We're Only Human...

A willingness to wonder

noreply@blogger.com (Wray Herbert) — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 16:49:00 +0000

Willingness is a core concept of addiction recovery programs, and a paradoxical one. Twelve-step programs emphasize that individual addicts cannot will themselves into recovery and healthy sobriety, indeed that the ego and self-reliance are often a root cause of their problem. Yet recovering addicts must be willing. That is, they must be open to the possibility that the group and principles are powerful enough to trump a compulsive disease.

It�s a tricky concept for many, and must be taken on faith. But now there may be a little bit of science to back it up, too. Psychologist Ibrahim Senay of the University of Illinois�Champaign figured out an intriguing way to create a laboratory version of both willfulness and willingness�and to explore possible connections to intention, motivation, and goal-directed actions. In short, some key traits needed for long-term abstinence.

He did this by exploring self-talk. Self-talk is just what it sounds like�that voice in your head that articulates what you�re thinking, spelling out your options and intentions and hopes and fears and so forth. It�s the ongoing conversation with oneself. Senay thought that the form and texture of self-talk�right down to the sentence structure�might be important in shaping plans and actions. What�s more, self-talk might be a tool for exerting the will�or being willing.

Here�s how he tested this notion. He had a group of volunteers work on a series of anagrams�changing the word sauce to cause, for example, or when to hewn. But before starting this task, half the volunteers were told to contemplate whether they would work on anagrams, while the others thought about the fact that they would be doing anagrams. It�s a subtle difference, but the former were basically putting their mind into wondering mode, while the latter were asserting themselves. It�s the difference between �I will do this� and �Will I do this?�

The wondering minds completed significantly more anagrams. In other words, they were much more goal-directed than were those who declared their intentions to themselves.

This is counterintuitive. Why would asserting one�s intentions to do something undermine that goal? Senay wanted to double-check these surprising results, which he did in this way: He recruited volunteers on the pretense that they were needed for a handwriting study. Some wrote the words I will over and over, while others wrote Will I. The idea was that self-posed questions about the future are fundamentally different than self-declarations. Questions should inspire thoughts about autonomy and motivation to pursue a goal�and in the end make the questioners more successful.

To test this, Senay again had the volunteers work on an anagram task. And again, the willful volunteers performed more poorly than the questioners. He ran another version of this experiment, but he changed the goal to exercise rather than anagrams, and got the same result: Those primed with the words Will I had greater intentions to exercise regularly than did those primed with I will. What�s more, when the volunteers were asked why they had decided to exercise more, the quesioners said things like �Because I want to take more responsibility for my own health.� Those primed with I will offered explanations like �Because I would feel guilty or ashamed of myself if I did not.�

This last finding is crucial. It indicates that those with questioning minds were more intrinsically motivated to change. Those asserting their will lacked this internal motivation, which explains their weak commitment to future change. Put in terms of addiction recovery, those who were asserting their willpower were closing their minds, narrowing their view of the future. Those who were questioning and wondering were open-minded�and therefore willing to see new possibilities for the future.

Selections from �We�re Only Human� appear regularly in the magazine Scientific American Mind. Wray Herbert�s book, On Second Thought: Outsmarting Your Mind�s Hard-Wired Habits, will be published by Crown in September.

Vieux, en bonne sante . . . et bilingue

noreply@blogger.com (Wray Herbert) — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 15:32:00 +0000

In French, that means old, healthy . . . and bilingual. I could just as well have used Google Translate to put that phrase into Finnish or Spanish or Chinese. The fact is, I don�t speak any of those languages fluently�any language except English really. Which puts me in good company: When Senator Barack Obama was campaigning for the presidency back in 2008, he told a crowd in Dayton, Ohio: �I don�t speak a foreign language. It�s embarrassing.�

It is embarrassing. But worse than that, it may be unhealthy. New research suggests that bilingualism may convey previously unrecognized cognitive benefits�benefits that appear early and last a lifetime. These benefits may go well beyond language itself. Indeed, speaking two languages may shape the mind and brain in fundamental ways, creating mental reserves that help stave off the ravages of dementia.

That�s the surprising possibility emerging from an ongoing research project at York University in Ontario. Cognitive psychologist Ellen Bialystok has for years been testing and comparing people who speak one or two languages, including children, adults and the elderly. Her overall conclusion is that bilingualism enhances the brain�s �executive control.� That�s a catchall term that encompasses the ability to pay attention, to ignore distractions, to hold information in short-term memory, to do more than one task at a time. It�s mental discipline, and it typically emerges in childhood and declines in old age.

Bialystok has tested this many different ways. Here�s one example: She had 4- and 5-year-old kids do a card sorting task. The cards show circles or triangles, some red and some blue, and the kids are told to sort the deck by color. Later they are told to switch�and sort the same cards by shape. Young children usually have great difficulty making this mental switch, but when Bialystok ran the experiment, bilingual kids were much better with the rule change. This indicates heightened executive control.

This advantage appears to persist into adulthood. Bialystok (working with various colleagues) compared bilinguals and monolinguals on various lab tests that require mental discipline. The Stroop test is one such test. That�s the one where you have the word R-E-D printed in blue, and you have to rapidly name the ink color rather than read the word. It�s hard�and again the bilinguals consistently did better than subjects who only spoke one language. Or looked at another way, monolinguals had a cognitive deficit�and this deficit appears to increase as adults get older.

Right into old age. Bialystok wanted to explore whether enhanced executive control actually has a protective effect in mental aging�specifically, whether bilingualism contributes to the �cognitive reserve� that comes from stimulating social, mental and physical activity. She studied a large group of men and women with dementia, and compared the onset of their first symptoms. The age of onset for dementia was a full four years later in bilinguals than in patients who had lived their lives speaking just one language. That�s a whopping difference. Delaying dementia four years is more than any known drug can do, and could represent a huge savings in health care costs.
Is there any downside to bilingualism? Yes. As reported on-line in the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science, Bialystok�s studies also found that bilinguals have less linguistic proficiency in either of their two languages than do those who only speak that language. They have somewhat smaller vocabularies, for example, and aren�t as rapid at retrieving word meanings. But compared to the dramatic cognitive advantages of learning a second language, that seems a small price to pay. Plus you can travel to Paris without the embarrassment of constantly thumbing through your dog-eared French for Dummies.

Wray Herbert�s �We�re Only Human� column appears regularly in the magazine Scientific American Mind. His book, On Second Thought: Outsmarting Your Mind�s Hard-Wired Habits, will be published by Crown in September.

Casting light on cheating and greed

noreply@blogger.com (Wray Herbert) — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 20:54:00 +0000

Louis Brandeis was already one of America�s most famous lawyers when Woodrow Wilson appointed him to the Supreme Court in 1916. He was a tireless and prescient critic of big investment banks�including bankers� excessive bonuses�an argument he spelled out in his influential book of essays, Other People�s Money and How Bankers Use It. His solution for the problem of concentrated financial power was unfettered public scrutiny, a belief he summarized in his famous statement: �Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman.�

Justice Brandeis was an intuitive psychologist. When he said that the �broad light of day� would purify men�s actions, he was anticipating a field of research that is just now beginning to illuminate the intricate interplay of the mind, the body, and morality. Light, it appears, does much more than distinguish day from night; it takes away our illusion of anonymity and, in doing so, literally keeps us honest.

This seems obvious on one level. Streetlights were most likely invented to deter crime, and big power outages are almost inevitably followed by looting. But darkness in that sense is actual cover for criminals, like a mask. The new research suggests that even non-criminals may be influenced by the metaphorical meaning of light and darkness, becoming more dishonest and self-centered as light diminishes.

Here�s the science. Three psychologists�Chen-Bo Zhong and Vanessa Bohns of the University of Toronto and Francesca Gino of the University of North Carolina�wanted to explore the idea that metaphorical darkness leads to illusory anonymity, and in turn to moral transgression. In one experiment, they had a group of volunteers perform a complicated mathematical task�so complicated that it was impossible to complete in the time allotted. When they ran out of time, the volunteers were told to pay themselves only for the work they were able to finish. This was all done anonymously, although secretly the scientists were monitoring the volunteers� actions.

Half the volunteers did this sham exercise is a brightly lit room, with twelve overhead light bulbs, while the others did it in a room dimly lit by just four bulbs. The idea was to see if those in the darker room were more likely to cheat than those working in bright light. And they were, indisputably. They not only lied about their performance on the difficult task, they also paid themselves more cash for work they had failed to do. In short, they lied, cheated and stole money.

It�s important to note that, while one room was darker than the other, neither room was actually dark. That is, the lack of illumination was not enabling the cheating; and indeed, the task was (ostensibly) anonymous anyway, so there was nothing really to hide. It�s not like they were tip-toeing out of the room with cash. Yet the dim lighting gave volunteers the psychological license to behave unethically.

These findings were bizarre enough that the scientists wanted to double-check them. So in a second experiment, instead of dimming the room, they had only some of the volunteers wear sunglasses to dim their view. Then all the volunteers participated in a laboratory exercise called the dictator�s game. The dictator�s game is a test of fairness and greed; one volunteer (the initiator) has a given pot of cash, and is allowed to give away all, some or none of it to another, who can accept or reject it. In this experiment, all the volunteers were initiators; the scientists simply wanted to see how generous or stingy they were, depending on whether they were wearing sunglasses or not.

Shades corrupt. As reported on-line in the journal Psychological Science, those with a slightly darkened view of the world gave away considerably less money�less than what�s fair and less than the volunteers not wearing shades. Darkness gave them the sensation that they were more concealed, and that in turn made them greedier people.

Think about this for a minute. The researchers were not manipulating light and darkness so that some actually had more cover. They were the ones perceiving a darker world, and that perception was enough to license their transgressions. What�s going on here? Well, the researchers believe that dimming the lights or wearing sunglasses is a kind of egocentric mental �anchor�; because they see the world as somewhat darkened, they assume that others have an obscured view of them as well. They act not as if they have sunglasses on, but as if there has been a widespread power outage that has darkened everyone's world.

Kids are notoriously egocentric in this way. They�ll close their eyes when they play hide-and-seek, thinking that they can�t be seen if they themselves can�t see. Apparently, adults don�t outgrow this egocentrism entirely. But what�s cute in a childhood game of hide-and-seek isn�t nearly so cute in grownup games with other people�s money.

For more insights into the quirks of human nature, visit the �Full Frontal Psychology� blog as True/Slant. Excerpts from �We�re Only Human� appear regularly in the magazine Scientific American Mind. Wray Herbert�s book, On Second Thought: Outsmarting Your Mind�s Hard-Wired Habits, will be published by Crown in September.

