Category: Psychology

Five things we didn’t know last week from the world of psychology:

Meeting online = (slightly) longer marriages

Did you know that one-third of people who get married in the US originally met online? And it seems these marriages are slightly less likely to fail. In this sample of almost 20,000 people in the US:

“…marriages that began on-line, when compared with those that began through traditional off-line venues, were slightly less likely to result in a marital break-up (separation or divorce) and were associated with slightly higher marital satisfaction among those respondents who remained married.”

See: the internet isn’t all bad…

Internet banging

…although, since all human life is online, a lot of stuff is quite bad. Just like everyone else, gang members now do a lot of their ‘business’ online. As a new paper entitled “Internet Banging: New trends in social media, gang violence, masculinity and hip hop” puts it: gang members now carry guns and Twitter accounts.

“Gang members now occupy two spaces: the “streets” and the internet. Data from the National Gang Threat Assessment suggest that gang members uses social medial to conduct drug sales, market their activities, communicate with other members, coordinate gang actions, recruit new members and to brag about acts of violence or make threats.”

Suicides peak in spring

Very counter-intuitive this one because spring is the season of new life and new hope. Except it turns out that suicides peak in spring.

Although it’s an established finding from around the world, going back centuries in some cases, we still don’t really know why. Here are a couple of candidate explanations:

“One traditional candidate [..] is the “broken promise effect” — the sometimes crushing disappointment that spring fails to bring the relief the sufferer has hoped for. In addition, psychiatrists have long observed that for patients with bipolar disorder and depression, spring can create a manic agitation that amplifies the risk of suicide.”

If you need emotional support, try Befrienders Wordwide.

The power of cutlery

There’s too much emphasis on food nowadays and not enough on cutlery. Something as simple as cutlery has quite noticeable effects on taste perceptions:

“…when the weight of the cutlery confirms expectations (e.g. a plastic spoon is light), yoghurt seemed denser and more expensive. Color contrast is also an important factor: white yoghurt when eaten from a white spoon was rated sweeter, more liked, and more expensive than pink-colored yoghurt. Similarly, when offered cheese on a knife, spoon, fork or toothpick, the cheese from a knife tasted saltiest.”

Throw away all those stupid cook-books and instead try experimenting with different coloured plates.

When uncertain we choose narcissistic leaders

As I’ve covered here before, narcissists seem to have a strange attraction for us. For a while at least we find ourselves drawn to their charm, their self-obsession and their entitled behaviour. Just the same effect is seen when people are looking for a leader, especially during times of uncertainty:

“…individuals were shown to be aware of the negative features of narcissistic leaders, such as arrogance and exploitativeness, but chose them as leaders in times of uncertainty, regardless. Thus, a narcissistic leader is perceived as someone who can help reduce individual uncertainty.”

Image credit: dierk schaefer

Here’s a common experience for motorists: you are driving somewhere new and you’re late.

As you drive down unfamiliar roads it seems that everything is conspiring against you: other cars, the road-layout, the traffic lights and even suicidal cyclists. You know it’s only a few more miles, but it seems to be taking for-e-e-e-e-e-ever.

Psychologically there are all sorts of things going on to make the journey seem longer than it really is, but let’s just isolate one of those: the unfamiliarity of the route.

Unknown routes peak our curiosity; they are filled with new names, landscapes and landmarks, all of which attract the interest. The fact that our attention is engaged with all this newness has a subtle effect on how much time we think has passed.

To see why, let’s take the opposite perspective for a moment.

Think about driving a route that’s very familiar. It could be your commute to work, a trip into town or the way home. Whichever it is, you know every twist and turn like the back of your hand. On these sorts of trips it’s easy to zone out from the actual driving and pay little attention to the passing scenery. The consequence is that you perceive that the trip has taken less time than it actually has.

This is the well-travelled road effect: people tend to underestimate the time it takes to travel a familiar route. The corollary is that unfamiliar routes seem to take longer.

