We're Only Human...

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.

Changing the old dating rules

noreply@blogger.com (Wray Herbert) — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 15:41:00 +0000

Women are much choosier than men when it comes to romance. This is well known, but the reason for this gender difference is unclear. Evolutionary psychologists think it�s because, way back in prehistoric times, �dating� was much riskier for women. Men who made an ill-advised choice in the ancient version of a singles bar simply had one lousy night. Women who chose unwisely could end up facing years of motherhood.

That�s less true today, yet women remain much more selective. Is this difference a vestige of our early ancestry? Or might it be totally unrelated to reproductive risk, something more modern and mundane? A couple of Northwestern University psychologists, Eli Finkel and Paul Eastwick, decided to explore this question in an unusual laboratory: a real-life speed dating event.

For the uninitiated, speed dating is an increasingly popular way for men and women to meet and find potential partners. Participants attend a sponsored event and go on a series of very brief �dates,� about four minutes each. Typically, the women sit scattered around a room, and the men make the rounds. Afterward, both men and women indicate to the sponsor if they would be interested in seeing any of the others again. If two �yeses� match up, they get phone numbers and that�s it. They�re on their own.

Men say �yes� a lot more than women. That�s expected, but Finkel and Eastwick had a novel theory about why. Perhaps it could be explained by the simple convention of men standing and approaching�and women sitting passively. There has been a lot of recent work on the mutual influence of body and mind--how we embody our thoughts and emotions�and the psychologists speculated that physically approaching someone might be enough to make the potential date more appealing romantically�and thus to make the men less choosy overall.

They tested this in a series of 15 heterosexual speed dating events, involving 350 young men and women. Each participant went on about 12 dates, but the researchers changed the rules: In these events, the women and men approached each other about equally. Following each date, each participant rated the other for romantic desire and romantic chemistry. They also rated their own sense of self-confidence on the date. A bit later, they decided thumbs up or thumbs down.

The results were a score. As reported on-line in the journal Psychological Science, the well-known gender difference vanished when men and women assumed more egalitarian roles. The difference didn�t completely reverse when women were on the move. That is, their choosiness went away but they didn�t become more indiscriminate than men. This suggests that the ancient tendencies may still have some force, but they are also reinforced by arbitrary social norms. What�s more, it was increased self-confidence that appeared to make the difference: Simply standing and being on the move boosted confidence, which in turn boosted romantic attraction.

We don�t speed date through real life, of course, but there are all sorts of social conventions based on gender, and these presumably shape romantic feelings and actions. Having men behave more like women and women more like men appears at least to narrow this one gap between the sexes.

For more insights into the quirks of human behavior, 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.

Making Sense of Pat

noreply@blogger.com (Wray Herbert) — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 20:52:00 +0000

Fans of the old Saturday Night Live will remember skits about the androgynous Pat. Pat�s formless body and non-descript clothes offered no clue about gender. Nor did Pat�s behavior, and the running joke was that the celebrity guest hosts would go ridiculous lengths to figure out if Pat was a man or a woman. They always failed.

The skits were funny in part because Pat defied a deep-seated urge to put people into tidy pigeonholes�to stereotype. Pat wasn�t aggressive in a stereotypical male way, and Pat wasn�t particularly caring in a stereotypical female way. Pat was just Pat.

We all trade in stereotypes every day, whether we like it or not. It�s how we sort an impossibly complex world into manageable categories: man, woman, Italian, Chinese, lawyer, engineer. Stereotypes can be unfair and hurtful to many people, but the power of stereotyping is undeniable. It�s a fact of the human psyche.

But what exactly is going on in the mind when we stereotype someone? Is the process instantaneous and automatic, or do we deliberate over traits and categories before making judgments? A clever new study of the actual internal process of stereotyping�from basic perception to judgment�offers some provocative findings.

Tufts University psychologists Jonathan Freeman and Nalini Ambady used many common stereotypes, including gender stereotypes, to explore a new theory about the cognitive mechanics underlying caricatures. Here�s the basic idea: When we catch sight of a stranger�s face, we immediately begin to extract information: That�s no problem if it�s the Marlboro Man or Betty Crocker, but most of us aren�t archetypal icons of our gender. Most humans are somewhere in between, so our immediate perception is usually more tentative: �He�s probably male.� This tentative perception in turn triggers a tentative stereotype: "He�s likely to be aggressive." In other words, our perceptions and categories are not crisp and fixed, but rather in dynamic flux. It takes a few seconds for this ambiguous impression to stabilize into a final interpretation of the stranger.