An angry voter is an ignorant voter

noreply@blogger.com (Wray Herbert) — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 19:51:00 +0000

Imagine this scenario: You lost your job at the lumber yard early in 2009. Nobody is building new homes these days, and this slowdown has trickled down to suppliers all over the country. What�s worse, you�re dipping into savings just to make your own mortgage payments�on a house that has lost a big chunk of its value. In short, your American dream is in shambles.

It�s a dreary but all too familiar scenario. Now imagine further how you feel about this. Is worry your primary emotion? Are you anxious about your wife�s health, and the possibility of an expensive hospitalization? Are you fearful about depleting your kids� college funds? Where will you all live if you lose the house?

Or are you mostly angry? After all, this situation is totally unfair, given how hard you have worked all these years. Who�s to blame? Those fat cat bankers are still drawing their obscene bonuses, while working guys like you are barely eking out a living. Someone�s got to pay for this mess.

Both fear and anger are understandable under these dire circumstances. But what are you going to do? Well, there�s an election coming up later this year. Here�s your chance to at least take some action, to raise your citizen�s voice and be heard. How will you exercise this civic responsibility when you go to the polls in November?

We like to think that our democracy is rational, that as voters we educate ourselves on the issues and choose the candidate who best represents our views. Emotions, while natural, would seem to undermine this civic ideal, leading to cynicism and confused thinking and wrongheaded choices. But is it so simple? New research suggests that emotions can indeed skew voting behavior�but in surprising and nuanced ways.

University of Massachusetts scientists Michael Parker and Linda Isbell rigged an election to explore the interplay of specific emotions and voting. Not a real election, of course, but a hypothetical Democratic primary election for the Massachusetts state senate. They created two candidates, John Clarkson and Tom Richards, each with detailed positions on a dozen important public issues. The candidates� positions are spelled out on the candidates� Web sites, along with general information on each aspiring senator.

The researchers recruited a large number of volunteers, all Massachusetts residents, to act as voters in this election. They were directed to the Web sites, and told to peruse as much information as they liked, in any manner they wanted�and to consider whatever they needed to make an informed voting decision. Clarkson and Richards actually agreed on most of the issues, though they stated their views differently. The general information was vague, but made clear that each candidate was well qualified.

But here�s the rub: Before the voters started researching the issues and candidates, some were primed for fear and others for anger�much like the scenarios above. The idea was to see if these two basic human emotions shaped civic behavior in different ways. That is, did angry citizens size up candidates one way, and anxious voters a different way? And did these thinking styles translate into different behavior at the polls?

The answer is a resounding yea. As reported on-line in the journal Psychological Science, the worried voters were much more deliberate and organized in their thinking than were the angry voters, spending significantly more time exploring the candidates� Web sites. What�s more, the anxious citizens actually voted for the candidates whose positions they agreed with; in other words, democracy worked the way it�s supposed to work. This may seem obvious, but it wasn�t to the angry citizens, for whom there was no apparent connection among issues and positions and ballot-box choices.

So what was influencing the angry voters, if not the issues of the day and the candidates promises? Apparently it was the vague general information that guided their choices. In the real world, that means things like basic name recognition, party loyalty, and simplistic political labels. The angry voters didn�t take the time to really concentrate on the issues and positions, and instead let these skimpy generalities guide them. It appears their anger was switching their brain from deliberate mode to automatic mode�to gut feelings more than rational analysis. The worried citizens had too much at stake to trust their gut.

For more insights into the quirks of human nature, visit the �Full Frontal Psychology� blog at True/Slant. Excerpts from �We�re Only Human� appear regularly in the magazine Scientific American Mind. Wray Herbert�s book, On Second Thought: Outsmarting Your Mind�s Hard-Wired Habits, will be published by Crown in September.

The Mind of a Misanthrope

noreply@blogger.com (Wray Herbert) — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 20:19:00 +0000

I become misanthropic every February. I avoid social gatherings, and really just want to hole up at home. I always assumed it was the dark evenings and slippery sidewalks and general misery of venturing outside. But truth be told, I don�t want guests visiting me either. Not until the crocuses come through.

Or not until cold and flu season is over, more accurately. New research suggests that my anti-social ways may have little to do with friendliness or lack of it. Indeed, my attitudes and actions may be self-protective, part of an ancient, hard-wired psychological immune system, shaped over eons to help humans steer clear of germs.

Think of it from an evolutionary point of view. Group living conveyed many survival benefits for early humans, but it also carried risks�most notably the spread of harmful disease. The body�s immune system is very good at fighting off germs, but it�s a costly system to operate. In the parlance of immunology, people are vectors, and another way to avoid sickness is simply to avoid disease carriers in the first place. In this sense, extraversion is costly and introversion is adaptive�especially during flu season.

That�s the theory at least, which psychologist Chad Mortensen of Arizona State University has been investigating in his lab. He and his colleagues wanted to see if exposure to germs�or at least the idea of germs and illness�would change people�s basic perceptions about themselves as social beings. To test this, they showed a group of volunteers a slide show about germs and contagious disease, while control subjects watched a slide show about architecture. Afterward, all the volunteers completed a personality inventory, which includes measures of extraversion, agreeableness and openness to experience. Finally, the researchers assessed each volunteer�s feelings of vulnerability to disease� basically, how much they fret about getting sick.

They anticipated that the volunteers with disease on their minds would see themselves as more reclusive. And that�s just what they found. The infection-minded volunteers saw themselves as less gregarious than did controls, and the hypochondriacs in the group also saw themselves as less open-minded about people and less cooperative. In other words, the more intense the volunteers� worry about infection, the less they desired the company of others.

That�s striking in itself. But attitudes and self-perceptions are only an effective defense if they change people�s actual behavior. So in a second experiment, the scientists came up with an ingenious way to measure actual avoidance. As before, they primed only some of the volunteers with worries about infection and illness. Then they exposed all the volunteers to pictures of faces, while measuring their arm movements. Very subtle pushing away is an indicator of social avoidance, as when we push away something undesirable; flexing similarly indicates acceptance. As expected and reported on-line in the journal Psychological Science, those primed to fret about germs were more avoidant; and the chronic hypochondriacs were the most avoidant by far.

So that�s a pretty nifty defense mechanism. Or at least it was at one time. But these evolved tendencies are often blunt instruments, and this hard-wired bias against germs may go awry in the modern world. For example, sensitivity to disease threats can be indiscriminate, causing people to judge and avoid not only sick people but also obese people and people with disabilities. And because people who are unfamiliar pose an especially potent threat of unknown diseases, the psychological immune system might also foster xenophobia toward foreigners, anti-gay attitudes, and right-wing authoritarianism. That�s a big price to pay, just to dodge a sore throat and sniffles.

For more insights into the quirks of human nature, visit the �Full Frontal Psychology� blog at True/Slant. Excerpts from �We�re Only Human� appear regularly in the magazine Scientific American Mind. Wray Herbert�s book, On Second Thought: Outsmarting Your Mind�s Hard-Wired Habits, will be published by Crown in September.

Focusing on the Cinematic Mind

noreply@blogger.com (Wray Herbert) — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 20:21:00 +0000

Our household is a rolling Alfred Hitchcock festival. We almost always have at least one of the celebrated director�s films on DVD, and over the years we have watched most of our favorites�Suspicion, North by Northwest, The 39 Steps�time and time again. It�s a tribute to the master�s skills and sensibility that his films have such enduring appeal, because many films from the same time period have a distinctly �old� feel to them. It�s not just the primitive cameras and films. There is something about the rhythm and texture of early cinema that has a very different �feel� than modern films. But it�s hard to put one�s finger on just what that something is.

New research may help explain this elusive quality. Cognitive psychologist and film buff James Cutting of Cornell University decided to use the sophisticated tools of modern perception research to deconstruct 70 years of film, shot by shot. He measured the duration of every single shot in every scene of 150 of the most popular films released from 1935 to 2005. The films represented five major genres�action, adventure, animation, comedy and drama. Using a complex mathematical formula, Cutting translated these sequences of shot lengths into �waves� for each film.

What Cutting was looking for were patterns of attention. Specifically, he was looking for a pattern called the 1/f fluctuation. The 1/f fluctuation is a concept from chaos theory, and it means a pattern of attention that occurs naturally in the human mind. Indeed, it�s a rhythm that appears throughout nature, in music, in engineering, economics, and elsewhere. In short, it�s a constant in the universe, though it�s often undetectable in the apparent chaos.

Cutting found that modern films�those made after 1980�were much more likely than earlier films to approach this universal constant. That is, the sequences of shots selected by director, cinematographer and film editor have gradually merged over the years with the natural pattern of human attention. This explains the more natural feel of newer films�and the �old� feel of earlier ones. Modern movies may be more engrossing�we get �lost� in them more readily�because the universe�s natural rhythm is driving the mind.

What does this mean? Cutting doesn�t believe that filmmakers have deliberately crafted their movies to match this pattern in nature. Instead, he believes the relatively young art form has gone through a kind of natural selection, as the edited rhythms of shot sequences were either successful or unsuccessful in producing more coherent and gripping films. The most engaging�and successful�films were subsequently imitated by other filmmakers, so that over time the industry as a whole evolved toward an imitation of this natural cognitive pattern.

Over all, action movies are the genre that most closely approximates the 1/f pattern, followed by adventure, animation, comedy and drama. But as Cutting reports on-line in the journal Psychological Science, individual films from every genre have almost perfect 1/f rhythms. The Perfect Storm, released in 2000, is one of them, as is Rebel Without a Cause, though it was made in 1955. So too is The 39 Steps, Hitchcock�s masterpiece from way back in 1935.

For more insights into the quirks of the human mind, visit the �Full Frontal Psychology� blog at True/Slant. Excerpts from �We�re Only Human� appear regularly in the magazine Scientific American Mind. Wray Herbert�s book, On Second Thought: Outsmarting Your Mind�s Hard-Wired Habits, will be published by Crown in September.

A Salvo in the Calorie War

noreply@blogger.com (Wray Herbert) — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 20:51:00 +0000

The calorie war is heating up. It�s actually been simmering for some time, sparked by an alarming obesity rate among young Americans and related spikes in diabetes and other health problems. Nobody really disputes this sorry trend anymore, but there is a lot of disagreement over what to do about it. Public health advocates are clamoring for everything from warning labels on junk food to aggressive television marketing campaigns, even for outright prohibitions. Just last week, the Obama administration entered the fray, calling for a total ban on candy and soda in the nation�s schools.

