Category: Psychology

Recently I covered the Dunning-Kruger effect which explains why the incompetent don’t know they’re incompetent.

But there’s a flip-side to the Dunning-Kruger: sometimes the competent don’t know when they’re competent.

This is the worse-than-average effect. This means that when you’re good at something, you tend to assume that other people are good at it as well. So, when you’re faced with a difficult task that you are good at, you underestimate your own ability.

It doesn’t just kick in when we have special skills, but also when we think that the odds are long, say because the task is particularly difficult. For example Kruger (1999) found that people underestimate their ability at stereotypically difficult tasks like playing chess, telling jokes, juggling or computer programming.

On the other hand they overestimate their ability at stereotypically easy tasks like using a mouse, driving a car or riding a bicycle.

Here’s another example, described by Moore (2007):

“University of Iowa students report believing that they stand only a 6% chance of beating fellow University of Iowa students in a trivia contest featuring questions on the history of Mesopotamia (Windschitl et al., 2003). In contrast, a trivia contest featuring questions on TV sitcoms inspired an average estimated probability of winning of 70%. Naturally, these beliefs are erroneous because the tests will be simple or difficult for everyone. On average, the actual probability of winning must be 50%.”

How can we explain all this?

“When people compare themselves with their peers, they focus egocentrically on their own skills and insufficiently take into account the skills of the comparison group.” (Kruger, 1999)

In other words we tend to forget how good other people are at riding bicycles and how bad they are at telling jokes or computer programming.

The same is true of judgements we make about ourselves. For example older people tend to assume they are less attractive and athletic than other people their own age (Zell & Alicke, 2011).

The moral of the story is simple: sometimes we do ourselves down, especially when faced with a difficult task or when we have special skills. Under these circumstances we are better than we know.

Image credit: Henry_Spencer

The Roman philosopher Seneca knew the benefits of self-control, as do modern psychologists:

“…self-control is strongly associated with what we label success: higher self-esteem, better interpersonal skills, better emotional responses and, perhaps surprisingly, few drawbacks at even very high levels of self-control (Tangney et al., 2004). (From: How to Improve Your Self Control)

I’ve discussed many strategies for improving self-control in: Top 10 Self-Control Strategies.

But in a new study they’ve found that the merest suggestion of money is enough to help people recover from the ego-depletion effect (i.e. when your self-control ‘muscle’ is tired from too much exertion):

“Across two experiments using varied operationalizations of self-control, participants completed an initial task that depleted self-control resources or not, were then reminded of money or neutral concepts, and finally, completed a second task requiring self-control. In both experiments, among depleted participants, those reminded of money performed better on the second self-control task than those reminded of neutral concepts.” (Boucher & Kofos, 2012)

Image credit: Eric Gjerde

Children are often heard to whine to their parents: “But that’s not fair!” and their agitated parents reply: “Tough, life’s not fair.”

With age you hear people express less and less surprise at life’s unfairness. We still whine about it, but we’re less surprised.

Still, there’s some part of us that likes to believe the world should be fair. Psychologists call this kernel of teenage righteousness ‘the just-world hypothesis’. Here it is stated by Lerner and Miller (1978):

“Individuals have a need to believe that they live in a world where people generally get what they deserve”

This simple statement has all sorts of strange effects. Here’s a depressing one from Hafer and Begue (2005):

“A woman is raped by a stranger who sneaks into her apartment while she takes out the garbage […] The rape victim described how several people (even one close friend) suggested that she was partly to blame, in one case because of her “negative attitude” that might have ‘attracted’ more ‘negativity’; in another, by choosing to live in that particular neighborhood.” (referring to: After Silence: Rape & My Journey Back)

Clearly these are terrible, terrible judgements to make about someone who has been raped. But people still make these sorts of attributions in all sorts of situations. They think that ill people deserve their illness, that poor people deserve their poverty and so on.

But why? What does the just-world belief do for people? Here’s what:

“The belief that the world is just enables the individual to confront his physical and social environment as though they were stable and orderly. Without such a belief it would be difficult for the individual to commit himself to the pursuit of long-range goals or even to the socially regulated behavior of day-to-day life.” (Lerner & Miller, 1978)

We naturally vary in the amount we believe in the just-world hypothesis, so not all of us are under the same delusion. But the bias does help to explain why some people continue to attribute blame where there is none.

Image credit: ilkin

Everyone has had the experience of reading a few pages of a book and then suddenly noticing none of it has gone in. But how common is this experience?

A study by Schooler et al., (2004) suggests it’s fairly common:

“On average participants caught themselves zoning out approximately 5.4 times during the 45 min reading period. Several findings were consistent with the hypothesis that people are often (at least initially) unaware of the fact that they are zoning out.”

This means you’re not always aware of when you’re zoning out. To combat this the experimenters used a system to catch people zoning out. This found that they were zoning out from reading about 13% of the time. And what were they thinking about while zoning out?

