The wonderful human behaviour that elevates all our morals.
Mind reading in psychology improves social skills, cooperation and teamwork immeasurably. So, who has the natural ability and how can it be improved?
Mind reading in psychology improves social skills, cooperation and teamwork immeasurably. So, who has the natural ability and how can it be improved?
People are surprisingly poor at mind reading or what psychologists call ‘mentalising’, which is working out what other people are thinking.
For example, experiments suggest we rarely do better than chance at rating how likeable, intelligent or attractive others think we are.
So, who is naturally best at mind reading, why do some people fail so badly and what can they do about it?
Mind-reading, or mentalising, involves understanding what other people are thinking from subtle cues in their language and behaviour.
In contrast, empathy refers to being able to read the emotions of others.
People who are good at mentalising tend to agree strongly with the following three statements:
People good at mentalising disagree strongly with this statement:
People with autism, in particular, are poor at mind reading.
It is probably no surprise that autism is four times more prevalent in men, who are consistently worse at mind reading.
Dr Punit Shah, study co-author, said:
“We will all undoubtedly have had experiences where we have felt we have not connected with other people we are talking to, where we’ve perceived that they have failed to understand us, or where things we’ve said have been taken the wrong way.
Much of how we communicate relies on our understanding of what others are thinking, yet this is a surprisingly complex process that not everyone can do.”
Dr Nicholas Epley of the University of Chicago in Social and Personality Psychology Compass, argues that the biggest obstacle to mind reading and understanding how we are viewed by others is our egocentric bias.
We are all stuck inside our own heads.
The egocentric bias means that when we try to imagine how we are seen by others, we can’t help but be biased by the way in which we see ourselves.
Effectively to read others’ minds, we first read our own minds.
Unfortunately, it turns out that we often don’t see ourselves as other people see us.
Here are two major reasons why:
The time-honoured approach for mind reading, including finding out what others think of us has been to try and take their perspective.
In a series of unpublished studies, though, Tal Eyal and Nick Epley found that this was not effective in increasing people’s accuracy.
Instead, three experiments on mind reading they conducted suggest the answer is to think about yourself at a higher level of abstraction.
Participants in one condition were asked to focus on central and defining features of the self rather than low level details.
They were then able to judge what others thought of them more accurately.
Dr Epley explains:
“You can look at yourself from the street level or you can look at yourself from the satellite level.
Other people see you from the satellite level, so if you think of yourself from that big picture perspective, you’ll tend to be more accurate.
While we live our own lives under a microscope and we are present all the time when we do things, other people are not there with us.
That’s a problem for intuiting other people’s thoughts because we tend to evaluate ourselves in much finer detail.
We look at ourselves from the street view, whereas other people are looking at us from space.”
One of the most obvious keys to mind reading is to pay attention to the person’s face and body language when you are trying to read their mind.
Few people do this as well as they think.
In fact, research shows that the young and the old are the worst at mind reading (De Lillo et al., 2021).
The reason is that both older adults and adolescents pay less attention to body language than those in between.
By ignoring more facial expressions, gestures and voice tones, the young and old get less information about other people’s mental states.
This means they find it harder to read other people’s emotions, intentions, desires and beliefs.
Naturally this also makes it harder to take someone else’s perspective and empathise with them.
Both empathy and perspective-taking are vital to enjoying social interactions.
Professor Heather Ferguson, study co-author, explained:
“Focusing less on people and their faces means that adolescents and older adults miss important cues, and this could lead to larger impairments in social interaction, or less opportunities to engage in social interaction with others.
During adolescence, 10-19-year-olds are still learning and developing peer relationships, so they are experiencing a rapid change in their social experiences and preferences.
For older adults, a substantial decline in social participation can lead to isolation, loneliness and poor health.
Both groups can therefore be significantly impacted by a lack of social engagement.”
The study, which included adolescents, younger adults and older people, used eye tracking technology.
The results showed that older people and adolescents spent less time looking at the face of the person they were talking to.
When walking around a busy environment, the young and old looked less at other people’s faces as they moved through it.
This is likely because of the extra processing required to navigate a complex social situation.
Of course, how good we are at mind reading depends on our motivation.