Some see the past tobacco war as the proper model for this public health campaign. Indeed, one idea that has gotten traction recently is another �sin tax��this one a fat and sugar tax�to dissuade people from eating junk food. Yale University psychologist and diet expert Kelly Brownell, writing in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine last spring, called for a penny-per-ounce tax on soda sweetened with sugar or corn syrup. Only such a tax, he believes�and not lectures about nutrition and exercise�will make people eat more sensibly, and what�s more, the revenue could be used to promote healthier foods and habits.

Not everyone agrees. Pricing strategies may well be a key to changing behavior, but others favor subsidies over punitive taxes, as a way to encourage people to eat fruits and vegetables and whole grains. The problem is that both these market approaches�taxes and subsidies�are founded on the belief that people make rational economic decisions: Make it cheaper and people will eat more of it, more expensive and people will eat less. But decades of behavioral economics research argues that consumers are not always so rational. And the two strategies have never been tested head to head, to see which one most effectively alters calorie consumption.

Until now. Leonard Epstein, a clinical psychologist at the University of Buffalo, decided to explore the persuasiveness of sin taxes and subsidies in the laboratory, and he did so in an innovative way. He and his colleagues turned their lab into a simulated grocery store, �stocked� with images of everything from bananas and whole wheat bread to Dr. Pepper and nachos. A group of volunteers�all mothers�were given laboratory �money� to shop for a week�s groceries for the family. Each food item was priced the same as groceries at a real grocery nearby, and each food came with basic nutritional information.

The mother-volunteers went shopping several times in the simulated grocery. First they shopped with the regular prices, but afterward the researchers imposed either taxes or subsidies on the foods. That is, they either raised the prices of unhealthy foods by 12.5 %, and then by 25%; or they discounted the price of healthy foods comparably. Then they watched what the mothers purchased.

It�s important to know how the scientists defined healthy and unhealthy foods. They used an index called calorie-for-nutrition value, of CFN, which simply means the number of calories one must eat to get the same nutritional payoff. So for example, nonfat cottage cheese has a very low CFN, because it is packed with nutrition but not with calories; chocolate chip cookies have a much higher CFN. The most sinful food in the store was commercial iced tea, with a whopping CFN equivalent to ten times that of chocolate chip cookies. The researchers also measured the energy density�basically calories�in every food.

Then they crunched all the data together, and the findings were striking. To put it bluntly, taxes worked and subsidies did not. Specifically, taxing unhealthy foods reduced overall calorie intake, while cutting the proportion of fat and carbs and upping the proportion of protein in a typical week�s groceries. By contrast, subsidizing the prices of healthy food increased overall calorie consumption without changing the nutritional value at all. Why? As reported on-line last week in the journal Psychological Science, it appears that mothers took the money they saved on subsidized fruits and vegetables and treated the family to some chips and soda pop. Taxes had basically the opposite effect, shifting spending from junk to healthier choices.

The scientists conclude that subsidizing broccoli and yogurt�as appealing as that idea might be to some�is unlikely to bring about the massive weight loss the nation now requires.

For more insights into the quirks of human nature, visit the �Full Frontal Psychology� blog at True/Slant. Excerpts from �We�re Only Human� appear regularly in the magazine Scientific American Mind. Wray Herbert�s book, On Second Thought: Outsmarting Your Mind�s Hard-Wired Habits, will be published by Crown in September.

The Science of Recovery

noreply@blogger.com (Wray Herbert) — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 17:22:00 +0000

Over the past few years, I have written many short essays on new findings in psychological science. Most have these have appeared in this blog, "We're Only Human," but many others have been published in Newsweek.com and, more recently, in the "Full Frontal Psychology" blog at True/Slant. At this point, I have written enough that I am beginning to identify clusters of essays all focusing on a particular topic, and I thought it might be useful to organize these topical essays in a way that's more useful to readers.

One such topic is the science of recovery. There have been volumes written on the science of alcoholism and others addictions, but surprisingly little on the behavioral and brain science underlying recovery from addiction and relapse prevention. Many recovering alcoholics and addicts believe it is unimportant to understand the why and how of the sober mind, indeed that science cannot fathom the spiritual aspects of 12-step programs. No argument there, but many others may be curious about what science has to say about this program and its principles. For those readers, I have compiled an annotated listing of essays on this subject. Some of these essays address specific steps and principles of recovery--like powerlessness and pride and moral inventory; others deal with what might be called the folk wisdom of recovery. It's a work in progress, and will continue to grow as new science emerges. I also invite reader comments and suggestions of related reading, with the goal being the most thorough resource available on the psychology of sobriety.

"The future is lookin' sweet" The HALT principle, specifically the H

"The Science of Prayer" The destructiveness of resentment, and a strategy for defusing it

"The Perils of Willpower" The counter-intuitive idea that willpower is a character flaw

"I am a lovable person." "Not" On the harmful message of the self-esteem movement

"Hey, you're wearing me out!" The power and peril of the group

"Try a Little Powerlessness" The first step to recovery

"The Paradox of Temptation" Relapse prevention and "forbidden fruit"

"A Recipe for Motivation" The KISS principle: Keep it simple, stupid

"Sudoku in the Saloon" Alcohol and aggression

"Neurons of Recovery" Honesty, authenticity, moral inventory

"The Two Faces of Pride" Healthy pride, and perilous pride

"Destined to Cheat?" Attitudes, beliefs and cheating

"Pumping Emotional Iron" Overtaxing the mind's powers

"Who Says Quitters Never Win?" When to throw in the towel on moderation

"Oops, I did it again" Arrogance and mistakes

"Why Does Self-Reliance Make You Sick?" The (fatal) risks of social isolation

"The Empathy Gap" Why we're so bad at predicting cravings

"Talking the Talk" The value and danger of public declarations

"A willingness to wonder" Willpower vs willingness

So let's get the discussion going. This blog posting is free for the taking, as is any of the essays in "We're Only Human." Journalists, bloggers, website editors--indeed anyone with an interest in this topic--is encouraged to link to this post or to reproduce it, either electronically or in print. Please link back to The Science of Recovery so we can grow this resource and develop a network of interested readers.

The "Super Uncles" of Samoa

noreply@blogger.com (Wray Herbert) — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 19:34:00 +0000

Male homosexuality doesn�t make complete sense from an evolutionary point of view. It appears that the trait is heritable, but since homosexual men are much less likely to produce offspring than heterosexual men, shouldn�t the genes for this trait have been extinguished long ago? What value could this sexual orientation have, that it has persisted for eons even without any discernible reproductive advantage?

One possible explanation is what evolutionary psychologists call the �kin selection hypothesis.� What that means is that homosexuality may convey an indirect benefit by enhancing the survival prospects of close relatives. Specifically, the theory holds that homosexual men might enhance their own prospects by being �helpers in the nest.� By acting altruistically toward nieces and nephews, homosexual men�bachelor uncles in effect�would perpetuate the family genes, including their own.

Two evolutionary psychologists have been testing this idea for the past several years on the Pacific island of Samoa. Paul Vasey and Doug VanderLaan of Lethbridge University, Canada, chose Samoa because male homosexuals there�called fa�afafine�are widely recognized and accepted as a distinct gender category, neither man nor woman. The fa�afafine tend to be effeminate, and to be exclusively homosexual. This clear demarcation makes it easier to identify a sample for study.

The researchers have shown in past research that the fa�afafine behave much more altruistically toward their nieces and nephews than do either Samoan women or heterosexual men. They babysit a lot, tutor the kids in art and music, and help out financially�paying for medical care and education and so forth. That�s interesting in itself, but it�s unclear just why they behave this way. What�s going on cognitively that supports such avuncular acts. In their most recent study, the scientists set out to unravel the psychology of the fa�afafine, to see if their altruism is targeted specifically at kin rather than kids in general.

They recruited a large sample of fa�afafine, and comparable samples of women and heterosexual men. They gave them all a series of questionnaires, measuring their willingness to help their nieces and nephews in various ways�caretaking, gifts, teaching�and also their willingness to do these things for other, unrelated kids. The findings, reported on-line this week in the journal Psychological Science, lend strong support to the kin selection idea. Compared to Samoan women and heterosexual men, the fa�afafine showed a much weaker link between their avuncular behavior and their altruism toward kids generally. This cognitive disconnect, the scientists argue, allows the fa�afafine to allocate their resources more efficiently and precisely to their kin�and thus enhance their own evolutionary prospects.

But these aren�t your garden variety uncles. From an evolutionary perspective, you can�t make up for not having any offspring just by giving a toy to your nephew, or tossing a football with your niece once in a while. Indeed, to compensate for being childless, each fa�afafine would have to somehow support the survival of two additional nieces or nephews who would otherwise not have existed. In short, the fa�afafine must be �super uncles� to earn their evolutionary keep.

Do these findings have any meaning outside of Samoa? Yes and no. Samoan culture is very different from most Western cultures. Samoan culture is very localized, and centered on tight-knit extended families, whereas Western societies tend to be highly individualistic and homophobic. Families are also much more geographically dispersed in Western cultures, diminishing the role that bachelor uncles can play in the extended family, even if they choose to. But in this sense, the researchers say, Samoa�s communitarian culture may be more�not less�representative of the environment in which male homosexuality evolved eons ago. In that sense, it�s not the bachelor uncle who is poorly adapted to the world, but rather the modern Western world that has evolved into an unwelcoming place.

For more insights into human nature, visit the �Full Frontal Psychology� blog at True/Slant. Excerpts from �We�re Only Human� appear regularly in the magazine Scientific American Mind. Wray Herbert�s book, On Second Thought: Outsmarting Your Mind�s Hard-Wired Habits, will be published by Crown in September.

A warm glow in Bangkok

noreply@blogger.com (Wray Herbert) — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 17:25:00 +0000

Say you are traveling in a foreign country, trying to find your way through the bustling capital city. Not Paris or London, some place a bit edgier. Bangkok. You don�t speak the language, and you�re a little frazzled. You walk into a caf� for some respite, and to your surprise to see a fellow you know from back home sitting at a corner table, sipping coffee. He�s hardly a friend, but you know him to say hello. How do you feel? Well, after the initial surprise, you probably feel a warm glow as you walk up and greet him. You�re genuinely happy to see his familiar face in this strange place. He�s like an old friend.

Now, simply switch cities. You�re back at home and the same basic scenario takes place: You walk into a caf�, and there�s the same acquaintance, sitting at a corner table sipping coffee. How do you feel today? Well, if you�re like most people, you don�t feel much of anything. You recognize him, but no smile comes to your face. You might nod hello, but you�re really more focused on getting your morning coffee.

Same face, similar scenario. So what�s going on here? Are you a couple of hypocrites? Well, don�t feel bad. First of all, he�s probably not feeling all that warmly toward you either. And what�s more, your own mixed feelings are probably beyond your control. That warm glow of recognition may be hard-wired into your neurons, but it�s also tightly entwined with other emotions, notably fears about personal peril and a yearning for safety.

