology was the intellectual rage of 19th century America. Edgar Allan Poe and Walt Whitman each incorporated bits of the popular personality theory into his works, and Herman Melville went so far as to make his most famous narrator, Ishmael, an amateur phrenologist. The essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson was obsessed with the practice, alternating between enthusiasm and fear about phrenology’s deterministic view of the brain and behavior.

For those who need a quick refresher, phrenology was the theory that an individual’s personality could be “read” from the shape of his skull. The bumps and depressions in the cranium were thought to represent the shape of the brain below, which itself was determined by the volume of the 27 discrete “brain organs.” These brain modules presumably housed such personality traits as cleverness, pride, wit, and affection.

Phrenology is considered pseudoscience today, but it was actually a vast improvement over that era’s prevailing views of personality. For example, phrenology for the first time recognized the brain as the “organ of the mind,” although phrenologists lacked the sophisticated tools of modern neuroscience and could only speculate on the details. Unfortunately, they got the details laughably wrong.

But phrenology may be undergoing a redemption of sorts. Not the skull part—that’s still considered bunk. But neuroscientists today are using their new tools to revisit and explore the idea that different personality traits are localized in different brain regions. The emerging field of personality neuroscience is producing some intriguing early results.

Two of the leaders in this new field are psychologists Colin DeYoung of the University of Minnesota and Jeremy Gray of Yale, who have been using a brain scanner to search for evidence of the so-called “big five” personality traits. There is growing scientific consensus that every human personality is a unique mix of just five core attributes: extraversion, neuroticism, agreeableness, openness/intellect, and conscientiousness. Every other character trait is subsumed under one of the big five—or its flip side.

These traits can be reliably measured using personality inventories, which DeYoung and Gray ran on more than a hundred volunteers in a recent study. Basic brain research has in recent years revealed a great deal about the purposes and functions of various brain regions, and the scientists drew upon these insights. They wanted to see if volunteers’ dominant personality traits matched up—in a way that makes sense—with the size (and presumably the power) of these clusters of neurons.

Take extraversion, for example. Extraversion includes qualities like assertiveness and sociability and talkativeness—all traits having to do with positive emotions and rewarding social experiences. Based on this, the scientists guessed that the most extraverted people would have larger than normal brain regions associated with sensitivity to reward. And when they used a MRI to measure the volume of the extraverted subjects’ brains, that is exactly what they found. As reported on-line in the journal Psychological Science, the regions known to be involved in the reward experience were noticeably larger.

Similarly, the scientists found that neuroticism—a tendency toward negative emotions like irritability and anxiety—was associated with the brain regions involved in threat and punishment. Agreeableness—a catchall for altruism, empathy, cooperation and compassion—correlated with regions known to process those traits. And, finally, the most conscientious volunteers had unusually large brain structures involved in “executive” powers like future planning and following complex rules. In short, the brain studies lent strong support to the idea that the big five personality traits have a biological foundation. Indeed, the only trait of the five that was not significantly linked to a particular region was openness/intellect, which is an umbrella for imagination and aesthetics and intelligence. Even here, there was some suggestive evidence linking this trait to the brain’s center for working memory and attention and reasoning.

Personality traits are reliable predictors of everything from health and well-being to career and relationship success. The most conscientious people, for instance, tend to be the healthiest, and to excel at school and work. So finding the biological roots of these individual differences would be an important advance. But having neurological roots does not mean that character is unchanging. That deterministic notion of the brain and personality has gone the way of phrenologists' bumpy heads.

Excerpts from “We’re Only Human” appear regularly 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.

Copycats and Culture

2010-05-03T11:12:00.004-04:00

Young kids have to figure out everything about the adult world. Think about it: They have no innate understanding of how to get peanut butter out of a jar, or how to switch to the cartoon channel, or how to tie a shoe. So they figure these things out mostly by watching others very closely—and aping what they see.

Well, not aping exactly. Apes imitate too, but they focus on the goal rather than the drill. Kids are high-fidelity copycats, precisely mimicking every adult action, including arbitrary and irrelevant and counterproductive actions. If an adult were to touch the peanut butter jar with his nose before twisting off the cap, a two-year-old would figure that’s the accepted way to open a peanut butter jar.

That doesn’t seem very efficient. What purpose could such mindless mimicry possibly serve? Is it just a maladaptive error of human evolution? Or is it perhaps a feature only of Western cultures, where doting parents tend to instruct their kids in very explicit ways?

Psychologists Mark Nielsen and Keyan Tomaselli favored the latter explanation—in part because over-imitation has only been observed in affluent urban cultures. What’s more, parents in many indigenous cultures are much more casual about instruction in basic life skills. They don’t spell everything out in detail. The scientists decided to test this idea by comparing kids in two very different cultures. Nielsen is a professor at the University of Queensland, Australia; Tomaselli, a professor at University of KwaZulu-Natal, in South Africa. So they decided to test and compare kids in their own backyards.

They recruited a sample of kids from Brisbane, an industrial city of 2 million and capital of Queensland, and a sample from a remote Bushman community in South Africa’s Kalahari Desert. The kids were all between 2 and 6 years old—the age span during which over-imitation typically occurs. The kids were given various versions of a learning task, all of which went essentially like this: The kids were shown a box and a stick, and the goal was simply to open the box, as demonstrated by an adult. But the adults’ modeling varied. Sometimes the adult would open the box the most economical way possible, by simply pulling a knob, but other times the adult might use the stick to open the door. The stick worked okay, but it was unnecessary, and actually made the task a bit more difficult. Other times the adult rotated the stick three times before opening the box—an irrelevant action akin to putting your nose on the peanut butter jar. The idea was to see how precisely the kids from the two cultures mimicked the adults.

The findings were unambiguous, and not at all what Nielsen and Tomaselli had guessed. In short, the rural African kids and the urban Australian kids were indistinguishable. Both copied the irrelevant stick rotation when it was modeled, as if that was a perfectly normal step in the box-opening drill. And kids from both cultures were also equally likely—and more likely than controls—to use the stick for opening the box—if that’s what they saw the adult do. What’s more, the irrelevant and counterproductive movements were only replicated by kids who observed adults modeling the actions, never by kids left to their own devices. These findings suggest that the kids were intentionally (and uncritically) mimicking the adults, step by precise step.

They also suggest that high-fidelity copycatting is pervasive among young children, perhaps universal. But why? The scientists have a theory, which they describe on-line this week in the journal Psychological Science: When an adult models an action, kids assume that they’re supposed to learn something new; they see the modeling as purposeful. Eons of evolution have hard-wired this habit into the neurons—so it’s hard to be flexible, even when some of the actions are irrelevant.

But why has evolution hard-wired this habit of mind? Though it may seem maladaptive at first, it is quintessential to the creation and transmission of human culture, the scientists believe. They offer the example of meat: Knowing that a group cooks meat doesn’t tell us much about that group. There are hundreds of ways to prepare meat. Knowing how they cook meat says much more—that’s a hallmark of culture. Two-year-old copycats, in that sense, are simply in practice to be cultural beings.

Excerpts from "We're Only Human" appear regularly 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.

"I feel your disease"

2010-04-21T16:10:00.009-04:00

Make no mistake. Flu season isn’t over. I was in my doc’s office the other day for something routine, and he’s still pushing the H1N1 vaccine. I don’t know why the other patients were in the waiting room, but I do know a few of them were sniffling and sneezing. There was a video on the TV about the importance of hand washing during flu season, to prevent the spread of germs. My throat started to feel a little sore.

I’m fine. I apparently escaped without exposure to anything sickening. But my mind was on high alert the entire time I was there. Such waiting room vigilance is not unusual, and indeed has long been recognized as a kind of behavioral immune system. Simply seeing signs of disease triggers thoughts and emotions that motivate us to take extra precautions around any possible contagion.

And it may trigger our bodies as well, according to new research from the University of British Columbia. Psychologist Mark Schaller and his colleagues suspected that psychological defenses might be just part of a broader immune response—one involving the natural killer cells and cytokines and other biochemical defenses that fight off invading germs. They decided to test this idea—by seeing if they could trick healthy bodies into action. Here’s the study:

The scientists recruited healthy men and women and had them watch slide shows. All of the volunteers watched a 10-minute slide show about furniture; this was deliberately boring, to act as a control condition. Then a bit later, half the volunteers watched a fairly disgusting slide show, with images of skin lesions and oozing pox, in addition to garden variety sneezes and coughs. The other volunteers watch a slide show about guns—not just guns, but people brandishing firearms, and mostly pointing the weapons directly at the viewer.

The guns were important, because guns are very threatening—especially when they’re aimed at you—but they’re not related at all to disease or infection. The scientists wanted to rule out threat—any threat—as the cause of any immune response they measured. And that’s just what they saw. They drew blood from the volunteers before and after each slide show, and measured the levels of a cytokine called IL-6, a major fighter in the immune war. Those who had viewed the depictions of sickness showed a dramatic jump in IL-6 production—more than 23 percent. These same volunteers had no biological response to looking at furniture and—more important—the volunteers who looked at brandished weapons also showed no significant immune response.

One possible interpretation of these results is that looking at pox and sores is stressful, and that the stress triggered the immune response. But the scientists ruled that out. They measured self-reported stress, and in fact those who had watched the guns were under more—not less—stress. The psychologists also ruled out personality as an explanation: They measured traits like neuroticism and agreeableness as well as the volunteers’ perceived vulnerability to illness—none of these traits distinguished the gun viewers from the disease viewers. The only explanation, it appears, is that simply seeing other people’s sickness prompted the volunteers’ immune systems to act as if they were under attack.

Is this a good thing? Perhaps not as good as it sounds. As the researchers explain this week in the on-line version of Psychological Science, a direct link between perception and immune response may have helped our ancient ancestors respond quickly and efficiently to pathogens. It may even have helped us evolve as a social species by permitting early humans to gather in groups. But that doesn’t mean it’s still a good thing. All sorts of social cues can today mimic actual disease threats, causing the immune system to respond aggressively even when there is no real threat. Too many false starts could compromise immune function over time, with serious consequences for human health and welfare.

Excerpts from “We’re Only Human” appear regularly in The Huffington Post and Scientific American Mind. Wray Herbert also writes the “Full Frontal Psychology” blog at True/Slant. His book, On Second Thought, can be preordered from Crown for September delivery.

The ironic power of stereotype

2010-04-20T13:12:00.003-04:00

Brent Staples is an editorial writer for the New York Times and a University of Chicago-trained psychologist. He is also African-American, and back in the 70s, when he was doing his graduate studies, he discovered that he could threaten white people simply by walking down the streets of his Hyde Park neighborhood. When white couples saw him coming, especially at night, they would lock arms, stop all conversation, and stare straight ahead. Sometimes they would cross to the other side of the street.

The white Chicagoans were obviously being influenced by the stereotype of the dangerous young black man. But the more sinister effects of the stereotype were on Staples himself. At first he played with this new-found power, deliberately using it to “scatter the pigeons.” But he also felt guilty about discomfiting innocent strangers, and ultimately he figured out a way to defuse his own potent symbolism. He did this simply by whistling—whistling Vivaldi. Somehow, whistling the sweet refrains of the Venetian composer’s Four Seasons was enough to trump the stereotype and put the neighbors at ease.

But Staples wasn’t at ease. Whether he was exploiting the stereotype or resenting it or actively countering it, it was on his mind, distracting him from other matters. Social psychologist Claude Steele borrows from Staples’s experience for the title and central metaphor of his new book, Whistling Vivaldi (W.W. Norton), an illuminating tour through many years work on stereotypes and “stereotype threat.” Stereotypes are rampant in society, Steele argues, but his purpose here is not to whine about the unfairness of these caricatured views. Instead, he takes us inside his and others’ labs to show precisely how stereotypes commandeer the mind and do their psychological damage.

Steele, who is also African-American, is especially interested in performance—in school, sports and the workplace—and indeed his work began with his curiosity about the sub-par performance of even the best African-American university students. He has a theory about academic failure, which basically goes like this: Even in the absence of overt racism, stereotypes about unintelligent African-Americans are always “in the air.” That is, African-American students are aware of these common caricatures, and this awareness makes them anxious—anxious about reinforcing the group stereotype and contributing to its legitimacy. This anxiety, through a variety of physiological pathways, actually depletes the students’ cognitive reserves—leading, ironically, to exactly the poor academic performance that the stereotype predicts.

Steele marshals study after study to demonstrate the power of such stereotype threat. In a typical experiment, for example, he had both white and African-American students take a rigorous test, but beforehand he told only some of the students that it was a test of intelligence; the others believed it was a test of no particular importance. The African-American students who thought their intelligence was being assessed, and compared to white intelligence, did much worse on the exam—worse than the whites and worse than the African-Americans who were under no stereotype threat.

And it’s not just African-Americans who suffer under stereotype threat. If women believe they are being compared to men in math, they indeed perform worse on math tests. If white men are told that their natural athletic ability is being measured, they choke in a golf contest against African-American golfers; but if they’re told that their golf acumen is being tested, they outperform African-Americans. Indeed, fifteen years of such studies has demonstrated the effects of stereotype threat in Latinos, third-grade schoolgirls, Asian American students, U.S. soldiers, female business students, older Americans, German and French students, aspiring psychologists. The list goes on.

Steele’s unique contribution is taking us inside the mind of the stereotype victim, and it’s not a pretty sight. When we’re unnerved by an unsavory caricature, our minds race; we’re vigilant; we’re arguing internally against the stereotype; denying its relevance; disparaging anyone who would use such a stereotype; pitying ourselves; trying to be stoic. In short, we’re doing everything except high level thinking—the kind that leads to academic excellence. We’ve channeled our limited cognitive power into dealing with the threatening caricature.

Steele ends Whistling Vivaldi with prescriptions for countering the effects of stereotype threat—creating self-affirming narratives, for example, and mind-sets that emphasize growth and change rather than fixed abilities. These are proven strategies for creating “identity safety,” but they need to begin early in children’s lives. Ignoring the perils of stereotypes is just another way of whistling in the dark.

Excerpts from “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.

Dog tired: What our hounds can teach us about self-control

2010-04-12T11:32:00.003-04:00

We humans have much more self-discipline than other animals. We can and do set goals—losing 25 pounds, going to college—and then go without certain pleasures to achieve those goals. We’re far from perfect at this, but there’s no question that better self-control sets us apart from more lowly beasts.

Scientists have long argued that delaying gratification requires a sense of “self.” Having a sense of personal identity allows us to compare what we are today, at this very moment, with what we want to be—an idealized self. Aspiring to this idealized self is what fosters uniquely human self-control powers.

Well maybe—or maybe not. New research is now suggesting a much more primitive explanation for our powers of self-discipline—one that brings us down a notch or two
in the animal kingdom. Indeed, it appears that, even with our lofty goals, we may rely on the same basic biological mechanism for self-discipline as our four-legged best friends. Here’s the science.

Psychological scientist Holly Miller and her colleagues at the University of Kentucky knew from previous research that human self-control relies on the brain’s “executive” powers, which coordinate thought and action. It’s further known that this kind of cognitive processing is fueled by glucose, and that depletion of the brain’s fuel supply compromises self-discipline. But is this a uniquely human system? Or do less evolved animals rely on sugar-powered executive powers as well?

To find out, Miller recruited a group of dogs ranging in age from ten months to more than ten years old. Some were pure breeds, like Australian shepherds and Vizlas, while others were mutts. The dogs were all familiar with a toy called a Tug-a-Jug, which is just a clear cylinder with treats inside; dogs can easily manipulate the Tug-a-Jug to get a tasty payoff. In the experiment, some of the dogs were ordered by their owners to “sit” and “stay” for ten minutes. That’s a long time to sit still; it was meant to exhaust the hounds mentally, and thus to deplete their fuel reserves. The other dogs, the controls, merely sat in a cage for ten minutes.

Then all the dogs were given the familiar Tug-a-Jug, except that it had been altered so that it was now impossible to get the treats out. The hungry dogs could see and hear the treats—but not get at them. The idea was to see if the previous demand for self-discipline made the dogs less, well, dogged in working for the treats. And it did, unmistakably. Compared to the dogs who had simply been caged, those who had stayed still for ten minutes gave up much more quickly—after less than a minute, compared to more than two minutes for the controls. In other words, exerting self-discipline had used up much of their sugar supply—and weakened the executive powers needed for goal-directed effort.

Executive powers? In old Shep? These findings suggest that self-control may not be a crowning psychological achievement of humanity, and indeed may have nothing to do with self-awareness. It may simply be biology—and beastly biology at that. These are humbling results, so the scientists decided to recheck them in a different way. In a second experiment, they recruited another group of dogs, this time including Shetland sheepdogs and border collies. As before, some of the dogs sat and stayed for ten minutes while the others were caged. But this time, half of the obedient dogs got a sugar drink following the exercise, while others got an artificially sweetened drink. Miller basically wanted to see if she could restore the dogs’ executive powers by refueling them.

Which is exactly what happened. As reported in the April issue of the journal Psychological Science, the dogs who exerted self-control, then got replenished with sugar, were just like the dogs who had not been exhausted to begin with. They persisted just as much with the Tug-a-Jug, even though it was frustrating and demanding to do so. The depleted dogs who were not replenished gave up in short order. In short, they all acted just like humans.

So we’re not unique—at least not in this regard. It appears that hallmark sense of human identity—our selfhood—is not a prerequisite for self-discipline. Whatever it is that makes us go to the gym and save for college is fueled by simple sugar—much like our hound’s decision to sit still and stay.

Articles from “We’re Only Human” also run regularly in The Huffington Post and in Scientific American Mind. Wray Herbert’s book, On Second Thought: Outsmarting Your Mind’s Hard-Wired Habits, will be published by Crown in September.

How to read minds like a wizard

2010-04-07T14:20:00.006-04:00

Fans of the Harry Potter books will be familiar with the art of Legilimency. Legilimency is an advanced form of wizardry, the supernatural ability to coax thoughts and feelings and memories from another’s mind. It’s a magical skill encompassing mind reading and lie detection—and it’s black magic in the wrong hands. Dumbledore, headmaster of Hogwarts, is a master Legilimens, as are the evil Snape and Voldemort. Harry never quite masters the difficult craft.

Many of us Muggles wouldn’t mind a touch of telepathy from time to time—though for much more ordinary purposes. Wouldn’t it be helpful to know—to really know—what your colleagues are thinking about that paper you just presented? Or how about that blind date? Did she find you witty? Attractive? Foolish? Humans are actually very bad at mind reading. Indeed, studies have shown that we do no better than chance when intuiting how much people like us.

Well, it may now be possible to do better than that. We may not have supernatural powers, but we do have untapped cognitive powers that might be harnessed to help us more accurately assess what others think of us. Two psychological scientists have been exploring why we misinterpret others’ thoughts so often, and they have been using these insights to construct a tool for ordinary, everyday telepathy.

Tal Eyal of Ben Gurion University in Israel and Nicholas Epley of the University of Chicago started with “construal theory.” That’s just psychological jargon meaning that we perceive different people and things in our world at different levels of detail. Think of two houses; you’re standing in the yard right next to one of them, and the other is on a hill a quarter mile away. The distant house is only a vague outline; it’s got two stories, a pitched roof, windows and a door. By contrast, you see the house next to you in all its detail, right down to the marigolds in the flower boxes and the chipped green paint on the shutters.

And this is how we construe ourselves and others as well—which is why we have so much trouble reading minds. We see ourselves in all our glorious (or inglorious) detail, so we assume that others do as well. But in fact others see us as off in the distance, drawn only in broad strokes. Eyal and Epley figured that if we can somehow manage to take the long view of ourselves—the view that others routinely take—then we might be able to get a more accurate sense of what others think and feel about us.

Here’s how they tested this idea in the laboratory. They had each of a large group of volunteers pose for a photograph, which was displayed on a computer screen. The volunteers were told that someone of the opposite sex would be rating their attractiveness—not unlike a blind date. But some were told that they would be judged later that day, while others were told that the judging wouldn’t take place for several months. This was the laboratory equivalent of psychological distance, which the scientists anticipated would determine how people read the minds of their judges.

To find out, those in the beauty contest were asked to write down how they expected the other person to describe the photograph—and how that person would rate their attractiveness. And other volunteers—the judges—in fact did this, describing the photo and rating the person’s looks. And what did they find out? Those who didn’t expect to be judged for several months were much more accurate in "mind reading" others’ opinions and ratings. That’s because imagining themselves as psychologically distant brought them more in sync with the reality of how people see other people. Those who anticipated having their looks judged that very afternoon guessed that their judges would be much pickier and more critical than they were in fact. They expected (wrongly) to be put under a microscope.

