Category: Psychology

According to a new study, successful entrepreneurs are three times more likely to have engaged in illicit activities as teens like shoplifting, skipping out of school and even drug-dealing.

The insight comes from a nationally representative sample of 12,686 Americans who have been followed for other 30 years, since they were teenagers (Levine & Rubinstein, 2013).

They looked at what types of cognitive and other factors were associated with becoming a successful entrepreneur—especially one that had incorporated their business.

Naturally they found that successful entrepreneurs have to be smart, have high self-esteem and be well-educated; but they also need the attraction to risk.

Those who turned out to be the best entrepreneurs often had a history of being rule breakers in their teenage years. They were more likely to have smoked marijuana, to have bunked off school and even to have assaulted others.

But this illicit aspect was also coupled with a very stable family background. Successful entrepreneur’s were disproportionately likely to come from families that were:

• high-income,
• well-educated,
•  and stable.

So we’re not exactly talking about disadvantaged youths here.

We’re also not talking about women here: since men, on average, are more aggressive and are prepared to take on higher risks, they are more likely to become entrepreneurs. Women made up just 28% of the entrepreneurs who had incorporated their business.

Does more risk mean more reward?

But does this extra risk pay off?

This study found that in a financial sense, the risk may well pay off. Successful entrepreneurs earned 41% more per hour than similar salaried workers, although they also worked longer hours (on average, 27% more).

The study doesn’t, however, tell us anything about the effects of being an entrepreneur on family life or on psychological health. Perhaps these may not be as favourable as the economic benefits.

In a similar vein, the taste for risk-taking plus high self-esteem can provide a dangerous mix which can easily lead to lapses in judgement. Because of this, entrepreneurs are likely to need someone more risk-averse around who can rein them in when they go too far.

Image credit: Philip Daun

It’s a well-known fact that you can’t tickle yourself.

Try it; you (mostly) can’t. Brush your own fingers across the soles of your feet. You certainly feel a sensation, but it’s nothing like when someone else does it.

But why can’t you tickle yourself? If someone else can tickle you, then you should be able to tickle yourself. After all, I can feel my own touch just the same as someone else’s can’t I?

The answer is, psychologists think, that our brains have a basic function which is designed to tell whether some sensation is caused by ourselves, or whether it comes from outside (Blakemore et al, 2000).

Telling the difference between the two is important because otherwise your own touch might give you the same surprise as when someone comes up behind you and taps you on the shoulder.

To test this out some researchers have created a simple tickling robot (Blakemore et al., 1999). The way it works is you put your left hand on a little stick and move it around. This causes a sponge to move around on your right hand.

It turns out that when the robot works like this, people feel little, because it’s like they are causing the sponge to move themselves, through this ‘robot’. It’s like when you brush a feather duster across your own palm: your brain knows you’ve caused the sensation, so it doesn’t feel that ticklish.

But, when the robot introduces a delay of one-third of a second between their left hands moving the stick, and feeling the sponge move on their right hands, suddenly it tickles!

The reason is that the ‘robot’ has tricked the mind into thinking the source of the movement is external. And because it feels like someone else is causing the sensation, then it tickles!

Ah, tickling robot! Don’t tickle me!

Image credit: Matt Batchelor

It’s hardly controversial to say that most people believe more controversy causes more conversation.

For example:

• TV execs think more controversial programmes will attract the most viewers.
• Amongst people surveyed, 91% said controversy causes conversation (Chen & Berger, 2012).

This assumption about the benefits of being outrageous and controversial is barely questioned nowadays, but should it be?

Finding the sweet spot

The internet provides an easy way of seeing what topics provoke the most conversations. All you need to do is scroll down to the bottom of an article and see how many people are slugging it out in the comments section.

Effectively that’s what Chen and Berger (2012) did in a study which looked at articles posted on Topix.com, a news website.