The effect is caused by the way we allocate our attention. When we travel down a well-known route, because we don’t have to concentrate much, time seems to flow more quickly. And afterwards, when we come to think back on it, we can’t remember the journey well because we didn’t pay much attention to it. So we assume it was proportionately shorter.

The well-travelled road effect has an odd consequence. When you estimate how long it takes to travel a familiar route, typically you’ll underestimate it. Because of its familiarity the travelling time feels shorter than it really is. This means that when you travel a familiar route, unless you adjust for this effect, you’re more likely to be late.

Routine makes time fly

Actually the well-travelled road effect is a specific example of the fact that we tend to underestimate how long routine activities take. Or, put the other way around: time seems to fly when we’re engaged in automatic, routine tasks.

This means that people often find the last part of their holiday tends to go quicker than the first part (Avni-Babad & Ritov, 2003). That’s because as the holiday goes on, we settle into a routine, so time seems to go quicker towards the end.

The same happens at work, where people report routine activities as taking proportionately less time than those that require more deliberate, conscious attention.

Familiarity, then, with routes travelled, holidays and work activities, tends to speed up our perception of time.

Maybe this all helps explain why the latter parts of our lives–which are more likely to be filled with routine, predictable events–seem to skip by much quicker than our earlier years. As the roads of our lives become well-worn we take less notice of the landscape.

One way to avoid this is to expose yourself to more unexpected, unpredictable experiences…

…but probably not being late and getting stuck in traffic.

Image credit: James Vaughan

Not long ago I reported on a study which found that guitar cases have considerable power over women when they are asked on a date.

The French psychologist who conducted that study, Nicolas Gueguen, has been up to his old tricks again on the Atlantic Coast of France.

In a new experiment, reported in the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior, he had some women lying on a beach, face-down, reading a book (Gueguen, 2013). Sometimes they displayed a 10cm x 5cm temporary tattoo of a butterfly on their lower backs and sometimes not.

Then another research assistant counted how many times a man came up to them and tried to start a conversation.

Without a tattoo they were approached 10% of the time, but with the tattoo this shot up to 24%. Not only that but the tattoo increased the speed with which men approached from 35 minutes up to 24 minutes.

I will pass no judgement on the rights or wrongs of tattoos, the types of men that might have been approaching or anything else, but simply leave this for you to interpret as you will.

Oh wait; one final fact does need mentioning. When men were asked to evaluate the women with or without the tattoo, they judged that the women with tattoos were more likely to say yes to their advances and were probably more promiscuous.

Whether or not either of these assumptions is actually true is a totally different matter. It may well be that men misinterpret tattoos and/or that women don’t realise how men perceive them.

OK, now discuss.

Image credit: Stephanie Wallace

One of the mind’s great talents is to simulate events that haven’t happened. Projected into the future, our imaginative power helps us plan everything from our weekends to the construction of our homes and cities.

But when our minds turn towards the past, our ability to simulate alternative realities seems less useful. What use is it to imagine how things could have been? Do we not learn more from our pasts by analysing the reasons for either success or failure?

A recent study by Kray et al. (2010), though, demonstrates a role for thinking about what might have been that doesn’t invoke that horrible word: regret.

Instead they wonder if thinking about what might have been actually helps us make more sense of our lives.

In the first of four studies they had students think about the sequence of events that had led them to attend that particular college. Half the participants then wrote about all the things that could have gone differently. Finally, everyone completed measures of meaning and significance of events in their lives.

The results showed that those who had considered counter-factuals—how their lives might have been different—gave higher ratings to the significance of their choice to attend that particular college and to how meaningful this was in their lives.

Psychologically, then, thinking about how life could have been different, made people feel that what did actually happen was more special in comparison.