It’s important to note that the judges’ opinions didn’t change. People always see others in general and abstract ways. What changed were the opinions ascribed to the judges—the mind reading. The actual descriptions are telling. For example, those who were close (in time and psychologically) expected to be described in immediate and close detail—pony tail, weary eyes—where in fact the judges were quite general in their descriptions—Asian, slender, wears glasses or doesn’t. Much like the near and distant houses.

The researchers ran another version of this experiment, but this one focused on general impressions rather than looks. In this study, volunteers talked into a microphone for 2 ½ minutes, describing themselves in great detail—their education and hobbies and family and dreams. They knew that others would be listening to this recording and forming an impression of them, but again the distancing varied: As before, some thought they would be evaluated later in the day, while others thought that would occur months later.

The results were basically the same as before. As reported on-line in the journal Psychological Science, those who had more psychological distance from themselves had a much more realistic sense of how others saw them. They were able to see the “big picture” rather than focusing on trivial flaws and defects that only a microscope can detect. In short, they were better mind readers.

This is not simply putting oneself into someone else’s shoes. The scientists emphasize that, and indeed they ran to test to compare construal-based thinking to mere perspective-taking. Perspective-taking didn’t match up. That’s because being in another’s shoes is not a scientific concept; it’s not based on any understanding of human cognition. Psychological distancing is. And as these experiments show, it can be a powerful cognitive tool for everyday telepathy. It may not be Legilimency, but it’s not bad for mere Muggles.

Excerpts from “We’re Only Human” also 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.

Knockoff psychology: I know I'm faking it

2010-04-05T15:19:00.002-04:00

Within just a few blocks of my office, street vendors will sell me a Versace t-shirt or a silk tie from Prada, cheap. Or I could get a deal on a Rolex, or a chic pair of Ray Ban shades. These aren’t authentic brand name products, of course. They’re inexpensive replicas. But they make me look and feel good, and I doubt any of my friends can tell the difference.

That’s why we buy knockoffs, isn’t it? To polish our self-image—and broadcast that polished version of our personality to the world—at half the price? But does it work? After all, we first have to convince ourselves of our idealized image if we are going to sway anyone else. Can we really become Ray Ban-wearing, Versace-bedecked sophisticates in our own mind—just by dressing up?

New research suggests that knockoffs may not work as magically as we’d like—and indeed may backfire. Three psychological scientists—Francesca Gino of Chapel Hill, Michael Norton of Harvard Business School, and Dan Ariely of Duke—have been exploring the power and pitfalls of fake adornment in the lab. They wanted to see if counterfeit stuff might have hidden psychological costs, warping our actions and attitudes in undesirable ways.

Here’s an example of their work. The scientists recruited a large sample of young women and had them wear pricey Chloe sunglasses. The glasses were the real thing, but half the women thought they were wearing knockoffs. They wanted to see if wearing counterfeit shades—a form of dishonesty—might actually make the women act dishonestly in other ways.

So they had them perform a couple tasks—tasks that presented opportunities for lying and cheating. In one, for example, the women worked on a complicated set of mathematical puzzles—a task they couldn’t possibly complete in the time allowed. When time elapsed, the women were told to score themselves on the honor system—and to take money for each correct score. Unbeknownst to them, the scientists were monitoring both their work and their scoring.
And guess what. The women wearing the fake Chloe shades cheated more—considerably more. Fully 70 percent inflated their performance when they thought nobody was checking on them—and in effect stole cash from the coffer.

To double-check this distressing result, the scientists put the women through a completely different task, one that forced a choice between the right answer and the more profitable answer. And again the Chloe-wearing women pocketed the petty cash. Notably, the women cheated not only when they expressed a preference for the cheap knockoffs, but also when the real and fake designer glasses were randomly handed out. So it appears that the very act of wearing the counterfeit eyewear triggered the lying and cheating.

This is bizarre and disturbing, but it gets worse. The psychologists wondered if inauthentic image-making might not only corrupt personal ethics, but also lead to a generally cynical attitude toward other people. In other words, if wearing counterfeit stuff makes people feel inauthentic and behave unethically, might they see others as phony and unethical, too? To test this, they again handed out genuine and counterfeit Chloe shades, but this time they had the volunteers complete a survey about “someone they knew.” Would this person use an express line with too many groceries? Pad an expense report? Take home office supplies? There were also more elaborate scenarios involving business ethics. The idea was that all the answers taken together would characterize each volunteer as having a generally positive view of others—or a generally cynical view.

Cynical, without question. Compared to volunteers who were wearing authentic Chloe glasses, those wearing the knockoffs saw other people as more dishonest, less truthful, and more likely to act unethically in business dealings.

So what’s going on here? Well, the scientists ran a final experiment to answer this question, and here are the ironic results they report on-line this week in the journal Psychological Science: Wearing counterfeit glasses not only fails to bolster our ego and self-image the way we hope, it actually undermines our internal sense of authenticity. “Faking it” makes us feel like phonies and cheaters on the inside, and this alienated, counterfeit “self” leads to cheating and cynicism in the real world.

Counterfeiting is a serious economic and social problem, epidemic in scale. Most people buy these fake brands because they are a lot cheaper, but this research suggests there may be a hidden moral cost yet to be tallied.

Excerpts from "We're Only Human" also 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.

Do you really need those eyeglasses?

2010-04-02T12:01:00.002-04:00

Most of us use the numbers 20/20 unthinkingly, basically as a synonym for good vision. We take it on faith that 20/20 is an accurate measure of some biological reality. But how straightforward is visual acuity in fact? After all, those eye charts in your optometrist’s office measure not only the sharpness of the image on your eye’s retina, but also your brain’s interpretation of that information. How much liberty does the interpreting mind take with this biological reality?

New research is beginning to focus on the psychological dimensions of vision—with some surprising results. The studies are from the Harvard University laboratory of Ellen Langer, whose books Mindfulness and Counterclockwise challenge many of our assumptions about our physical limitations—especially the limitations we associate with aging. In the new studies, Langer and her colleagues manipulated various beliefs about vision to see if mind-set can affect something as basic as eyesight.

Langer’s experiments are always innovative. In one of the vision studies, for example, she started with the widespread belief that Air Force pilots have excellent vision. That’s not an unfounded belief in fact, because 20/20 vision is a prerequisite for fighter pilot training. To exploit this belief, she recruited a group of students from MIT’s ROTC program, many of who aspire to be pilots. She tested their vision with standard eye charts, and then asked some of the volunteers to “become pilots” by flying a flight simulator. She specifically instructed them to actively imagine themselves as pilots, as they used the throttle, compass and other trappings of an actual cockpit to execute flight maneuvers. They even wore green army fatigues to enhance their role-playing.

No mention was made of vision, neither to the “pilots” nor to the controls, who merely sat in a stationary cockpit. After a short time, Langer surreptitiously measured all the volunteers’ vision. She had four aircraft “approach” from the front, each with a serial number on the wing. The volunteers were told to read the serial numbers on the four wings which, unbeknownst to them, were the equivalent of different lines on an eye chart. Langer was in effect administering the optometrist’s standard eye exam, under the guise of flight simulation.

And what did she find? Unmistakably, the “pilots” showed greater improvement in vision. Four of ten volunteers could see better after playing pilot, compared to none of the controls. Langer reran this experiment, in one case telling the controls they could motivate themselves to have better vision and in another actually giving them eye exercises. But the pilots still outperformed them. In other words, simply believing that pilots have good vision was enough to sharpen the volunteer-pilots’ eyesight.

This was obviously an elaborate experiment, and the number of volunteers was necessarily small. So Langer decided to explore the question in a completely different way. In a second experiment, she exploited the belief that athletes have good vision—again not an unreasonable assumption since vision generally enhances coordination. To test this idea, she tested the eyesight of a larger group of volunteers, then had some of them do jumping jacks, while others simply skipped around them room. She wanted all of the volunteers to be equally aroused physically, but she figured that psychologically, jumping jacks would be seen as more athletic than skipping. And indeed when she retested their eyesight, the results echoed those from the pilot study. Fully a third of the volunteers had better vision after acting athletically; only one of the skippers showed such improvement.

Now keep in mind that the volunteers did not in fact differ at all on athleticism. All that differed was their psychological mind-set, as a result of jumping or skipping. And it appeared that psychology was enough to sharpen their view of the world.

Langer ran a final experiment, this one using the actual optometrist’s eye chart—or versions of it. She wanted to test the power of two common beliefs that most of us take with us when we have our eyes examined: One, that it will be easy to read the top lines of the eye chart. And two, that it will be increasingly difficult to read the farther down the chart one reads. I think it’s fair to say that most adults share those beliefs.

But what if the chart is switched around? That’s what Langer did. She created two eye charts that looked in most ways like the standard chart, except for this: In one case, the letters became not smaller but progressively larger moving down the chart. In the other, the chart started not with the huge E, but with a line that would normally be about two-thirds of the way down. In other words, she administered eye exams that exploit fundamental assumptions about optometrists’ eye charts.

And again, psychology trumped biology. As reported on-line this week in the journal Psychological Science, the volunteers saw letters that they normally couldn’t see when the chart was shifted or reversed. They believed they would be able to read the top of the chart, and so they did—regardless of the actual font size. Taken together, these experimental results suggest that our vision may be compromised, at least in part, by our mindless beliefs.

Wray Herbert also writes regularly for the Huffington Post, where this article first appeared. His book, On Second Thought: Outsmarting Your Mind's Hard-Wired Habits, will be published by Crown in September.

American restlessness, American unhappiness?

2010-03-30T15:01:00.006-04:00

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

2010-03-25T15:34:00.003-04:00

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

2010-03-18T15:15:00.002-04:00

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

2010-03-17T11:43:00.002-04:00

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?

2010-03-15T11:49:00.006-04:00

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

2010-03-11T11:49:00.004-05:00

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

2010-03-09T10:32:00.006-05:00

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

2010-03-05T15:54:00.006-05:00

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

2010-03-03T14:51:00.004-05:00

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.

The Mind of a Misanthrope

2010-02-24T15:19:00.006-05:00

I become misanthropic every February. I avoid social gatherings, and really just want to hole up at home. I always assumed it was the dark evenings and slippery sidewalks and general misery of venturing outside. But truth be told, I don’t want guests visiting me either. Not until the crocuses come through.

Or not until cold and flu season is over, more accurately. New research suggests that my anti-social ways may have little to do with friendliness or lack of it. Indeed, my attitudes and actions may be self-protective, part of an ancient, hard-wired psychological immune system, shaped over eons to help humans steer clear of germs.

Think of it from an evolutionary point of view. Group living conveyed many survival benefits for early humans, but it also carried risks—most notably the spread of harmful disease. The body’s immune system is very good at fighting off germs, but it’s a costly system to operate. In the parlance of immunology, people are vectors, and another way to avoid sickness is simply to avoid disease carriers in the first place. In this sense, extraversion is costly and introversion is adaptive—especially during flu season.

That’s the theory at least, which psychologist Chad Mortensen of Arizona State University has been investigating in his lab. He and his colleagues wanted to see if exposure to germs—or at least the idea of germs and illness—would change people’s basic perceptions about themselves as social beings. To test this, they showed a group of volunteers a slide show about germs and contagious disease, while control subjects watched a slide show about architecture. Afterward, all the volunteers completed a personality inventory, which includes measures of extraversion, agreeableness and openness to experience. Finally, the researchers assessed each volunteer’s feelings of vulnerability to disease— basically, how much they fret about getting sick.

They anticipated that the volunteers with disease on their minds would see themselves as more reclusive. And that’s just what they found. The infection-minded volunteers saw themselves as less gregarious than did controls, and the hypochondriacs in the group also saw themselves as less open-minded about people and less cooperative. In other words, the more intense the volunteers’ worry about infection, the less they desired the company of others.

That’s striking in itself. But attitudes and self-perceptions are only an effective defense if they change people’s actual behavior. So in a second experiment, the scientists came up with an ingenious way to measure actual avoidance. As before, they primed only some of the volunteers with worries about infection and illness. Then they exposed all the volunteers to pictures of faces, while measuring their arm movements. Very subtle pushing away is an indicator of social avoidance, as when we push away something undesirable; flexing similarly indicates acceptance. As expected and reported on-line in the journal Psychological Science, those primed to fret about germs were more avoidant; and the chronic hypochondriacs were the most avoidant by far.

So that’s a pretty nifty defense mechanism. Or at least it was at one time. But these evolved tendencies are often blunt instruments, and this hard-wired bias against germs may go awry in the modern world. For example, sensitivity to disease threats can be indiscriminate, causing people to judge and avoid not only sick people but also obese people and people with disabilities. And because people who are unfamiliar pose an especially potent threat of unknown diseases, the psychological immune system might also foster xenophobia toward foreigners, anti-gay attitudes, and right-wing authoritarianism. That’s a big price to pay, just to dodge a sore throat and sniffles.

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.

Focusing on the Cinematic Mind

2010-02-18T15:21:00.004-05:00

Our household is a rolling Alfred Hitchcock festival. We almost always have at least one of the celebrated director’s films on DVD, and over the years we have watched most of our favorites—Suspicion, North by Northwest, The 39 Steps—time and time again. It’s a tribute to the master’s skills and sensibility that his films have such enduring appeal, because many films from the same time period have a distinctly “old” feel to them. It’s not just the primitive cameras and films. There is something about the rhythm and texture of early cinema that has a very different “feel” than modern films. But it’s hard to put one’s finger on just what that something is.

New research may help explain this elusive quality. Cognitive psychologist and film buff James Cutting of Cornell University decided to use the sophisticated tools of modern perception research to deconstruct 70 years of film, shot by shot. He measured the duration of every single shot in every scene of 150 of the most popular films released from 1935 to 2005. The films represented five major genres—action, adventure, animation, comedy and drama. Using a complex mathematical formula, Cutting translated these sequences of shot lengths into “waves” for each film.

What Cutting was looking for were patterns of attention. Specifically, he was looking for a pattern called the 1/f fluctuation. The 1/f fluctuation is a concept from chaos theory, and it means a pattern of attention that occurs naturally in the human mind. Indeed, it’s a rhythm that appears throughout nature, in music, in engineering, economics, and elsewhere. In short, it’s a constant in the universe, though it’s often undetectable in the apparent chaos.

Cutting found that modern films—those made after 1980—were much more likely than earlier films to approach this universal constant. That is, the sequences of shots selected by director, cinematographer and film editor have gradually merged over the years with the natural pattern of human attention. This explains the more natural feel of newer films—and the “old” feel of earlier ones. Modern movies may be more engrossing—we get “lost” in them more readily—because the universe’s natural rhythm is driving the mind.

What does this mean? Cutting doesn’t believe that filmmakers have deliberately crafted their movies to match this pattern in nature. Instead, he believes the relatively young art form has gone through a kind of natural selection, as the edited rhythms of shot sequences were either successful or unsuccessful in producing more coherent and gripping films. The most engaging—and successful—films were subsequently imitated by other filmmakers, so that over time the industry as a whole evolved toward an imitation of this natural cognitive pattern.

Over all, action movies are the genre that most closely approximates the 1/f pattern, followed by adventure, animation, comedy and drama. But as Cutting reports on-line in the journal Psychological Science, individual films from every genre have almost perfect 1/f rhythms. The Perfect Storm, released in 2000, is one of them, as is Rebel Without a Cause, though it was made in 1955. So too is The 39 Steps, Hitchcock’s masterpiece from way back in 1935.

For more insights into the quirks of the human mind, 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.

A Salvo in the Calorie War

2010-02-17T15:51:00.004-05:00

The calorie war is heating up. It’s actually been simmering for some time, sparked by an alarming obesity rate among young Americans and related spikes in diabetes and other health problems. Nobody really disputes this sorry trend anymore, but there is a lot of disagreement over what to do about it. Public health advocates are clamoring for everything from warning labels on junk food to aggressive television marketing campaigns, even for outright prohibitions. Just last week, the Obama administration entered the fray, calling for a total ban on candy and soda in the nation’s schools.

Some see the past tobacco war as the proper model for this public health campaign. Indeed, one idea that has gotten traction recently is another “sin tax”—this one a fat and sugar tax—to dissuade people from eating junk food. Yale University psychologist and diet expert Kelly Brownell, writing in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine last spring, called for a penny-per-ounce tax on soda sweetened with sugar or corn syrup. Only such a tax, he believes—and not lectures about nutrition and exercise—will make people eat more sensibly, and what’s more, the revenue could be used to promote healthier foods and habits.

Not everyone agrees. Pricing strategies may well be a key to changing behavior, but others favor subsidies over punitive taxes, as a way to encourage people to eat fruits and vegetables and whole grains. The problem is that both these market approaches—taxes and subsidies—are founded on the belief that people make rational economic decisions: Make it cheaper and people will eat more of it, more expensive and people will eat less. But decades of behavioral economics research argues that consumers are not always so rational. And the two strategies have never been tested head to head, to see which one most effectively alters calorie consumption.

Until now. Leonard Epstein, a clinical psychologist at the University of Buffalo, decided to explore the persuasiveness of sin taxes and subsidies in the laboratory, and he did so in an innovative way. He and his colleagues turned their lab into a simulated grocery store, “stocked” with images of everything from bananas and whole wheat bread to Dr. Pepper and nachos. A group of volunteers—all mothers—were given laboratory “money” to shop for a week’s groceries for the family. Each food item was priced the same as groceries at a real grocery nearby, and each food came with basic nutritional information.

The mother-volunteers went shopping several times in the simulated grocery. First they shopped with the regular prices, but afterward the researchers imposed either taxes or subsidies on the foods. That is, they either raised the prices of unhealthy foods by 12.5 %, and then by 25%; or they discounted the price of healthy foods comparably. Then they watched what the mothers purchased.

It’s important to know how the scientists defined healthy and unhealthy foods. They used an index called calorie-for-nutrition value, of CFN, which simply means the number of calories one must eat to get the same nutritional payoff. So for example, nonfat cottage cheese has a very low CFN, because it is packed with nutrition but not with calories; chocolate chip cookies have a much higher CFN. The most sinful food in the store was commercial iced tea, with a whopping CFN equivalent to ten times that of chocolate chip cookies. The researchers also measured the energy density—basically calories—in every food.

Then they crunched all the data together, and the findings were striking. To put it bluntly, taxes worked and subsidies did not. Specifically, taxing unhealthy foods reduced overall calorie intake, while cutting the proportion of fat and carbs and upping the proportion of protein in a typical week’s groceries. By contrast, subsidizing the prices of healthy food increased overall calorie consumption without changing the nutritional value at all. Why? As reported on-line last week in the journal Psychological Science, it appears that mothers took the money they saved on subsidized fruits and vegetables and treated the family to some chips and soda pop. Taxes had basically the opposite effect, shifting spending from junk to healthier choices.

The scientists conclude that subsidizing broccoli and yogurt—as appealing as that idea might be to some—is unlikely to bring about the massive weight loss the nation now requires.

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.

The Science of Recovery

2010-02-16T12:22:00.027-05:00

Over the past few years, I have written many short essays on new findings in psychological science. Most have these have appeared in this blog, "We're Only Human," but many others have been published in Newsweek.com and, more recently, in the "Full Frontal Psychology" blog at True/Slant. At this point, I have written enough that I am beginning to identify clusters of essays all focusing on a particular topic, and I thought it might be useful to organize these topical essays in a way that's more useful to readers.

One such topic is the science of recovery. There have been volumes written on the science of alcoholism and others addictions, but surprisingly little on the behavioral and brain science underlying recovery from addiction and relapse prevention. Many recovering alcoholics and addicts believe it is unimportant to understand the why and how of the sober mind, indeed that science cannot fathom the spiritual aspects of 12-step programs. No argument there, but many others may be curious about what science has to say about this program and its principles. For those readers, I have compiled an annotated listing of essays on this subject. Some of these essays address specific steps and principles of recovery--like powerlessness and pride and moral inventory; others deal with what might be called the folk wisdom of recovery. It's a work in progress, and will continue to grow as new science emerges. I also invite reader comments and suggestions of related reading, with the goal being the most thorough resource available on the psychology of sobriety.