At least that�s a theory, which a team of cognitive psychologists have recently been testing in the laboratory. According to Marieke de Vries of Radboud University Nijmegen, in the Netherlands, people naturally feel good when they see something recognizable and familiar. That�s because things that are familiar are�generally speaking�less risky. This is the same impulse that makes us buy the same soap or automobile over and over again: It�s worked in the past, so it�s likely a safe bet again today. With recognizable people, that positive feeling, that sense of comfort, often feels like a warm glow.

But it may not be quite that straightforward. De Vries and her colleagues wondered: Wouldn�t the power of familiarity depend somewhat on the context? Specifically, isn�t it possible that mood might modify and shape the mind�s response to familiar and unfamiliar things? Is that what�s occurring when you feel a warm glow in Bangkok and a big yawn back home? They decided to explore this idea experimentally.

Instead of using people�s faces, the scientists used abstract patterns of dots. Basically what they did is familiarize volunteers with some patterns and not others; then they measured their responses when they saw the familiar patterns later. But they didn�t simply ask them which ones they liked and which ones they didn�t; in addition to doing that, they attached electrodes to their faces to detect subtle physiological signs of smiling. In other words, they measured the body�s visceral response to familiarity and novelty.

But before doing this, they manipulated each volunteer�s mood. They asked some to think of sad events in their lives, and others joyous events; and then they played mood-appropriate music to maintain the gloom or happiness. The idea was that mood �tunes� the mind toward safety concerns. That is, if our mood is good, we assume we must be in a safe place; if we�re feeling edgy or down, that must be because we�re threatened in some way. The researchers predicted that feeling blue (and therefore unsafe) would make familiarity an especially potent cue; feeling happy (and therefore safe) would make that cue much less significant.

And that�s precisely what they found. As reported on-line in the journal Psychological Science, the volunteers who were melancholy smiled much more at the familiar patterns than did those who were upbeat. Think about that: Familiarity wasn�t all that important to people who were already feeling secure; they already had the safety of their local coffee shop. But people who were feeling uneasy and threatened experienced familiarity as very comforting�even when the familiar stimuli were nothing more than meaningless abstract patterns of dots. No wonder the face of an �old friend� can seem so welcoming in a Bangkok caf�.

For more insights into the quirks of human nature, visit the �Full Frontal Psychology� blog at True/Slant. Excerpts from �We�re Only Human� also appear regularly in the magazine Scientific American Mind. Wray Herbert�s book, On Second Thought: Outsmarting Your Mind�s Hard-Wired Habits, will be published by Crown in September.

Hyper-binding ain't for sissies

noreply@blogger.com (Wray Herbert) — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 19:40:00 +0000

Imagine this hypothetical scenario: You�re at a cocktail party and the host introduces you to a stranger, whose name is Jeremy. It�s a crowded party, and as you chat with Jeremy, you�re also picking up snippets of another conversation nearby. Something about a big football game on Sunday. It doesn�t concern you, so you try to tune it out. You have a short but pleasant conversation with Jeremy, then go on to mingle with other guests.

What do you remember when you run into Jeremy the next day? Well, if you�re young, you will probably recognize Jeremy�s face and associate his face with his name. That�s normal social memory. But if you�re older, you may have a very different kind of association: You may inexplicably link Jeremy with the upcoming football game. That overheard chatter about football is an irrelevant piece of information�you don�t even like football much. But your mind has been distracted by it, and it has connected that unimportant tidbit with your newly forged memory of Jeremy.

This is just a theory, which scientists call �hyper-binding.� That�s really just a jargony way of saying that the elderly remember a lot of useless information by attaching it to important new learning. But according to new research from the University of Toronto, such seemingly haphazard learning might be a blessing in disguise for the elderly. Psychological scientists Karen Campbell, Lynn Hasher and Ruthann Thomas recently ran a laboratory version of the cocktail party conversation to see if the phenomenon is indeed unique to the elderly�and to explore its possible benefits.

The experiments were fairly technical, but here�s the gist: The researchers recruited two groups of volunteers, the first about 19 years old and the second in the mid-60s. They showed all of them a string of pictures that were superimposed with irrelevant words. That�s like meeting Jeremy and hearing sports chatter at the same time. The volunteers were told to ignore the irrelevant words, and later on they were given a memory test for pictures and words in different combinations. They wanted to compare the older and younger minds at work.

The results were dramatic. As reported on-line this week in the journal Psychological Science, the older volunteers were clearly unable to ignore the distracting information even when they were instructed to. They stored away the irrelevant words by linking them tightly with their corresponding pictures in memory. What this suggests is that the elderly have weaker mental regulation and a broader �bandwidth,� taking in important and unimportant information indiscriminately. They store this new knowledge for later use and what�s more, they do this without even being aware of it.

Wouldn�t such distractibility be a terrible hindrance? Wouldn�t it just clutter up the mind with a lot of junk information? Not so, say the Toronto scientists. In fact, it may well be an advantage for the elderly. Aging often brings with it some mild cognitive declines�and indeed the elderly were slower and less accurate in some parts of these memory experiments. But awareness of how events connect in everyday life�even seemingly irrelevant events�may play a critical role in certain kinds of reasoning and judgment. In this way, distractibility may surreptitiously bolster everyday problem-solving.

The fact is, we never really know for sure what information in our world is important or useless�not when we�re first encountering it. The elderly mind may not be as fleet as it once was, but by being unfiltered, it perhaps is making connections that aren�t literal or obvious, and can be insightful. It might even be the foundation of a novel kind of intuition that comes with aging, or perhaps even what we call wisdom.

For more insights into the quirks of human nature, visit the �Full Frontal Psychology� blog at True/Slant. Excerpts from �We�re Only Human� also appear regularly in the magazine Scientific American Mind. Wray Herbert�s book, On Second Thought, will be published by Crown in September.

The Science of Prayer

noreply@blogger.com (Wray Herbert) — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 21:10:00 +0000

Everyone who is in any kind of serious relationship�with a partner, a child, a close friend�has been guilty of transgression as one time or another. That�s because we�re not perfect. We all commit hurtful acts, violate trust, and hope for forgiveness.

That�s simply a fact, and here�s another one: Nine out of 10 Americans say that they pray�at least on occasion. Florida State University psychologist Nathaniel Lambert put these two facts together and came up with an idea: Why not take all that prayer and direct it at the people who have wronged us? Is it possible that directed prayer might spark forgiveness in those doing the praying�and in the process preserve relationships?

This is obviously not a new idea. Indeed it�s ancient, but Lambert and his colleagues decided to test it scientifically in two simple experiments. In the first, they had a group of men and women pray for their romantic partner. It was just a single prayer for their partner�s well-being, spoken privately in a quiet room. Others�the experimental controls�also went into a quiet room, where they simply described their partner, speaking into a tape recorder.

Then they meaured forgiveness. When someone hurts you, it�s human nature to want to strike back, retaliate�or to withdraw from the relationship. The scientists defined forgiveness as the diminishing of these initial negative feelings, and when they analyzed all the data, the results were clear: Those who had prayed for their partner harbored fewer vengeful thoughts and emotions: They were more ready to forgive and move on.

This is remarkable, when you think that a single prayer made the difference. The researchers decided to run another test to double-check the findings. In this study, they had a group of men and women pray for a close friend every day for four weeks. Others simply reflected on the relationship, thinking positive thoughts but not praying for their friend�s well-being. They also added another dimension. They used a scale to measure selfless concern for others�not any particular person but other people generally. They speculated that prayer would increase selfless concern, which in turn would boost forgiveness.

And that�s just what they found. But why? How does this common spiritual practice exert its healing effects? The psychologists have an idea, which they described recently in the journal Psychological Science: Most of the time, couples profess and believe in shared goals, but when they hit a rough patch, they often switch to adversarial goals like retribution and resentment. These adversarial goals shift cognitive focus to the self, and it can be tough to shake that self-focus. Prayer appears to shift attention from the self back to others, which allows the resentments to fade.

For more insights into the quirks of human nature, visit the �Full Frontal Psychology� blog at True/Slant. Excerpts from �We�re Only Human� also appear regularly in the magazine Scientific American Mind. Wray Herbert's book, On Second Thought: Outsmarting Your Mind's Hard-Wired Habits, will be published by Crown in September.

Revisiting the Green Monster

noreply@blogger.com (Wray Herbert) — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 17:20:00 +0000

When South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford was caught red-handed returning from a tryst with his Argentine mistress last June, he told the Associated Press that he had met his �soul mate.� His choice of words seemed to suggest that having a deep emotional and spiritual connection with Maria Belen Chapur somehow made his sexual infidelity to his wife Jenny Sanford less tawdry.

Jenny Sanford wasn�t buying it, and neither would most women. What the two-timing governor didn�t understand is that most women view emotional infidelity as worse, not better, than sexual betrayal. Publicly acknowledging a soul connection was probably the most insulting and hurtful thing he could have said to his wife of 20 years.

The clueless governor is not alone. Research has documented that most men become much more jealous about sexual infidelity than they do about emotional infidelity. Women are the opposite, and this is true all over the world. Just why this is the case is not fully understood, although the prevailing theory is that the difference has evolutionary origins: Men learned over eons to be hyper-vigilant about sex because they can never be absolutely certain they are the father of a child, while women are much more concerned about having a partner who is committed to raising a family.

New research now suggests an alternative explanation. The new studies do not question the fundamental gender difference regarding jealousy�indeed they add additional support for that difference. But the new science suggests that the difference may be rooted more in personality�specifically in traits like self-reliance and insecurity.

Pennsylvania State University scientists Kenneth Levy and Kristen Kelly doubted the evolutionary explanation because there is a conspicuous subset of men who are more like women. That is, they find emotional betrayal more distressing than sexual infidelity. Why would this be? The researchers suspected that it might have to do with trust and emotional attachment. Some people�men and women alike�are by nature more secure in their attachments to others, while others are more invested in their own autonomy and seemingly less in need of intimacy. Psychologists see this compulsive self-reliance as a defensive strategy�protection against deep-seated feelings of vulnerability. People high on this trait tend to be preoccupied with the sexual aspects of relationships rather than emotional intimacy.

Levy and Kelly decided to explore a possible link between attachment style and jealousy style, and they did this by running a group of volunteers through some standard psychological tests. One questionnaire measured whether the volunteers were secure in their romantic relationships, or whether they instead were avoidant and noncommittal. A second questionnaire asked which they would find more distressing�knowing their partner was off having passionate sexual intercourse with someone else, or knowing that same partner had formed a deep emotional attachment with someone else.