In three mores studies they confirmed this finding and looked at what mechanisms connected counter-factual thinking with meaning-making. Two emerged:

1. Fate. Thinking about what might have been makes us feel that major events in our lives were ‘fated’. This is because counter-factuals make you more aware of all the other things that could have happened.
2. Finding the upside. When people thought about counter-factuals, they noticed more positive aspects to the true chain of events. Many people were even able to find the upside of apparently negative events (things like: “If I hadn’t broken my leg, I wouldn’t have met my husband”).

As Kray et al. conclude:

“Mentally veering off the path of reality, only briefly and imaginatively, forges key connections between what might have been and what was meant to be, thereby injecting our experiences and relationships with deeper meaning and significance.”

Image credit: pedro veneroso

I’m not, as they say, a betting man; but if I were I’d put down the form book and spend my time studying a new paper by Yoon et al. (2013) published in Psychological Science.

The Korean researchers are fascinated by the question of whether thinking more carefully about a bet can actually make you less likely to win.

In their first test of the idea they looked at 1.9 billion bets placed on baseball and soccer through a Korean company called “Sports ToTo”. They wanted to see how people did when betting just on who won compared with when they tried to predict the exact score.

Obviously getting the final score right is harder than just predicting the outcome; but when you guess the score, you are also predicting the outcome.

What they found was that across all the games, when people made a bet on the score they won 42.2% of the time, but when they just tried to predict the outcome they were right 44.4% of the time.

Not a massive difference admittedly and it could just be a statistical anomaly or something to do with the way people bet through this company. So they then took this finding to the lab to see if they could replicate it under controlled conditions…

The experiments

Participants in three experiments made predictions on the 2010 World Cup, the 2012 European Football Championship and the 2011 Asian Cup. For each event, half the participants tried to predict the score, while the other half just tried to predict the outcome.

This time the superiority of just predicting the outcome rather than the exact score was clearer. On the World Cup performance went up from 41.4% for the exact sore to 46.5% for the outcome; on the European Championship it went up from 47.8% to 53.5% and on the Asian cup it went up from 45.8% to 50.4%.

In other words people predicting just the outcome rather than the score increased their chances of being correct by about 5%.

Think global

What’s going on here? Why do people do better at calling these matches when they just predict the score rather than being more specific?

The researchers think it’s essentially because by trying to be too specific, we trip ourselves up. For example when you try to guess the score of a soccer match, you are more likely to focus on specific factors like the form of the striker, their goalie’s recent divorce settlement or the colour of the manager’s shirt. In doing so you neglect the fact that the match is an away fixture.

When you just try to predict the outcome of the match, though, you’ll tend to take a more global view. This encourages you to concentrate mainly on really important factors.

So, will these results generalise to other decisions outside sporting events? Is it better not to think too specifically about a job candidate’s skill-set or a potential partner’s Toby jug collection?

Who knows? But it’s a nice example of when concentrating too much on specific details gets in the way of effective decision-making. And we’ve all done that.

Image credit: Roger Price

Sometimes psychologists come up with such good names for their findings that I’m powerless to resist. Take this newly minted expression: ‘the temporal Doppler effect’.

This really appeals to both the psychologists in me and my inner physics geek.

Here’s a reminder of the Doppler effect, which I’m sure you’ve experienced even if you haven’t heard of the Austrian physicist Christian Doppler (click here for YouTube video):

(In case you can’t see the video: the Doppler effect is most often experienced when an ambulance with siren blaring travels past you. The pitch of the siren shifts downwards as it whizzes past. The siren’s notes aren’t actually changing in pitch; it’s the effect of the ambulance’s movement on the sound-waves reaching your ear that produces the effect.)

So, what is a temporal Doppler effect and what does this have to do with psychology?

It seems to suggest that as events approach us from the future they feel closer, compared with events in the past, which feel further away as they recede. In other words: one week in the future feels closer in time than one week in the past.

How far away does it feel?