"The future is lookin' sweet" The HALT principle, specifically the H

"The Science of Prayer" The destructiveness of resentment, and a strategy for defusing it

"The Perils of Willpower" The counter-intuitive idea that willpower is a character flaw

"I am a lovable person." "Not" On the harmful message of the self-esteem movement

"Hey, you're wearing me out!" The power and peril of the group

"Try a Little Powerlessness" The first step to recovery

"The Paradox of Temptation" Relapse prevention and "forbidden fruit"

"A Recipe for Motivation" The KISS principle: Keep it simple, stupid

"Sudoku in the Saloon" Alcohol and aggression

"Neurons of Recovery" Honesty, authenticity, moral inventory

"The Two Faces of Pride" Healthy pride, and perilous pride

"Destined to Cheat?" Attitudes, beliefs and cheating

"Pumping Emotional Iron" Overtaxing the mind's powers

"Who Says Quitters Never Win?" When to throw in the towel on moderation

"Oops, I did it again" Arrogance and mistakes

"Why Does Self-Reliance Make You Sick?" The (fatal) risks of social isolation

"The Empathy Gap" Why we're so bad at predicting cravings

"Talking the Talk" The value and danger of public declarations

"A Willingness to Wonder" Willpower vs willingness

"The Power of Gratitude" The #1 AA topic

"Emotions by the Roomful" The power of the room

"I'm sorry. I'll change. I promise." The 9th Step: Trust violation, amends, and foregiveness

"Knockoff psychology: I know I'm faking it" Authenticity and phoniness

"Pack Up All Your Cares and Woes" Giving up resentments: God Jars

So let's get the discussion going. This blog posting is free for the taking, as is any of the essays in "We're Only Human." Journalists, bloggers, website editors--indeed anyone with an interest in this topic--is encouraged to link to this post or to reproduce it, either electronically or in print. Please link back to The Science of Recovery so we can grow this resource and develop a network of interested readers.

The "Super Uncles" of Samoa

2010-02-02T14:34:00.003-05:00

Male homosexuality doesn’t make complete sense from an evolutionary point of view. It appears that the trait is heritable, but since homosexual men are much less likely to produce offspring than heterosexual men, shouldn’t the genes for this trait have been extinguished long ago? What value could this sexual orientation have, that it has persisted for eons even without any discernible reproductive advantage?

One possible explanation is what evolutionary psychologists call the “kin selection hypothesis.” What that means is that homosexuality may convey an indirect benefit by enhancing the survival prospects of close relatives. Specifically, the theory holds that homosexual men might enhance their own prospects by being “helpers in the nest.” By acting altruistically toward nieces and nephews, homosexual men—bachelor uncles in effect—would perpetuate the family genes, including their own.

Two evolutionary psychologists have been testing this idea for the past several years on the Pacific island of Samoa. Paul Vasey and Doug VanderLaan of Lethbridge University, Canada, chose Samoa because male homosexuals there—called fa’afafine—are widely recognized and accepted as a distinct gender category, neither man nor woman. The fa’afafine tend to be effeminate, and to be exclusively homosexual. This clear demarcation makes it easier to identify a sample for study.

The researchers have shown in past research that the fa’afafine behave much more altruistically toward their nieces and nephews than do either Samoan women or heterosexual men. They babysit a lot, tutor the kids in art and music, and help out financially—paying for medical care and education and so forth. That’s interesting in itself, but it’s unclear just why they behave this way. What’s going on cognitively that supports such avuncular acts. In their most recent study, the scientists set out to unravel the psychology of the fa’afafine, to see if their altruism is targeted specifically at kin rather than kids in general.

They recruited a large sample of fa’afafine, and comparable samples of women and heterosexual men. They gave them all a series of questionnaires, measuring their willingness to help their nieces and nephews in various ways—caretaking, gifts, teaching—and also their willingness to do these things for other, unrelated kids. The findings, reported on-line this week in the journal Psychological Science, lend strong support to the kin selection idea. Compared to Samoan women and heterosexual men, the fa’afafine showed a much weaker link between their avuncular behavior and their altruism toward kids generally. This cognitive disconnect, the scientists argue, allows the fa’afafine to allocate their resources more efficiently and precisely to their kin—and thus enhance their own evolutionary prospects.

But these aren’t your garden variety uncles. From an evolutionary perspective, you can’t make up for not having any offspring just by giving a toy to your nephew, or tossing a football with your niece once in a while. Indeed, to compensate for being childless, each fa’afafine would have to somehow support the survival of two additional nieces or nephews who would otherwise not have existed. In short, the fa’afafine must be “super uncles” to earn their evolutionary keep.

Do these findings have any meaning outside of Samoa? Yes and no. Samoan culture is very different from most Western cultures. Samoan culture is very localized, and centered on tight-knit extended families, whereas Western societies tend to be highly individualistic and homophobic. Families are also much more geographically dispersed in Western cultures, diminishing the role that bachelor uncles can play in the extended family, even if they choose to. But in this sense, the researchers say, Samoa’s communitarian culture may be more—not less—representative of the environment in which male homosexuality evolved eons ago. In that sense, it’s not the bachelor uncle who is poorly adapted to the world, but rather the modern Western world that has evolved into an unwelcoming place.

For more insights into 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.

A warm glow in Bangkok

2010-01-29T12:25:00.002-05:00

Say you are traveling in a foreign country, trying to find your way through the bustling capital city. Not Paris or London, some place a bit edgier. Bangkok. You don’t speak the language, and you’re a little frazzled. You walk into a café for some respite, and to your surprise to see a fellow you know from back home sitting at a corner table, sipping coffee. He’s hardly a friend, but you know him to say hello. How do you feel? Well, after the initial surprise, you probably feel a warm glow as you walk up and greet him. You’re genuinely happy to see his familiar face in this strange place. He’s like an old friend.

Now, simply switch cities. You’re back at home and the same basic scenario takes place: You walk into a café, and there’s the same acquaintance, sitting at a corner table sipping coffee. How do you feel today? Well, if you’re like most people, you don’t feel much of anything. You recognize him, but no smile comes to your face. You might nod hello, but you’re really more focused on getting your morning coffee.

Same face, similar scenario. So what’s going on here? Are you a couple of hypocrites? Well, don’t feel bad. First of all, he’s probably not feeling all that warmly toward you either. And what’s more, your own mixed feelings are probably beyond your control. That warm glow of recognition may be hard-wired into your neurons, but it’s also tightly entwined with other emotions, notably fears about personal peril and a yearning for safety.

At least that’s a theory, which a team of cognitive psychologists have recently been testing in the laboratory. According to Marieke de Vries of Radboud University Nijmegen, in the Netherlands, people naturally feel good when they see something recognizable and familiar. That’s because things that are familiar are—generally speaking—less risky. This is the same impulse that makes us buy the same soap or automobile over and over again: It’s worked in the past, so it’s likely a safe bet again today. With recognizable people, that positive feeling, that sense of comfort, often feels like a warm glow.

But it may not be quite that straightforward. De Vries and her colleagues wondered: Wouldn’t the power of familiarity depend somewhat on the context? Specifically, isn’t it possible that mood might modify and shape the mind’s response to familiar and unfamiliar things? Is that what’s occurring when you feel a warm glow in Bangkok and a big yawn back home? They decided to explore this idea experimentally.

Instead of using people’s faces, the scientists used abstract patterns of dots. Basically what they did is familiarize volunteers with some patterns and not others; then they measured their responses when they saw the familiar patterns later. But they didn’t simply ask them which ones they liked and which ones they didn’t; in addition to doing that, they attached electrodes to their faces to detect subtle physiological signs of smiling. In other words, they measured the body’s visceral response to familiarity and novelty.

But before doing this, they manipulated each volunteer’s mood. They asked some to think of sad events in their lives, and others joyous events; and then they played mood-appropriate music to maintain the gloom or happiness. The idea was that mood “tunes” the mind toward safety concerns. That is, if our mood is good, we assume we must be in a safe place; if we’re feeling edgy or down, that must be because we’re threatened in some way. The researchers predicted that feeling blue (and therefore unsafe) would make familiarity an especially potent cue; feeling happy (and therefore safe) would make that cue much less significant.

And that’s precisely what they found. As reported on-line in the journal Psychological Science, the volunteers who were melancholy smiled much more at the familiar patterns than did those who were upbeat. Think about that: Familiarity wasn’t all that important to people who were already feeling secure; they already had the safety of their local coffee shop. But people who were feeling uneasy and threatened experienced familiarity as very comforting—even when the familiar stimuli were nothing more than meaningless abstract patterns of dots. No wonder the face of an “old friend” can seem so welcoming in a Bangkok café.

For more insights into the quirks of human nature, visit the “Full Frontal Psychology” blog at True/Slant. Excerpts from “We’re Only Human” also 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.

Hyper-binding ain't for sissies

2010-01-27T14:40:00.003-05:00

Imagine this hypothetical scenario: You’re at a cocktail party and the host introduces you to a stranger, whose name is Jeremy. It’s a crowded party, and as you chat with Jeremy, you’re also picking up snippets of another conversation nearby. Something about a big football game on Sunday. It doesn’t concern you, so you try to tune it out. You have a short but pleasant conversation with Jeremy, then go on to mingle with other guests.

What do you remember when you run into Jeremy the next day? Well, if you’re young, you will probably recognize Jeremy’s face and associate his face with his name. That’s normal social memory. But if you’re older, you may have a very different kind of association: You may inexplicably link Jeremy with the upcoming football game. That overheard chatter about football is an irrelevant piece of information—you don’t even like football much. But your mind has been distracted by it, and it has connected that unimportant tidbit with your newly forged memory of Jeremy.

This is just a theory, which scientists call “hyper-binding.” That’s really just a jargony way of saying that the elderly remember a lot of useless information by attaching it to important new learning. But according to new research from the University of Toronto, such seemingly haphazard learning might be a blessing in disguise for the elderly. Psychological scientists Karen Campbell, Lynn Hasher and Ruthann Thomas recently ran a laboratory version of the cocktail party conversation to see if the phenomenon is indeed unique to the elderly—and to explore its possible benefits.

The experiments were fairly technical, but here’s the gist: The researchers recruited two groups of volunteers, the first about 19 years old and the second in the mid-60s. They showed all of them a string of pictures that were superimposed with irrelevant words. That’s like meeting Jeremy and hearing sports chatter at the same time. The volunteers were told to ignore the irrelevant words, and later on they were given a memory test for pictures and words in different combinations. They wanted to compare the older and younger minds at work.

The results were dramatic. As reported on-line this week in the journal Psychological Science, the older volunteers were clearly unable to ignore the distracting information even when they were instructed to. They stored away the irrelevant words by linking them tightly with their corresponding pictures in memory. What this suggests is that the elderly have weaker mental regulation and a broader “bandwidth,” taking in important and unimportant information indiscriminately. They store this new knowledge for later use and what’s more, they do this without even being aware of it.

Wouldn’t such distractibility be a terrible hindrance? Wouldn’t it just clutter up the mind with a lot of junk information? Not so, say the Toronto scientists. In fact, it may well be an advantage for the elderly. Aging often brings with it some mild cognitive declines—and indeed the elderly were slower and less accurate in some parts of these memory experiments. But awareness of how events connect in everyday life—even seemingly irrelevant events—may play a critical role in certain kinds of reasoning and judgment. In this way, distractibility may surreptitiously bolster everyday problem-solving.

The fact is, we never really know for sure what information in our world is important or useless—not when we’re first encountering it. The elderly mind may not be as fleet as it once was, but by being unfiltered, it perhaps is making connections that aren’t literal or obvious, and can be insightful. It might even be the foundation of a novel kind of intuition that comes with aging, or perhaps even what we call wisdom.

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

The Science of Prayer

2010-01-19T16:10:00.003-05:00

Everyone who is in any kind of serious relationship—with a partner, a child, a close friend—has been guilty of transgression as one time or another. That’s because we’re not perfect. We all commit hurtful acts, violate trust, and hope for forgiveness.

That’s simply a fact, and here’s another one: Nine out of 10 Americans say that they pray—at least on occasion. Florida State University psychologist Nathaniel Lambert put these two facts together and came up with an idea: Why not take all that prayer and direct it at the people who have wronged us? Is it possible that directed prayer might spark forgiveness in those doing the praying—and in the process preserve relationships?

This is obviously not a new idea. Indeed it’s ancient, but Lambert and his colleagues decided to test it scientifically in two simple experiments. In the first, they had a group of men and women pray for their romantic partner. It was just a single prayer for their partner’s well-being, spoken privately in a quiet room. Others—the experimental controls—also went into a quiet room, where they simply described their partner, speaking into a tape recorder.

Then they meaured forgiveness. When someone hurts you, it’s human nature to want to strike back, retaliate—or to withdraw from the relationship. The scientists defined forgiveness as the diminishing of these initial negative feelings, and when they analyzed all the data, the results were clear: Those who had prayed for their partner harbored fewer vengeful thoughts and emotions: They were more ready to forgive and move on.

This is remarkable, when you think that a single prayer made the difference. The researchers decided to run another test to double-check the findings. In this study, they had a group of men and women pray for a close friend every day for four weeks. Others simply reflected on the relationship, thinking positive thoughts but not praying for their friend’s well-being. They also added another dimension. They used a scale to measure selfless concern for others—not any particular person but other people generally. They speculated that prayer would increase selfless concern, which in turn would boost forgiveness.

And that’s just what they found. But why? How does this common spiritual practice exert its healing effects? The psychologists have an idea, which they described recently in the journal Psychological Science: Most of the time, couples profess and believe in shared goals, but when they hit a rough patch, they often switch to adversarial goals like retribution and resentment. These adversarial goals shift cognitive focus to the self, and it can be tough to shake that self-focus. Prayer appears to shift attention from the self back to others, which allows the resentments to fade.

For more insights into the quirks of human nature, visit the “Full Frontal Psychology” blog at True/Slant. Excerpts from “We’re Only Human” also 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.

Revisiting the Green Monster

2010-01-08T12:20:00.005-05:00

When South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford was caught red-handed returning from a tryst with his Argentine mistress last June, he told the Associated Press that he had met his “soul mate.” His choice of words seemed to suggest that having a deep emotional and spiritual connection with Maria Belen Chapur somehow made his sexual infidelity to his wife Jenny Sanford less tawdry.

Jenny Sanford wasn’t buying it, and neither would most women. What the two-timing governor didn’t understand is that most women view emotional infidelity as worse, not better, than sexual betrayal. Publicly acknowledging a soul connection was probably the most insulting and hurtful thing he could have said to his wife of 20 years.

The clueless governor is not alone. Research has documented that most men become much more jealous about sexual infidelity than they do about emotional infidelity. Women are the opposite, and this is true all over the world. Just why this is the case is not fully understood, although the prevailing theory is that the difference has evolutionary origins: Men learned over eons to be hyper-vigilant about sex because they can never be absolutely certain they are the father of a child, while women are much more concerned about having a partner who is committed to raising a family.

New research now suggests an alternative explanation. The new studies do not question the fundamental gender difference regarding jealousy—indeed they add additional support for that difference. But the new science suggests that the difference may be rooted more in personality—specifically in traits like self-reliance and insecurity.

Pennsylvania State University scientists Kenneth Levy and Kristen Kelly doubted the evolutionary explanation because there is a conspicuous subset of men who are more like women. That is, they find emotional betrayal more distressing than sexual infidelity. Why would this be? The researchers suspected that it might have to do with trust and emotional attachment. Some people—men and women alike—are by nature more secure in their attachments to others, while others are more invested in their own autonomy and seemingly less in need of intimacy. Psychologists see this compulsive self-reliance as a defensive strategy—protection against deep-seated feelings of vulnerability. People high on this trait tend to be preoccupied with the sexual aspects of relationships rather than emotional intimacy.

Levy and Kelly decided to explore a possible link between attachment style and jealousy style, and they did this by running a group of volunteers through some standard psychological tests. One questionnaire measured whether the volunteers were secure in their romantic relationships, or whether they instead were avoidant and noncommittal. A second questionnaire asked which they would find more distressing—knowing their partner was off having passionate sexual intercourse with someone else, or knowing that same partner had formed a deep emotional attachment with someone else.

They sorted the data, and the conclusions were indisputable. As the scientists reported on-line in the journal Psychological Science this week, avoidant types—those who prize their autonomy in relationships over commitment—were much more upset about sexual infidelity than emotional infidelity. And conversely, emotionally secure volunteers—including secure men—were much more likely to find emotional betrayal more upsetting.

But here’s the interesting twist. Just like all the earlier studies, Levy and Kelly found clear evidence of a gender difference in jealousy style.
In other words, men are indeed preoccupied with sexual betrayal, and women the reverse, but not for the reasons we thought. Men fret about sexual betrayal because they are overly invested in the sexual side of their own relationships—and that superficiality is linked to their thin personal attachments. Not to put too fine a point on it, male jealousy is shaped by deep emotional insecurities. Jenny Sanford probably knew that already, and the governor’s soul mate is no doubt having her suspicions by now.

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.

Hearses, coffins and the meaning of life

2009-12-23T11:37:00.001-05:00

In the darkly funny film classic Harold and Maude, Harold is a 19-year-old who is obsessed with death and dying. He repeatedly fakes his own suicide, drives around in a hearse, and attends strangers’ funerals as a pastime. At one of these funerals he meets Maude, a 79-year-old with the same morbid hobby, and in one of the most unlikely romances on film, the melancholy young man and the vivacious concentration camp survivor fall in love. Maude’s life ends with her suicide on her 80th birthday, but it’s not a depressing death. Indeed, the final scene shows Harold putting aside his morbid ways and embracing life anew.

Harold and Maude is one of the cleverest films to wrestle with existential themes, but the interplay of morbidity and zest for life is a recurring theme in art and literature. And in real lives as well: People who have close brushes with death often report a sharpened appetite even for the ordinary stuff of daily life. Facing one’s mortality appears to give new meaning to being alive.

But why would this be? It’s not obvious. One can imagine becoming negative and fearful when faced with life’s fragility, or reckless, but that doesn’t seem to happen. What cognitive crunching transforms morbidity into hope, mourning into joy? In other words, what was taking place in young Harold’s neurons when his soul mate’s death lifted his spirits out of the doldrums?

Some new science offers one possible explanation for this cognitive phenomenon. A team of cognitive scientists at the University of Missouri, headed by Laura King, decided to look at the death-and-zest interplay in terms of mental heuristics. Heuristic is just scientific jargon for the ancient, deep-wired rules that shape many of our thoughts and actions, and the Missouri scientists were especially interested in two of these rules. The so-called scarcity heuristic states: If something is rare, it must be valuable. This explains, for example, why we prize gold, even though steel is much more useful. The flip side of the scarcity heuristic, often called the value heuristic, states: If we desire something very much, it must be scarce.

Neither of these cognitive rules is necessarily correct or useful all the time, but they are both powerful—powerful enough to explain the common intertwining of morbidity and zest. Because scarcity and value are so tightly linked in the human mind, King and her colleagues reasoned, the mind might interpret death as a scarcity of life, which according to the theory should enhance its perceived value. They decided to test this idea in their laboratory.

The experiments were fairly straightforward. In one, for example, the researchers had a large group of volunteers complete word-find puzzles—those grids of letters with words embedded in them. For some of the volunteers, the embedded words were death-related, like tombstone and coffin, while for others—the controls—they were pain-related, like headache. Then all the volunteers completed three widely used measures of life’s meaning and purpose. The findings were simple and unambiguous: Those with death on their mind found life more meaningful and, well, simply better. They valued life more when primed by funerals and hearses.

So that’s the scarcity principle at work. But the scientists wanted to test their idea the other way around. That is, if it is indeed the heuristic mind finding meaning in death, then loving and embracing life should also enhance awareness of death’s constant presence. They tested this idea in an ingenious way. They approached strangers on the streets of Columbia, Missouri, and asked them to read a brief prose passage. Some read about how valuable the human body was if the organs were traded on the market—in the neighborhood of $45 million, the equivalent of “400 Porsches, 265 houses, or 45 luxury yachts.” The idea was to spark thoughts about life’s monetary worth. Others read about how the body was made up of common chemicals with a total value of about $4.50—the equivalent of “a Big Mac Value Meal at McDonald’s.”

Then they had all the volunteers do a different word test, this one requiring word completions like coff__ and de__. These words could be completed with either death-related words like coffin and dead, or with neutral words like coffee and deal. The idea was to see how much the two different groups of volunteers were thinking about death and dying. And the findings, reported in the December issue of the journal Psychological Science, were again clear: As the value heuristic would predict, those who were imagining themselves as the $45 million bionic man were also focused on the inevitability of dying—much more than those primed to devalue life. Valuing life made it seem scarcer and thus more fragile.