They sorted the data, and the conclusions were indisputable. As the scientists reported on-line in the journal Psychological Science this week, avoidant types�those who prize their autonomy in relationships over commitment�were much more upset about sexual infidelity than emotional infidelity. And conversely, emotionally secure volunteers�including secure men�were much more likely to find emotional betrayal more upsetting.

But here�s the interesting twist. Just like all the earlier studies, Levy and Kelly found clear evidence of a gender difference in jealousy style.
In other words, men are indeed preoccupied with sexual betrayal, and women the reverse, but not for the reasons we thought. Men fret about sexual betrayal because they are overly invested in the sexual side of their own relationships�and that superficiality is linked to their thin personal attachments. Not to put too fine a point on it, male jealousy is shaped by deep emotional insecurities. Jenny Sanford probably knew that already, and the governor�s soul mate is no doubt having her suspicions by now.

For more insights into the quirks of human nature, visit the �Full Frontal Psychology� blog at True/Slant. Excerpts from �We�re Only Human� appear regularly in the magazine Scientific American Mind.

Hearses, coffins and the meaning of life

noreply@blogger.com (Wray Herbert) — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 16:37:00 +0000

In the darkly funny film classic Harold and Maude, Harold is a 19-year-old who is obsessed with death and dying. He repeatedly fakes his own suicide, drives around in a hearse, and attends strangers� funerals as a pastime. At one of these funerals he meets Maude, a 79-year-old with the same morbid hobby, and in one of the most unlikely romances on film, the melancholy young man and the vivacious concentration camp survivor fall in love. Maude�s life ends with her suicide on her 80th birthday, but it�s not a depressing death. Indeed, the final scene shows Harold putting aside his morbid ways and embracing life anew.

Harold and Maude is one of the cleverest films to wrestle with existential themes, but the interplay of morbidity and zest for life is a recurring theme in art and literature. And in real lives as well: People who have close brushes with death often report a sharpened appetite even for the ordinary stuff of daily life. Facing one�s mortality appears to give new meaning to being alive.

But why would this be? It�s not obvious. One can imagine becoming negative and fearful when faced with life�s fragility, or reckless, but that doesn�t seem to happen. What cognitive crunching transforms morbidity into hope, mourning into joy? In other words, what was taking place in young Harold�s neurons when his soul mate�s death lifted his spirits out of the doldrums?

Some new science offers one possible explanation for this cognitive phenomenon. A team of cognitive scientists at the University of Missouri, headed by Laura King, decided to look at the death-and-zest interplay in terms of mental heuristics. Heuristic is just scientific jargon for the ancient, deep-wired rules that shape many of our thoughts and actions, and the Missouri scientists were especially interested in two of these rules. The so-called scarcity heuristic states: If something is rare, it must be valuable. This explains, for example, why we prize gold, even though steel is much more useful. The flip side of the scarcity heuristic, often called the value heuristic, states: If we desire something very much, it must be scarce.

Neither of these cognitive rules is necessarily correct or useful all the time, but they are both powerful�powerful enough to explain the common intertwining of morbidity and zest. Because scarcity and value are so tightly linked in the human mind, King and her colleagues reasoned, the mind might interpret death as a scarcity of life, which according to the theory should enhance its perceived value. They decided to test this idea in their laboratory.

The experiments were fairly straightforward. In one, for example, the researchers had a large group of volunteers complete word-find puzzles�those grids of letters with words embedded in them. For some of the volunteers, the embedded words were death-related, like tombstone and coffin, while for others�the controls�they were pain-related, like headache. Then all the volunteers completed three widely used measures of life�s meaning and purpose. The findings were simple and unambiguous: Those with death on their mind found life more meaningful and, well, simply better. They valued life more when primed by funerals and hearses.

So that�s the scarcity principle at work. But the scientists wanted to test their idea the other way around. That is, if it is indeed the heuristic mind finding meaning in death, then loving and embracing life should also enhance awareness of death�s constant presence. They tested this idea in an ingenious way. They approached strangers on the streets of Columbia, Missouri, and asked them to read a brief prose passage. Some read about how valuable the human body was if the organs were traded on the market�in the neighborhood of $45 million, the equivalent of �400 Porsches, 265 houses, or 45 luxury yachts.� The idea was to spark thoughts about life�s monetary worth. Others read about how the body was made up of common chemicals with a total value of about $4.50�the equivalent of �a Big Mac Value Meal at McDonald�s.�

Then they had all the volunteers do a different word test, this one requiring word completions like coff__ and de__. These words could be completed with either death-related words like coffin and dead, or with neutral words like coffee and deal. The idea was to see how much the two different groups of volunteers were thinking about death and dying. And the findings, reported in the December issue of the journal Psychological Science, were again clear: As the value heuristic would predict, those who were imagining themselves as the $45 million bionic man were also focused on the inevitability of dying�much more than those primed to devalue life. Valuing life made it seem scarcer and thus more fragile.

So the reality of death does not render life meaningless. Indeed, the opposite. And what�s more, when we embrace life, death is not pushed out of awareness; it lurks just outside of consciousness, easily accessible. That�s a psychological reality that Maude knew well from experience, and 19-year-old Harold was just beginning to sense.

For more insights into the quirks of human nature, visit the �Full Frontal Psychology� blog at True/Slant. Excerpts from �We�re Only Human� also appear regularly in the magazine Scientific American Mind. Wray Herbert�s book on the heuristic mind will be published by Crown in fall of 2010.

Savoring the passage of time

noreply@blogger.com (Wray Herbert) — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 20:24:00 +0000

I take part in a spinning class a couple times a week, and I always position my bike so I can�t see the wall clock. Spinning is really hard, and I know from experience that the session will seem much longer and much more arduous if I have one eye on the clock. It still drags some days, but other days I really forget about the clock. Time flies.

I know, it�s a clich�, but who hasn�t experienced a deep connection between the clock and the subjective experience of pleasure or pain? It�s what psychological scientists call �na�ve physics.� We all know that time doesn�t really ever speed up or slow down; it always ticks at its own pace. But our perceptions of time vary dramatically, depending on our state of mind.

The universality of this na�ve theory got scientist Aaron Sackett wondering if the opposite might also be true: If indeed time seems to tick away faster when we�re having fun, could a distorted sense of time make an experience more or less enjoyable? And why? Sackett, a professor of marketing at the University of St. Thomas in Minneapolis, ran several experiments to look at this common perception in a variety of ways. All of them involved tinkering with the passage of time in creative ways.

In one experiment, for example, Sackett and his colleagues put a group of men and women in two rooms, each without any clocks or watches or cell phones. They had them do a timed test, in which they had to read a text and underline certain words�so not particularly fun-filled, but not particularly aversive either. The scientists told the volunteers the test would take exactly ten minutes, and made a big show of starting a stopwatch as they left the room.

But the test didn�t take exactly ten minutes. For some, the scientists reentered after just five minutes, but acted as if the full ten minutes had passed; they even left the stopwatch conspicuously in view. For others, they didn�t reenter the room until 20 minutes had passed, but again they left the volunteers with the idea that ten minutes had passed. In other words, for some ten minutes seemed surprisingly long, while for others it seemed short�the lab equivalent of making time fly.

Then all the volunteers rated the experience for enjoyment, challenge, fun, engagement, and so forth. And the results were clear: If the ten minutes passed surprisingly quickly, volunteers found the word search task more pleasurable than if time seemed to drag. This doesn�t mean they found it exhilarating, or that the others found it crushingly boring�but their subjective experiences were definitely different on the pleasure scale.

But what if the task were actually aversive�more akin to the muscle ache of a spinning class? In a second study, the scientists forced the volunteers to listen to a tape recording of a dot matrix printer for 30 seconds. Thirty seconds is not a long time, but apparently this was a really irritating noise. While they listened, they watched the elapsed time tick off on a screen-- except that, unbeknownst to the volunteers, the elapsing time was either too slow or too fast. So again, for some time flew, while for others time dragged.

And again, time perceptions shaped emotions. When time flew, the tedious listening experience seemed less tedious, more bearable. When it dragged, it was worse; these listeners said they would rather listen to an electric drill if given the option. They also ran the experiment with a pleasant audiotape�of a favorite song�and once again time distortions determined the pleasure of the listening experience. That is, a pleasant experience became more pleasant.

So what does all of this mean? As the researchers explain on-line this week in the journal Psychological Science, humans are sense-making creatures. If we perceive something in the world as surprising, we automatically look for an explanation for the aberration. So if time sees distorted, we want to know why�and out intuitive physics clicks in: If time flies when we�re having fun, then flying time must signal that something fun is taking place.

In real life, we can�t slow or speed up time, of course. But we can shorten our estimates of time, and one way is not to look at clocks or other time cues. There may be other ways to make time fly as well, which suggests the possibility of making the inevitable tedium of everyday life�waiting in line, for example, or even a spinning class�just a bit more fun.

For more insights into the quirks of human nature, visit the �Full Frontal Psychology� blog at True/Slant. Excerpts from �We�re Only Human� appear regularly in the magazine Scientific American Mind.

Redemption for the fast and furious?

noreply@blogger.com (Wray Herbert) — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 16:17:00 +0000

My kids cut their video gaming teeth on Super Mario Brothers in the late 80s, and I confess I had some qualms about buying our first Nintendo. Would these seemingly pointless games be intellectually numbing, a waste of time and money? Would my kids lose interest in books? The usual parental fretting, I guess. But Mario and Luigi�s adventures with Princess Toadstool seemed benign enough, so we took the plunge. I limited their gaming time, and censored their games choices, and they seem to have emerged as undamaged adults.

I had it easy, really. The video gaming culture has become much more pervasive over the past two decades, and as we enter the holiday gift-giving season, many parents are in a deep quandary. Today�s games�especially those for teenagers and young adults�have become much more frenetic. Many reward adrenaline-pumping vigilance, rapid reactions, sharpshooting and other skills of personal combat. So parents are still left to wonder: Is there any redeeming value in the hours that teens spend transfixed by these contests?

Well, the latest psychological science provides at least a partial answer, and one that might surprise a lot of Luddites, Grinches and well-meaning moms and dads. Indeed, parents might consider putting an action video game under the tree not only for their kids, but for their aging parents as well. The weight of evidence, summarized by University of Rochester scientists in the December issue of the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science, suggests that regular gamers are fast and accurate information processors and�more important�that this skill carries over far beyond fragging bots in Unreal Tournament.

Anecdotal evidence has long hinted that players who spend a lot of hours on a game get faster�at least faster at that game. That�s not surprising, but cognitive scientists Matthew Dye, Shawn Green and Daphne Bavelier wanted to look beyond the obvious. They gathered together all the existing studies of video gaming that they could find, and crunched them together in what�s called a �meta-analysis��to see what general conclusions they could extract. They found some surprising insights in the mounds of data.