They counted the comments to news articles that were rated as low, medium or high in controversy (Chen & Berger, 2012). Here are some examples:

• Low controversy: “New hybrid whale discovered in Arctic.”
• Medium controversy: “NY bill would ban ‘e-cigarettes’ until FDA action.”
• High controversy: “Oklahoma senator wants open carry, firearms on campus.”

Then they looked at how many comments each article received.

What they found was that when topics were either very high or very low in controversy, on average there were fewer comments posted. For sparking controversy, the sweet spot was in the middle.

These results seem surprising because we’d expect the most controversial articles to stir up the most chat, but apparently this didn’t happen.

Controversy makes people uncomfortable

To investigate further, the researchers moved into the lab. Here they manipulated the controversy of topics and then let participants have online conversations. Once again it was the moderately controversial topics that people talked about most. This was because:

• The most controversial topics were most interesting, but were also more uncomfortable to talk about, so tended to be avoided.
• However, it depends how anonymous you feel. When people talked anonymously online, they could bear more controversy than if they knew the person they were talking to.

So, our intuition that controversial subjects provoke discussion is tempered by the fact that people find it uncomfortable discussing them.

Whether you want people to talk about your website, product or business, or just talk to you (!), it seems that the sweet spot for controversy is right there in the middle.

Add a dash of controversy to heat up the debate, but not so much that people clam up.

Image credit: Pixel Fantasy

According to a survey conducted by psychologist Kevin Dutton—called the Great British Psychopath Survey—here are the top 10 professions with the most psychopaths:

1. CEO
2. Lawyer
3. Media (TV/Radio)
4. Salesperson
5. Surgeon
6. Journalist
7. Police Officer
8. Clergyperson
9. Chef
10. Civil Servant

And here are the professions with the least psychopaths:

1. Care Aide
2. Nurse
3. Therapist
4. Craftsperson
5. Beautician/Stylist
6. Charity Worker
7. Teacher
8. Creative Artist
9. Doctor
10. Accountant

Although people tend to think of psychopaths as killers—indeed about 15-25% of people in prison are psychopaths—in fact many people with psychopathic tendencies are not criminals.

Here are some of the traits of psychopaths:

• Self-confident
• Cold-hearted
• Manipulative
• Fearless
• Charming
• Cool under pressure
• Egocentric
• Carefree

If you look through the list of professions, then you can see how a few of these traits might be useful.

None of this means that every CEO or lawyer is a psychopath, nor should the suggestion be that having psychopathic tendencies is helpful in any of these jobs (although it may be!).

Rather, there is an overlap between psychopathic personality traits and the types of people who go into those professions.

Successful psychopath?

A few people try to talk up the benefits of psychopathic personality traits, saying that there are such things as ‘successful psychopaths’: people who benefit from being that way.

But many psychologists have questioned whether there really is such a thing as a ‘successful psychopath’.

That’s because research has found that psychopaths generally do worse at the things that are often associated with success: their relationships are worse, they earn less money and do not generally attain high status (research described in Stevens et al., 2012).

Maybe the standard for a ‘successful psychopath’ should be lower. We should simply be amazed that someone with little or no fear response, unlimited confidence and without fellow-feeling can live outside of an institution, let alone become a respected professional.

Image credit: Victor1558

What do you feel right at the start of a long-term project that you’re involved with—whether at work, school or home?

Enthusiasm? Energy? Optimism?

Then as the deadline/big day/launch/test/whatever-it-is approaches, the shine starts to come off, doesn’t it?

Happy, open-hearted optimism about how it’ll turn out tends to give way to pessimism, cynicism and downright despair.

If you’ve experienced something like this then you’re not alone. This emotional slide or ‘sobering up effect’ has been documented in all kinds of areas (studies mentioned in Sweeny & Krizan, 2012):

• Results of medical tests: people who took a medical test were more optimistic when the results were four weeks away than a few minutes away.
• Performance in an exam: people think their exam marks will be higher when asked one month before the results compared with 50 minutes before getting their grades.
• Driving test expectations: people are more pessimistic about their own driving skills when told they have to take a test to prove it right away.
• Corporate earnings forecasts: when analysts predict how much money a company is going to make, they become less optimistic the closer the release of the actual results.