So the reality of death does not render life meaningless. Indeed, the opposite. And what’s more, when we embrace life, death is not pushed out of awareness; it lurks just outside of consciousness, easily accessible. That’s a psychological reality that Maude knew well from experience, and 19-year-old Harold was just beginning to sense.

For more insights into the quirks of human nature, visit the “Full Frontal Psychology” blog at True/Slant. Excerpts from “We’re Only Human” also appear regularly in the magazine Scientific American Mind. Wray Herbert’s book on the heuristic mind will be published by Crown in fall of 2010.

Savoring the passage of time

2009-12-17T15:24:00.003-05:00

I take part in a spinning class a couple times a week, and I always position my bike so I can’t see the wall clock. Spinning is really hard, and I know from experience that the session will seem much longer and much more arduous if I have one eye on the clock. It still drags some days, but other days I really forget about the clock. Time flies.

I know, it’s a cliché, but who hasn’t experienced a deep connection between the clock and the subjective experience of pleasure or pain? It’s what psychological scientists call “naïve physics.” We all know that time doesn’t really ever speed up or slow down; it always ticks at its own pace. But our perceptions of time vary dramatically, depending on our state of mind.

The universality of this naïve theory got scientist Aaron Sackett wondering if the opposite might also be true: If indeed time seems to tick away faster when we’re having fun, could a distorted sense of time make an experience more or less enjoyable? And why? Sackett, a professor of marketing at the University of St. Thomas in Minneapolis, ran several experiments to look at this common perception in a variety of ways. All of them involved tinkering with the passage of time in creative ways.

In one experiment, for example, Sackett and his colleagues put a group of men and women in two rooms, each without any clocks or watches or cell phones. They had them do a timed test, in which they had to read a text and underline certain words—so not particularly fun-filled, but not particularly aversive either. The scientists told the volunteers the test would take exactly ten minutes, and made a big show of starting a stopwatch as they left the room.

But the test didn’t take exactly ten minutes. For some, the scientists reentered after just five minutes, but acted as if the full ten minutes had passed; they even left the stopwatch conspicuously in view. For others, they didn’t reenter the room until 20 minutes had passed, but again they left the volunteers with the idea that ten minutes had passed. In other words, for some ten minutes seemed surprisingly long, while for others it seemed short—the lab equivalent of making time fly.

Then all the volunteers rated the experience for enjoyment, challenge, fun, engagement, and so forth. And the results were clear: If the ten minutes passed surprisingly quickly, volunteers found the word search task more pleasurable than if time seemed to drag. This doesn’t mean they found it exhilarating, or that the others found it crushingly boring—but their subjective experiences were definitely different on the pleasure scale.

But what if the task were actually aversive—more akin to the muscle ache of a spinning class? In a second study, the scientists forced the volunteers to listen to a tape recording of a dot matrix printer for 30 seconds. Thirty seconds is not a long time, but apparently this was a really irritating noise. While they listened, they watched the elapsed time tick off on a screen-- except that, unbeknownst to the volunteers, the elapsing time was either too slow or too fast. So again, for some time flew, while for others time dragged.

And again, time perceptions shaped emotions. When time flew, the tedious listening experience seemed less tedious, more bearable. When it dragged, it was worse; these listeners said they would rather listen to an electric drill if given the option. They also ran the experiment with a pleasant audiotape—of a favorite song—and once again time distortions determined the pleasure of the listening experience. That is, a pleasant experience became more pleasant.

So what does all of this mean? As the researchers explain on-line this week in the journal Psychological Science, humans are sense-making creatures. If we perceive something in the world as surprising, we automatically look for an explanation for the aberration. So if time sees distorted, we want to know why—and out intuitive physics clicks in: If time flies when we’re having fun, then flying time must signal that something fun is taking place.

In real life, we can’t slow or speed up time, of course. But we can shorten our estimates of time, and one way is not to look at clocks or other time cues. There may be other ways to make time fly as well, which suggests the possibility of making the inevitable tedium of everyday life—waiting in line, for example, or even a spinning class—just a bit more fun.

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.

Redemption for the fast and furious?

2009-12-15T11:17:00.003-05:00

My kids cut their video gaming teeth on Super Mario Brothers in the late 80s, and I confess I had some qualms about buying our first Nintendo. Would these seemingly pointless games be intellectually numbing, a waste of time and money? Would my kids lose interest in books? The usual parental fretting, I guess. But Mario and Luigi’s adventures with Princess Toadstool seemed benign enough, so we took the plunge. I limited their gaming time, and censored their games choices, and they seem to have emerged as undamaged adults.

I had it easy, really. The video gaming culture has become much more pervasive over the past two decades, and as we enter the holiday gift-giving season, many parents are in a deep quandary. Today’s games—especially those for teenagers and young adults—have become much more frenetic. Many reward adrenaline-pumping vigilance, rapid reactions, sharpshooting and other skills of personal combat. So parents are still left to wonder: Is there any redeeming value in the hours that teens spend transfixed by these contests?

Well, the latest psychological science provides at least a partial answer, and one that might surprise a lot of Luddites, Grinches and well-meaning moms and dads. Indeed, parents might consider putting an action video game under the tree not only for their kids, but for their aging parents as well. The weight of evidence, summarized by University of Rochester scientists in the December issue of the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science, suggests that regular gamers are fast and accurate information processors and—more important—that this skill carries over far beyond fragging bots in Unreal Tournament.

Anecdotal evidence has long hinted that players who spend a lot of hours on a game get faster—at least faster at that game. That’s not surprising, but cognitive scientists Matthew Dye, Shawn Green and Daphne Bavelier wanted to look beyond the obvious. They gathered together all the existing studies of video gaming that they could find, and crunched them together in what’s called a “meta-analysis”—to see what general conclusions they could extract. They found some surprising insights in the mounds of data.

For example, they found that avid players got faster not only on their game of choice, but on a variety of unrelated laboratory tests of reaction time: finding a particular letter in a field of letters, that kind of thing. They also found evidence that gamers don’t lose accuracy as they get faster. This is important, because skeptics have claimed that avid gamers are simply “trigger happy”—that is, fast but impulsive, and prone to errors. It appears they’re fast and accurate—just as accurate as cautious players. Perhaps most important, they found that all avid players’ share a common underlying cognitive change that explains their generalized quickness and sharpness.

That’s the most important finding. When they examined the gamers’ speed-plus-accuracy boost more closely, they found that the common underlying ingredient is improved visual cognition. Playing video games enhances performance on things like mental rotation skills, visual and spatial memory, and tasks requiring divided attention. What’s more, it’s not just that kids with these skills are drawn to video games. Scientists have trained novices with no particular interest in gaming, and with enough hours, they too become both faster and more visually sharp.

These enhanced visual skills are beginning to sound like talents that might be helpful to an airline pilot, not just a Call to Duty2 champion. But there’s more to recommend these games, the Rochester scientists conclude: Studies have already indicated that training might reduce gender differences in visual and spatial processing, and there is good reason to believe such training might stem the cognitive declines that come with aging as well. Indeed, one theory is that all the decrements that come with aging are related to a generalized slowing of the ability to process information—the exact opposite of the generalized cognitive gain that comes from gaming.

But hold up. There are obviously many other considerations before parents run out and buy the latest first-person assassin game for the whole family. Many of the action-oriented video games are unsuitable for children, and granddad might lack the manual dexterity and eyesight to play these games anyway. But perhaps in a Christmas future, there will be an intergenerational face-off on an educational toy for all ages.

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

Remembering who's the grown-up

2009-12-08T12:27:00.004-05:00

As a child, I used to drive my mother to distraction. It was my job. And my mother, for her part, would regularly threaten to wring my neck. It was kind of a family ritual. But as often as she threatened, she never actually did it. My neck is fine.

I had friends growing up whose necks didn’t fare so well. The difference between normal parenting and abusive parenting is the difference between wanting to throttle your children—and really doing it. All children can be maddening at times, but why do some parents react with harshness while others do not? Harsh parenting has been linked to everything from poverty to lack of education, but those explanations really beg the more intriguing question: What’s going on in the heads of harsh and abusive parents? What specific cognitive deficit makes it so difficult for some parents to regulate their frustration with their kids?

New research is suggesting a somewhat surprising answer to this question. Kirby Deater-Deckard, a professor of psychological science at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, argues in a just-published study that inadequate working memory may be the culprit. Working memory is the ability to hold information in mind and manipulate it for a short period of time: For example, try doing this simple addition problem in your head: 888 + 333. It’s not complex, but it does require remembering the numbers you’re carrying for a few seconds, remembering the sum of each column, and so forth. Some people are better at this than others.

Here’s how Deater-Deckard and his colleagues demonstrated the link between memory and patience—or lack of it. They recruited more than 200 mothers with same-sex twins, all about six years old. They visited their homes, where they videotaped the mothers working with each of the twins separately on difficult cooperative tasks. On one task, for example, mother and child had to draw a picture on an Etch-A-Sketch, each manipulating one of the toy’s two handles. The task was meant to frustrate both child and mother, to test their patience and self-control.

And it did, to varying degrees. The researchers had independent judges score both the child’s and the mother’s behavior. The children were rated for overt anger and frustration, for disobedience, giving up on the Etch-A-Sketch task, and so forth. The mothers were similarly rated, but in their case for their negative reactions to their children’s challenging behavior—including annoyance and anger, taking over the game in frustration, criticizing the child’s errors.

The twins were necessary for statistical purposes. By observing each interaction separately and subtracting one score from the other, the scientists were able to zero in on a purer measure of each parent’s overall tendency to react negatively to their kids, rather than to a particular child's personality. Then they gave each mother a battery of standard tests, including measures of verbal skills, spatial reasoning and working memory. They crunched all the data together for analysis.

The results clearly implicated working memory deficits (and only working memory deficits) as a cause of harsh parenting. But why? The link between poor memory and harsh impatience may not be intuitively obvious, but the scientists have an explanation. In those few seconds between experiencing frustration and reacting, a mother must appraise the situation. That is, she must say to herself something like this: Remember now, you’re the grown-up here; children are a challenge, but they don’t mean to be. And so forth and so forth. This kind of appraisal happens again and again, and each time it requires the powers of working memory. It may not seem like the same skill as that needed to add 888 and 333, but essentially it is. One must keep the facts of a situation in mind in order to rapidly and accurately appraise one’s emotions and arrive at an appropriate reaction.

These findings, published on-line in the journal Psychological Science this week, almost certainly apply to fathers as well, and they offer some small good news for both parents and kids. It’s commonly said that harsh and abusive parents lack good parenting skills, but that’s both obvious and unhelpful. These findings implicate a much more specific cognitive skill, and what’s more, one that evidence suggests can be enhanced with practice. Working memory training will not solve the problem of child maltreatment, but it’s a concrete intervention that might help some parents and children at risk.

For more insights into 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.

The Perils of Willpower

2009-12-01T15:18:00.007-05:00

The coming holiday season looms as a nightmare of temptation for many, whether the lure is fruitcake or martinis. Most dieters and abstainers think of willpower as the key to success. Bite the bullet; just say no. Yet paradoxically, the cornerstone of most addiction recovery programs is the exact opposite of willpower: It’s admitting powerlessness over drugs or sweets or booze.

This is a difficult concept for many, especially for those who have grown up in a culture that celebrates self-reliance. How can weakness be the way to success? Whatever happened to personal responsibility and self-discipline? It’s not entirely clear why or how this principle works, but some new research may help illuminate the dynamic.

Northwestern University psychologist Loran Nordgren and colleagues wanted to explore how our beliefs about our own powers of restraint might shape our behavior in the face of temptation. They suspected that people who believe they are powerless would be less likely to put themselves in risky situations—holiday parties, for example—and would therefore be less likely to give into temptation. Similarly, people who believe in their own powers of restraint would be less vigilant about temptation—and thus at heightened risk for a slip. They were especially interested in one puzzling question about addiction and recovery: Why do so many people relapse even after the physical symptoms of addiction subside?

They decided to study smokers. They contacted about 50 smokers who were trying to quit through a smoking cessation program. All had gone without a smoke for at least three weeks, which means that their physical withdrawal cravings were past. The researchers began by giving the smokers a questionnaire to gauge their beliefs about their ability to control their impulses and withstand temptation. Then they asked them a series of questions about the steps they took to avoid being around cigarettes: Do you avoid people who smoke? Ask people not to smoke? Sneak an occasional drag? And so forth.

Four months later, they contacted the recovering smokers again to see how they were doing with their effort to quit. They expected that their beliefs would shape their risky behavior, which would in turn influence success or failure. And that’s precisely what they found. As reported in the December issue of the journal Psychological Science, quitters who were confident in their powers of self-restraint were more apt to hang around smokers and keep cigarettes around—and were also more likely to relapse. Those who felt weak and vulnerable had a higher rate of success.

But what makes one person believe in willpower, while another sees himself as powerless? According to the researchers, beliefs are not fixed. They fluctuate depending on our circumstances and psychological state. People in a “hot” state are feeling the full force of their visceral impulses—hunger and craving—and therefore “believe” in the potency of addiction and in their vulnerability. But people in a “cold” state—who aren’t having cravings at the moment—have a great deal of trouble remembering what those impulses feel like, and as a result tend to believe more in their personal willpower. This disconnect is what the psychologists call the “empathy gap.”

The problem is that we spend most of our time in a cold state, so we tend to overestimate our powers of control and restraint. When we overestimate these powers, we are more likely to act recklessly. This would help explain why people relapse long after their physical compulsions are gone: They feel confident in their abstinence, and let their guard down, only to find themselves in a hot state—and at a holiday party. It would also explain another cornerstone of recovery programs: Going to meetings. Spending time around other recovering addicts, listening to stories of temptation and struggle and relapse is a way to prevent a hot state from going cold.

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

Some of my best friends are pawns

2009-11-19T14:39:00.005-05:00

There are certain rules of conduct on which most ethical people would agree. It’s not nice to date the boss’s daughter just to get ahead in the company. Or marry her son. And no parent would approve of a child befriending another child just because he happens to own an Xbox 360 Elite. That would be like an adult warming up to a colleague simply because he happens to have season tickets for the New Orleans Saints.

All of these ethical lapses fall under the general category of using people, which we’re taught early on not to do. People are not instruments or tools to be wielded for our own purposes, pawns to help us achieve our personal goals.

Yet we do use people anyway, often in more subtle ways than these. Why is that? Why do these moral strictures fail much of the time? New and forgiving research suggests that the urge to use people may be deeply embedded in human nature. Indeed, seeing others as useful or not may be as fundamental as perceiving gender or race in navigating out social world.

University of Waterloo psychologist Grainne Fitzsimons is interested in the interplay of personal goals and stereotypes. We are all motivated by goals, from big ones like career success to more modest ones, like losing ten pounds—or simply getting to the train on time. In fact, we spend much of daily lives in pursuit of one goal or another. We also categorize people. We all do, whether we like it or not, simply because we need to find order in the world’s complexity. So we pigeonhole others as blue-collar or professional, conservative or liberal, Black or white or Asian, man or woman, young or old.

Given that personal goals and stereotyping are both so basic to our psychology, Fitzsimons reasoned, is it possible that our goals actually influence how we pigeonhole people? Or put another way, why would we not categorize others as instruments or tools if we see them as helping us get what we want in life? Working with psychologist James Shah of Duke, she designed an experiment to explore this possibility.

Here’s the gist of the study. They had a group of volunteers focus on a goal—say, staying fit and healthy. Then they had them pick three people who they felt could help them meet their goal; let’s call them Ian, Susan and Joe. They also listed three people who they did not perceive as helpful or useful in staying fit—not a hindrance but not instrumental either. We’ll call them Nancy, Ben and Lori.

The names are important because, later on, the volunteers read a series of sentences with these names embedded in them: “The cashier gave Ian his change.” “Ben was tired of arguing” And so forth. There was a pretense for this reading, but then the psychologists surprised the volunteers with a memory test, in which they had to supply the right names: “The cashier gave ____ his change.”

The researchers expected mistakes. Indeed, it was really the mistakes they were studying. They wanted to see if they were more likely to mix up people who they had categorized as useful with other people they saw as useful (confusing Ian with Susan, for example), as opposed to confusing useful people with non-useful people (Joe and Nancy, for instance). If they did the former—confusing instrumental people only with each other—that would suggest that were grouping anyone who served their purposes as alike. It would suggest that we have a mental category for “people-who-get-me-what-I-want.”

And that’s precisely what they found. As reported on-line this week in the journal Psychological Science, the controls—those who were not focused on the fitness goal—made random errors, confusing Ben with Ian with Nancy with Susie. But those who were intent on their personal health-and-fitness goal were much more likely to perceive and remember people categorically, according to their utility, their value in helping reach the goal. Not to put too fine a point on it: All pawns look alike.

This is humbling, but it does not mean we’re slave to our automatic stereotyping. Our neurons may be categorizing the boss’s daughter as a useful tool for achieving our career goals, but whether or not to be a cad remains a choice. Our ethical sensibilities can still trump that impulse to use people as pawns, but it helps to be mindful of our baser nature.

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

"The Piece of Cake Heuristic"

2009-11-17T13:10:00.005-05:00

Don’t bother searching your long-term memory. There is no “Piece of Cake Heuristic.” I just made that up. I made it up and capitalized the main words and threw in an obscure word and added quotation marks—all so you, the reader, might consider the concept intellectually important and worthy of your attention. After all, it has a name and it’s in print—so it must have some heft, right?

Well, maybe--or maybe not, according to new research. University of Chicago psychologist Aparna Labroo and colleagues wondered if simply naming an idea—an economic theory, a medical diagnosis, a legal precedent—might make it easier for the mind to process, and thus more accessible. They further speculated that this cognitive ease might shape judgments of importance. They gave this idea a jargony label (the “Name-Ease” Effect), and then tested it in the laboratory.

Labroo’s idea is consistent with much earlier work on mental effort: If ideas are easier to process for whatever reason, we tend to find them more familiar and comfortable. Vocabulary, pronunciation, even the typeface in which these sentences are printed—all these can affect cognitive palatability. Labroo wanted to see if official names might have the same force. The link to importance is a bit more complicated. We all believe ideas are important if they are memorable—after all, that’s why we remember them. But we also associate importance with difficulty: The tougher to grasp, the more important an idea must be. If it’s too easy to process, it must be trivial.

The psychologists wanted to sort out these competing ideas, and here’s one of several experiments they ran. They had a group of volunteers read a legal case concerning school prayer. They all read the same case description, but for some the case was given a name, Engel v. Vitale. Once they had all read the case, some of the volunteers were asked to recall the details of the case, while others were instructed to think about the meaning of the case. In other words, some completed a memory task while others completed a comprehension task. Then they all rated the importance of the school prayer case.

The researchers were exploring the interplay of effort, memory and understanding in judgments of importance—and the findings were intriguing. Knowing that the case was officially called Engel v Vitale made it seem more important—but only for those who were focused on remembering it. In other words, the name made the information easier to process, and attributing this ease to the case’s memorability gave it weight. The case name did the opposite for those who were actually trying to comprehend the case: It made the case seem too familiar, and thus run-of-the-mill and simplistic.

Labroo and her colleagues reran this experiment many times, with a variety of ideas: an economic principle (the Coase Theorem); a mathematical concept (the Weierstrass Theorem); a medical diagnosis (acromegaly); and a psychological concept (Optimal Distinctiveness Theory). They got the same basic results, no matter what the subject matter. The psychologists’ paper on the “Name-Ease” Effect was published on-line this week in the journal Psychological Science. You be the judge of its importance.

For more insights into the quirks of human nature, visit the “Full Frontal Psychology” blog at True/Slant. Excerpts from the “We’re Only Human” blog also appear regularly in the magazine Scientific American Mind. Wray Herbert's book on heuristics will be published by Crown in autumn 2010.

A Case for the Distractible Toddler

2009-11-10T13:25:00.006-05:00

When my oldest son was three years old, someone gave him a very large can of Legos as a gift, enough to build a fortress. So we decided to build a fortress. Or I did, but he was an enthusiastic co-conspirator in the project—at least for about ten minutes. But then he got distracted by the sound of an ambulance siren outside; then he re-discovered a plastic triceratops; then he thought he should inspect the ashes in the fireplace. I tried to reengage him in the fortress, because I was doing an excellent job. But he had lots of things to do. He was busy.