For example, they found that avid players got faster not only on their game of choice, but on a variety of unrelated laboratory tests of reaction time: finding a particular letter in a field of letters, that kind of thing. They also found evidence that gamers don�t lose accuracy as they get faster. This is important, because skeptics have claimed that avid gamers are simply �trigger happy��that is, fast but impulsive, and prone to errors. It appears they�re fast and accurate�just as accurate as cautious players. Perhaps most important, they found that all avid players� share a common underlying cognitive change that explains their generalized quickness and sharpness.

That�s the most important finding. When they examined the gamers� speed-plus-accuracy boost more closely, they found that the common underlying ingredient is improved visual cognition. Playing video games enhances performance on things like mental rotation skills, visual and spatial memory, and tasks requiring divided attention. What�s more, it�s not just that kids with these skills are drawn to video games. Scientists have trained novices with no particular interest in gaming, and with enough hours, they too become both faster and more visually sharp.

These enhanced visual skills are beginning to sound like talents that might be helpful to an airline pilot, not just a Call to Duty2 champion. But there�s more to recommend these games, the Rochester scientists conclude: Studies have already indicated that training might reduce gender differences in visual and spatial processing, and there is good reason to believe such training might stem the cognitive declines that come with aging as well. Indeed, one theory is that all the decrements that come with aging are related to a generalized slowing of the ability to process information�the exact opposite of the generalized cognitive gain that comes from gaming.

But hold up. There are obviously many other considerations before parents run out and buy the latest first-person assassin game for the whole family. Many of the action-oriented video games are unsuitable for children, and granddad might lack the manual dexterity and eyesight to play these games anyway. But perhaps in a Christmas future, there will be an intergenerational face-off on an educational toy for all ages.

For more insights into the quirks of human nature, visit the �Full Frontal Psychology� blog at True/Slant. Excerpts from �We�re Only Human� also appear regularly in the magazine Scientific American Mind.

Remembering who's the grown-up

noreply@blogger.com (Wray Herbert) — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 17:27:00 +0000

As a child, I used to drive my mother to distraction. It was my job. And my mother, for her part, would regularly threaten to wring my neck. It was kind of a family ritual. But as often as she threatened, she never actually did it. My neck is fine.

I had friends growing up whose necks didn�t fare so well. The difference between normal parenting and abusive parenting is the difference between wanting to throttle your children�and really doing it. All children can be maddening at times, but why do some parents react with harshness while others do not? Harsh parenting has been linked to everything from poverty to lack of education, but those explanations really beg the more intriguing question: What�s going on in the heads of harsh and abusive parents? What specific cognitive deficit makes it so difficult for some parents to regulate their frustration with their kids?

New research is suggesting a somewhat surprising answer to this question. Kirby Deater-Deckard, a professor of psychological science at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, argues in a just-published study that inadequate working memory may be the culprit. Working memory is the ability to hold information in mind and manipulate it for a short period of time: For example, try doing this simple addition problem in your head: 888 + 333. It�s not complex, but it does require remembering the numbers you�re carrying for a few seconds, remembering the sum of each column, and so forth. Some people are better at this than others.

Here�s how Deater-Deckard and his colleagues demonstrated the link between memory and patience�or lack of it. They recruited more than 200 mothers with same-sex twins, all about six years old. They visited their homes, where they videotaped the mothers working with each of the twins separately on difficult cooperative tasks. On one task, for example, mother and child had to draw a picture on an Etch-A-Sketch, each manipulating one of the toy�s two handles. The task was meant to frustrate both child and mother, to test their patience and self-control.

And it did, to varying degrees. The researchers had independent judges score both the child�s and the mother�s behavior. The children were rated for overt anger and frustration, for disobedience, giving up on the Etch-A-Sketch task, and so forth. The mothers were similarly rated, but in their case for their negative reactions to their children�s challenging behavior�including annoyance and anger, taking over the game in frustration, criticizing the child�s errors.

The twins were necessary for statistical purposes. By observing each interaction separately and subtracting one score from the other, the scientists were able to zero in on a purer measure of each parent�s overall tendency to react negatively to their kids, rather than to a particular child's personality. Then they gave each mother a battery of standard tests, including measures of verbal skills, spatial reasoning and working memory. They crunched all the data together for analysis.

The results clearly implicated working memory deficits (and only working memory deficits) as a cause of harsh parenting. But why? The link between poor memory and harsh impatience may not be intuitively obvious, but the scientists have an explanation. In those few seconds between experiencing frustration and reacting, a mother must appraise the situation. That is, she must say to herself something like this: Remember now, you�re the grown-up here; children are a challenge, but they don�t mean to be. And so forth and so forth. This kind of appraisal happens again and again, and each time it requires the powers of working memory. It may not seem like the same skill as that needed to add 888 and 333, but essentially it is. One must keep the facts of a situation in mind in order to rapidly and accurately appraise one�s emotions and arrive at an appropriate reaction.

These findings, published on-line in the journal Psychological Science this week, almost certainly apply to fathers as well, and they offer some small good news for both parents and kids. It�s commonly said that harsh and abusive parents lack good parenting skills, but that�s both obvious and unhelpful. These findings implicate a much more specific cognitive skill, and what�s more, one that evidence suggests can be enhanced with practice. Working memory training will not solve the problem of child maltreatment, but it�s a concrete intervention that might help some parents and children at risk.

For more insights into human nature, visit the �Full Frontal Psychology� blog at True/Slant. Excerpts from �We�re Only Human� appear regularly in the magazine Scientific American Mind.

The Perils of Willpower

noreply@blogger.com (Wray Herbert) — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 20:18:00 +0000

The coming holiday season looms as a nightmare of temptation for many, whether the lure is fruitcake or martinis. Most dieters and abstainers think of willpower as the key to success. Bite the bullet; just say no. Yet paradoxically, the cornerstone of most addiction recovery programs is the exact opposite of willpower: It�s admitting powerlessness over drugs or sweets or booze.

This is a difficult concept for many, especially for those who have grown up in a culture that celebrates self-reliance. How can weakness be the way to success? Whatever happened to personal responsibility and self-discipline? It�s not entirely clear why or how this principle works, but some new research may help illuminate the dynamic.

Northwestern University psychologist Loran Nordgren and colleagues wanted to explore how our beliefs about our own powers of restraint might shape our behavior in the face of temptation. They suspected that people who believe they are powerless would be less likely to put themselves in risky situations�holiday parties, for example�and would therefore be less likely to give into temptation. Similarly, people who believe in their own powers of restraint would be less vigilant about temptation�and thus at heightened risk for a slip. They were especially interested in one puzzling question about addiction and recovery: Why do so many people relapse even after the physical symptoms of addiction subside?

They decided to study smokers. They contacted about 50 smokers who were trying to quit through a smoking cessation program. All had gone without a smoke for at least three weeks, which means that their physical withdrawal cravings were past. The researchers began by giving the smokers a questionnaire to gauge their beliefs about their ability to control their impulses and withstand temptation. Then they asked them a series of questions about the steps they took to avoid being around cigarettes: Do you avoid people who smoke? Ask people not to smoke? Sneak an occasional drag? And so forth.

Four months later, they contacted the recovering smokers again to see how they were doing with their effort to quit. They expected that their beliefs would shape their risky behavior, which would in turn influence success or failure. And that�s precisely what they found. As reported in the December issue of the journal Psychological Science, quitters who were confident in their powers of self-restraint were more apt to hang around smokers and keep cigarettes around�and were also more likely to relapse. Those who felt weak and vulnerable had a higher rate of success.

But what makes one person believe in willpower, while another sees himself as powerless? According to the researchers, beliefs are not fixed. They fluctuate depending on our circumstances and psychological state. People in a �hot� state are feeling the full force of their visceral impulses�hunger and craving�and therefore �believe� in the potency of addiction and in their vulnerability. But people in a �cold� state�who aren�t having cravings at the moment�have a great deal of trouble remembering what those impulses feel like, and as a result tend to believe more in their personal willpower. This disconnect is what the psychologists call the �empathy gap.�

The problem is that we spend most of our time in a cold state, so we tend to overestimate our powers of control and restraint. When we overestimate these powers, we are more likely to act recklessly. This would help explain why people relapse long after their physical compulsions are gone: They feel confident in their abstinence, and let their guard down, only to find themselves in a hot state�and at a holiday party. It would also explain another cornerstone of recovery programs: Going to meetings. Spending time around other recovering addicts, listening to stories of temptation and struggle and relapse is a way to prevent a hot state from going cold.

For more insights into the quirks of human nature, visit the �Full Frontal Psychology� blog at True/Slant. Excerpts from �We�re Only Human� also appear regularly in the magazine Scientific American Mind.

Some of my best friends are pawns

noreply@blogger.com (Wray Herbert) — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 19:39:00 +0000

There are certain rules of conduct on which most ethical people would agree. It�s not nice to date the boss�s daughter just to get ahead in the company. Or marry her son. And no parent would approve of a child befriending another child just because he happens to own an Xbox 360 Elite. That would be like an adult warming up to a colleague simply because he happens to have season tickets for the New Orleans Saints.

All of these ethical lapses fall under the general category of using people, which we�re taught early on not to do. People are not instruments or tools to be wielded for our own purposes, pawns to help us achieve our personal goals.

Yet we do use people anyway, often in more subtle ways than these. Why is that? Why do these moral strictures fail much of the time? New and forgiving research suggests that the urge to use people may be deeply embedded in human nature. Indeed, seeing others as useful or not may be as fundamental as perceiving gender or race in navigating out social world.

University of Waterloo psychologist Grainne Fitzsimons is interested in the interplay of personal goals and stereotypes. We are all motivated by goals, from big ones like career success to more modest ones, like losing ten pounds�or simply getting to the train on time. In fact, we spend much of daily lives in pursuit of one goal or another. We also categorize people. We all do, whether we like it or not, simply because we need to find order in the world�s complexity. So we pigeonhole others as blue-collar or professional, conservative or liberal, Black or white or Asian, man or woman, young or old.

Given that personal goals and stereotyping are both so basic to our psychology, Fitzsimons reasoned, is it possible that our goals actually influence how we pigeonhole people? Or put another way, why would we not categorize others as instruments or tools if we see them as helping us get what we want in life? Working with psychologist James Shah of Duke, she designed an experiment to explore this possibility.