Could that be true? For example, imagine I ask you one week before Valentine’s Day how psychologically distant that feels to you. Then, imagine I ask you the same question one week after Valentine’s Day. Surely they should feel about the same distance?

What the temporal Doppler effect suggests is that Valentine’s Day will feel closer in time one week beforehand than one week after.

Sounds mad? Well this is exactly the experiment that Caruso et al. (2013) carried out. And guess what? They got this temporal Doppler effect. On a 1 to 7 scale, where 1 means it feels close in time and 7 means it feels far in time, people rated an upcoming Valentine’s Day an average of 3.9 when it was one week in the future, but an average of 4.8 when it was one week in the past.

They got similar results for comparisons of time-points both one month and one year in the future and the past. This temporal Doppler effect kept showing up: the future seems to feel psychologically closer to people than the past, despite the fact we know it’s exactly the same.

Metaphors of time and space

So why does it happen? Caruso et al. put forward two explanations, one more abstract than the other. I’ll do the abstract one first but feel free to bail out and get on to the concrete one if it gets too much!

The abstract argument goes like this: we don’t directly experience time although we see its effects. Unlike space, which we can clearly see, time is invisible. In contrast, you can reach out and touch objects and feel the space between them.

Because time is abstract we try to understand it psychologically using metaphors. We say that ‘time flows like a river’, ‘time marches on’ or ‘time flies’. These are all spatial ways of thinking about an abstract idea.

The result is that we unconsciously apply the same spatial rules to time. Just like things that are coming towards us sound higher in pitch and appear to us closer in space than things going away, so we intuit that things ahead of us in time are also closer than things in the past.

Convinced?

If not you’ll be interested in a further experiment Caruso et al. carried out where they tried to reverse the temporal Doppler effect with a simple manipulation: they had people walking backwards in virtual reality (VR).

Compared to those walking forwards in VR, those walking backwards showed no tendency towards thinking the future was closer than the past. This helps support the idea that how we think about time is linked to how we think about space and why the temporal Doppler effect occurs.

Future-facing

Now here’s the more concrete explanation. The temporal Doppler effect is also highly adaptive. It’s very useful for our survival and success in life that the future seems closer than the past. What happens tomorrow we can plan for, what happened yesterday is just a memory.

Yes, it’s important to understand where you’ve come from, but without a plan, you can’t know where you’re going. The temporal Doppler effect is one example of how we’re future-oriented creatures; always scheming for, worrying about, plotting and simulating the future. So that hopefully, when we get there, we’ve got some kind of plan.

Image credit: Myxi

No matter what it is—a pair of jeans, a car or even a house—in that moment when an object becomes your property, it undergoes a transformation.

Because you chose it and you associate it with yourself, its value is immediately increased (Morewedge et al., 2009). If someone offers to buy it from you, the chances are you want to charge much more than they are prepared to pay.

That is a cognitive bias called ‘the endowment effect’.

It’s the reason that some people have lofts, garages and storage spaces full of junk with which they cannot bear to be parted. Once you own something, you tend to set its financial value way higher than other people do.

When tested experimentally the endowment effect can be surprisingly strong. One study found that owners of tickets for a basketball match overvalued them by a factor of 14 (Carmon & Ariely, 2000). In other words people wanted 14 times more than others were prepared to pay. However, this is a particularly high one and the ratio will vary depending on what it is.

The endowment effect is particularly strong for things that are very personal and easy to associate with the self, like a piece of jewellery from your partner. Similarly we also overvalue things we’ve had for a long time.

Sometimes, of course, the sentimental value of things is justified; but more often than not people hold on to old possessions for no good reason. So if you’re surrounded by rubbish, ask yourself: do I really need all this, or is it the endowment effect?

After all, it’s just stuff.

Image credit: Kevin Utting

If you were to undergo brain surgery, would you care if the surgeon regularly carried out mental practice of the operation? Or, would you only be interested in the physical practice?