Being high in a quality called ‘mind reading motivation’ is linked to all sorts of social advantages, research finds (Carpenter et al., 2016).
People high in mind reading motivation tend to notice and observe small pieces of social information.
Dr Melanie Green, a study author, said:
“We’re not talking about the psychic phenomenon or anything like that, but simply using cues from other people’s behavior, their non-verbal signals, to try to figure out what they’re thinking.”
People high in mind reading motivation enjoy trying to work out what others are thinking and feeling.
This has all sorts of advantages for them including being better at teamwork and at cooperating.
They also seem to gain a more nuanced understanding of those around them, Dr Green explained:
“Those high in mind reading motivation seem to develop richer psychological portraits of those around them.
It’s the difference between saying ‘this person strives for success, but is afraid of achieving it’ as opposed to ‘this person is a great cook.'”
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Opening umbrellas indoors – why do even the most rational people have superstitious instincts?
Opening umbrellas indoors – why do even the most rational people have superstitious instincts?
Superstition means beliefs or practices that are false or irrational, including magic, astrology, luck and fortune telling.
For example, put your rational hat on, if you will, and consider these questions:
My head gives me the same answer to all these questions: no.
I don’t believe in fate so it’s not possible to tempt it.
And yet I get a muffled message – call it instinct or call it superstition – from the depths of my mind about how deeply I would regret it if it did actually rain, my team lost or my (old) ticket won the lottery.
It would be as though I had tempted the gods and been punished for my arrogance.
Psychologists Jane Risen and Thomas Gilovich were intrigued by just how many otherwise rational people seem to hold superstitious beliefs, and what causes them.
In their research, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, they wanted to find out if people really do believe that negative outcomes tend to follow actions that tempt fate.
And, if so, what psychological processes are responsible for this strange superstition.
Could it be that both rationality and instinct have some role to play?
First, Risen and Gilovich wanted to see whether a (presumably) reasonably intelligent bunch of Cornell University students thought tempting fate was bad luck.
Sixty-two students were approached randomly on campus and told about a scenario where a fictional ‘Jon’ had applied to Stanford University.
Jon’s mother, being confident in his ability, sends him a Stanford t-shirt.
Participants then read either one of these two endings to the story:
Participants were asked to rate his chances of being offered a place on a scale of 1 to 10.
People told he’d stuffed the t-shirt in the drawer responded that his chances were an average of 6 out of 10 – seems reasonable given there’s little other information provided.
But when Jon tempted fate people only rated his chances at 5 out of 10, a full point lower.
On average, then, this sample of Cornell University students believed tempting fate can increase the chances of a negative outcome.
This is surprising given that these students probably consider themselves intelligent and rational human beings.
Nevertheless a second experiment backed up this finding with a further 120 students.
It also tested an alternative explanation for the results: that participants were not reporting what they thought would happen, but what they wanted to happen.
No support was found for this alternative explanation suggesting participants really were displaying superstitious attitudes.
Next, Risen and Gilovich wanted to find out the reason for people’s superstitious behaviour.
They thought it might be because negative outcomes come to mind very easily.
To test this a further 211 participants were shown the start of 12 stories in some of which people tempted fate, and in others they didn’t.
They were then shown the ending of these stories and asked to indicate as quickly as possible whether it was ‘logical’.
Half of the stories were not logical – for example the main character changed or the topic was completely different – while the other half were logical.
Whether or not the endings were logical, though, was a bit of a red herring for the participants.
The experimenters weren’t so much interested in people getting the answer right, but in how quickly they did so.
Risen and Gilovich thought that if negative outcomes were more accessible when people tempted fate, then participants should correctly respond more quickly to those scenarios in which negative outcomes did actually follow tempting fate.
And that’s exactly what they found.
When people saw the outcome which didn’t ‘punish’ the characters in the story for tempting fate, they were slower to respond by almost half a second.
This suggested the negative outcome was more accessible so that participants were quicker to respond when the characters had tempted fate.
A further study confirmed that there was a causal link between people thinking negative outcomes were more likely and their accessibility.
In many ways, these are strange findings.
In an age when many of us claim to be rational and free of superstition, it seems we still have some quite mysterious and irrational beliefs about how the universe works.
This naturally raises the question of what is going on here.