Here�s the gist of the study. They had a group of volunteers focus on a goal�say, staying fit and healthy. Then they had them pick three people who they felt could help them meet their goal; let�s call them Ian, Susan and Joe. They also listed three people who they did not perceive as helpful or useful in staying fit�not a hindrance but not instrumental either. We�ll call them Nancy, Ben and Lori.

The names are important because, later on, the volunteers read a series of sentences with these names embedded in them: �The cashier gave Ian his change.� �Ben was tired of arguing� And so forth. There was a pretense for this reading, but then the psychologists surprised the volunteers with a memory test, in which they had to supply the right names: �The cashier gave ____ his change.�

The researchers expected mistakes. Indeed, it was really the mistakes they were studying. They wanted to see if they were more likely to mix up people who they had categorized as useful with other people they saw as useful (confusing Ian with Susan, for example), as opposed to confusing useful people with non-useful people (Joe and Nancy, for instance). If they did the former�confusing instrumental people only with each other�that would suggest that were grouping anyone who served their purposes as alike. It would suggest that we have a mental category for �people-who-get-me-what-I-want.�

And that�s precisely what they found. As reported on-line this week in the journal Psychological Science, the controls�those who were not focused on the fitness goal�made random errors, confusing Ben with Ian with Nancy with Susie. But those who were intent on their personal health-and-fitness goal were much more likely to perceive and remember people categorically, according to their utility, their value in helping reach the goal. Not to put too fine a point on it: All pawns look alike.

This is humbling, but it does not mean we�re slave to our automatic stereotyping. Our neurons may be categorizing the boss�s daughter as a useful tool for achieving our career goals, but whether or not to be a cad remains a choice. Our ethical sensibilities can still trump that impulse to use people as pawns, but it helps to be mindful of our baser nature.

For more insights into the quirks of human nature, visit �Full Frontal Psychology� at True/Slant. Selections from �We�re Only Human� also appear regularly in the magazine Scientific American Mind.

"The Piece of Cake Heuristic"

noreply@blogger.com (Wray Herbert) — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 18:10:00 +0000

Don�t bother searching your long-term memory. There is no �Piece of Cake Heuristic.� I just made that up. I made it up and capitalized the main words and threw in an obscure word and added quotation marks�all so you, the reader, might consider the concept intellectually important and worthy of your attention. After all, it has a name and it�s in print�so it must have some heft, right?

Well, maybe--or maybe not, according to new research. University of Chicago psychologist Aparna Labroo and colleagues wondered if simply naming an idea�an economic theory, a medical diagnosis, a legal precedent�might make it easier for the mind to process, and thus more accessible. They further speculated that this cognitive ease might shape judgments of importance. They gave this idea a jargony label (the �Name-Ease� Effect), and then tested it in the laboratory.

Labroo�s idea is consistent with much earlier work on mental effort: If ideas are easier to process for whatever reason, we tend to find them more familiar and comfortable. Vocabulary, pronunciation, even the typeface in which these sentences are printed�all these can affect cognitive palatability. Labroo wanted to see if official names might have the same force. The link to importance is a bit more complicated. We all believe ideas are important if they are memorable�after all, that�s why we remember them. But we also associate importance with difficulty: The tougher to grasp, the more important an idea must be. If it�s too easy to process, it must be trivial.

The psychologists wanted to sort out these competing ideas, and here�s one of several experiments they ran. They had a group of volunteers read a legal case concerning school prayer. They all read the same case description, but for some the case was given a name, Engel v. Vitale. Once they had all read the case, some of the volunteers were asked to recall the details of the case, while others were instructed to think about the meaning of the case. In other words, some completed a memory task while others completed a comprehension task. Then they all rated the importance of the school prayer case.

The researchers were exploring the interplay of effort, memory and understanding in judgments of importance�and the findings were intriguing. Knowing that the case was officially called Engel v Vitale made it seem more important�but only for those who were focused on remembering it. In other words, the name made the information easier to process, and attributing this ease to the case�s memorability gave it weight. The case name did the opposite for those who were actually trying to comprehend the case: It made the case seem too familiar, and thus run-of-the-mill and simplistic.

Labroo and her colleagues reran this experiment many times, with a variety of ideas: an economic principle (the Coase Theorem); a mathematical concept (the Weierstrass Theorem); a medical diagnosis (acromegaly); and a psychological concept (Optimal Distinctiveness Theory). They got the same basic results, no matter what the subject matter. The psychologists� paper on the �Name-Ease� Effect was published on-line this week in the journal Psychological Science. You be the judge of its importance.

For more insights into the quirks of human nature, visit the �Full Frontal Psychology� blog at True/Slant. Excerpts from the �We�re Only Human� blog also appear regularly in the magazine Scientific American Mind. Wray Herbert's book on heuristics will be published by Crown in autumn 2010.

A Case for the Distractible Toddler

noreply@blogger.com (Wray Herbert) — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 18:25:00 +0000

When my oldest son was three years old, someone gave him a very large can of Legos as a gift, enough to build a fortress. So we decided to build a fortress. Or I did, but he was an enthusiastic co-conspirator in the project�at least for about ten minutes. But then he got distracted by the sound of an ambulance siren outside; then he re-discovered a plastic triceratops; then he thought he should inspect the ashes in the fireplace. I tried to reengage him in the fortress, because I was doing an excellent job. But he had lots of things to do. He was busy.

Toddlers are distractible. Their minds flit constantly here and there, and they have a terrible time concentrating on even the most stimulating project. They might be fascinated by a colorful new toy, but only until the next best toy comes along, or the next or the next.

This can be maddening for parents, especially for those of us who want to give our kids a leg up on getting into a premier university. Parents often try to teach their toddlers self-control and mental discipline, to rein in their impulsivity. Increasingly, pre-school teachers do this, too. They see inattention and lack of focus as academic problems to be fixed.

But should we really be trying to teach self-control? Is there perhaps a reason why toddlers are such space cadets? Psychologists are beginning to raise these questions, and some are even suggesting that it may be detrimental to the developing brain to push it toward maturity too soon. Indeed, children�s impulsivity may be an essential tradeoff, one that allows the young mind to learn social conventions and language.

University of Pennsylvania neuropsychologist Sharon Thompson-Schill and her colleagues study a region of the brain called the prefrontal cortex, or PFC. This is basically the part of the brain that gives us mental agility and self-control; it filters out irrelevant information and allows us to focus. It is also the last part of the brain to mature and become fully functional. It lags behind the rest of the brain until about age four.

Why would that be? Well, the psychologists speculate that an immature PFC may not be a deficit at all, but rather an advantage in the first years of life. Here�s an example of their evidence, discussed in the most recent issue of the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science. It has to do with guessing. Say you are na�ve about the game of football, but you are playing a guessing game: Will the offensive team pass or run the ball? You observe that the team passes the ball three out of every four plays, so you guess �pass� 75 percent of the time and �run� 25 percent of the time.

That�s not smart. Smart would be saying �pass� all the time. And if you played this game with your toddler, that is likely what he or she would do. Toddlers are often better at this, because their immature brains are still operating on a brute-force competition between two alternatives: pass or run. They are not yet capable of nuance and probability. That is, they�re not really capable of guessing.

And good thing, because toddlers can�t afford to guess. They have a lot of learning to do, and much of that learning has to do with hard-and-fast rules and conventions. Having an immature and inflexible mind is an advantage in finding patterns in the chaos of the world. In fact, this rigidity may be essential to language acquisition. Learning language is an intimidating task; it requires saying the right thing in the right context, and agreeing with everyone else that these are the right things to say. Consider the example of irregular verbs: They are simply conventions; they can only be learned by brute force, and that�s precisely how toddlers learn them. It�s no surprise, the psychologists note, that kids pick up languages so effortlessly compared to adults

And it�s not just language. Toddlers are mastering all sorts of social conventions that, like irregular verbs, simply must be learned. They�re the rules of the world. In this sense, trying to hasten the brain�s development may be not only difficult by unwise.

For more insights into the quirks of human nature, visit the �Full Frontal Psychology� blog at True/Slant. Selections from �We�re Only Human� also appear in the magazine Scientific American Mind.

Close Encounters of the Rude Kind

noreply@blogger.com (Wray Herbert) — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 17:40:00 +0000

One of my personal crotchets is people who walk down busy city sidewalks without looking where they�re going. These days they might be texting on an electronic device, but it�s not the technology I object to. They could just as well be reading a book. What�s annoying is the expectation that the crowds will part, that all the other pedestrians will make the effort to get out of their way.

This may be simple rudeness. But I suspect that some of these people truly believe they can skillfully multi-task even in a crowd. Well they can�t, and I�ve now got science to prove it. Finnish researchers did a laboratory simulation to see how pedestrians avoid collisions in everyday sidewalk encounters. Millions of people pass by millions of other people without incident every day on the world�s streets, and the scientists wanted to know how we manage this. Although they simulated polite pedestrians, their findings hold a valuable lesson for the self-centered as well.

Cognitive psychologist Lauri Nummenmaa and her colleagues studied volunteers� eye gaze as they encountered an animated man walking toward them on a city street. They wanted to see if the simulated stranger�s eye gaze was an important cue in avoiding sidewalk collisions. In the simulation, the stranger looked steadily either to the left or the right, and the volunteers had to decide which way to move. The results, reported on-line this week in the journal Psychological Science, were clear: If the stranger looked to his left, volunteers not only looked but also moved to the stranger�s right; and vice versa. The scientists also ran a more realistic scenario in which the stranger looked straight ahead until the last minute, and then suddenly shifted his gaze left or right. They got the same results.

Much recent work on the brain�s �mirror neurons� suggests that humans automatically mimic others, and that this unconscious aping is important to social interaction. Interestingly, the volunteers in these studies did not mirror the stranger�s eye gaze, suggesting that their own eye movements are not simply an automatic neuronal reflex. That reflex may be occurring, but it doesn�t stop there: It appears the pedestrians are also �mind reading,� quickly but deliberately interpreting a stranger�s eye gaze as a signal of intent to walk left or right. That is, they are social animals, analyzing and navigating a social world.

This lab simulation captures only half a real-life sidewalk encounter. On an actual city street, not only am I observing and reasoning about your gaze and intentions, you are doing the same with my gaze. It�s a social contract that protects both of us and keeps the world moving smoothly. Unless, of course, your mind is somewhere else.

For more insights into the quirks of human nature, visit the �Full Frontal Psychology� blog at True/Slant. Excerpts from �We�re Only Human� appear regularly in Newsweek.com and in the magazine Scientific American Mind.

Sneezing at health care reform

noreply@blogger.com (Wray Herbert) — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 14:31:00 +0000

I ride a public bus to and from work, and today some of my fellow commuters were sneezing. My guess is that people sneeze on the bus ride every day, but I am especially mindful of any contagion at the moment. And well I should be. We�ve got the regular seasonal bug out there, plus the ominous swine flu on the horizon. And the airwaves and newspapers are filled with warnings about this year�s heightened risk for a flu pandemic. Hundreds of thousands have already been struck by swine flu, with deaths in the thousands and climbing daily.