(By mental practice I don’t mean getting ‘psyched up’ or making plans or getting in the right frame of mind; I mean mentally running through the physical movements required for the operation.)

Quite naturally you’d probably be much more interested in how often the surgeon had carried out the operation in real life, rather than in his imagination.

But should you be? What is the value of mental practice, not just in surgery, but in life in general? How much benefit is there to mental rehearsal and do we undervalue the power of mental practice?

Rehearsal

For neurosurgery specifically there is no study looking at what difference mental practice can make (although some surgeons do carry out this sort of rehearsal). But we do know that for basic surgical techniques, mental practice can benefit performance.

One study by Sanders et al. (2008) was carried out on medical students. On top of their usual training—which included physical practice—half were trained in mental imagery techniques, while the other half studied their textbooks.

When the students carried out live surgery, those who’d used mental imagery performed better, on average, than those assigned the book learning.

Another study looking at laparoscopic surgery has also shown benefits for mental practice for novice surgeons (Arora et al., 2011).

Away from the operating theatre, the main way we’re used to hearing about mental rehearsal is in sports. Whether it’s an amateur tennis player or Roger Federer, sports-people often talk about how mental rehearsal improves their performance.

My favourite example is the British Formula 1 driver, Jenson Button. In practice he sits on an inflatable gym ball, with a steering wheel in his hands, shuts his eyes, and drives a lap of the circuit, all the while tapping out the gear changes. He does this in close to real time so that when he opens his eyes he’s not far off his actual lap time.

Powerful pinkies

The reason that sports-people, surgeons and many others are interested in the benefits of mental practice is that they can be so dramatic, plus they are effectively free.

Here’s a great example from a simple study in which some participants trained up a muscle in their little fingers using just the power of mental practice (Ranganathan et al., 2004). In the study participants were split into four groups:

1. These people performed ‘mental contractions’ of their little finger. In other words, they imagined exercising their pinkies.
2. Same as (1), but they performed mental contractions on their elbows, not their little fingers.
3. Did no training at all.
4. Carried out physical training on their little finger.

They all practised (or not) in the various different ways for four weeks. Afterwards, the muscle strength in their fingers and elbows was tested. Unsurprisingly those who’d done nothing hadn’t improved, while those who’d trained physically improved their muscle strength by an average of 53%.

The two mental practice groups couldn’t beat physical training, but they still did surprisingly well. Those imagining flexing their elbow increased their strength by 13.5% and those imagining flexing their little finger increased their strength by 35%. That’s surprisingly close to the 53% from physical training; I bet you wouldn’t have expected it to be that close.

Thinking practice

This is just strength training, but as we’ve seen there’s evidence that mental rehearsal of skills also produces benefits. Examples include mentally practising a music instrument, during rehabilitation from brain injuries and so on; the studies are starting to mount up.

Indeed some of these have shown that mental practice seems to work best for tasks that involve cognitive elements, in other words that aren’t just about physical actions (Driskell et al., 1994).

So it’s about more than mentally rehearsing your cross-court forehand. Rehearsal could also be useful for a job interview or important meeting; not just in what you’ll say but how you’ll talk, carry yourself and interact with others. Mental rehearsal could also be useful in how you deal with your children, or make a difficult phone call or how you’ll accomplish the most challenging parts of your job.

Notice the type of mental imagery I’m talking about here. It’s not so much about visualising ultimate success, with all its attendant pitfalls, but about visualising the process. What works is thinking through the steps that are involved and, with motor skills, the exact actions that you will perform.

To be effective, though, mental practice has to be like real practice: it should be systematic and as close to reality as you can make it. Just daydreaming won’t work. So if you make a mistake, you should work out why and mentally correct it. You should also make the practice as vivid as possible by tuning in to the sensory experience: what you can see, hear, feel and even smell, whatever is important.

If it can work for surgeons, elite athletes and little-finger-muscle-builders, then it can work for all of us.

Image credit: Adam Rhoades