And it turns out that the more important the outcome is to us, the stronger the sobering up effect.

So, how come people dampen down their expectations and optimism about an outcome as the moment of truth approaches? According to Sweeny and Krizan, there are four main reasons:

1. Controlling the emotions: people manage how they will feel about an outcome by changing their expectations. It feels better if the outcome exceeds your expectations. An ‘A’ grade is more enjoyable if you expected a ‘C’ than if you knew it was going to be an ‘A’. The same is true of disappointing results.
2. It’s out of my hands: once the test is taken or project completed; control over the outcome is gone. Although people have no control over the outcome, they can still control their own expectations of the outcome. Managing personal expectations is another way of exerting control over the situation.
3. From abstract to concrete thinking: when outcomes are way off in the future, people tend to think more abstractly and, therefore, more optimistically about them. When they are closer, they see all the things that could go wrong, and then they get more pessimistic.
4. Now we’re accountable: as the outcome approaches, people worry that their predictions might be too optimistic. It seems better to be cautious to avoid looking foolish.

While many people are hardened optimists—indeed humans as a species show a bias towards being optimistic—as the moment of truth approaches, most of us become pessimists.

That’s because, as Thomas Hardy put it:

“Pessimism is, in brief, playing the sure game. You cannot lose at it; you may gain. It is the only view of life in which you can never be disappointed. Having reckoned what to do in the worst possible circumstances, when better arise, as they may, life becomes child’s play.”

And there’s no time we need a ‘sure game’ more than when the chips are about to fall.

Image credit: Shandi-lee

Until now people have been gathering around tables and whiteboards without properly understanding what is going on in ‘The Meeting’.

Perhaps that’s why so many of them feel like a complete waste of time. As ‘The Meeting’ stretches out, participants start to feel lost, adrift, confused and unsure of the point.

But now, thanks to an analysis of 95 meetings by researchers at MIT, we understand this strange beast a little better (Kim & Rudin, 2013).

‘The Meeting’, it seems, sends out little clues about what stage it’s at through the language of those at ‘The Meeting’.

Although it sounds incredible, by close textual analysis of the words being used, you can tell when a decision is being made.

Usually, of course, decisions are avoided at all costs in ‘The Meeting’ in case anyone has to actually do anything as a result of ‘The Meeting’.

But if you listen carefully enough, you can hear the almost imperceptible signal that agreement is being reached. That signal, according to the MIT researchers, is when people start asking each other for specific information:

“As it turns out, the important parts of the meeting are characterized mostly by information and information request dialogue acts, and very few offers, rejections, or acceptances. We hypothesize that at the important parts of the meeting, when the decisions have been narrowed down and few choices remain, the meeting participants would like to ensure that they have all the relevant information necessary to make the decision, and that the outcome will fit within all of their constraints.”

The question is, then, how can you persuade other people to reach one of these mythical ‘decisions’ which we hear so much about, yet which are so elusive in ‘The Meeting’?

The researchers argue that top of the potential list comes the word ‘yeah’. Apparently when people start their utterances with ‘yeah’, this is a particularly good signal that ‘The Meeting’ is creeping ever-so-slowly towards this so-called ‘decision’.

OK, it’s a miracle and ‘the meeting’ has made its ‘decision’, now, how long ’till I can get out of here? Not so fast, now we’ve got the wrap-up.

The MIT researchers found that how long the wrap-up lasts depends on how long it’s taken to reach a decision. Once ‘The Meeting’ was over 14 minutes, the longer it was, the shorter the wrap-up. After the decision was made, people in ‘The Meeting’, if it was 14 minutes long, took 18 further minutes to wrap-up.

But, if ‘The Meeting’ went to 35 minutes, the wrap-up normally only lasted about 10 minutes.

