Category: Psychology

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

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