So, in a final study the experimenters examined the psychological process that might be responsible for this connection between tempting fate and negative outcomes.
They hypothesised that the connection is due to automatic, associative processes which occur outside of conscious awareness.
These instinctually create the link between tempting fate and negative outcomes.
To test this idea they carried out an experiment similar to those before.
This time, though, in some conditions participants were placed under ‘cognitive load’ (i.e. they were given something else effortful to do at the same time).
The results showed that when under cognitive load people were even more likely to behave as though tempting fate leads to negative outcomes.
The experimenters argue that they successfully disrupted the rational, deliberate thinking processes which were trying to tell participants that tempting fate is superstitious rubbish.
Consequently, people were more likely to rely on their intuition – but it’s these fast automatic processes which tend to conjure up negative visions of the future, make people superstitious.
In effect, the extra task they were given limited their ability to think rationally and override their superstitious instincts.
This explanation of the roots of superstition is built on the now popular idea in psychology that many cognitive processes run at two levels:
Our superstitions (‘don’t tempt fate!’) come from the fast, associative, parallel processing part of the mind, while our rational, logical side comes from the (relatively) slow, deliberate processing (‘come on, there’s no such thing as fate!’).
Rationally we know it is no more likely to rain if we don’t take our umbrella, but our mind can’t help reminding us how bad we’ll feel if we tempt fate.
What this research demonstrates beautifully is how easy it is for superstitions like tempting fate to be formed.
We absorb superstitions from around us, especially vigilant for their occurrence and reinforced by any events that fit the pattern, conveniently forgetting events that don’t fit.
Then the fast, automatic processes of our minds automatically anticipate the regret we might feel in the future, trapping us in a reinforcing loop.
Risen and Gilovich point to the importance of culture in this process: our shared cultural imagination provides a major source of superstitions about tempting fate.
But we also each have a private menagerie of superstitions, sometimes manufactured from only the tiniest fragments of personal experience.
Whatever their original source, all manner of negative events can find fertile breeding ground in our already suspicious minds.
This can give even the most rational person pause for thought while the mind’s rational systems work to overcome its intuitive superstition.
Given this model it’s a miracle that human societies have escaped as far as they have from the age of superstition.
Or perhaps we haven’t come that far at all and our age-old superstitions are now just wrapped in cloaks of rationality?
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Consumerism promises happiness through purchasing, but psychologists find six reasons why it is unsatisfying and how to fix it.
Consumerism promises happiness through purchasing, but psychologists find six reasons why it is unsatisfying and how to fix it.
Consumerism is the idea that the consumption of goods is economically desirable.
Some would go further and say that consumerism means people’s happiness relies on acquiring goods — that people need to buy things in order to be happy.
Not everyone uses the word consumerism with this meaning.
Consumerism has also become a pejorative term since the 1970s, used to mean a frivolous and selfish collecting of products which has little regard for its effect on society or the environment.
Whatever the political angles on consumerism or anti-consumerism, psychologists have focused on some of its real-world effects on our happiness.
In the first place, everyone knows that buying stuff can be disappointing.
After swallowing the hype, checking out the options and trolling for bargains, finally you’ve got it; your brand new whatever-it-is.
Before long, though, the excitement fades.
Your whatever-it-is isn’t so great any more.
They’ve brought out a newer model with more features and anyway you’ve seen it cheaper elsewhere.
It’s happened to all of us.
Psychological research on consumerism tells us that this disappointment is particularly pronounced when people buy things like electronic devices or watches, compared with experiences like vacations or concert tickets (see: experiences beat possessions).
A study by Carter and Gilovich (2010) explores six reasons that material purchases are less satisfying than experiential purchases, and what we can do about it.
In their first study on consumerism, participants recalled past experiential and material purchases costing at least $50 and were asked to rate their satisfaction with them.
People were consistently more satisfied with their experiential purchases compared with their material purchases.
The reason is that experiential purchases are difficult to compare.
The band you went to see on that wet Tuesday after work on the spur of the moment is likely to be literally incomparable.
On the other hand, phones are much easier to compare: one has more memory while another looks prettier.
When it’s easy to compare two things, like salaries, dissatisfaction isn’t far away because there’s always someone who earns more than you or, in this case, has a better phone than you.