Toddlers are distractible. Their minds flit constantly here and there, and they have a terrible time concentrating on even the most stimulating project. They might be fascinated by a colorful new toy, but only until the next best toy comes along, or the next or the next.

This can be maddening for parents, especially for those of us who want to give our kids a leg up on getting into a premier university. Parents often try to teach their toddlers self-control and mental discipline, to rein in their impulsivity. Increasingly, pre-school teachers do this, too. They see inattention and lack of focus as academic problems to be fixed.

But should we really be trying to teach self-control? Is there perhaps a reason why toddlers are such space cadets? Psychologists are beginning to raise these questions, and some are even suggesting that it may be detrimental to the developing brain to push it toward maturity too soon. Indeed, children’s impulsivity may be an essential tradeoff, one that allows the young mind to learn social conventions and language.

University of Pennsylvania neuropsychologist Sharon Thompson-Schill and her colleagues study a region of the brain called the prefrontal cortex, or PFC. This is basically the part of the brain that gives us mental agility and self-control; it filters out irrelevant information and allows us to focus. It is also the last part of the brain to mature and become fully functional. It lags behind the rest of the brain until about age four.

Why would that be? Well, the psychologists speculate that an immature PFC may not be a deficit at all, but rather an advantage in the first years of life. Here’s an example of their evidence, discussed in the most recent issue of the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science. It has to do with guessing. Say you are naïve about the game of football, but you are playing a guessing game: Will the offensive team pass or run the ball? You observe that the team passes the ball three out of every four plays, so you guess “pass” 75 percent of the time and “run” 25 percent of the time.

That’s not smart. Smart would be saying “pass” all the time. And if you played this game with your toddler, that is likely what he or she would do. Toddlers are often better at this, because their immature brains are still operating on a brute-force competition between two alternatives: pass or run. They are not yet capable of nuance and probability. That is, they’re not really capable of guessing.

And good thing, because toddlers can’t afford to guess. They have a lot of learning to do, and much of that learning has to do with hard-and-fast rules and conventions. Having an immature and inflexible mind is an advantage in finding patterns in the chaos of the world. In fact, this rigidity may be essential to language acquisition. Learning language is an intimidating task; it requires saying the right thing in the right context, and agreeing with everyone else that these are the right things to say. Consider the example of irregular verbs: They are simply conventions; they can only be learned by brute force, and that’s precisely how toddlers learn them. It’s no surprise, the psychologists note, that kids pick up languages so effortlessly compared to adults

And it’s not just language. Toddlers are mastering all sorts of social conventions that, like irregular verbs, simply must be learned. They’re the rules of the world. In this sense, trying to hasten the brain’s development may be not only difficult by unwise.

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

Close Encounters of the Rude Kind

2009-11-05T12:40:00.002-05:00

One of my personal crotchets is people who walk down busy city sidewalks without looking where they’re going. These days they might be texting on an electronic device, but it’s not the technology I object to. They could just as well be reading a book. What’s annoying is the expectation that the crowds will part, that all the other pedestrians will make the effort to get out of their way.

This may be simple rudeness. But I suspect that some of these people truly believe they can skillfully multi-task even in a crowd. Well they can’t, and I’ve now got science to prove it. Finnish researchers did a laboratory simulation to see how pedestrians avoid collisions in everyday sidewalk encounters. Millions of people pass by millions of other people without incident every day on the world’s streets, and the scientists wanted to know how we manage this. Although they simulated polite pedestrians, their findings hold a valuable lesson for the self-centered as well.

Cognitive psychologist Lauri Nummenmaa and her colleagues studied volunteers’ eye gaze as they encountered an animated man walking toward them on a city street. They wanted to see if the simulated stranger’s eye gaze was an important cue in avoiding sidewalk collisions. In the simulation, the stranger looked steadily either to the left or the right, and the volunteers had to decide which way to move. The results, reported on-line this week in the journal Psychological Science, were clear: If the stranger looked to his left, volunteers not only looked but also moved to the stranger’s right; and vice versa. The scientists also ran a more realistic scenario in which the stranger looked straight ahead until the last minute, and then suddenly shifted his gaze left or right. They got the same results.

Much recent work on the brain’s “mirror neurons” suggests that humans automatically mimic others, and that this unconscious aping is important to social interaction. Interestingly, the volunteers in these studies did not mirror the stranger’s eye gaze, suggesting that their own eye movements are not simply an automatic neuronal reflex. That reflex may be occurring, but it doesn’t stop there: It appears the pedestrians are also “mind reading,” quickly but deliberately interpreting a stranger’s eye gaze as a signal of intent to walk left or right. That is, they are social animals, analyzing and navigating a social world.

This lab simulation captures only half a real-life sidewalk encounter. On an actual city street, not only am I observing and reasoning about your gaze and intentions, you are doing the same with my gaze. It’s a social contract that protects both of us and keeps the world moving smoothly. Unless, of course, your mind is somewhere else.

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 Newsweek.com and in the magazine Scientific American Mind.

Sneezing at health care reform

2009-10-28T10:31:00.005-04:00

I ride a public bus to and from work, and today some of my fellow commuters were sneezing. My guess is that people sneeze on the bus ride every day, but I am especially mindful of any contagion at the moment. And well I should be. We’ve got the regular seasonal bug out there, plus the ominous swine flu on the horizon. And the airwaves and newspapers are filled with warnings about this year’s heightened risk for a flu pandemic. Hundreds of thousands have already been struck by swine flu, with deaths in the thousands and climbing daily.

A stranger’s sneeze can be a good thing in a way. Think of it as a public service announcement, a very-simple-to-understand message about health risk. A sneeze can remind us to wash our hands and schedule our inoculations—probably more effectively than a lecture. But what if, in our hyper-vigilance, we overreact to everyday sneezes and coughs and sniffles? Can such signals change healthy prudence into an unreasonable fearfulness about germs and more?

A team of University of Michigan researchers thought that might be the case, and ran a couple field studies to test the idea. Psychologist Norbert Schwarz and grad student Spike Lee suspected that a heightened perception of risk for a flu pandemic might unconsciously trigger fears of other, totally unrelated hazards. So last May, when the first wave of swine flu was just beginning to claim lives, the researchers stationed a sneezing actor in a busy campus building. As large numbers of students passed on their way to and from class, the actor would occasionally sneeze loudly. The psychologists then cornered and interviewed the students—and compared those who has witnessed the sneeze and those who had not.

They asked both groups to assess the risk of an “average American” getting a serious disease. They didn’t mention the flu, although it is a serious disease and could well have been on some of the students’ minds. Perhaps not surprisingly, those who had just witnessed someone sneezing perceived a greater chance of falling ill. But here’s the interesting part: Those with sneezing on their mind also perceived an increased risk of dying of a heart attack before age 50, dying in an accident, or dying as result of a crime. That is, the public sneeze triggered a broad fear of all health threats, even ones that couldn’t possibly be linked to germs—and sparked thoughts of mortality.

What’s going on here? Well, it gets better—or worse. The researchers asked the same people their views on the country’s existing health care system: Is it a wreck, or working pretty much okay? Those within hearing distance of the sneezing actor had far more negative views of health care in America. Think about that: The country’s health care system encompasses everything from obstetrics to diabetes prevention to insect-borne illnesses, yet a single sneeze in the corridor colored people’s views of the entire system.

This last finding was so striking that the psychologists ran another version of the sneezing scenario at a local mall, just to double-check the perplexing results. This time the interviewer himself sneezed and coughed (or did not) while conducting the interview, and in this version the interviewer didn’t even bother to ask about the personal risk of illness—at least not directly. Instead, the interviewer was ostensibly doing a public opinion survey on federal budget priorities. He asked, for example: Given limited tax dollars, should the government spend the money on vaccine production or on green jobs?

Clearly this issue is only tangentially connected to the flu or personal health, but it does play into people’s fears and doubts about health and disease: Is the government watching out for Americans’ welfare, broadly construed? And the results (to be published in a forthcoming issue of the journal Psychological Science) were unambiguous. Those who had just witnessed someone sneezing were much more likely to favor a public investment in vaccine production rather than green jobs. In other words, the sneeze sparked concerns not about personal health, but more broadly about public health.

This is quite remarkable when you tie it all together: Completely outside of awareness, a simple sneeze triggered fear of the flu, which in turn sparked fears of mortality, which even shaped people’s views on a somewhat abstract public policy question. So achoo! Let’s write our Congressmen about health care reform.

For more insights into the quirks of human nature, visit the "Full Frontal Psychology" blog at True/Slant. Selections from "We're Only Human" also appear regularly at Newsweek.com and in the magazine Scientific American Mind.

Another Roadside Distraction

2009-10-06T13:37:00.004-04:00

When Pulitzer Prize-winning music critic Tim Page was in second grade, he and his classmates went on a field trip to Boston. They later wrote about the experience as a class assignment, and this is part of what the nine-year-old Page wrote:

"Well, we went to Boston, Massachusetts through the town of Warrenville, Connecticut on Route 44A. It was very pretty and there was a church that reminded me of pictures of Russia from our book that is published by Time-Life. We arrived in Boston at 9:17. At 11 we went on a big tour of Boston on Gray Line 43, made by the Superior Bus Company like School Bus Six, which goes down Hunting Lodge Road where Maria lives and then on to Separatist Road and then to South Eagleville before it comes to our school. We saw lots of good things like the Boston Massacre site. The tour ended at 1:05. Before I knew it we were going home. We went through Warrenville again but it was too dark to see much. A few days later it was Easter. We got a cuckoo clock."

Page received an unsatisfactory grade on his essay. What's more, his irate teacher scrawled in red across the top of the essay: “See me!” As he recalls in his new memoir Parallel Play, such incidents were not uncommon in his childhood, and he knew why he was being scolded: “I had noticed the wrong things.”

The subtitle of Page’s memoir is Growing Up With Undiagnosed Asperger’s, and indeed Page didn’t learn until age 46 that he suffers from what’s called an autism spectrum disorder, or ASD. ASD is usually defined by impairments in social interaction and communication, but many people with autism and the milder Asberger’s syndrome also tend to fixate on irrelevant information in their world. Their attention seems to be awry or, to use Page’s words, they notice the wrong things.

But why? What’s going on in the autistic mind that makes the details of bus routes infinitely fascinating? Why are people like Page so easily distracted from the main act? Psychologists at University College London think that it might be a mistake to think of such distractibility as simply a deficit. To the contrary, Anna Remington and John Swettenham and colleagues speculate that people with ASD might have a greater than normal capacity for perception, so that what appears as irrelevant distraction is really a cognitive bonus. They decided to test the idea in the lab.

They studied a group of people with ASD, mostly Asperger’s, along with normal controls. They had all the subjects look at a computer screen, which displayed various combinations of letters and dots forming circles. They had to very rapidly spot the letters N or X among the other letters, and hit the corresponding key on the keyboard. Some of the circles—those with more letters—were more difficult to process than others. There were also other letters floating outside the circle, but the subjects were specifically instructed to ignore those letters. Those floating letters were the laboratory equivalent of an irrelevant distraction in the real world.

The psychologists were measuring perceptual capacity. That’s why they varied the complexity of the task. They were also measuring distractibility. They reasoned that, as long as the subjects’ total perceptual capacity was not exhausted, they would also process the irrelevant, distracting letters within their visual field. Once they had surpassed their capacity, irrelevant processing would stop. So if ASD subjects in fact have greater processing capacity, then they should process more distracting information even as the main task becomes increasingly complex.

And that’s exactly what they found. As reported on-line in the journal Psychological Science, while there was no difference among subjects in either reaction time or accuracy on the main task, those with ASD processed the irrelevant letters while solving much more complex problems. Put another way, they weren’t ignoring the main task, nor were they distracted away from it. Instead, they were completing their important work and moving on, using their untapped capacity.

But here’s the rub. While this increased distractibility may be a talent rather than a deficit, the psychologists say, it nevertheless can have detrimental consequences in real-life situations. Just ask Tim Page about his uncanny facility for bus routes.

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

"For just pennies a day"

2009-09-25T15:16:00.003-04:00

There are so many things you can purchase or accomplish for just pennies a day. You can get lots of interesting magazine subscriptions, or a good life insurance plan—no physical required. You can adopt a needy child in Africa, or save the Earth from global warming.

The “pennies a day” marketing scheme has been around a long time, and whoever came up with it showed extraordinary psychological insight. Indeed, science is only now beginning to demonstrate what these marketers sensed intuitively—that people are not entirely rational when it comes to processing numbers. What’s more, the way we think about scales and rates and ratios can make us into either cautious or indiscriminate consumers.

In a way this is obvious. “Pennies a day” is a meaningless ratio, because we’re not really reaching into our pockets each and every day for those copper coins. That’s what the marketers want you to visualize, but most of us are not truly fooled by the ruse. We know automatically--without doing any arithmetic at all—that we’re really talking about dollars a month and maybe hundreds of dollars over a year or years. It’s all a matter of knowing the meaningful scale.

But what if the manipulation of numbers is more subtle, or more complex? Are there marketing phrases and terms that do fool our imperfect minds? University of Michigan psychologist Katherine Burson and her co-workers believe so, and they’ve run a couple interesting experiments to simulate the kinds of offers we might well encounter in our daily lives. Here’s an example:

Imagine you’re in the market for a cell phone plan. After shopping around, you’ve narrowed your choices to two: Plan A costs $32 a month, and for that you’re guaranteed no more than 42 dropped calls out of 1000. Plan B only costs $27 a month, but the number of dropped calls is 65. In other words, you get what you pay for, and consumers make their choice based on what’s more important—money or service.

But what if the same offer was phrased this way? Plan A costs $364 a year, and drops 4.2 calls per 100. Plan B costs $324 and drops 6.5 calls per 100. It takes only the tiniest bit of arithmetic to see that nothing has changed. The offers are identical to what they were before, except that the scale has changed. But actually two scales have changed, and in different ways, so it’s not a no-brainer like “pennies a day.”

So how do consumers process these different offers? The psychologists gave these choices to a large group of volunteers, and the results were interesting. Consumers preferred Plan B when it was described as having a lower price per year, but they preferred Plan A when it was described as having fewer dropped calls per 1000. Notice that it’s the “per year” and “per 1000” that are important. Making the scale bigger also made the difference appear more exaggerated, so emotionally consumers feel like they’re getting much better service or a big savings in cost. Consumers actually changed their preferences with the larger scale—they became more discriminating—even though the real terms remained unchanged.

This is pretty remarkable—and unnerving. But there’s more. In a second experiment, the researchers offered a slightly different choice for movie rental plans. In this scenario, Plan A costs $10 a month for seven new movies per week. Plan B costs $12 a month for nine new movies a week. As before, either choice could make sense, depending on which meets your financial and movie-watching needs.

Then they once again changed the terms: This time the prices stayed the same, but instead of a weekly allotment of movies, consumers now got a yearly allotment. That is, for $10 a month they got 364 movies per year, and for $12 a month they got 468. How did the movie aficionados process these offers? As reported in the current issue of the journal Psychological Science, dramatically more consumers chose plan B when it was expressed in movies per year. It's the emotional impact of that number--468. That's a lot of movies, and a lot more than the other plan gets you, and still for only $12 a month. When you come to think of it, that's really just pennies a day.

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 and at Newsweek.com.

Changing the old dating rules

2009-09-22T11:41:00.002-04:00

Women are much choosier than men when it comes to romance. This is well known, but the reason for this gender difference is unclear. Evolutionary psychologists think it’s because, way back in prehistoric times, “dating” was much riskier for women. Men who made an ill-advised choice in the ancient version of a singles bar simply had one lousy night. Women who chose unwisely could end up facing years of motherhood.

That’s less true today, yet women remain much more selective. Is this difference a vestige of our early ancestry? Or might it be totally unrelated to reproductive risk, something more modern and mundane? A couple of Northwestern University psychologists, Eli Finkel and Paul Eastwick, decided to explore this question in an unusual laboratory: a real-life speed dating event.

For the uninitiated, speed dating is an increasingly popular way for men and women to meet and find potential partners. Participants attend a sponsored event and go on a series of very brief “dates,” about four minutes each. Typically, the women sit scattered around a room, and the men make the rounds. Afterward, both men and women indicate to the sponsor if they would be interested in seeing any of the others again. If two “yeses” match up, they get phone numbers and that’s it. They’re on their own.

Men say “yes” a lot more than women. That’s expected, but Finkel and Eastwick had a novel theory about why. Perhaps it could be explained by the simple convention of men standing and approaching—and women sitting passively. There has been a lot of recent work on the mutual influence of body and mind--how we embody our thoughts and emotions—and the psychologists speculated that physically approaching someone might be enough to make the potential date more appealing romantically—and thus to make the men less choosy overall.

They tested this in a series of 15 heterosexual speed dating events, involving 350 young men and women. Each participant went on about 12 dates, but the researchers changed the rules: In these events, the women and men approached each other about equally. Following each date, each participant rated the other for romantic desire and romantic chemistry. They also rated their own sense of self-confidence on the date. A bit later, they decided thumbs up or thumbs down.

The results were a score. As reported on-line in the journal Psychological Science, the well-known gender difference vanished when men and women assumed more egalitarian roles. The difference didn’t completely reverse when women were on the move. That is, their choosiness went away but they didn’t become more indiscriminate than men. This suggests that the ancient tendencies may still have some force, but they are also reinforced by arbitrary social norms. What’s more, it was increased self-confidence that appeared to make the difference: Simply standing and being on the move boosted confidence, which in turn boosted romantic attraction.

We don’t speed date through real life, of course, but there are all sorts of social conventions based on gender, and these presumably shape romantic feelings and actions. Having men behave more like women and women more like men appears at least to narrow this one gap between the sexes.

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

Making Sense of Pat

2009-09-15T16:52:00.007-04:00

Fans of the old Saturday Night Live will remember skits about the androgynous Pat. Pat’s formless body and non-descript clothes offered no clue about gender. Nor did Pat’s behavior, and the running joke was that the celebrity guest hosts would go ridiculous lengths to figure out if Pat was a man or a woman. They always failed.

The skits were funny in part because Pat defied a deep-seated urge to put people into tidy pigeonholes—to stereotype. Pat wasn’t aggressive in a stereotypical male way, and Pat wasn’t particularly caring in a stereotypical female way. Pat was just Pat.

We all trade in stereotypes every day, whether we like it or not. It’s how we sort an impossibly complex world into manageable categories: man, woman, Italian, Chinese, lawyer, engineer. Stereotypes can be unfair and hurtful to many people, but the power of stereotyping is undeniable. It’s a fact of the human psyche.

But what exactly is going on in the mind when we stereotype someone? Is the process instantaneous and automatic, or do we deliberate over traits and categories before making judgments? A clever new study of the actual internal process of stereotyping—from basic perception to judgment—offers some provocative findings.

Tufts University psychologists Jonathan Freeman and Nalini Ambady used many common stereotypes, including gender stereotypes, to explore a new theory about the cognitive mechanics underlying caricatures. Here’s the basic idea: When we catch sight of a stranger’s face, we immediately begin to extract information: That’s no problem if it’s the Marlboro Man or Betty Crocker, but most of us aren’t archetypal icons of our gender. Most humans are somewhere in between, so our immediate perception is usually more tentative: “He’s probably male.” This tentative perception in turn triggers a tentative stereotype: "He’s likely to be aggressive." In other words, our perceptions and categories are not crisp and fixed, but rather in dynamic flux. It takes a few seconds for this ambiguous impression to stabilize into a final interpretation of the stranger.

At least that’s the theory, which the psychologists decided to test in the lab. To do so, they morphed photos of men and women into amalgams of male and female traits, some more ambiguous than others. None were as baffling as the fictional Pat, but they were deliberately ambiguous—like in the real world. Then they used an innovative lab technique to explore the cognitive processing of these faces: Instead of scanning their brains, they tracked their hand movements. They flashed the photographs on a screen, and instructed the volunteers to move a mouse rapidly toward one of two adjectives—for example, “aggressive” and “caring”—in opposite corners of the screen. The psychologists tracked the computer mouse movements to see how quickly and directly they categorized each face by stereotypical traits.

The idea here is that the hands have a mind of their own, in the sense that movements reflect the mind’s hesitation and conflict. The results were fascinating. An instantaneous stereotype would be a straight line from the starting point to one of the two adjectives—male, therefore aggressive, no hesitation. Nobody did that. Instead the movements appear as curves, suggesting some hesitation and deliberation in each judgment.

