Category: Attractiveness

What do you do when a colleague’s criticism is burning a hole in your brain during a meeting? Or when toothache is distracting you from the presentation you’re giving? Or when you can’t stop thinking about a past lover while you’re on a date with a new lover?

Much research has suggested that trying to put a thought or emotion out of mind while we’re stressed can have ironic effects: it actually comes back stronger.

The classic example is the instruction: don’t think about a white bear. People instructed to suppress the thought typically think about it twice as often as those not instructed to suppress the thought (Wegner et al., 1987).

Sometimes our minds are dead set against us. We want to do one thing and it wants to do precisely the opposite. Here are eight examples of how ironic processes affect our daily lives (taken from Wegner, 2009):

1. Forbidden romance

In one study participants were told to play footsie with a stranger during a card game (Wegner et al., 1994). The twist was that some pairs were specifically told to hide their under-the-table-action while others weren’t.

The results showed that playing secret footsie made people more attracted to each other than blatant footsie. When they tried to suppress their attraction, it actually came back stronger.

That’s why it can be difficult to get rid of thoughts of an old flame at exactly the wrong moment. And the more we push down on these kinds of intrusive thoughts, the more they come back.

2. Faux pas

In a classic episode of the British sitcom Fawlty Towers, the hotel’s proprietor, Basil Fawlty is serving a group of Germans and trying to avoid mentioning the war. The more he tries to avoid it, the more he keeps mentioning it. If you’ve seen it, it’ll be seared across your memory; if not Google it and you’ll never forget it.

It’s a perfect example of how, when under pressure and specifically trying to avoid mentioning something, it can still find a way out.

In a study by Lane et al. (2006) exactly this phenomenon was observed. Participants were more likely to give a fact away when they were specifically told to keep it secret than when they were given no such instruction.

3. Prejudice

Rather more embarrassing is when latent prejudices are revealed after specific attempts are made to suppress them. Sometimes the more people try to be politically correct, the more they accidentally display their racism, sexism, homophobia or other prejudice.

Macrae et al. (1994) found participants in a waiting room who were actively trying to suppress their dislike of white supremacists sat further away from them than those given no instruction.

4. The yips

The ‘yips’ have destroyed many a sporting career, both amateur and professional. Most associated with golf, the ‘yips’ refers to the inexplicable loss of fine motor skills that sometimes happens to sports players.

Professionals who could previously hit a ball with frightening accuracy are suddenly worse than rank amateurs. And the more they concentrate on doing it right, the worse it gets.

One study found that when soccer players kicking a penalty are told to avoid a particular area of the goal, they actually spent more time looking at it (Bakker et al, 1996)

5. Feeling down

Our emotions are just as prone to ironic effects as our cognitions. Unfortunately when people try to suppress a depressed mood, they often find it comes back with a vengeance.

For this reason standard psychological therapies avoid thought suppression and try to focus on distraction and acceptance (Beevers et al., 1999).

6. Pain

There’s some evidence that trying to suppress pain may cause it to be experienced more strongly. But, Wegner (2009) explains, we have to be cautious about this one as it hasn’t been conclusively proven.

There is evidence, though, that trying to accept pain is a better policy than rejecting it or trying to cope spontaneously (Masedo & Esteve, 2007).

7. Can’t sleep…

Everyone who has ever tried to force themselves to get to sleep knows it’s impossible. The harder you consciously try to fall asleep quickly, the longer you stay awake.

This is exactly what researchers find in the sleep lab (Ansfield et al., 1996). That’s why it’s called falling asleep or dropping off—it’s as though you have to do it by accident.

For more advice on getting to sleep: 6 Steps to Falling Asleep Fast.

8. …bad dreams

Here’s a tip if you want to control your dreams: people are more likely to dream about subjects they are specifically trying to avoid (Schmidt & Gendola, 2008). Whether they are emotional or neutral topics, using suppression will make them more likely to turn up in your dreams.

The question is whether you can successfully convince yourself you don’t want to have a really delicious, engrossing dream!

Avoiding ironic processes

Ironic processes are strongest when we are distracted or stressed in some way. That’s why a lot of the time these effects don’t emerge and we can control ourselves successfully.

The main way to avoid all these problems is to find a way to relax, or at least not to try so hard.

→ You can read more about ironic processes here: Why Thought Suppression is Counter-Productive

Image credit: Zen Sutherland

All human societies are alive with the battle for influence. Every single day each of us is subject to innumerable persuasion attempts from corporations, interest groups, political parties and other organisations. Each trying to persuade us that their product, idea or innovation is what we should buy, believe in or vote for.