And if they don’t have it now, they will in six months because that’s the nature of consumerist culture.
There’s a crucial difference in the way we make decisions about material and experiential purchases, as revealed by the second study on consumerism.
When people choose material purchases they tend to use a strategy psychologists call ‘maximising’.
This means comparing all possible options.
But, because consumerism means we live in a world of endless choices, maximising takes a long time and is hard work; so people often end up irritated and unsatisfied even when they chose the best possible option.
However, when people choose experiential purchases they tend to use a strategy psychologists call ‘satisficing’.
This means setting a minimum standard for a purchase then choosing the first option that fits the bill.
Studies show that this leads to greater satisfaction with purchases and people are relatively untroubled by the existence of slightly better options.
Although maximising seems the better strategy, paradoxically it leaves people less satisfied than settling (sorry ‘satisficing’, ugh).
Consumerism means that it’s not just before purchasing that the availability of endless possibilities is problematic.
After purchasing, consumerism causes problems as well.
Imagine you buy a new electronic gadget costing $1,000.
After you’ve bought it, do you ever go back to look at the other options, just in case?
Would that change if it was a vacation you’d bought instead at the same price?
When researchers simulated the situation they found that, having bought a gadget, participants were more likely to continue investigating the alternatives than if they’d bought a vacation, despite not being explicitly asked to do so.
We automatically re-evaluate material purchases after we’ve made them.
In comparison, decisions about experiential purchases, once made, are not revisited and so we have less opportunity for disappointment.
It’s always the way: right after you buy it they bring out a new, improved model, or introduce better options.
The nature of consumerism and consumerist culture means there are always plenty of new ‘better’ options.
When Carter and Gilovich simulated this situation in the lab, participants reported that the new option effect was more disturbing when buying a watch, a pair of jeans or a laptop than when buying a holiday, movie ticket or fancy dining experience.
Once again experiential beat material purchases.
Like the introduction of new options, retailers also have a habit of dropping the price right after you buy something — that is the nature of consumerism.
Worse, the next day you spot it cheaper somewhere else.
Carter and Gilovich found that people were more troubled about the reduced price of laptops and watches than they were about cheaper holidays or meals out.
Similarly, participants reported being jealous of rivals who’d paid less for material purchases at another retailer, but weren’t so jealous when it came to experiential purchases.
Since consumerism is clearly with us to stay, this all begs the question of how we can be more satisfied with material purchases, other than simply trying to avoid all the above.
Carter and Gilovich wondered if it comes down to how we view our consumerist purchases.
Take music for example.
Buying music can be viewed as both an experiential and a material purchase in consumerism; it’s an object (even if digital), and it’s the experience of listening to the music: where you are, how it makes you feel and what you’re doing at the time.
Perhaps thinking experientially can help us avoid the disappointments inherent in consumerism?
In their last experiment on consumerism, the researchers encouraged half their participants to think of music as a material purchase and the other half as an experiential purchase.
They were then told the price had been reduced.
Sure enough participants who were thinking in experiential terms were less bothered by missing out on a bargain and therefore likely to be more satisfied with their purchase.
This experiment on consumerism suggests that thinking of material purchases in experiential terms helps banish dissatisfaction.
Try thinking of jeans in terms of where you wore them or how they feel, the phone in terms of how it changes your mood or outlook, even your laptop in terms of all the happy hours spent reading your favourite blog.
By thinking experientially we can make more of what we already have and ward off the invidious comparisons that can make the treadmill of consumerist culture so unsatisfying.
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Telepathy is the idea that thoughts can be transferred directly into someone else’s head. Although there is no evidence, many believe in it.
Telepathy is the idea that thoughts can be transferred directly into someone else’s head. Although there is no evidence, many believe in it.
Have you ever been thinking about someone and then moments later they’ve called you?
Is that random coincidence or something more?
People love to believe in supernatural powers like telepathy and ESP in general.
At least one-third of Americans report a belief in extra-sensory perception (ESP), including telepathy, with a further 40 percent refusing to rule out the possibility.
Surveys in Europe reveal similar figures with one study finding that almost two-thirds of people believe in some form of ESP.
Psychologists are particularly interested in why people have these sorts of beliefs in telepathy and ESP.
