Category: Social psychology

In road rage, small infractions can easily escalate to disproportionate responses.

People react far more strongly to social slights than they do to small acts of kindness.

It is true that people ‘pass forward’ small kindnesses paid to themselves, but they also pass on small slights with much more venom.

People tend to see courtesy as normal, so receiving it only slightly increases their own courteous behaviour.

Discourteous behaviour, however, can provoke strong irritation and a desire to punish others.

The psychological phenomenon may help to explain instances of road rage where apparently small infractions can easily escalate into disproportionate responses.

Professor Boaz Keysar, the study’s first author, said:

“For instance in driving, if you are kind and let someone go in front of you, that driver may be considerate in response.

But if you cut someone off, that person may react very aggressively, and this could escalate to road rage.

The one receiving the slight cannot imagine that the slighter lacks that appreciation.

And so it goes, because of such differential perception, they respond more and more strongly.

Small slights could escalate to unbelievable, irrational feuds.”

Small slights escalate

In the study, 40 participants exchanged money with one another.

The experimenters tested the effect of both giving and taking on how generous people were.

The results showed that perceiving that others were giving to them made people a little more generous to others.

By contrast, taking was linked to progressively higher levels of taking later.

Professor Keysar said:

“Acts of giving are perceived as more generous in social exchanges than objectively identical acts of taking.

Taking tends to escalate.

Reciprocity appears to operate on an exchange rate that assigns value to the meaning of events, in a fashion that encourages pro-social exchanges.”

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The study was published in the journal Psychological Science (Keysar et al., 2019).

The best liars don’t invent stories from scratch. Research reveals the tactic that helps them get away with deception.

The most effective way to lie is to stay close to the truth while adding a few carefully chosen embellishments.

So say respondents to a survey that asked people to report how much they lie, how good they are at it and what the best strategy is.

People who considered themselves poor liars said their attempts at deception usually resulted in vague or unclear statements.

The most common strategy was simply to omit information.

The study also found that men rate their own lying ability as roughly twice as high as women do.

Although, naturally, they could be lying.

Dr Brianna Verigin, the study’s first author, said:

“We found a significant link between expertise at lying and gender.

Men were more than twice as likely to consider themselves expert liars who got away with it.

Previous research has shown that most people tell one-two lies per day, but that’s not accurate, most people don’t lie everyday but a small number of prolific liars are responsible for the majority of lies reported.

What stood out in our study was that nearly half (40 per cent) of all lies are told by a very small number of deceivers.

And these people will lie with impunity to those closest to them.

Prolific liars rely on a great deal on being good with words, weaving their lies into truths, so it becomes hard for others to distinguish the difference, and they’re also better than most at hiding lies within apparently simple, clear stories which are harder for others to doubt.”

How expert liars operate

For the study, 194 people were asked how many lies they tell each day, how good they are at lying, who they told them to and how they told them.

According to the results, expert liars prefer face-to-face deception and seldom lie on social media.

People reported telling the most lies to friends, family and colleagues.

The most common type of lie was the ‘white truth’, followed by exaggeration, withholding information, mixing lies with truths and, finally, complete fabrication.

Everyday lies are surprisingly difficult to detect, Dr Verigin said:

“Time after time, studies have shown we are not as good at detecting lies as we think we are.

At best, most of us have a 50:50 chance of getting it right when someone is pulling the wool over our eyes.

We wanted to focus on those who are good at lying and try to understand how they do it and to whom.”

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The study was published in the journal PLOS ONE (Verigin et al., 2019).

A weird mental shortcut that makes us blame innocent people for a stranger’s mistake.

People tend to judge a whole group by the first person they meet from it.

It could be the first person at a company, a hotel or restaurant, or even the first person encountered from another country.

Any mistakes that first person makes are automatically applied to all the other people in the same group.

Conversely, a positive encounter with the first member leaves a lasting, favourable impression of the entire group.

It is as though the ‘first’ one becomes representative of all subsequent people from the same group.

Dr Janina Steinmetz, the study’s first author, said:

“If the first group member to do something is bad then the whole group is seen as bad, if the first group member to do something is great then the whole group is seen as great, and this is much less the case if the middle or the last member does something.”

First impressions stick

These findings stem from seven distinct studies tracking how we judge groups in real-world scenarios.

One scenario tested the effect of supermarket checkouts labelled with various numbers.

The results showed that if people had a bad experience at the checkout labelled ‘one’, they judged the whole store more harshly than if it was labelled five or six.

In another scenario, people were told that five research scientists had applied for a work visa.

When told that the scientist who received their visa first had made a serious mistake, people were more likely to judge the whole group as incompetent.

While seemingly irrational, this shortcut is deeply wired into human psychology.

Dr Steinmetz said:

“When the first one makes the big mistake, people are more likely to say that all these scientists are terrible and we don’t want them in the country.

People are more forgiving when the mistake is made by the scientist who receives their visa in the middle or last in the group and don’t make such a harsh judgment.”

Other scenarios had people judging athletes, students and even racehorses.

Dr Steinmetz said:

“If the first horse of a group that are trained together runs very slowly in its race then other members of its group are expected to be slow as well and people would be less likely to bet on them.”

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The study was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (Steinmetz et al., 2019).

The words that liars use only seem to distract observers from the truth.

People are better at detecting lies by ignoring the words and unconsciously judging facial expressions and tone of voice.

The words that liars use only seem to distract from the truth.

The conclusion comes from a study of people with aphasia — an inability to understand language, often caused by brain damage.

The research showed that people with aphasia are better at spotting lies than those whose language skills are intact.

Dr Nancy Etcoff, who led the study, said:

“As far back as the 1920s there are anecdotal reports of patients with aphasia being able to detect when people were lying.

In the popular book The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, Dr. Oliver Sacks describes a group of patients watching a politician on television and laughing at what they perceived to be his deceptive statements.”

Aphasic advantage

For the study, people were recorded while describing a scene they were looking at.

Sometimes they viewed a pleasant scene and described it truthfully; other times they viewed an unpleasant scene and told lies.

People with healthy brains performed very poorly, detecting lies only 50 percent of the time.

In other words, performance was no better than chance — like flipping a coin.

The aphasics, though, correctly identified the lies 73 percent of the time.

Dr Etcoff said:

“One question that may arise when considering these results is whether the patients with aphasia were better at detecting lies or at detecting emotional states.

Previous studies have not shown aphasics to be any better than people without brain damage in perceiving simple emotions – such as happiness or sadness.

In fact, because of their aphasia, these patients had impaired ability to understand what the volunteers were actually saying.

What they do seem to be more sensitive to are nuances in facial expression that reveal a disconnect between what someone is trying to express and what they really are feeling.”

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The study was published in the journal Nature (Etcoff et al., 2000).