“…they were only very rarely (less than 3%) thinking about what they were reading when they reported zoning out. Although they sometimes reported thinking about nothing at all (18%), more often participants reported thinking about specific things, such as school-related topics (27%), fantasies (19%), and themselves (11%).” (Schooler et al., 2004)

So we are often unaware that our minds are wandering from what we are reading, even when it’s a gripping Amazon bestseller rather than a boring textbook.

In fact, mind wandering is very common:

“Killingsworth and Gilbert (2010) sampled the experience of 2,250 US adults at random intervals. Each time participants reported, through their smartphone, how they were feeling and what they were doing. Almost half the time people were asked, at that moment their minds were wandering from whatever they were doing—43% to pleasant topics, 27% to unpleasant topics and the rest to neutral topics. The only time their minds weren’t wandering was when they were having sex.” (From: Does Keeping Busy Make us Happy?)

If our minds wander only 13% of the time when we’re reading, that’s actually pretty good compared to an average of 50% for everyday life.

Image credit: Mark Sebastian

Yes.

According to Leander et al. (2012):

“In three studies, we found that people literally feel colder in response to inappropriate amounts of behavioral mimicry”

That’s because:

“There exist implicit standards for how much nonverbal behavioral mimicry is appropriate in various types of social interactions”

So, how much is too much?

“Our results also highlight the importance of (implicitly) knowing when to mimic other people and when it is okay to be mimicked by them…”

In other words: it depends on the situation and you have to trust your instincts, but be aware that blanket mirroring of other people’s body language can come across as plain weird. People who mimic body language indiscriminately literally give us chills.

Image credit: Chuck Olsen

Most people are pretty bad at taking advice from others. People don’t mind hearing the advice, they just hate to take it.  This is one facet of what psychologists call the ‘egocentric bias’: the general rule that we think we know better.

The egocentric bias strikes in the boardroom, in schools, in hospitals and everywhere where two or more people are gathered together and one turns to the other and says: “What do you think?”

It’s the reason why every person and every generation has to make its own mistakes. People have a tendency not to listen until after it’s too late.

This is a real shame because a lot of the time other people have really important insights or experience that we don’t have ourselves (e.g. The Impressive Power of a Stranger’s Advice). We can’t hope to know everything ourselves.

So how can we force ourselves to properly weigh other people’s advice?

An approach that’s recently come to the fore in psychological research, and popular culture, is perspective-taking. You simply imagine someone who is like you faced with the same question and then you ask yourself what they would do.

It’s the secular equivalent of the Christian question: “What would Jesus do?”

Now it’s been tested in psychological research by Yaniv and Choshen-Hillel (2012). Across three studies they had some participants make choices from their own perspective and some from the perspective of another person who is similar to themselves.

What they found was that taking another imaginary person’s perspective had the desired effect of encouraging participants to take other people’s advice.

It’s a fascinating finding but it only tests people’s judgements in a relatively simple situation: guessing the amount of calories in a foodstuff. We’ll have to wait for further research to look at more complicated or nuanced decisions.

Still, the procedure is so simple it’s unlikely to do any harm. Plus anything that helps us think outside ourselves is very likely to be helpful since there are quite a few other studies which have found robust benefits for perspective-taking.

Image credit: Pryere

Imagine two people: one from the upper classes and one from the lower classes. Let’s say our lower class individual works in a factory, lives in a small house in an average area and receives a relatively small salary.

Our upper class individual, though, has inherited money, lives in a large house in a beautiful area and doesn’t need to work for money.

Now let’s say both these individuals are driving along in their cars (one cheap, one expensive), when they approach a pedestrian crossing (crosswalk for our US friends). There’s someone there waiting to cross and, by law, they are obliged to stop. And let’s say we’re in a country where generally people obey these sorts of rules.

On balance, who do you think is more likely to cheat and cut off the pedestrian? The upper class person or the lower class person?

Well, wonder no more because this exact observational study was carried out by Piff et al. (2012) in California. They stood at a junction watching who cut off pedestrians and how expensive their cars were.

The results were pretty clear. Overall about a third of drivers failed to stop for pedestrians, but it was those in the most expensive cars that were disproportionately represented amongst the discourteous drivers. About 30% of drivers in the cheapest cars failed to stop compared with over 45% of those in the most expensive cars.

Piff and colleagues then retired to the laboratory to see if they could catch upper class people cheating more than the lower classes on other sorts of tests. Sure enough, they could:

“…upper-class individuals were more likely to exhibit unethical decision-making tendencies (study 3), take valued goods from others (study 4), lie in a negotiation (study 5), cheat to increase their chances of winning a prize (study 6), and endorse unethical behavior at work (study 7) than were lower-class individuals.”

Perhaps the stereotype of the money-grabbing Mr Burns-type has some truth after all.