Over to you…

Why not conduct your own experiments in meeting science? All you need is a boring meeting to go to and a keen eye for details:

• How long until people start asking each other for detailed information? (Here comes the decision.)
• How long until people keep starting their sentences with ‘yeah’? (This is it, we’re making a decision now.)
• How long does the wrap-up take as a proportion of total meeting length? (And then bliss, sweet freedom, ‘the meeting’ is over.)

Please send your results to MIT, not me.

Image credit: Kevin Dooley

Although our bodies might still be (sort of) working as we approach 100-years-old,  many wonder whether their minds will be sharp enough to appreciate life.

A new Danish study has looked at this by comparing the brainpower of two groups of nonagenarians (Christensen et al., 2013):

• The first group were born in 1905 and assessed at 93-years-old.
• The second group were born in 1915 and assessed at 95-years-old.

To see how dramatically lifespan is increasing, the chances of people in this study reaching 90 increased by almost 30% in just those ten years between 1905 and 1915.

But the main question is: did people born 10 years later perform any differently on standardised cognitive tests?

Indeed they did:

“…the 1915 cohort performed significantly better than did the 1905 cohort both in cognitive functioning and activities of daily living.”

So, being born just 10 years later meant that, by the time they got to 95, their minds were sharper. This improvement in scores of cognitive functioning is known as ‘the Flynn effect’ and has been demonstrated on young and middle-aged people repeatedly. The reasons for it are hotly debated:

“Improvements in education are likely to be a major underlying factor for the Flynn effect at younger ages, but even after adjusting for the increase in education between the 1905 and 1915 cohorts, the 1915 cohort still performed better in the cognitive measures, which suggests that changes in other factors such as nutrition, burden of infectious disease, work environment, intellectual stimulation, and general living conditions also play an important part in the improvement of cognitive functioning.”

Whatever the explanation, the results of this study suggest that as we approach old age, on average, we should arrive in better shape mentally than any previous generation.

Image credit: Patrick

In a survey of 30 professionals, here are the top 5 career regrets:

1. I wish I’d quit to pursue my passion sooner

Around one-third of employees are dissatisfied with their jobs (here are 10 keys to job satisfaction). Not everyone wants to quit the day job, but amongst those people who have quit to follow their passion, almost all wish they had done it earlier.

Most people stick to the safe job in the hope of relatively small increases in their pay and conditions and are put off change by fears about insecurity.

2. I wish I’d worked harder at college

Most people value a higher education and those that benefited from it wished they’d appreciated it more at the time. People thought they’d been in too much of a hurry to get through college and did not fully understand how good the experience was at the time.

They also regretted not using their education more in their chosen careers.

3. I wish I hadn’t focused so much on the money

People who decided on high-paying but dissatisfying careers regretted their decision. Money doesn’t really motivate, especially if you can earn enough in a variety of different lines of work.

Many people wanted to leave their high-paying jobs but had built up too many financial commitments and were unsure if they’d be suited to other jobs.

4. I wish I’d followed my hunches

Looking back on their careers, people perceived vital opportunities they didn’t take. Sometimes these opportunities looked risky but it turned out that they would have created big leaps forward in their careers.

These turning points were amongst the things that people regretted the most.

5. I wish I’d started my own business

People wanted more control over their lives and were fed up with being beholden to their managers. Naturally, then, they wanted to start their own business.

While many people think about starting their own business, only a fraction (perhaps 15%) think they have what it takes. People regretted not having the guts to do it.

Regrets shape the future

It’s clear that people’s regrets shaped how they thought about their careers in the past. But regret can also shape how we think about the future.