In our personal lives the same struggle is played out for the supremacy of viewpoints, ideals and actions. Whether it’s friends and family, work colleagues, potential employers or strangers, each of us has to work out how to bring others around to our own point of view. We all play the influence game, to greater or lesser degrees.

Psychologists have been studying how we try to influence each other for many years. I’ve been covering some highlights of this research, which are collected below.

• 3 Universal Goals to Influence People – Effective influence and persuasion isn’t just about patter, body language or other techniques, it’s also about understanding people’s motivations.

• The Persuasive Power of Swearing – Show your passion and people have one more emotional reason to come around to your point of view.

• Loudest Voice = Majority Opinion – Even if only one member of a group repeats their opinion, it is more likely to be seen by others as representative of the whole group.

• Don’t Take No For An Answer – You ask someone for a favour and they say no. Where do you go from there?

• The Influence of Fleeting Attraction – Friendship is a fantastic lever for persuasion and influence, a lever we happily push on every day.

• Caffeine Makes Us Easier to Persuade – Of all the effects caffeine has on our minds—enhanced attention, vigilance and cognition—perhaps least known is its tendency to make us more susceptible to persuasion.

• Persuasion: The Right-Ear Advantage – If you want someone to comply with a random request for a cigarette, you should speak into their right ear.

• Balanced Arguments Are More Persuasive – The instinct to paper over weaknesses in our argument is wrong—so long as we counter criticism.

• The Battle Between Thoughts and Emotions in Persuasion – Nowadays people tend to use ‘I think’ and ‘I feel’ interchangeably. Does it make any difference whether what you say is couched in ‘thinking’ or ‘feeling’ terms?

• Our Secret Attitude Changes – When you change your attitude about something, do you know why?

• Are Fast Talkers More Persuasive? – Beware the fast-talker, the person with the gift of the gab—the friendly salesman, the oily politician—running through the ‘facts’ faster than you can keep up.

• Persuasion: The Sleeper Effect – Any time we receive a persuasive message before we find out who the source is, the sleeper effect can come into play.

• Communicating Persuasively: Email or Face-to-Face? – Face-to-face communication is usually most persuasive but it’s not always possible to meet in person. How, then, do people react to persuasion attempts over email?

• The Influence of Positive Framing – Do people really pay more attention to frightening messages? Actually emphasising the positive can be more persuasive than pointing out the negative.

• The Illusion of Truth – Repetition is used everywhere to persuade: advertising, politics and the media.

• 9 Propaganda Techniques in Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 – Back in the Summer of 2004 Michael Moore brought out ‘Fahrenheit 9/11’, his personal view of how terrorist attacks in the US were used to pursue illegal wars.

• Persuasion: The Third-Person Effect – Attractive woman holding a bottle of beer? Hah! How stupid do they think we are?

• 20 Simple Steps to the Perfect Persuasive Message – Perfection is hard to achieve in any walk of life and persuasion is no different.

• Why Stories Sell: Transportation Leads to Persuasion – Stories which transport people are more likely to be persuasive.

• How To Encourage People To Change Their Own Minds – Let people talk themselves around to your point of view.

• When Does Reverse Psychology Work? – Reverse psychology works best with people who are contrary or resistant.

• The One (Really Easy) Persuasion Technique Everyone Should Know – It’s supported by 42 studies on 22,000 people and it’s the easiest, most practical persuasion technique available.

• The Single Most Effective Method for Influencing People Fast – Works like magic: a little-known influence technique that out-guns the usual suspects.

• 9 Ways The Mind Resists Persuasion and How To Sustain or Overcome Them – Persuasion is about far more than just argument and counter-argument.

• How To Make Persuasive Eye Contact – How situations change the type of eye contact people make with each other.

Image credit: Martin Howard

There’s little doubt that friends are easier to persuade than strangers. That emotional connection and shared history is often enough to get the poor wretches doing things they’d rather avoid, like helping us move home.

Forgive the mercenary language, but friendship is a fantastic lever for persuasion and influence, a lever we happily push on every day.

But how much does someone have to like us before we can start to influence them? And, more to the point, can only the most fleeting attraction help us persuade them to comply with a request?

Mere similarity

Jerry Burger and colleagues at Santa Clara University used a sneaky experimental set-up to test this out (Burger et al., 2001). On arrival at the lab, participants were told the study was about first impressions and were asked to choose 20 adjectives which best described them from a list of 50 supplied.

The idea, they were told, was that they would swap lists with another participant in the experiment, then fill out some more questionnaires. After which, experiment over; back to the student bar. In fact the real test was coming.