A stranger�s sneeze can be a good thing in a way. Think of it as a public service announcement, a very-simple-to-understand message about health risk. A sneeze can remind us to wash our hands and schedule our inoculations�probably more effectively than a lecture. But what if, in our hyper-vigilance, we overreact to everyday sneezes and coughs and sniffles? Can such signals change healthy prudence into an unreasonable fearfulness about germs and more?

A team of University of Michigan researchers thought that might be the case, and ran a couple field studies to test the idea. Psychologist Norbert Schwarz and grad student Spike Lee suspected that a heightened perception of risk for a flu pandemic might unconsciously trigger fears of other, totally unrelated hazards. So last May, when the first wave of swine flu was just beginning to claim lives, the researchers stationed a sneezing actor in a busy campus building. As large numbers of students passed on their way to and from class, the actor would occasionally sneeze loudly. The psychologists then cornered and interviewed the students�and compared those who has witnessed the sneeze and those who had not.

They asked both groups to assess the risk of an �average American� getting a serious disease. They didn�t mention the flu, although it is a serious disease and could well have been on some of the students� minds. Perhaps not surprisingly, those who had just witnessed someone sneezing perceived a greater chance of falling ill. But here�s the interesting part: Those with sneezing on their mind also perceived an increased risk of dying of a heart attack before age 50, dying in an accident, or dying as result of a crime. That is, the public sneeze triggered a broad fear of all health threats, even ones that couldn�t possibly be linked to germs�and sparked thoughts of mortality.

What�s going on here? Well, it gets better�or worse. The researchers asked the same people their views on the country�s existing health care system: Is it a wreck, or working pretty much okay? Those within hearing distance of the sneezing actor had far more negative views of health care in America. Think about that: The country�s health care system encompasses everything from obstetrics to diabetes prevention to insect-borne illnesses, yet a single sneeze in the corridor colored people�s views of the entire system.

This last finding was so striking that the psychologists ran another version of the sneezing scenario at a local mall, just to double-check the perplexing results. This time the interviewer himself sneezed and coughed (or did not) while conducting the interview, and in this version the interviewer didn�t even bother to ask about the personal risk of illness�at least not directly. Instead, the interviewer was ostensibly doing a public opinion survey on federal budget priorities. He asked, for example: Given limited tax dollars, should the government spend the money on vaccine production or on green jobs?

Clearly this issue is only tangentially connected to the flu or personal health, but it does play into people�s fears and doubts about health and disease: Is the government watching out for Americans� welfare, broadly construed? And the results (to be published in a forthcoming issue of the journal Psychological Science) were unambiguous. Those who had just witnessed someone sneezing were much more likely to favor a public investment in vaccine production rather than green jobs. In other words, the sneeze sparked concerns not about personal health, but more broadly about public health.

This is quite remarkable when you tie it all together: Completely outside of awareness, a simple sneeze triggered fear of the flu, which in turn sparked fears of mortality, which even shaped people�s views on a somewhat abstract public policy question. So achoo! Let�s write our Congressmen about health care reform.

For more insights into the quirks of human nature, visit the "Full Frontal Psychology" blog at True/Slant. Selections from "We're Only Human" also appear regularly at Newsweek.com and in the magazine Scientific American Mind.

Another Roadside Distraction

noreply@blogger.com (Wray Herbert) — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 17:37:00 +0000

When Pulitzer Prize-winning music critic Tim Page was in second grade, he and his classmates went on a field trip to Boston. They later wrote about the experience as a class assignment, and this is part of what the nine-year-old Page wrote:

"Well, we went to Boston, Massachusetts through the town of Warrenville, Connecticut on Route 44A. It was very pretty and there was a church that reminded me of pictures of Russia from our book that is published by Time-Life. We arrived in Boston at 9:17. At 11 we went on a big tour of Boston on Gray Line 43, made by the Superior Bus Company like School Bus Six, which goes down Hunting Lodge Road where Maria lives and then on to Separatist Road and then to South Eagleville before it comes to our school. We saw lots of good things like the Boston Massacre site. The tour ended at 1:05. Before I knew it we were going home. We went through Warrenville again but it was too dark to see much. A few days later it was Easter. We got a cuckoo clock."

Page received an unsatisfactory grade on his essay. What's more, his irate teacher scrawled in red across the top of the essay: �See me!� As he recalls in his new memoir Parallel Play, such incidents were not uncommon in his childhood, and he knew why he was being scolded: �I had noticed the wrong things.�

The subtitle of Page�s memoir is Growing Up With Undiagnosed Asperger�s, and indeed Page didn�t learn until age 46 that he suffers from what�s called an autism spectrum disorder, or ASD. ASD is usually defined by impairments in social interaction and communication, but many people with autism and the milder Asberger�s syndrome also tend to fixate on irrelevant information in their world. Their attention seems to be awry or, to use Page�s words, they notice the wrong things.

But why? What�s going on in the autistic mind that makes the details of bus routes infinitely fascinating? Why are people like Page so easily distracted from the main act? Psychologists at University College London think that it might be a mistake to think of such distractibility as simply a deficit. To the contrary, Anna Remington and John Swettenham and colleagues speculate that people with ASD might have a greater than normal capacity for perception, so that what appears as irrelevant distraction is really a cognitive bonus. They decided to test the idea in the lab.

They studied a group of people with ASD, mostly Asperger�s, along with normal controls. They had all the subjects look at a computer screen, which displayed various combinations of letters and dots forming circles. They had to very rapidly spot the letters N or X among the other letters, and hit the corresponding key on the keyboard. Some of the circles�those with more letters�were more difficult to process than others. There were also other letters floating outside the circle, but the subjects were specifically instructed to ignore those letters. Those floating letters were the laboratory equivalent of an irrelevant distraction in the real world.

The psychologists were measuring perceptual capacity. That�s why they varied the complexity of the task. They were also measuring distractibility. They reasoned that, as long as the subjects� total perceptual capacity was not exhausted, they would also process the irrelevant, distracting letters within their visual field. Once they had surpassed their capacity, irrelevant processing would stop. So if ASD subjects in fact have greater processing capacity, then they should process more distracting information even as the main task becomes increasingly complex.

And that�s exactly what they found. As reported on-line in the journal Psychological Science, while there was no difference among subjects in either reaction time or accuracy on the main task, those with ASD processed the irrelevant letters while solving much more complex problems. Put another way, they weren�t ignoring the main task, nor were they distracted away from it. Instead, they were completing their important work and moving on, using their untapped capacity.

But here�s the rub. While this increased distractibility may be a talent rather than a deficit, the psychologists say, it nevertheless can have detrimental consequences in real-life situations. Just ask Tim Page about his uncanny facility for bus routes.

For more insights into the quirks of human nature, visit the �Full Frontal Psychology� blog at True/Slant. Selections from the �We�re Only Human� blog also appear regularly at Newsweek.com and in the magazine Scientific American Mind.

"For just pennies a day"

noreply@blogger.com (Wray Herbert) — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 19:16:00 +0000

There are so many things you can purchase or accomplish for just pennies a day. You can get lots of interesting magazine subscriptions, or a good life insurance plan�no physical required. You can adopt a needy child in Africa, or save the Earth from global warming.

The �pennies a day� marketing scheme has been around a long time, and whoever came up with it showed extraordinary psychological insight. Indeed, science is only now beginning to demonstrate what these marketers sensed intuitively�that people are not entirely rational when it comes to processing numbers. What�s more, the way we think about scales and rates and ratios can make us into either cautious or indiscriminate consumers.

In a way this is obvious. �Pennies a day� is a meaningless ratio, because we�re not really reaching into our pockets each and every day for those copper coins. That�s what the marketers want you to visualize, but most of us are not truly fooled by the ruse. We know automatically--without doing any arithmetic at all�that we�re really talking about dollars a month and maybe hundreds of dollars over a year or years. It�s all a matter of knowing the meaningful scale.

But what if the manipulation of numbers is more subtle, or more complex? Are there marketing phrases and terms that do fool our imperfect minds? University of Michigan psychologist Katherine Burson and her co-workers believe so, and they�ve run a couple interesting experiments to simulate the kinds of offers we might well encounter in our daily lives. Here�s an example:

Imagine you�re in the market for a cell phone plan. After shopping around, you�ve narrowed your choices to two: Plan A costs $32 a month, and for that you�re guaranteed no more than 42 dropped calls out of 1000. Plan B only costs $27 a month, but the number of dropped calls is 65. In other words, you get what you pay for, and consumers make their choice based on what�s more important�money or service.

But what if the same offer was phrased this way? Plan A costs $364 a year, and drops 4.2 calls per 100. Plan B costs $324 and drops 6.5 calls per 100. It takes only the tiniest bit of arithmetic to see that nothing has changed. The offers are identical to what they were before, except that the scale has changed. But actually two scales have changed, and in different ways, so it�s not a no-brainer like �pennies a day.�

So how do consumers process these different offers? The psychologists gave these choices to a large group of volunteers, and the results were interesting. Consumers preferred Plan B when it was described as having a lower price per year, but they preferred Plan A when it was described as having fewer dropped calls per 1000. Notice that it�s the �per year� and �per 1000� that are important. Making the scale bigger also made the difference appear more exaggerated, so emotionally consumers feel like they�re getting much better service or a big savings in cost. Consumers actually changed their preferences with the larger scale�they became more discriminating�even though the real terms remained unchanged.

This is pretty remarkable�and unnerving. But there�s more. In a second experiment, the researchers offered a slightly different choice for movie rental plans. In this scenario, Plan A costs $10 a month for seven new movies per week. Plan B costs $12 a month for nine new movies a week. As before, either choice could make sense, depending on which meets your financial and movie-watching needs.

Then they once again changed the terms: This time the prices stayed the same, but instead of a weekly allotment of movies, consumers now got a yearly allotment. That is, for $10 a month they got 364 movies per year, and for $12 a month they got 468. How did the movie aficionados process these offers? As reported in the current issue of the journal Psychological Science, dramatically more consumers chose plan B when it was expressed in movies per year. It's the emotional impact of that number--468. That's a lot of movies, and a lot more than the other plan gets you, and still for only $12 a month. When you come to think of it, that's really just pennies a day.

For more insights into the quirks of human nature, visit the "Full Frontal Psychology" blog at True/Slant. Excerpts from �We�re Only Human� appear regularly in the magazine Scientific American Mind and at Newsweek.com.