But here’s the really interesting part, reported on-line this week in the journal Psychological Science: The more ambiguous the face was, the more curved the path to judgment. That is, a male face with female traits might ultimately be judged as male and therefore aggressive, but not before the volunteer’s hand was tugged a bit toward the alternative stereotype of caring female. It’s like the mind is saying: Yeah, probably aggressive, but what about those nurturing features? What do I make of those? It’s as if the perceived gender ambiguity triggers a cognitive “competition” between incomplete and contradictory stereotypes, which persists until the mind settles on one or the other.

This is more than just a clever experiment, Freeman and Ambady believe. Even though the cognitive ambiguity is active only for an instant during the stereotyping process, those few seconds of contemplating life’s ambiguity may undermine our mind’s rigid categories—and have lasting effects on social judgments and behavior way down the line.

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

Cold Shoulder, Warm Heart

2009-09-11T12:34:00.005-04:00

One of Robert Frost’s best-loved poems is the short verse “Fire and Ice,” which goes like this:

Some say the world will end in fire;
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if I had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To know that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

Most good poets are part psychologist, and Frost shows keen insight into the human mind in these seemingly simple lines. Indeed, his 1920 poem anticipated ideas that are just now emerging in cognitive science—specifically the notion that our bodily sensations are inextricably bound up with emotions like hatred and desire. Or to put it a way that the Bard of New England would have appreciated, the metaphorical thermometer is as much a gauge of social life as it is of degrees Fahrenheit.

At least that’s the theory, which psychologists have been exploring in various ways in the laboratory. Here’s a recent example, from Hans IJzerman and Gun Semin of Utrecht University. The psychologists were intrigued by such metaphors as “the cold shoulder” and “warm feelings,” and decided to test the link between thermometer readings and feelings of closeness or distance, affection or iciness. They ran a few experiments to test this in different ways.

The first experiment was straightforward. Volunteers who had just arrived in the lab were asked to hold the experimenter’s beverage for a few minutes, ostensibly so he could do something that required two hands. Some were handed a cold beverage, and others a warm one. Then they were asked to rate both themselves and an acquaintance on a well-known scale that measures social proximity; the more they overlapped with
the other, the higher their score on closeness; the less overlap, the more distant they were feeling. The results were also straightforward. Holding the warm beverage induced greater feelings of closeness than the cold beverage.

Those findings are intriguing but hardly conclusive, so the researchers looked at the body-mind link a different way. When we are literally close to someone or something, we see more detail; our experience is more concrete. Similarly, distance makes our vision of things more vague and abstract. The psychologists reasoned from this that feelings of warmth would induce not only emotional closeness toward others, but also perceptual closeness--and thus more vivid and concrete perceptions.

They didn’t use beverages in this study. Instead they varied the room temperature, from the low 60s F to low 70s F. This isn’t a huge variation, but the researchers figured it would be enough to test the idea that temperature shapes emotion and thought. They showed all the volunteers a short film clip of chess pieces moving around, but not the usual way chess pieces move, and they asked the volunteers to describe “in their own words” what was happening. The idea was that room temperature would shape their perceptions and as a result the language that the volunteers used. That is, warm observers would write concrete descriptions of the chess scene, and chilly observers would write more abstract descriptions.

And that’s exactly what they found. When they coded the language in the narratives, they found that room temperature did indeed affect the volunteers’ choice of words. The warm volunteers also expressed greater feelings of closeness toward the experimenter.

The psychologists decided to take this one step further, to see if temperature shapes not only language but worldview. It’s well known that people from cultures that place a high value of individualism—Americans, for example—have a particular cognitive style, compared to more communitarian cultures. Specifically, those from communal cultures tend to see patterns in the world, where individualists tend to see disconnected parts. The researchers suspected that warmth would spark more a more relational worldview, while cold would induce a more self-reliant view.

They varied the room temperature as before, but this time they had the volunteers take a perception test specifically designed to differentiate these cognitive styles. That is, some people perceive patterns where others see independent components, and this is taken as a measure of either a relational or individualistic worldview. And once again, temperature showed a clear and direct connection to how volunteers processed what they saw. As reported on-line in the journal Psychological Science, warmth made volunteers see the connections between things, while the chilly were more individualistic in their perceptions of the world.

So affection, concrete language, communitarian worldview—that’s a lot to hook to the simple rising and falling of mercury. But perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising, the researchers say. After all, the mind evolved along with the body over millions of years, so the way we think and feel was no doubt shaped by real and important experiences in the world. What could be more basic than staying warm?

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

The Myth of Binge Eating

2009-09-03T13:42:00.006-04:00

An inviolable principle of most addiction recovery programs is total abstinence. It appears that for true addicts, one drink or one toke or one line is enough to trigger a binge—and a likely relapse. This dogma is not so hard and fast when it comes to food because . . . well, because we all have to eat.

Still, chronic overeaters do often embrace a version of the abstinence dogma, treating certain foods like Johnny Walker to an alcoholic. It might be an economy-sized bag of potato chips or a
hot fudge sundae or a double order of Buffalo wings. Every foodie has a taboo food or two that will predictably shatter his or her discipline and will power and send the dieter into face-stuffing freefall.

Or so the wisdom goes. But is it true? Surprisingly, this idea has never been tested in a real-life situation, so a team of psychologists decided to do just that. Traci Mann of the University of Minnesota and several colleagues suspected that the notion of catastrophic relapse was too simplistic for a complex behavior like eating. Food-minded people do violate their own rules, of course, but perhaps they make up for their transgressions with a little deprivation later on. This is the idea they wanted to explore.

To do so, the psychologists recruited a large group of college undergrads—all women. They deliberately chose college-age women because as a group they tend to be more weight-conscious and to diet more than the general population. They also questioned each of the volunteers individually to identify their attitudes toward eating, how often they dieted, their weight fluctuations, and so forth. The women thought they were taking part in a broad study of “health habits.”

To make the situation as realistic as possible, the women simply went about their days—going to class, studying, socializing, whatever—but they carried electronic “diaries” with them at all times. The psychologists paged the women once an hour during waking hours, and asked them a variety of questions, including queries about eating and snacking and—importantly—about diet violations. The study took two days, and the results showed no evidence that eating a forbidden food triggers binge or relapse. This was true even among the women most preoccupied with weight and dieting.

The researchers wanted to double-check this finding. So they did a second study, this one lasting eight days, during which the women kept detailed logs of their food consumption. In the first study, it was unclear how each of the volunteers defined a food violation. It might have been a single bite of a Snickers bar, or an entire tray of lasagna. So in this study, the researchers created a ruse that required about half the volunteers to drink an 8-ounce milkshake; they figured this would be a eating violation to most weight-conscious college women. They then compared their post-milkshake calorie consumption to their calorie consumption for the week before, and they also compared the violators to those who had not violated their diet.

And guess what? Drinking the forbidden milkshake was not a dietary catastrophe. Indeed, as reported on-line in the journal Psychological Science, the women who drank the shake ate no more calories overall than the other women, and their calorie consumption the day of the violation was no greater than their typical daily consumption had been for the prior week—about 1,400 calories. In other words, they somehow compensated for the milkshake later in the day—skipping an evening snack, going light at dinner—and as a result got themselves back on track without delay.

This is good news. It’s not clear from this study if the women deliberately compensated for the taboo milkshake, or if that caloric balancing act takes place on an unconscious level. Perhaps that doesn’t matter. The bottom line is that a milkshake is just that and no more. It’s not symbolic of weakness or failure, and doesn’t have to ruin a day or a week or a lifetime commitment.

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

The Science of Kids

2009-08-28T11:37:00.002-04:00

Nick is a 6-year-old boy who doesn’t lie. At least according to his father, Steve. So imagine Steve’s chagrin when he witnessed what a hidden camera had documented in the McGill University laboratory of psychologist Victoria Talwar. In order to win a prize, Nick readily cheated in a game, then lied to cover up his cheating. When pressed, he elaborated on his lie, and he showed not a glimmer of remorse. Indeed, he was gleeful.

Is Nick a “young sociopath in the making?” Probably not. In fact, he’s fairly typical of 6-year-olds, who lie about once an hour, usually to cover up a transgression of some kind. That’s about twice as much lying as 4-year-olds do, which suggests that kids are learning to lie. Looking at kids of all ages, fully 96 percent are liars. Indeed, Talwar views lying as an important developmental milestone, linked to intelligence.

That doesn’t mean lying is okay, and both father and son know this. It’s uncomfortable to watch Nick squirm through his lies as he digs himself in deeper. And Steve is a fairly typical parent too, in the sense that all parents are very bad at lie detection. What’s more, Nick likely learned to lie from watching his parents tell white lies. Parents typically view precocious lying as innocent, something that will correct itself; but in fact a lot of kids get “hooked” on lying very early.

Nick’s story comes from science writers Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman, who include it in NurtureShock, their delightful new collection of essays on the “science of kids.” Though not exactly a parenting manual, the book does offer a lot of useful information on why kids do what they do. For example, Talwar and her colleagues have tried using stories to teach kids like Nick to curb their lying. In one study, they had kids listen to either "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" or "George Washington and the Cherry Tree"; they heard the story after they had cheated, but before the psychologist asked them about cheating.

For those who don’t recall: In "The Boy Who Cried Wolf," the shepherd boy lies repeatedly about a wolf, and in the end is eaten by a wolf when nobody believes his calls for help. So it’s about severe punishment for lying. George Washington, by contrast, tells his father the truth about chopping down the tree, and is forgiven and praised for his truthfulness. When Bronson and Merryman conducted a survey, three of four respondents said the wolf story would be the more effective teaching tool, but in fact it was the opposite. The honest George tale cut lying by 75 percent in boys, and 50 percent in girls.

Why? Probably because kids already know that lying is a punishable offense; they’re not learning anything new there. What’s new—and welcome information—is that honesty might bring them both immunity from punishment and parental praise.

Bronson and Merryman’s essay on lying is representative of this engaging volume, in its mix of pitch-perfect science writing and soft-pedaled guidance for parents. Many of their essays—on sleep, racial attitudes, self-control, sibling relations, and more—are animated by actual flesh-and-blood kids, who we meet on an excursion through many of the nation’s top child psychology laboratories. It’s a rewarding and entertaining excursion. NurtureShock is published by Twelve Books, and is in bookstores now.

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

A cognitive metamorphosis

2009-08-25T11:30:00.003-04:00

Franz Kafka’s 1919 short story “A Country Doctor” is a tale about . . . well, who knows what it’s about really? The bare-bones plot involves a physician who must make his way through a blizzard to tend to a young boy who is ailing. Or might be ailing, or might not; it’s not clear. Beyond that it is hard to describe, much less interpret the string of absurdities and nonsense that make up this short piece. Time and traditional narrative break down entirely. It’s a disorienting assault on meaning.

That won’t surprise any reader familiar with the works of Kafka and other existentialist writers, who deliberately toyed with reality in order to disorient the reader. Indeed, the word Kafkaesque has come to be a synonym for bizarre, confusing, surreal.

But why is this great literature rather than just gibberish? What is its effect on the reader’s mind? How does a surreal tale like “A Country Doctor” work on a psychological level?

We may never know Kafka’s intentions, but psychologists are beginning to get some insight into the mental dynamics of reading such absurdist writing. One recent study suggests that Kafkaesque threats on life’s meaning might actually prime our need for (and perception of) order and pattern in the world. So paradoxically, experiencing meaninglessness may inspire a keener search for meaning. Here’s the evidence.

Psychologists Travis Proulx of UC-Santa Barbara and Steven Heine of the University of British Columbia ran an experiment in which volunteers actually read a modified version of “A Country Doctor,” this one illustrated with a series of drawings as nonsensical as the text. Other volunteers read a short story roughly like the Kafka tale, but more conventional in form. When they were done reading, all the volunteers took a difficult test that required them to identify patterns in long and seemingly random strings of letters. The psychologists expected that those who were disoriented by the Kafkaesque prose would be more earnest in searching—and more successful in spotting order in the chaos.

And that’s exactly what they found. As reported on-line in the journal Psychological Science, those who were unmoored by Kafka found more of the hidden patterns that actually existed, but they also identified more patterns overall, correctly and incorrectly—suggesting that they were highly motivated to seek and find order. But here’s the most intriguing aspect of these findings: A disorienting literary experience appears to have sharpened the volunteers’ yearning for meaning on a fundamental cognitive level; it’s unlikely that the volunteers even thought of themselves as searching for meaning, yet their neurons seemed primed to make order anywhere and everywhere they could.

Proulx and Heine ran another similar experiment and got the same results. Taken together, the studies suggest that we humans are irrepressible meaning makers. Indeed the need for order and predictability may be fundamental to the human condition, and challenging the world’s predictability may be one key to art’s psychological power. Kafka apparently had this uncanny insight into the human mind nearly a century ago, at age 36.

For more insights into the quirks of the human mind, visit the "Full Frontal Psychology" blog at True/Slant. Selections from "We’re Only Human" also appear regularly at Newsweek.com and in the magazine Scientific American Mind.

Carpe diem! Did our ancient ancestors have personalities?

2009-08-14T15:17:00.005-04:00

I have high school friends who are dead already, as a direct result of their chosen lifestyle. They drank too much, drove too fast, ate whatever they craved at any given moment. They were impulsive, live-for-today types, and they paid a price for these traits. Nobody’s shocked that they died early.

We all know people like this. We also know people who are conscientious workers, homebodies and parents, committed partners and committed bachelors, workaholics, health nuts, easy-going and neurotic. There’s no denying the stark individual differences in personality. “Who we are” seems to emerge early in life, and to endure through the lifespan. It shapes our life choices, from health to family to work and finances.

But why do we have personality at all? It wouldn’t seem to make sense from an evolutionary point of view. The traits that have been wired into our genes and neurons over the millennia tend not to be differences, but things we all share in common--habits of mind that have helped the entire human species survive and adapt. That’s why evolutionary psychologists have tended to dismiss personality traits as irrelevant “noise.”

Until recently. Now a small cadre of psychologists has been revisiting personality, to see how it might fit into an evolutionary understanding of humanity. One of the leaders in this effort is University of Texas psychologist David Buss, who lays out several emerging ideas in the April issue of the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science. Here’s just one:

Each of us has a finite supply of time and energy. Think of a hypothetical young man making his way in the modern world. He might choose to put his energy into prospering—being healthy and well-fed—or he might instead choose the life of a romantic gadabout. Or perhaps he’ll opt for being a devoted parent and provider. But he probably can’t do all these things well. He has to make choices.

So it was with our ancient ancestors. They were similarly called upon to make tradeoffs, spending their time and energy on one life “problem” or another. They probably weren’t as aware of making choices as we are today, but they were nevertheless prioritizing things like romance, parenting, and social climbing.

So the constant challenge that all early humans faced was making the optimal energy tradeoff. The individual choices they made—and continue making today—were shaped by their supply of energy and time, their personal qualities, and their circumstances. Very attractive men, for example, might put a lot of their energy into mating rather than parenting, while people with bleak mating prospects might opt for career or nurturing others’ children.

And those who lack energy, or who perceive the future as short, might discount mating and parenting and career, and squander their limited energy now. Those are the live-for-today types, according to Buss: In that sense, what is often disparaged as a maladjusted personality marked by poor self-control might more generously be viewed as a realistic adaptation to what life throws at you. Carpe diem.

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

I learned it at the movies

2009-08-04T13:38:00.009-04:00

In the 2003 movie The Last Samurai, Tom Cruise plays a former US Army captain named Nathan Algren, an alcoholic and mercenary who in the 1870s goes to Japan to work for the Emperor Meiji. The young Emperor is facing a Samurai rebellion, and Algren trains a ragtag bunch of farmers and peasants in modern warfare, including the use of rifles. When Algren is captured by the Samurai, however, he is gradually converted to their ways, and ends up fighting with the warriors in a losing battle against the Imperial Army he helped create.

The movie was both a critical and popular success, and why not? Lots of exciting swordplay, exotic costumes, and a fascinating piece of history that was probably unfamiliar to most Americans before the film was released. Indeed, it’s fair to say that many Americans have learned much of what they know about the westernization of Japan from watching films like The Last Samurai.

That’s probably not a good thing, because the film is full of historical errors. Most notably, it was the French and Dutch, not Americans, who played the key role in Japan’s modernization in the late 19th century, and the Algren character is loosely based on a French officer named Jules Brunet. What’s more, the movie conflates two decades of military history for the sake of simplicity, and presents a highly romanticized view of the Samurai warriors.

I know, I know. The Last Samurai is not a documentary, and people go to the movies to be entertained, not to be instructed in history. No argument there. But films like The Last Samurai are increasingly used in the classroom as well, as adjuncts to textbooks and lectures. Educators believe that the vividness of film can be a valuable teaching tool, enlivening and reinforcing students’ memories for otherwise dry historical text. But is that a good thing, if the facts are wrong? Are they doing more harm than good?

A team of psychologists has begun exploring these questions experimentally. Andrew Butler of Washington University in St. Louis and his colleagues decided to simulate a classroom where popular films are used as a teaching tool, to see if the practice improved or distorted students’ understanding of history. The Last Samurai was in fact one of the films they used in the experiment, along with Amadeus, Glory, Amistad, and a few others. All of the films contained both accurate and inaccurate information about the historical incidents they depicted.

The students watched the film clips either before or after they read an accurate version of the historical events. So with The Last Samurai, for example, they read a version that accurately identified the hero as French, not American, and was faithful to the actual timeline of Japanese history. In addition, some of the students received a general warning about the inaccuracy of popular historical films, while others got very specific warnings, about changing the hero's nationality, for instance. The idea was to see which teaching method led to the most accurate comprehension of the events: reading or watching a movie or both, with or without the teacher's commentary.

When the psychologists tested all the students a week later, the verdict for classroom movies was one thumb up, one thumb down. Watching the films did clearly help the students learn more—but only when the information was the same in both text and film. Apparently the vividness of the film—and simply having a second version of the same facts—did help the students create stronger memories of the material. But when the information in the film and the reading were contradictory—that is, when the film was inaccurate—the students were more likely to recall the film’s distorted version. What’s more, they were very confident in their memories, even though they were wrong. This happened even when the students were warned that filmmakers often play fast and loose with the facts.

So should films be banned from the classroom? Not necessarily, and here’s why. As the psychologists report on-line in the journal Psychological Science, a good teacher can trump a movie's shortcomings. They found that when teachers gave the very detailed warnings about inaccuracies in the film version, the students got it. But those warnings had to be very precise, something like: Pay attention when you watch the film and you’ll see that the filmmaker has changed the nationality of the hero from French to American, which is not the way it was. With such warnings, the students apparently “tagged” the information as false in the minds—and remembered the accurate version when quizzed later on.

In this sense, the movie’s distorted version of history can be used as a teachable moment.* Students learn the truth by identifying the mistakes and labeling them, so their take-away learning is: the film says this, but in fact it’s that. Not a bad way to learn, assuming the classroom teacher knows enough to point out what’s this and that.

*For an entertaining guide to some historical inaccuracies in popular films, check out this slideshow at the Washington University in St. Louis website: http://news-info.wustl.edu/tips/page/normal/14418.html

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

Seeing the World in Black and White

2009-07-17T16:16:00.004-04:00

When the Chrysler car company released its new model Dodge Coronet in 1967, the theme of its ad campaign was the “White Hat Special.” Some of the ads featured cartoon cowboys riding around “keepin’ the prices low,” while others had the ubiquitous “Dodge Girl” in her signature white Stetson, chirping: “Only the good guys could put together a deal like this.”

These ads didn’t need any elaboration. Madison Avenue knew the potential buyers had all been raised on film and TV Westerns, and knew the symbolism of white hats. Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, the Lone Ranger—cinematic heroes wore white hats, and bad guys wore black. It was all very simple.

Simple, but maybe not all that original. The colors white and black have carried layers of moral meaning since long before American’ infatuation with cowboys and automobiles, and some scientists believe that those associations may be automatic and universal and ancient. Indeed, blackness and whiteness may be wired into our neurons, and tightly tangled up with notions of sin and virtue and cleanliness and dirt.

Two University of Virginia psychologists recently decided to explore this provocative idea in the laboratory. Gary Sherman and Gerald Clore wanted to know if common metaphors may be more than mere rhetorical devices, if in fact they might be deep embodiments of moral thinking. They decided to test the link between white and virtue (and black and sin) as part of this larger question.