One common explanation is that people’s natural desire to make sense of what is a fundamentally random and confusing world is so strong that patterns are seen where there are none.
It’s like when we look at a visual illusion or watch a good magician: we’re easily tricked.
So what kinds of situations make us more prone to this magical thinking?
This is the question that inspired Fred Ayeroff and Robert P. Abelson to carry out a classic social psychology experiment on a group of students at Yale University in the 1970s (Ayeroff & Abelson, 1976).
They wanted to see if a simple experimental manipulation could be used to get people to act as though they believed in telepathy.
For their experiment they used 32 participants and a fairly standard set-up for a parapsychological ESP study.
One participant, the sender, was sent to a soundproof room and told to transmit a series of images telepathically.
The other participant, the receiver, was sent to another soundproof room and told to get ready to receive (this was the 70s remember!).
There were two experimental manipulations:
Then, once the experiment got under way, both sender and receiver were asked to say how confident they were that they had successfully transmitted (or received) each card.
Participants weren’t told how they had done on this apparent test of telepathy.
Looking at the results, Ayeroff and Abelson found no support for telepathy.
The participants had done no better than chance.
But, when they looked at how confident the participants had been about their telepathic powers, they did find an interesting effect.
When participants had not been allowed to choose the cards nor allowed to speak to each other before the experiment, their confidence in their performance was absolutely accurate: they predicted they wouldn’t be able to beat chance.
But, when they spoke to each other first, and when they chose the cards to transmit and receive, their confidence in telepathy shot way up to almost three times that expected by chance (see graph above showing results for the 4 conditions).
Suddenly, participants were acting as though they had been converted into believers simply by chatting to their telepathic partner and choosing the cards.
So, no evidence of ESP via telepathy, but evidence of the kinds of social situations in which people can be induced to believe in telepathy.
What this experiment shows is how remarkably easy it is to (effectively) turn people into believers in telepathy.
This makes it much clearer why people have a tendency to grasp at straws when trying to make sense of what is a random and chaotic world.
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Playing hard to get means being coy and vague about your interest to keep a potential partner keen. This can work if it is done correctly.
Playing hard to get means being coy and vague about your interest to keep a potential partner keen. This can work if it is done correctly.
Back in the 60s and 70s, before the sexual revolution had really taken hold, the standard dating advice for women was playing hard to get.
In some quarters it still is.
Social scientists in the 1960s accepted the cultural lore that women could increase their desirability by playing hard to get.
When interviewed, men seemed to agree: they said that women playing hard to get were probably more popular, beautiful and had better personalities.
Unfortunately every time psychologists used an experiment to test the idea that playing hard to get is a good dating strategy, their results didn’t make any sense.
At least not until 1973 when Elaine Walster and colleagues at the University of Wisconsin finally hit upon a method that teased out the subtleties (Walster et al., 1973).
Here’s what they did.
Single young men were given a folder containing details of five fictitious single women with quite similar descriptions.
They were told the computer had matched them and that three of the women had already seen and rated their own details and those of four other rival suitors.
This was all a ruse, however, to set up a series of experimental conditions related to how hard to get each of the women appeared to be.
Each woman fell into one of the following categories:
Each man saw the women’s ratings, including of themselves, then chose one to date.
One woman was far and away more popular than the others, and it had nothing to do with the small variations in their descriptions:
The woman who was apparently selectively playing hard to get, i.e. easy for you but hard for everyone else was the runaway winner for the men.
Not only that but men thought the selectively hard to get woman would have all the advantages of the easy to get woman with none of the drawbacks of the hard to get woman.
They thought she would be popular, warm and easy-going, but not demanding and difficult.
We have to be careful what conclusions we draw from this experiment: crucially it didn’t involve anyone meeting face to face, or address what happens when men play hard to get, plus it only looked at heterosexual matches.
But, a subsequent study on speed-dating has also found that showing selective interest is the best strategy (Eastwick et al., 2007).
Despite these drawbacks, once you’ve heard the results it’s difficult to imagine how it could have turned out any other way—after all, everyone wants to feel special.
So, this experiment suggests that playing hard to get only works in the sense that it signals selectivity.
But for the person you are after, you should be easy to get because otherwise they’ll assume you’re hard work.