We actually anticipate regretting certain decisions, and this anticipated regret can paralyse decision-making. But research has shown that the regret we will actually experience isn’t as bad as we anticipate:

“Anticipated regret is such a powerful emotion that it can cause us to avoid risk, lower our expectations, steer us towards the familiar and away from new, interesting experiences. We anticipate more regret when we go against the grain, when we make positive decisions ourselves, rather than letting the chips fall as they may. And all for what? So that we can avoid something that won’t be that bad anyway and might not happen at all?” (from: The Power of Regret to Shape Our Future)

Image credit: Sodanie Chea

Although women can only conceive during a relatively short window during their monthly cycle…

“…scientists have not found any clearly observable, objective behavioral display associated with ovulation in humans.” (Beall & Tracy, 2013)

From an evolutionary point of view it’s mysterious, given the continuance of the species and so on. For one thing studies have not consistently found that women dress more sexily when they are more fertile.

But according to a new study, apparently women do provide a clue about their fertility:

“Across two samples (N = 124), women at high conception risk were more than 3 times more likely to wear a red or pink shirt than were women at low conception risk, and 77% of women who wore red or pink were found to be at high, rather than low, risk.” (Beall & Tracy, 2013)

Perhaps, whether consciously or unconsciously women use it as a more subtle signal than dressing more sexily, which in itself tends to be associated with social stigma. And red works to attract men:

“Individuals across cultures associate red with love and passion (Aslam, 2006). Studies using a range of methods and populations have demonstrated that women’s use of red is linked to sex and romance (e.g., Elliot & Pazda, 2012; Greenfield, 2005) and that men find women wearing or surrounded by red particularly attractive and sexually desirable (Elliot & Niesta, 2008).”

Although when they followed up this finding in another study, the researchers found the red signal for fertility was strongest in the winter compared with the summer. They guessed that this is because women can use other signals in the summer when less clothing needs to be worn.

Image credit: Mait Juriado

Nowadays it’s hardly news that self-control is vital to success in many areas of life.

The studies bear this out with boring monotony in education, in health, in terms of how much money you earn, in personal relationships and even mental health.

Consciously or otherwise, people with low self-control know it’s a disadvantage to be weak-willed. To make up for it they seek out others who do possess this magical property, both socially and as dating partners (Shea et al., 2013).

But, according to studies published in the last six months, a more subtle picture is emerging of the advantages and disadvantages of having, or lacking, self-control. These provide new answers to what self-control can do for you and what it can’t.

1. Can it make you happier?

One stereotype of people with high self-control is that they are boring killjoys. After all, how much fun can you have if you’re so in control all the time?

But, according to a new study by Hofmann et al., (2013), this stereotype is now being attacked. Their research showed that people with high self-control are happier because it helps them deal better with goal conflict.

Instead of agonising over whether to indulge in fattening foods, extra-marital affairs or cheap reality TV, people with high self-control find it easier to make the right choice. This is part of the reason they are happier. That and the fact they got better grades at school, earn more money, have better physical and mental health and so on.

2. Can it stop you lying?

Have you ever used a drug called ‘clorovisen’, also known as ‘zens’? And how many times have you used the drug in the last month?

That’s the question Meldrum et al. (2013) put to a group of 1,600 adolescents at a school in the US. Of these, 40 students admitted they had used the drug.

The weird thing is that the drug doesn’t exist. The researchers had made it up to see if anyone would admit to using a totally fictitious drug.

Apparently some people just can’t help lying and it’s those who have low self-control that succumb to the temptation more easily, even if, as in this situation, there was absolutely nothing to gain from it. It was just lying for the sake of lying.

3. Can it make you willing to sacrifice for others?

The benefits of self-control have become so well-known that it’s easy to overlook the disadvantages of iron self-control, because there are a few.

One comes out in neat research by Righetti et al., (2013) who found that in close personal relationships it was the people who had low self-control who were more willing to make sacrifices for their partner.

This is because sometimes that first instinctual reaction is to sacrifice your own interests to someone else. This happens before boring old self-interest kicks in.

But those lovely people with low self-control just can’t help themselves. Before they know what they’ve done, they’ve done something nice.

4. Can it make you fairer?

Another advantage of people currently low in self-control emerged in a study by Halali et al. (2013): they are fairer. Or at least they acted more fairly in an economic game played in the lab called ‘the ultimatum game’.