To do this, the psychologists adapted a reaction-time test from the 1930s, called the Stroop Test. Readers may know this from the Internet, where it circulates as a kind of parlor game. It’s the one in which the names of colors are printed in different colors—say the word blue in yellow ink—and you must very rapidly indicate the ink color rather than the meaning. It’s hard, because our mind wants to read the word—and slow reaction time is taken as a sign of cognitive disconnect or conflict.

In Sherman and Clore’s version of the Stroop, volunteers read not the names of colors but words with strong moral overtones: greed and honesty, for example. Some of the words were printed in black and some in white, and they flashed rapidly on a screen. As with the original Stroop, a fast reaction time was taken as evidence that a connection was mentally automatic and natural; hesitation was taken as a sign that a connection didn’t ring true. The researchers wanted to see if the volunteers automatically linked immorality with blackness, as in black ink, and virtue with whiteness.

And they did, so quickly that the connections couldn’t possibly be deliberate. Just as we unthinkingly—almost unconsciously—“know” a lemon is yellow, we instantly know that sin and crime are black; grace and virtue, white.

Why would this be? Well, one possibility is that the metaphor is more complex, embodying not just right and wrong but purity and contagion, too. Think of the metaphor “new fallen snow”: It’s not only white, it’s virginal and unadulterated, like a wedding dress. And blackness not only discolors it; it stains it, taints its purity. With this in mind, the psychologists ran another experiment, adding this idea of contagion, feeling morally dirty. They deliberately primed some volunteers’ immoral thoughts by having them read a story about a self-serving, immoral lawyer, and compared them to volunteers primed for ethical thinking.

The idea was that people who were feeling morally dirty would be quicker to make the connection between immorality and blackness on the moral Stroop test, which is exactly what they found. And what’s more, they found this with much looser definitions of morality and immorality—including words like dieting, gossip, duty, partying, helping, and so forth. In other words, those primed for misbehavior linked blackness not only with crime and cheating but with being irresponsible, unreliable, self-centered slackers.

This is pretty convincing in itself, but the researchers wanted to look at the question yet another way. If the association between sin and blackness really does reflect a concern about dirt and impurity, then this association should be stronger for people who are preoccupied with purity and pollution. Such fastidiousness often manifests as personal cleanliness, and a proxy for personal cleansing might be the desire for cleaning products. They tested this string of psychological connections in a final study, again ending with the Stroop test.

The results were unambiguous. As reported on-line in the journal Psychological Science, those who expressed the strongest desire for an array of cleaning products were also those most likely to link morality with white, immorality with black. But here’s the really interesting part: The only products with this power were Dove soap and Crest toothpaste, products for personal cleanliness; things like Lysol and Windex did not activate the sin-blackness connection. In short, concerns about filth and personal hygiene appear central to seeing the moral universe in black and white.

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

The Narrative in the Neurons

2009-07-14T16:53:00.004-04:00

Frank and Joe Hardy clutched the grips of their motorcycles and stared in horror at the oncoming car. It was careening from side to side on the narrow road.
“He’ll hit us! We’d better climb this hillside—and fast!” Frank exclaimed, as the boys brought their motorcycles to a screeching halt and leaped off.
“On the double!” Joe cried out as they started up the steep embankment.

Some readers will recognize the quick-witted motorcyclists here as the Hardy Boys, brothers and heroes of a long-popular series of kids’ mystery books. The amateur teenage sleuths do manage to escape the reckless driver in this scene, but the close call entangles them in a perilous adventure involving stolen jewels, false accusation, deathbed confession, and clever detective work. Good stuff.

These are actually the opening lines of The Tower Treasure, first published in 1927. I read this passage in the 1950s, and kids are apparently still getting sucked into the story even today. What is it about narratives like these that grab our attention? We may quickly move on to more sophisticated tastes in literature, but even a simple story such as this has power to grab our attention, engage our brains. But what’s the brain responding to exactly?

Psychologists are very interested in this question, and have some ideas. One theory is that we all have many “scripts” stored in our neurons. These scripts are derived from past experiences, and words activate these scripts, transforming the printed text into something more like a real-life experience. The opening scene from The Tower Treasure is actually rather spare in its language, yet for the reader it can be a rich encounter. We visualize a narrow road, perhaps one that we have actually known from somewhere. We feel our grip on the motorcycle handlebars, and hear the screech of the tires; we imagine leaping and the difficult pitch of the embankment and the effort of climbing.

At least that’s the idea, which a team of psychologists at Washington University in St. Louis decided to test in the lab. Jeffrey Zacks and his colleagues suspected that several different regions of the brain collaborate in the reading of a tale, each supplying a specialized script based on a particular kind of real-world experience. So, for example, one group of neurons might supply a story’s sense of space and movement (the careening car on a narrow road), while another might contribute the sensation of handling objects (clutching the grips), and still another, the characters’ goals (climbing to safety).

To test this idea, the scientists used a brain scanner to see what regions lit up during the reading of a story. They watched the brains of volunteers as they read four short narrative passages. Each clause in each story was coded for the script it should theoretically trigger: movement in space, sense of time passing, characters’ goals, interaction with physical objects, and so forth. The idea was to see if different parts of the brain lit up as the reader’s imagined situation unfolded.

And they did. The details of the brain anatomy aren’t important here, but clearly there are several different neuron clusters involved in story comprehension. For example, a particular area of the brain ramped up when readers were thinking about intent and goal-directed action, but not meaningless motion. Motor neurons flashed when characters were grasping objects, and neurons involved in eye movement activated when characters were navigating their world.

These findings, reported on-line in the journal Psychological Science, strongly suggest that readers are far from passive consumers of words and stories. Indeed, it appears that we dynamically activate real-world scripts that help us to comprehend a narrative—and those active scripts in turn enrich the story beyond its mere words and sentences. In this way, reading is much like remembering or imagining a vivid event.

It’s possible, the psychologists say, that not just reading but all thinking may be similarly embodied in stored, real-life experiences. In this sense, language may have been an adaptive strategy for efficient and vivid communication of experiences to others. Put another way, storytelling may have evolved as a tool of survival.

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

The Paradox of Loyalty

2009-07-10T11:47:00.003-04:00

A curious thing happened among my friends during the Bush-Cheney years. Some, especially those who opposed the invasion of Iraq, disengaged from American symbols and traditions. They didn’t celebrate the 4th of July; indeed wouldn’t even watch a fireworks display or fly a flag. But others, also no fans of the war or the administration’s torture policies, did the opposite: They became more patriotic, or at least more public in their displays and declarations of loyalty to country.

I count myself in the second group, yet I admit to being perplexed by this phenomenon. Why would disappointment in one’s country inspire increased loyalty? Doesn’t it seem more natural to disavow the country as a protest against its unjust actions, or at least to disengage a bit?

Well, it turns out that loyalty is a complex and paradoxical emotion. Psychologists have been studying the interplay of social injustice, righteous anger and group allegiance, and it appears that loyalists are not simply apologists for anything and everything the group stands for. In fact, ramped-up loyalty may be a predictable step toward taking a firm and principled stand.

New York University psychologists Heather Barry and Tom Tyler have been exploring this phenomenon in the laboratory, focusing on students’ loyalty to their university. In one study, for example, they used an elaborate procedure to measure the strength of students’ group commitment—that is, how important the university was to the individual students’ sense of identity. Once the students were sorted out according to their group allegiances, they were all asked to review the university’s grievance procedures. This was actually a laboratory ruse: In fact, some read procedures that seemed just and fair, while others read a version that clearly disrespected students’ rights, along with fellow students' complaints about unfair treatment.

The psychologists wanted to see how the students would react to unfavorable revelations about their university. Would seeing their group in a bad light change their sense of loyalty? Would they remain team players, with a shared sense of common purpose? They measured this in two ways. First, they asked them a series of questions about their willingness to serve their schools and fellow students in selfless ways: Would they tutor another student if asked? Would they help a professor with some photocopying? That kind of thing. The researchers wanted to get a general measure of how cooperative and service-oriented the students were feeling. In addition, one of the experimenters deliberately dropped her pen during the experiment, to see which of the students were spontaneously helpful.

The findings were provocative. As reported on-line in the journal Psychological Science, the students who were the most devoted to their school to begin with were also the most cooperative and helpful when forced to confront the school’s failings. That is, those truest to their group redoubled their sense of service and commitment when faced with injustice. They didn’t criticize, nor did they distance themselves from the others in the group.

These results were immediate and short-term. The psychologists emphasize this, and find the results encouraging. It means that the group members’ loyalty is not so fragile that they jump ship with just a little disillusionment; they stay to help strengthen the group and correct its course. But this pumped-up loyalty is unlikely to last for long: If confronted with continued evidence of unfairness and injustice, many will stop compensating for the group’s shortcomings—and leave. What’s unclear is how long this will take—or how unjust a group must be before it squanders its members’ loyalty.

For more insights into the quirks of 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 Newsweek.com.

Bending Time's Arrow

2009-07-07T14:58:00.005-04:00

Among my parenting memorabilia is an illustrated timeline my son made back in the second grade. It starts with his 1986 birthday on the left and proceeds through various milestones of his first years—first day of kindergarten, T-ball, and so forth—ending on the far right with another celebration at the ripe old age of seven. I treasure this.

But how did he know that life unfolds from left to right, and not the other way around? Sure, his teacher instructed him and his classmates to draw the timeline this way, but why? Why do we accept without question that left equals early while right equals late, far off in time? More fundamentally, why do we entwine time and space?

Psychologists suspect that this space-time continuum may be more than a social convention, an artifice that we all simply agree to. Perhaps the brain has wired our perceptions of space and time together for some reason. A team of researchers has been exploring this question in the laboratory, using an unusual pair of spectacles.

Psychologist Francesca Frassinetti of the University of Bologna and her colleagues wanted to see if deliberately distorting space perception would also distort perception of the passage of time. They had a group of volunteers look at an image on a computer screen for different intervals of time—say two seconds. Then a different image appeared on the screen, and the volunteers tried to keep it on the screen for exactly the same amount of time, using a controller. In other words, they tried to duplicate the interval of time they had just perceived.

Most of the volunteers were pretty good at this, but that wasn’t the point. After the initial test, all of the volunteers put on special glasses, called prismatic lenses. These glasses shifted the volunteers’ perception of the image horizontally, either to the left or to the right; that is, they would look at the image just as before, but it would appear to the left or the right. They were basically forced to shift their spatial attention. Then they all did the same time estimation task as before.

The results were clear, and a bit spooky. As reported in the June issue of the journal Psychological Science, when the glasses shifted the volunteers’ attention to the right, they overestimated time. Not to put too fine a point on it, time hurried by; it expanded in their minds. Similarly, shifting the brain’s focus to the left compressed time; time intervals seemed shorter than they were in fact.

This doesn’t explain why time’s arrow moves from left to right, but it does show that time's on a horizontal line in the mind's eye. And it does help explain something else about my son’s timeline. A lot of time and experience is compressed into a very small space early on in his young life, with each year taking up more space as he gets older. It makes intuitive sense that we would experience time as expanding into the future, where the exact dimensions of our experience are as yet unknown.

For more insights into the quirks of 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 Newsweek.com.

"I am a lovable person." "Not."

2009-07-02T14:17:00.004-04:00

A milestone in the self-help movement was the publication of Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking in the early 1950s, which encouraged Americans to both think and talk positively about their lives and themselves. By the mid-1980s, that therapeutic philosophy had become so pervasive in American society that the Saturday Night Live comedian Al Franken wickedly parodied self-glorification through his alter-ego Stuart Smalley, who wrote the quintessential self-help volume: I’m Good Enough, I’m Smart Enough, and Doggone It, People Like Me!

A lot has changed since the 80s. Comedy writer Franken is now the junior Senator from Minnesota, and will soon be writing laws instead of SNL skits. But one thing has not changed appreciably: Americans are still being urged—through self-help books, TV therapists and the like—to think positively and make daily affirmations of their self-worth.

But do they work? Is self-affirmation a sound scientific idea, or just more of our therapeutic culture’s gobbledygook? Interestingly, despite its broad popularity, the effectiveness of positive self-talk has never been rigorously tested. Until now. Psychologist Joanne Wood of the University of Waterloo and her colleagues recently decided to explore the idea in the laboratory. They report their surprising findings in the July issue of the journal Psychological Science.

There’s scientific reason to be skeptical about the value of self-affirmation. Psychologists know, for example, that people have a great deal of difficulty balancing two contradictory ideas. We may try to tell ourselves we’re something we’d like to be, but most of us are deeply resistant to ideas that violate our true sense of identity. Based on this theory, Wood reasoned that forced affirmations might merely remind some people of how they are not measuring up—and indeed might boomerang and make them feel worse. Here’s the experiment:

Wood gave a group of volunteers a standard test for self-esteem, and selected those who scored highest and lowest. Then they all participated in a writing exercise, but half got this instruction: Every time you hear a bell sound, repeat to yourself: “I am a lovable person.” The bell sounded about every 15 seconds during the exercise, and afterward she measured their mood and self-esteem. She also had the volunteers think about the words “I am a lovable person”; but some thought only about why the statement might be true, while others thought about why the statement might be either true or false.

The results were unambiguous and ironic. Those who already felt good about themselves got a slight boost from self-loving talk, but those who had low self-esteem to begin with got worse—more depressed and more self-critical. But interestingly, the volunteers who tried to focus on only positive thoughts about themselves did worse than those who were encouraged to think both good and bad things about themselves. Those preoccupied with self-affirmation were probably unsuccessful at suppressing all negative thinking, giving the negativity more power—power enough to trump the self-loving words.

For more insights into the quirks of 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 Newsweek.com.

In the Eye of the Storm

2009-06-19T10:09:00.005-04:00

In the Eye of the Storm from Assn. for Psych Science on Vimeo.

Hurricane Katrina was the largest natural disaster in U.S. history, killing more than 1,800 and causing well over $100 billion in damage along the Gulf coast from Florida to Texas. The 2005 storm breached every levee in New Orleans, flooding almost the entire city as well as the neighboring parishes. Yet many residents chose to stay at home and ride out the perilous winds and water.

This perplexed many commentators at the time, including the top officials of the Bush administration. FEMA director Michael “Brownie” Brown blamed the rising death toll on those who refused to take prudent action, as did homeland security chief Michael Chertoff, who told CNN: “Officials called for a mandatory evacuation. Some people chose not to obey that order. That was a mistake on their part.” Many others chimed in, asking in so many words: What were they thinking?

What were they thinking? The general consensus seemed to be that they were irresponsible, indecisive—perhaps even lazy or stupid. Anyone with an ounce of sense would take action in the face of such a threat, make a plan, solve the problem. Passivity was widely denounced as a character flaw.

The problem with these instant analyses is that nobody bothered to ask the people themselves, the ones paddling the boats and clinging to the rooftops. Until now. Stanford University psychologist Nicole Stephens and her colleagues decided to compare the views of outside observers with the perspective of the New Orleans residents who actually rode out Katrina. They suspected that these people had not simply thrown up their hands, but rather that they had a different concept of conscientious action.

To find out, they conducted two surveys, one of observers and one of survivors, to see how they perceived both those who fled and those who did not. The study of observers—including a large group of relief workers, firefighters, physicians, and so forth—basically confirmed the pop wisdom. That is, these close-up observers’ views matched those who watched the tragedy from afar: They perceived those who evacuated their homes in a much more positive light in general—more self-reliant, hardworking. Those who stayed put were described as careless and dependent. Those who stayed were also seen as depressed and hopeless, where the evacuees were characterized as self-righteously angry, primed for action. But here’s perhaps the most interesting point: These observers derogated those who stayed even though they were well aware that these residents lacked the resources to leave—money, transportation, out-of-town relatives. Their disadvantages didn’t soften the view that they were somehow responsible for their own suffering.

The survivors themselves told a very different story, however. When the psychologists surveyed actual Katrina survivors, they found that those who stayed behind did not feel powerless or passive. To the contrary, they saw themselves as connected with their neighbors—communitarian rather than self-reliant. Their stories emphasized their faith in God and their
feelings of caring for others. In short, they didn’t see themselves as failing to take action, but rather as taking a different kind of action—adapting to life’s travails and staying strong despite hardship.

The psychologists also took detailed measures of all the survivors’ well-being—their mood, life satisfaction, mental health, drug and alcohol use. As they report in the July issue of the journal Psychological Science, there was absolutely no difference between those who stayed in New Orleans and those who high-tailed it out. It seems their different “choices” did not reflect differences in well-being. Rather, they were different kinds of actions suitable to different life circumstances.

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

A Confidence Gene?

2009-06-05T14:34:00.003-04:00

Smart kids tend on balance to do well in school. That may seem obvious, but there are a lot of exceptions to that rule. Some kids with high IQs don’t ever become academic superstars, while less gifted kids often shine. Why would this be?

Psychologists have focused on things like self-esteem and confidence—how good kids think they are—to explain these outcomes. And the assumption has always been that such psychological traits are shaped mostly by parenting—by parents’ beliefs and expectations and modeling. But surprisingly this idea had never been scientifically tested.

Until now. Behavioral geneticist Corina Greven of King’s College London and her colleagues decided to do the first rigorous analysis of the heritability of confidence—and its relationship to IQ and performance. To do so, they studied more than 3700 pairs of twins, both identical and fraternal twins, from age seven to ten. Comparing genetically identical twins to non-identical siblings allows scientists to sort out the relative contributions of genes and environment, and when they did this they came up with surprising but unmistakable findings.

Contrary of accepted wisdom, the researchers found (and report in the June issue of Psychological Science) that kids’ confidence is heavily influenced by heredity—at least as much as IQ is. Indeed, as-yet-unidentified confidence genes appear to influence school performance independent of IQ genes, with shared environment having only a negligible influence.

The fact that confidence is heritable does not mean it is unchanging, of course. Siblings share a lot of influences living in basically the same home and community, but there are always worldly influences pulling them apart. A genetic legacy of self-confidence merely opens up many possible futures.

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

The Power of Backward Thinking

2009-05-18T15:39:00.002-04:00

Our bodies shape our emotions and thoughts and language. Just consider a few common phrases: He was a forward thinker. She is way ahead of her time. We are an advanced civilization. Like locomotion, our minds seem naturally to value what lies in front of us.

Psychologists think this powerful bias may have deep evolutionary roots. Forward motion is what our ancient ancestors did when they felt safe, unthreatened. When they confronted something aversive or perilous, they would retreat. Over eons our evolving brain added layer upon layer of emotion to these deep-wired impulses to approach and avoid.

A team of Dutch psychologists took this basic idea and ran with it. If avoidance and retreat have to do with danger, they wondered, is it possible that backward motion might actually recruit more brain power than forward motion? If threats are problems to be solved, shouldn’t actual and emotional retreat require greater concentration and attention? They decided to explore this possibility in the lab.

Psychologist Severine Koch and her colleagues at Radboud University Nijmegen ran this simple experiment. They had volunteers walk just a few steps, either forward, backward, to the left or to the right. Then they immediately took the Stroop test. This is the test with the names of colors printed in different color inks; the word blue, for example, might be printed in blue—or it might be printed in red or yellow. The volunteers try very quickly to name the color of the ink rather than read the word. It’s cognitively very difficult to quash the impulse to read, so fast and accurate responses are taken as an indicator of focus and concentration.

The results, reported in the May issue of the journal Psychological Science, were intriguing. Those who had walked just a few steps backward were far more focused and attentive than were any of the others. That is, their physical retreat triggered increased mental control—presumably because of the ancient link between threat and vigilance. Confronted with a problem or difficulty, it made be advisable to take a step back and think about the situation—literally.

For more insights into the quirks of 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 www.sciam.com.

Cuteness With a Purpose

2009-05-12T11:50:00.002-04:00

Fans of the old TV sitcom Seinfeld will recall the episode in which Jerry and Elaine visit their friend Carol and her newborn baby Adam in the Hamptons. The proud Mom wants to show Adam off, but when she ushers Jerry and Elaine into the nursery, they are dumbstruck with horror at the baby’s looks. They manage to hide their feelings and say a few polite words, but when they’re out of earshot they can’t hold back:

Jerry: “Is it me or was that the ugliest baby you have ever seen?
Elaine: “Uh, I couldn’t look. It was like a Pekinese.”
Jerry: “Boy, a little too much chlorine in that gene pool. And you know, the thing is, they’re never going to know. No one’s ever going to tell them.”