The 20 adjectives from the ‘other person’ weren’t really from another person, it was part of the experimental manipulation. By varying the number of adjectives the ‘other person’ had ticked, the researchers were dividing participants into three groups:

• Similar: this group thought the other person had ticked 17 of the same adjectives.
• Neutral: 10 adjectives matched.
• Dissimilar: had only ticked 3 of the same adjectives.

The experimenters were manipulating liking between participants and the ‘other person’ by using what psychologists call the ‘mere similarity’ effect. This is people’s tendency to like others more because of some slight similarity with themselves. It could be a friend in common or something as trivial as their names starting with the same letter.

So, when participants left the lab, what a surprise, the person they thought they had been exchanging self-descriptive adjectives with just happened to be walking down the corridor with them.

Then the moment of truth. In passing the participant was asked for a favour: would they mind reading an 8-page essay and providing a page of feedback?

Compliance doubled

Even this seemingly trivial manipulation of adjectives-in-common had a measurable effect. People who thought they were dissimilar only complied with the request 43% of the time. This went up to 60% in the neutral condition. But in the similar condition, compliance went up to an impressive 77%, almost double the dissimilar condition.

The experimenters also did the same experiment in a couple of other ways but reached the same conclusion. Whether the fleeting attraction was caused by choosing the same adjectives or sitting together silently for a couple of minutes, it was enough to double compliance to a request.

This experiment suggests that fleeting attraction can be remarkably powerful in changing ‘no’ into ‘yes’. We process relatively small requests in an automatic way, using simple rules-of-thumb. When asked for a small favour by a stranger, we make a snap judgement on how much we like them based on trivial information, and this can have a huge influence on our response.

Image credit: Derek

Love it or loathe it, Facebook is everywhere, and will continue to be everywhere as the film describing its genesis—The Social Network—is released worldwide over coming months.

To help you cope, here are 7 research-based tips for total Facebook domination. If you don’t use it, these should at least help you pepper Facebook-related conversations with compelling observations from the psychological research.

1. Get between 100 and 300 friends

It doesn’t look good to have too many Facebook friends, or too few.

It has been suggested that humans can maintain relationships with 150 people and Tong et al. (2008) found Facebooker’s social attractiveness peaked at around this number. Go much above 300 or below 100 and social attractiveness starts to drop.

2. Court attractive friends

Make sure your friends, or the people who post on your ‘wall’, are good-looking. Walther et al. (2008) found that attractive friends boosted the perceived attractiveness of participant’s profiles.

Keep the uggos away, unlike the offline world, it won’t make you look better in comparison.

3. Understand the 7 motivations

If you need to lure more people in as Facebook friends, it’s handy to understand its attraction.

Joinson (2008) found 7 basic motivations for using Facebook: connecting with old or distant friends, social surveillance (see what old friends are up to, but without talking to them), looking up people met offline, virtual people watching, status updating and content.

4. Don’t let your partner use Facebook

Muise et al. (2009) found that participants who spent more time on Facebook were more jealous of their partners. This is probably because they are finding out things about their partner—who they know and where they’ve been—which, in the days before social networking, could have been kept quiet.

So, don’t let your partner see your Facebook profile. Unless you want them to be jealous. In which case, carry on.

5. Guard your privacy

Privacy is a big, controversial topic on Facebook because many people’s social networking profiles do say too much.

Nosko et al. (2010) found that young, single people were particularly likely to disclose sensitive information about themselves. It’s the online disinhibition effect writ large. But, according to Boyd (2010), more young people are using the privacy settings than a year ago, so the message is getting through.

You’ve heard it before and you’ll hear it again: watch what you say about yourself online, you never know who’s taking notes.

6. Display your real self

Remarkably, you can often trust Facebook profiles; Back et al., (2010) found that Facebook profiles generally reflected their owner’s actual rather than idealised selves.

Facebook users may not personally know all their Facebook friends but they probably do like the movies, books and bands they claim to like.

7. Use Facebook to get a job

Because we move huge distances nowadays, away from home towns and old friends, it’s easy to lose contact with people who might be able to give us a leg up in life. Facebook to the rescue…

Ellison et al. (2008) found that Facebook users had higher levels of ‘social capital’. In other words: people are using their Facebook contacts to get jobs or other opportunities.

See, Facebookers aren’t just surfing for photos of people they know and people they’d like to know, they’re building social capital.

At least, that’s the excuse I’ll be using from now on.

Image credit: Rishi Bandopadhay

Much as we might prefer otherwise, there’s solid evidence that, on average, people are quite cynical about human nature.

Continue reading “The Trust Gap: Why People Are So Cynical”