The findings took the authors by surprise. To explain them they think that those low in self-control acted more fairly because of fear of having less fair offers rejected.

Perhaps, but that’s a rather weaselly explanation. Maybe it was like the last study: the first instinctual reaction is to act fairly and this is only tempered by later, more selfish thoughts.

Whatever the explanation, it seems in some circumstances people with low self-control act more fairly.

5. Can it help you quit smoking?

Sure, self-control is handy when you’re trying to give up smoking, or any other long-standing bad habit. But how can you boost your self-control when it’s been depleted by a long, stressful day?

One way of fighting back against low self-control is to use abstract thinking. When we are thinking abstractly we are more connected to our overall goals.

This was recently tested for people who were trying to quit smoking (Chiou et al., 2013). Participants who concentrated on why they were quitting smoking managed to smoke fewer cigarettes. This was because it boosted their depleted self-control.

(Find out more about self-control and abstract reasoning.)

6. Can it improve your mental focus?

One of the major benefits of self-control is it enhances mental focus and the ability to ignore anxious thoughts.

Just this process was seen in a study by Bertrams et al. (2013) who had participants trying to do maths in their heads while under pressure. Those with low self-control in the moment were more distracted by negative thoughts and performed worse in the task.

Much the same was true in another study on dart tossing (McEwan et al., 2013). Here participants whose self-control was depleted were less accurate and less consistent at throwing darts.

7. Can it stop you snooping on your partner?

Have you ever read your partner’s email or text messages, or searched their pockets or been too inquisitive about where they were last night? It’s pretty common, with one survey suggesting two-thirds of young adults have invaded their partner’s privacy at some point.

Relationships without trust are hard. But perhaps it’s about more than just trust, it’s also about self-control. Maybe some people trust their partner, but can’t restrain themselves from a little snooping.

Brand new research by Buyukcan-Tetik et al., (2013) found that, amongst married couples, snooping behaviours were only lower when a person both trusted their partner and was high in self-control.

So it seems that snooping on your partner doesn’t necessarily mean you don’t trust them, it might be that you can’t resist (even though you don’t expect to find anything).

8. Can it be replenished with sugar?

Perhaps you’ve heard of the studies which show that people’s self-control is replenished by eating something, especially something sugary? The idea being if you’re feeling low on self-control, a glass of orange juice will do the trick.

But the idea that there is some physiological connection has now been questioned, with some believing that really it’s all about what you believe.

There’s evidence for this in a new study by Hagger & Chatzsiarantis (2013) who used a glucose mouth rinse to try and boost the self-control of those who were feeling mentally weak. It worked. By contrast they found that using an artificially sweetened placebo did not work to boost weakened self-control.

So maybe it’s not really the sugar that replenishes self-control, it’s the idea of sugar. In other words self-control is much less about what’s in your stomach than was previously thought.

9. Can it make leaders unethical?

Leaders are often under a lot of pressure to perform. This tends to sap their willpower meaning that under some circumstances it’s hard to make the right decisions.

For those low in moral convictions, perhaps this makes them more likely to make unethical decisions.

Joosten et al. (2013) found that when leaders who had high moral standards were under pressure, they still generally did the right thing. But, for those leader whose morals were questionable, low self-control made it much more likely they would slip over the line into unethical behaviours.

So, low self-control can make leaders unethical if they’ve got low moral standards.

10. Can it make you easier to hypnotise?

You might imagine—I certainly did—that being hypnotised is all about giving up your self-control to someone else. That suggests it would be easier to hypnotise someone who has low self-control.

That’s the theory Ludwig et al. (2013) had when they hypnotised 154 participants and also measured their self-control.

Contrary to their expectations—and mine—they found that having higher self-control made people easier to hypnotise.

The explanation they put forward is that people high in self-control try harder to ‘do well’ when they are hypnotised. People lower in self-control, however, get distracted and don’t pay so much attention to the hypnotic induction so are less hypnotisable.

Image credit: Bellah