Jerry’s right. Nobody is going to tell them—or any parent for that matter—that their baby isn’t cute. That would be cruel, and parental love trumps any objective, universal standard of cuteness anyway. But cruel or not, the fact is that some babies are cuter than others. Unless it’s your own kid, most people agree that features like big eyes, a large forehead and pinchable cheeks add up to cute.

But what is cuteness for? Psychologists have speculated that cuteness might trigger emotional bonding and nurturance in parents, and there is some evidence that women have keener perceptions than men when it comes to subtle variations of cuteness. But no clear biological link has been found between cuteness and womanhood and mothering—until now.

Psychologist Reiner Sprengelmeyer of the University of St. Andrews and an international team of colleagues decided to explore the possibility that female hormones might be linked to perception of facial cuteness. They used photographs of babies that had been manipulated by computer to very subtly alter the level of cuteness, and tested the perceptions of both women and men of various ages.

Their findings were intriguing. Young women, from 19 to 26 years old, were much more sensitive to nuances of cuteness than were either young or older men. That’s interesting in itself, but it gets better: Women who were between ages 45 and 51 were just like the younger women in their sensitivity, but women 53 to 60 were just like the men. The dividing line is right around the typical time of menopause, suggesting that female reproductive hormones may play a role on cuteness perception.

The psychologists ran a second test to double-check these findings, this time comparing pre- and post-menopausal women of the same age. They also tested young women who were (or were not) taking oral contraceptives, which artificially boost female hormones. The findings confirmed the link: As reported in the journal Psychological Science, older pre-menopausal women and younger women on the pill were much more sensitive to subtle variations in babies’ cuteness.

These studies do not show how hormones shape women’s judgments of cuteness. But since all the volunteers could see equally well, it’s likely that cuteness also elicits heartwarming emotions, and that the emotional response is entangled with actual perception of cuteness. Whatever the exact mechanism, it appears that cute babies are well designed by nature to make the rewards of motherhood outweigh all the hard work.

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/.

Don't Know Much Of Biology

2009-04-23T14:27:00.006-04:00

Just think about what it takes to learn biology. Not textbook biology, the kind you learn in high school with microscopes and dissecting kits. Rather, the kind you learn on your own, as a young child encountering the vast and diverse world of living things. How does the human mind link together things as varied as hippos and lichen and mosquitoes and rhododendrons? And how do we sort this diversity into meaningful categories? In short, how do we think about life?

Psychologists are very interested in how the mature mind sorts the living world, and where we put ourselves in relation to other life forms. That’s the stuff of philosophy and religion and morality. But it’s not as obvious as one would think. Take motion, for example. Many living things move, but so do rivers and clouds and rocket ships. And some living things, like coral, don’t appear to move at all. So it’s not just the fact of motion that defines life, but the why and how. Young children find this confusing and make a lot of mistakes about what’s animated and what’s not. Only over time do we outgrow our primitive, childish ideas and replace them with a sophisticated view of the natural world.

Or do we? Do we really discard all our naive thinking as we experience the world and learn about its complexity? University of Pennsylvania psychologists Robert Goldberg and Sharon Thompson-Schill have been exploring these questions in the laboratory, with intriguing results. Here’s one of their experiments:

The psychologists showed a group of college students a long list of words, one at a time and very rapidly. Some were the names of plants, others animals, and still others non-living things. The non-living things were further divided into non-moving objects like brooms; non-moving natural things, like boulders; moving artifacts like trucks; and finally, natural moving things, like rivers. The idea was to see how quickly and accurately the volunteers used movement and “naturalness” to classify these various things as living or non-living.

The scientists were particularly interested in how we think about plants, where we put them in the grand scheme of things. Plants are an interesting anomaly because—at least to young children—they don’t “do” anything; instead, we do things to them, like climb them and water them and prune them. If they move at all, their movement is very subtle. Not surprisingly, kids often misclassify plants as non-living.

But how about college students? Well, it appears that they too make mistakes, even with all that formal education: The volunteers in the study were much more hesitant in classifying plants, suggesting that they had to slow down to deliberately overrule their naïve taxonomy; and they also made more outright errors. They were also slower to size up moving things in general, and non-living natural things—suggesting that movement and naturalness were the features that stymied them.

To be fair, these weren’t biology majors. And we all know that kids can slip into college without much in the way of rigorous scientific training. But here’s the really interesting part. The psychologists ran basically the same experiment with biology professors, people who make their living teaching university students about the natural world. Indeed, the volunteers in this second study had been teaching college-level biology for a quarter century, on average, and at highly prestigious schools.

And guess what. As reported in the April issue of the journal Psychological Science, the profs did better than the undergraduates, but not as brilliantly as one might from the scientific elite. Even these experts were significantly worse at classifying plants than they were at categorizing animals. That is, even a lifetime of advanced scientific training didn’t trump the naïve impulse to view plants as artifacts.

Children may be natural-born taxonomists, but they’re not all that good at it. That’s because they have a deep-wired urge to see the world as designed and simple, and to be at the center of it all. Apparently that impulse never goes away entirely.

For more insights into the quirks of 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 www.sciam.com.

Nursing's Hidden Blessings

2009-04-17T10:56:00.002-04:00

One in five Americans is currently taking care of another adult, voluntarily tending to an ill or frail loved one. And as the Baby-Boomer generation ages, that obligation is likely to increase. The burden takes a serious toll on caregivers, leading to poorer health and even an increased risk of death.

But what is it that actually takes the toll? Is it the physical wear-and-tear of feeding and bathing a needy relative? Is it simply that caregivers have too much work and too little time and energy? Or is it the emotional costs of watching a loved one deteriorate, or the anticipation of loss? Or all of this rolled together?

Interestingly, these possibilities have never really been sorted out—until now. A team of public health researchers, headed by Stephanie Brown at the University of Michigan, decided to explore these questions by examining the histories of more than 3000 elderly married people over several years. The couples were all living together in their own homes, but the level of neediness varied, as did the commitment of caring time. The researchers tracked the health and the survival rate of the caregivers, all 70 or older.

The results were interesting and a bit surprising. As reported in the April issue of the journal Psychological Science, those who were providing the most care for their spouses—14 or more hours a week—actually had a lower mortality rate than did those who had no care obligation. This was true regardless of the spouse’s neediness, including cognitive decline. This suggests that the health problems of caregivers may not result from the actual burden of caring. Indeed, caring may have a tonic effect under certain circumstances, which may offset the emotional toll of witnessing a spouse’s deterioration and worrying about life alone.

Why would that be? It’s not entirely clear, but it may be that the very act of giving acts as a buffer, moderating the untoward physical consequences of chronic stress, including immune dysfunction. It’s also possible that the hormones associated with helping—oxytocin, for example—actually help the body’s cells repair and store nutrients. Whatever the mechanism, it appears that nurturance is a blessing at the microscopic level.

For more insights into human nature, visit the “We’re Only Human” blog at www.psychologicalscience.org/onlyhuman. For more on healthy aging, see Wray Herbert’s recent “Mind Matters” column at Newsweek.com.

A Moral Thermostat?

2009-04-09T11:46:00.004-04:00

Much of the immorality in the news these days has to do with greed: Wealthy financiers running Ponzi schemes, presidential aides cheating on their taxes, industrialists spoiling the environment. There appears to be a widespread erosion of any sense of social responsibility.

What’s going on with these people? Are they simply bad people? Are our educational and religious institutions failing? Are the rewards of being a good and honest man simply not enough to curb our darker impulses? Or are we all both sinners and saints, depending on the circumstances?

Psychologists have been looking into these questions, specifically the idea that we all toggle back and forth constantly between righteousness and immorality. Is it possible that we have a set point for morality, much like we do for body weight? Three Northwestern University psychologists recently explored this question in the laboratory, with some intriguing results.

Sonya Sachdeva, Rumen Iliev and Douglas Medin had the idea that our sense of moral self-worth might serve as a kind of thermostat, tilting us toward moral stricture at one time and moral license at another, but keeping us on a steady track. They tested this by priming volunteers’ feelings of moral superiority—or their sense of guilt—and watching what happened.

In one experiment, for example, they had the volunteers write brief stories about themselves. Some were required to use words like generous, fair and kind, while others wrote their stories using words such as greedy, mean and selfish. This was the unconscious prime, well known to activate feeling of either righteousness or regret. Afterward, all the volunteers were given a chance to donate money to a favorite charity; as much as $10 or as little as zero. The volunteers didn’t know their charity was being measured as part of the experiment, and the results were unambiguous. Those who were primed to think of their moral transgressions gave on average $5.30, more than twice that of controls; those who were primed to feel self-righteous gave a piddling $1.07.

These results suggest that when people feel immoral, they “cleanse” their self image by acting unselfishly. But when they have reason to feel a little superior, that positive self image triggers a sense of moral license. That is, the righteous feel they have some latitude to stray a bit in order to compensate. It’s like working in a soup kitchen gives you the right to cheat on your taxes later in the week.

The psychologists wanted to double check these findings, and they did so in the context of the environment. That is, do the same feelings of moral superiority and moral transgression shape the trade-offs we make between self-interest and the health of the planet? They used the same primes, and then had all the volunteers pretend they were managing a manufacturing plant. As managers, they had to choose how much they would pay to operate filters that would control smokestack pollution. They could simply obey the industry standard, or they could do more or less; that is, choose social responsibility or choose to cheat the common good.

The results, reported in the April issue of the journal Psychological Science, were clear. Those who were feeling morally debased were much more communitarian, spending more money for the sake of clean skies. The morally righteous were stingy, and what’s more, they took the view that plant managers should put profits ahead of green concerns. They saw it as a business decision, not an ethical choice.

So it appears that our inner moralist deals in a kind of moral “currency.” We collect chits through our good deeds, and debts through our transgressions, and we spend our chits to pay off our moral debts. That way, we keep the moral ledger balanced.

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 sciam.com.

"Hey, You're Wearing Me Out!"

2009-03-31T11:18:00.007-04:00

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

2009-03-19T16:05:00.005-04:00

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

2009-03-18T15:37:00.003-04:00

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"

2009-03-12T15:23:00.003-04:00

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

2009-03-10T15:24:00.009-04:00

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/.

Stigma, His and Hers

2009-02-25T12:09:00.007-05:00

The mentally ill don’t get a fair shake in this country. Many employers don’t want to hire them, and health insurers don’t want to treat their illnesses. Even within their own communities and families, the mentally ill are often treated with contempt and disgust and outright anger.

All this has been known for a long time. There have been many efforts to combat the stigma of mental illness, but they inevitably fail. That’s in part because the stereotypes are so powerful, and so easy to conjure up, even if we don’t believe them: Mental patients are either violently dangerous or docile and incompetent. We fear the first and disdain the latter.

These are not equal opportunity stereotypes, however. The image of dangerous mental illness, including violent alcoholism, is much more often directed at men; we can always come up with exceptions, from the movies and real life, but they are exceptions. Similarly, women are much more likely to be caricatured as pathologically dependent and depressed.

Is it possible that these gender biases contribute to the harmful stigma of mental illness? Psychologists James Wirth of Purdue and Galen Bodenhausen of Northwestern thought that they might. Specifically, they suspected that when the mentally ill act “out of character,” violating the stereotype, they might arouse more of our sympathy and leniency; if it’s more uncommon, it's probably more authentic. By contrast, we might be more apt to blame and stigmatize the mentally ill when they conform to stereotype. In other words, we don’t like the broad caricatures and resent people when they act in caricatured ways.

The psychologists decided to explore this provocative idea with a national survey. They had a group of volunteers, mostly in their 40s, read a case history of a person with mental illness. Some read about Brian, who was a stereotypical alcoholic, while others read about Karen, who showed all the classical symptoms of major depression. Still others read switched-around versions of these cases, so that Karen was the one abusing alcohol and Brian was depressed. The idea was to see if the typicality of Brian and Karen’s symptoms (or lack of it) shaped the volunteers’ reactions and judgments.

And it did, without question. As reported in the February issue of the journal Psychological Science, the volunteers expressed more anger and disgust—and less sympathy—toward Brian the alcoholic than toward Karen the alcoholic, and vice versa for depression. They were also more willing to help Brian and Karen when they suffered from an atypical disorder. Most striking of all, the volunteers were much more likely to view the Brain’s depression (and Karen’s alcoholism) as genuine biological disorders—rather than character defects or matters of personal irresponsibility. What this suggests is that stigma-busting campaigns might profit by putting a different face on these mental disorders—and perhaps others as well.

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 http://www.sciam.com/.

The Perils of Ageism

2009-02-19T14:53:00.004-05:00

When the AARP put Caroline Kennedy on its magazine’s cover last year, the retirees’ group was sending a message about aging in America: Growing old is not about decline and neediness and decrepitude. It’s about vibrancy and independence and creativity. The darling of Camelot joined the likes of Jamie Lee Curtis, Richard Gere and Katie Couric in combating the stigma of age.

Not everyone buys into this sanguine view of aging, however. Indeed, ageism is still rampant in America, and many old people themselves trade in unflattering stereotypes of the elderly, including helplessness and incompetence. Such caricatures are not only false and cruel, they are also unhealthy. Research has shown time and again that old people who believe in negative age stereotypes tend to fulfill them.

And it may not just be the elderly who are harmed by ageism. New evidence suggests that young, healthy people who stereotype old people may themselves be at risk of heart disease many years down the road. Becca Levy of the Yale School of Public Health examined data on hundreds of men and women who have been studied for almost four decades as part of the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging. Back in 1968, when scientists first began studying these volunteers, they ranged in age from 18 to 49 and were all in very good health. At that time, scientists gathered all sorts of information about the volunteers, including their attitudes toward the elderly. Their images of being old covered the gamut from very positive to very negative.

Levy and her colleagues examined the health histories of all the volunteers, focusing on cardiovascular disease: heart attacks, congestive heart failure, stroke, and so forth. There was a striking link between ageism early in life and poor heart health later on. That is, those who viewed old age as a time of helplessness were much more likely to experience some kind of cardiovascular disorder over the next four decades. The scientists also looked at a subset of volunteers who didn’t have any heart problems until after they were 60—at least 21 years later—and found that these people had been very negative about aging from early on. The episodes of heart disease could not be explained by smoking, depression, cholesterol, family history, or any of a myriad other possible risk factors.

What this suggests, Levy writes in the March issue of the journal Psychological Science, is that people are internalizing stereotypes of old age when they are still quite young—with far reaching consequences. This is the first scientific look at people maturing into the very people they have been unkindly caricaturing. It could be taken as a cautionary tale for those who think they’ll never grow old.

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 http://www.sciam.com/.

Coming of Age on the Internet

2009-02-17T13:15:00.002-05:00

Like many people of my generation, I was a latecomer to the Internet. In fact, I learned about cyberspace mostly from my kids, who embraced this emerging technology from earliest childhood. As a parent, I paid close attention to the sordid tales of Internet sleaziness, and I was also mindful of the more subtle psychological perils: the risk of social isolation and aberrant teenage obsession. The Internet seemed like a dark place.

This was in the mid-90s, and I was far from alone in my worries. Indeed, scientific studies from that time were documenting some real risks for teenagers, including fewer close friendships and more tenuous connections with family. It appeared that teens were sacrificing real relationships for superficial cyber-relationships with total strangers.

Is this still true? Has the Internet fulfilled the fearful vision of the early days? Social scientists are revisiting those early concerns, and some are coming to believe that the psychological benefits may now outweigh the detrimental effects. Psychologists Patti Valkenburg and Jochen Peter of the University of Amsterdam are among the newly optimistic. They took a look at a decade of research on these questions, and they believe two important historical changes have altered the psychological landscape.

First, the sheer number of teenagers now using the Internet has transformed the technology into a true social networking tool. Even in the late 90s, only about one in ten adolescents were online, which meant that kids actually had to choose between online relationships and real relationships. There was very little overlap, so it was very difficult to maintain flesh-and-blood relations while exploring cyberspace. Today, Valkenburg and Peter say, the vast majority of teenagers in Western countries have access to the Internet, and most appear to use the technology to nurture their existing relationships rather than to forge new ones.

Second, the newer communication tools also encourage building on existing relationships rather than isolating. In the 90s, the few teens who did spend time on the Internet tended to hang out with strangers in public chat rooms and so-called MUDS, multi-user dungeons. The appearance of instant messaging and social networks like Facebook has changed all that, according to the psychologists. Today, more than eight in ten teenagers use IM to connect with the same friends they see at school and work.

Recent studies document the positive effects of these technological changes. But what exactly is going on in the minds of the teenagers to produce this greater sense of well-being? Valkenburg and Peter have an idea about this. They believe that the 21st century Internet encourages honest talking about very personal issues—feelings, worries, vulnerabilities—that are difficult for many self-conscious teens to talk about. When they communicate through the Internet, they have fewer sounds and sights and social cues to distract them, so they become less concerned with how others perceive them. This in turn reduces inhibition, leading to unusually intimate talk. This emotionally liberating frankness is healthy and tonic.

The psychologists have shown these positive effects in their studies, which they describe in the February issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science. They’ve also shown that “hyperpersonal” Internet talk leads to higher quality friendships, and that these quality friendships buffer teenagers against stress and lead to greater happiness. By contrast, solitary “surfing” of the Internet has no positive effects on connectedness or well-being, and hanging around public chat rooms—though much rarer—still appears psychologically risky.

Facebook, the social networking tool invented for college kids five years ago, is now being taken over by those kids’ parents. That means it’s just a matter of time before the younger generation abandons this technology and move on to the next best thing. We’ll see what that is. Perhaps the connectedness and openness are now permanent features of a technology that has come of age.

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 http://www.sciam.com/.

Try A Little Powerlessness

2009-02-06T12:18:00.001-05:00

Self-control is one of our most cherished values. We applaud those with the discipline to regulate their appetites and actions, and we try hard to instill this virtue in our children. Think of the slogans: Just say no. Just do it. We celebrate the power of the mind to make hard choices and keep us on course.

But what if we can’t just do it? What if “it” is too difficult or our strategy for success is misguided? Is it possible that willpower might actually be an obstacle rather than a means to happiness and harmony? Can we have too much of a good thing?

Two Tufts University psychologists believe there may be some truth to this. Evan Apfelbaum and Samuel Sommers were intrigued by the notion that too much self-control may indeed have a downside—and that relinquishing some power might be paradoxically tonic, both for individuals and for society. They decided to test this idea in the laboratory.

They explored the virtue of powerlessness in the arena of race relations. They figured that well-intentioned people are careful—sometimes hyper-careful—not to say the wrong thing about race in a mixed-race group. Furthermore, they thought that such effortful self-control might actually cause both unease and dishonesty, which could in turn be misconstrued as racial prejudice.

To test this, they deliberately sapped the mental powers of a number of volunteers. This is not as diabolical as it sounds. They ran the volunteers through a series of computer-based mental exercises that are so challenging that they temporarily deplete the cognitive reserves needed for discipline. Once they had the volunteers in this compromised state of mind, they put them (and others not so depleted) into a social situation with the potential for racial tension. Here it is:

Each white volunteer is left alone in a room. A black man enters and asks if the volunteer will consent to a brief interview on the issue of how universities should guarantee racial diversity. This is ostensibly unrelated to the self-control experiment, but in fact that’s a ruse. The interviewer asks the volunteer to share any thoughts he might have on this “hot topic,” and the conversation is recorded.

It’s that simple, though sometimes the interviewer was white. Afterward, the volunteers rated the interaction for comfort, awkwardness, and enjoyment. In addition, independent judges—both black and white—analyzed the five-minute interactions, commenting on how cautious the volunteers were, how direct in their answers—and how racially prejudiced.

The results were provocative. As reported in the February issue of the journal Psychological Science, those who were mentally depleted—that is, those lacking discipline and self-control—found talking about race with a black man much more enjoyable than did those with their self-control intact. That’s presumably because they weren’t working so hard at monitoring and curbing what they said. What’s more, independent black observers found that the powerless volunteers were much more direct and authentic in conversation. And perhaps most striking, blacks saw the less inhibited whites as less prejudiced against blacks. In other words, relinquishing power over oneself appears to thwart over-thinking and “liberate” people for more authentic relationships.

Race relations is just one arena of life where a little powerlessness may go a long way. Self-reliance is so deeply ingrained in us that it pervades our work lives, our relationships and our health choices, so it’s a real challenge to accept that it might sometimes be a character flaw. But remember that the volunteers here were not only perceived as fairer, they themselves felt happier. One wonders where else we might be acting too smart for our own good?

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