The Roman poet Ovid wrote around 2,000 years ago:
“Easy things nobody wants, but what is forbidden is tempting.”
In the light of this experiment we can remix Ovid’s quote to:
“Easy things are tempting, but only if they are forbidden to others.”
There’s a maxim to live by.
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Self-awareness is low in some people and classic social psychology research helps to explain why self-knowledge eludes them.
Self-awareness is low in some people and classic social psychology research helps to explain why self-knowledge eludes them.
Self-awareness is being in touch with one’s own feelings, behaviours and traits.
High levels of self-awareness are often linked to high emotional intelligence.
However, many people seem blissfully ignorant of certain aspects of their own personalities.
Take an everyday example of lack self-awareness: there are some infuriating people who are always late for appointments.
A few of these people explain it by saying they are ‘laid-back’, while others seem unaware that they’re always late.
For laid-back people, their lateness is a part of their personality, there is self-awareness and presumably they are not worried about appearing unconscientious.
For the unaware it’s almost as if they don’t realise they’re always late — they lack self-awareness.
How is that possible?
It’s probably because they’ve never noticed or paid attention to the fact that they are always late so they never learn to think of themselves as lacking conscientiousness.
Or, so suggests a psychological theory describing how we think about ourselves called self-schema theory.
This theory says that we have developed ‘schemas’, like internal maps of our personalities, which we use to understand and explain our current and future behaviour to ourselves, e.g. I’m always on time for meetings so I’m a conscientious person.
These schemas, though, can cause problems for people’s self-awareness.
However, schema theory also suggests that these maps have uncharted areas, leaving people with certain blind spots in their self-knowledge.
This aspect of self-schemas was investigated in a classic social psychology study by Professor Hazel Markus (Markus, 1977) who examined not conscientiousness, but whether people thought they had independent or dependent personalities.
To do this she gave 48 female participants questionnaires which assessed their self-perceived independence.
It asked whether they were individualists or conformists and whether they were leaders or followers.
From their answers the women were sorted into three groups:
This third group that showed no clear pattern was labelled ‘aschematic’, i.e. having no schema about independence or otherwise — for one reason or another it was a hole in their self-awareness.
Crucially, though, this group was only arrived at after discarding the people who thought the dependence/independence dimension was important but happened to think they were independent in some situations but not in others.
Only those who truly didn’t care either way were labelled aschematic.
So, there were some people who appeared not to notice or even care about their independence (or otherwise) while others did notice it.
But Markus wanted to see if people were just saying these things, or whether they actually behaved as though they were true.
To find out she invited the same participants back to the lab a few weeks later to give them a few more tests.
This time she flashed up words on a screen, some of which were related to being independent, some dependent and some neither.
It emerged that participants who had said they were independent endorsed more words associated with being independent and did so quicker.
Dependents did the same with words related to being dependent but those who were aschematic showed no preference either way.
In further tests those who had identified themselves as independent remembered more examples of independent behaviour as well as resisting an experimental suggestion that they weren’t independent.
The same pattern was seen with the dependents.
The aschematics, however, could remember few examples demonstrating either dependence or independence and could easily be swayed by experimental suggestion towards believing they were dependent or independent.
It seemed they simply hadn’t been paying any attention to situations which marked them out as either dependent or independent people.
In other words, some people lack self-awareness.
What these results confirm is that the three groups of participants did actually think in different ways about the idea of independence.
Some believed they were independent, some not and the others didn’t know or, apparently, care.
In some ways the aschematics are the most fascinating category because they are the people that seemed not to realise whether or not they were independent.
And we all have these aschematic areas in our self-knowledge, traits which are blind spots to us but are perfectly obvious to others.
Unfortunately, the only way for us to find out is to ask other people, but this may prove difficult or embarrassing.
Still, while our hidden traits might be negative, they might also be positive: people are sometimes surprisingly unaware of their charm, warmth or conscientiousness.
Whether or not we pluck up the courage, this research reveals the fascinating and unnerving idea that some aspects of our own personalities may be completely mysterious to us only because we never bothered to take any notice of them.
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Media bias seems greater when you hold stronger beliefs about the subject, psychological research finds.