The authors think that all kinds of factors probably contribute to this finding. Here are a few:

• Upper class people are more insulated from ordinary society and tend to think the rules don’t apply to them.
• Upper class people have the resources to make problems ‘go away’, so they are less exposed to the adverse consequences of their unethical behaviour.
• They care less about what other people think.

Of course none of this is to say that all upper class people are cheats. That’s far from the truth.

What this study is finding is a trend amongst some upper class people. There are plenty of examples of upper class people acting in ethical and praiseworthy ways, it’s just that this is more unusual than the rest of us might like.

The authors conclude by saying:

“Although greed may indeed be a motivation all people have felt at points in their lives, we argue that greed motives are not equally prevalent across all social strata. As our findings suggest, the pursuit of self-interest is a more fundamental motive among society’s elite, and the increased want associated with greater wealth and status can promote wrongdoing.”

Image credit: Die Jugend

It might seem like a question that’s too obvious to ask. Practically every job description ever written demands ‘a good team player’.

Teams of all kinds pop up everywhere in organisations and the assumption is that they enhance organisational performance.

In fact the evidence for the supposedly stupendous power of teams is pretty weak. Hundreds of studies have been carried out examining people’s performance in groups.

Far from finding a huge boost to performance from teamwork, the studies are neutral or only show small benefits (Allen & Hecht, 2004). Here are some typical characteristics of groups from Hackman (1990):

• High performing groups are not normal, instead groups often have huge variations in ability from top to bottom.
• People in groups often waste time squabbling over goals.
• Groups frequently suffer downward performance spirals.

The message from the research is clear: the benefits of teamwork are nowhere near as clear as the fashion would suggest. Worse, sometimes the arbitrary implementation of teams reduces organisational performance. The classic example is group brainstorming which just doesn’t work (see my article on brainstorming).

There’s no ‘I’ in ‘team’

Obviously sometimes people do work together much better in teams. Some jobs are like team sports, they need close co-ordination between people to achieve their goals.

But many, many jobs don’t have these characteristics. Academics and call-centre workers don’t need to be in teams or groups, neither do sales, HR or many other standard corporate departments.

Indeed many people belong to multiple teams, many of which may have very little meaning for them. And when there’s little meaning, there’s little effort (see: social loafing).

So is teamwork just a management fad or is there a deeper psychological function?

Allen and Hecht do point out that teams can be psychological beneficial. The research suggests that people draw both confidence and satisfaction from being in a team, even if it doesn’t boost performance much.

But they also caution that not everyone responds well to teams and their benefits have been overinflated.

Image credit: Thomas Cunningham

Last week I asked you the following question:

Say you’re in your car, sitting at a red light behind another car. The lights turn green but the car in front doesn’t move. Twelve seconds go by. Do you think you’d be more likely to honk if the car was an old Ford or if it was a brand new Porsche?

Over the weekend 1,313 people took part and the results were clear-cut. Here’s what you said: 781 people thought they’d be more likely to honk at the high-status car and 532 said it would be the low-status car.

Statistically this is a significant difference which means we wouldn’t expect to get these results by chance, so it probably means there’s something going on here.

Now let’s look at the breakdowns by gender:

• Men, high-status: 408
• Men, low-status: 331
• Women, high-status: 373
• Women, low-status: 201

So the pattern is the same across men and women, although stronger for women (again differences within genders are significant).

For real

This is just the result I was expecting as when participants were asked this question by Doob and Gross (1968), they got a similar result. More people thought they would honk at the high-status car.

The difference is that Doob and Gross carried out the experiment for real. As well as asking, they wanted to see what people would really do in the situation. They had drivers pausing at intersections in either expensive or cheap cars and waiting to see if the person behind honked.

Overall what they found was that when the car was low-status, 84% of drivers honked at least once within 12 seconds. But, when the car was high-status, only 50% of drivers honked. Indeed people honked faster and more often at the low-status car. These results were also replicated in a later study (Deaux, 1971).

So, in reality people’s collective tendency was the exact reverse of their prediction and also what PsyBlog readers predicted.

Why?

The explanation for why people honk less at high-status cars is simple.

It’s the same reason you don’t tell your boss what you really think: unconsciously (or otherwise) we fear what high status people can do to us. We may be frustrated by the car in front pausing at the lights, but that frustration is inhibited by any signals that the car’s driver is high-status.

Status is just one example of how our aggressive behaviour is curbed by aspects of the situation. For example people are generally less aggressive towards polite people and more aggressive towards members of their own sex (Harris, 1974).

So, how do you explain people’s inaccurate prediction? Perhaps we like to think we’re not cowed by authority, that people who are richer have no effect on us and so we compensate too much. On the other hand maybe we feel more affiliation with the driver of the cheaper car—they are more like us.

Whatever the explanation, it’s a good example of how our predictions of our own behaviour can be biased in the wrong direction. It’s also a good example of when crowds are not so wise.

Image credit: D. Sharon Pruitt