Media bias seems greater when you hold stronger beliefs about the subject, psychological research finds.
Media bias is a bias among journalists and news producers that affects which news stories they report and how they choose to report them.
Some of the most common ways in which media bias occurs are:
There are many more types of media bias.
Media bias certainly exists in the media: in fact it would be a miracle if it were permanently and perfectly balanced, that isn’t what this article is about.
Instead, this is about how you and I perceive the presence or absence of bias in the media.
This study, conducted in the 1980s, helps to explain a lot of the heat and light that gets produced by those commenting on media bias across the political spectrum, including the remarkably vitriolic outpourings often seen in the comment sections of newspaper websites and across the internet.
Robert P. Vallone and colleagues from Stanford University invited 144 Stanford undergrads who held a variety of views on the continuing Arab-Israeli conflict to watch some of the news coverage of the Beirut massacre (Vallone et al., 1985).
The Beirut massacre was the killing of between 328 and 3,500 Palestinian and Lebanese civilians by Lebanese militia forces in September 1982.
At the time the story received huge media coverage around the world with much speculation about whether Israeli forces had allowed it to happen (a subsequent commission held the Israeli government indirectly responsible).
Some of the participants recruited for the study were moderate in their initial views, others were specifically recruited from both the pro-Arab and pro-Israeli student associations.
Each was asked for their views about the conflict, its history and where their sympathies lay.
Here’s what they found:
All the participants then watched a series of news segments taken from US networks (NBC, ABC and CBS).
Afterwards they were asked to rate whether overall it was for or against Israel.
They used a scale of 1 (heavy pro-Arab bias) to 9 (heavy pro-Israel bias) where a rating of 5 was fair and impartial.
Here are the average ratings for the news coverage from each group:
As you can see the pro-Israeli participants thought the news reports were biased against Israel while the pro-Arab participants thought the news reports were biased against Arabs.
This is impressive because everyone was watching exactly the same news reports.
Even more surprising was that each thought that when someone neutral saw the coverage, it would persuade them to side with the opposite position.
Notice that those who claimed to be neutral thought the coverage had a slight pro-Arab bias.
This could be a hint of actual media bias or could be just an unacknowledged bias in those initially declaring themselves neutral.
The study demonstrates what the authors call the ‘hostile media phenomenon’: people’s tendency to view news coverage about which they hold strong beliefs as biased against their own position.
There were two mechanisms at work here:
Put simply: when we care about an issue, we tend not to notice all the points we agree with, and focus on the ones we don’t.
Whether the news actually is biased in one particular outlet about an issue that you care about can be very hard to quantify.
What we can say from this study is that people who care about a particular issue will tend to find media bias everywhere, whether or not it really exists.
Not only that but they are unlikely to admit this fact to themselves since this study, amongst others, also shows how remarkably resistant we are to admitting to our own biases, even when they are categorically demonstrated to us.
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Busy rush-hour commutes on public transport seem to distort our sense of time, making them feel longer than they actually are.
The top five list of personal fears of Americans: public speaking is at number 5.
The top five list of personal fears of Americans: public speaking is at number 5.
The first comprehensive survey of what Americans are afraid of has revealed that top of the list of personal fears is ‘walking alone at night’, not ‘public speaking’.
The full top 5 list of personal fears is:
People in the Chapman University survey were asked separately about fear of crime, and the researchers were surprised by the results.
Dr Edward Day, who led this part of the study, said:
“What we found when we asked a series of questions pertaining to fears of various crimes is that a majority of Americans not only fear crimes such as, child abduction, gang violence, sexual assaults and others; but they also believe these crimes (and others) have increased over the past 20 years.
When we looked at statistical data from police and FBI records, it showed crime has actually decreased in America in the past 20 years.
Criminologists often get angry responses when we try to tell people the crime rate has gone down.”
Here is the percentage of people who thought different crimes were on the increase:
In fact, crime is decreasing in the United States:
Across the different types of fears, the researchers looked at what characteristics of individuals predicted fear.
Dr. Christopher Bader, one of the study’s authors, explained:
“Through a complex series of analyses, we were able to determine what types of people tend to fear certain things, and what personal characteristics tend to be associated with most types of fear.”
What emerged were two factors that most consistently predicted high levels of fear:
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