At least that�s the theory, which the psychologists decided to test in the lab. To do so, they morphed photos of men and women into amalgams of male and female traits, some more ambiguous than others. None were as baffling as the fictional Pat, but they were deliberately ambiguous�like in the real world. Then they used an innovative lab technique to explore the cognitive processing of these faces: Instead of scanning their brains, they tracked their hand movements. They flashed the photographs on a screen, and instructed the volunteers to move a mouse rapidly toward one of two adjectives�for example, �aggressive� and �caring��in opposite corners of the screen. The psychologists tracked the computer mouse movements to see how quickly and directly they categorized each face by stereotypical traits.

The idea here is that the hands have a mind of their own, in the sense that movements reflect the mind�s hesitation and conflict. The results were fascinating. An instantaneous stereotype would be a straight line from the starting point to one of the two adjectives�male, therefore aggressive, no hesitation. Nobody did that. Instead the movements appear as curves, suggesting some hesitation and deliberation in each judgment.

But here�s the really interesting part, reported on-line this week in the journal Psychological Science: The more ambiguous the face was, the more curved the path to judgment. That is, a male face with female traits might ultimately be judged as male and therefore aggressive, but not before the volunteer�s hand was tugged a bit toward the alternative stereotype of caring female. It�s like the mind is saying: Yeah, probably aggressive, but what about those nurturing features? What do I make of those? It�s as if the perceived gender ambiguity triggers a cognitive �competition� between incomplete and contradictory stereotypes, which persists until the mind settles on one or the other.

This is more than just a clever experiment, Freeman and Ambady believe. Even though the cognitive ambiguity is active only for an instant during the stereotyping process, those few seconds of contemplating life�s ambiguity may undermine our mind�s rigid categories�and have lasting effects on social judgments and behavior way down the line.

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 at Newsweek.com and in the magazine Scientific American Mind.

Cold Shoulder, Warm Heart

noreply@blogger.com (Wray Herbert) — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 16:34:00 +0000

One of Robert Frost�s best-loved poems is the short verse �Fire and Ice,� which goes like this:

Some say the world will end in fire;
Some say in ice.
From what I�ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if I had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To know that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

Most good poets are part psychologist, and Frost shows keen insight into the human mind in these seemingly simple lines. Indeed, his 1920 poem anticipated ideas that are just now emerging in cognitive science�specifically the notion that our bodily sensations are inextricably bound up with emotions like hatred and desire. Or to put it a way that the Bard of New England would have appreciated, the metaphorical thermometer is as much a gauge of social life as it is of degrees Fahrenheit.

At least that�s the theory, which psychologists have been exploring in various ways in the laboratory. Here�s a recent example, from Hans IJzerman and Gun Semin of Utrecht University. The psychologists were intrigued by such metaphors as �the cold shoulder� and �warm feelings,� and decided to test the link between thermometer readings and feelings of closeness or distance, affection or iciness. They ran a few experiments to test this in different ways.

The first experiment was straightforward. Volunteers who had just arrived in the lab were asked to hold the experimenter�s beverage for a few minutes, ostensibly so he could do something that required two hands. Some were handed a cold beverage, and others a warm one. Then they were asked to rate both themselves and an acquaintance on a well-known scale that measures social proximity; the more they overlapped with
the other, the higher their score on closeness; the less overlap, the more distant they were feeling. The results were also straightforward. Holding the warm beverage induced greater feelings of closeness than the cold beverage.

Those findings are intriguing but hardly conclusive, so the researchers looked at the body-mind link a different way. When we are literally close to someone or something, we see more detail; our experience is more concrete. Similarly, distance makes our vision of things more vague and abstract. The psychologists reasoned from this that feelings of warmth would induce not only emotional closeness toward others, but also perceptual closeness--and thus more vivid and concrete perceptions.

They didn�t use beverages in this study. Instead they varied the room temperature, from the low 60s F to low 70s F. This isn�t a huge variation, but the researchers figured it would be enough to test the idea that temperature shapes emotion and thought. They showed all the volunteers a short film clip of chess pieces moving around, but not the usual way chess pieces move, and they asked the volunteers to describe �in their own words� what was happening. The idea was that room temperature would shape their perceptions and as a result the language that the volunteers used. That is, warm observers would write concrete descriptions of the chess scene, and chilly observers would write more abstract descriptions.

And that�s exactly what they found. When they coded the language in the narratives, they found that room temperature did indeed affect the volunteers� choice of words. The warm volunteers also expressed greater feelings of closeness toward the experimenter.

The psychologists decided to take this one step further, to see if temperature shapes not only language but worldview. It�s well known that people from cultures that place a high value of individualism�Americans, for example�have a particular cognitive style, compared to more communitarian cultures. Specifically, those from communal cultures tend to see patterns in the world, where individualists tend to see disconnected parts. The researchers suspected that warmth would spark more a more relational worldview, while cold would induce a more self-reliant view.

They varied the room temperature as before, but this time they had the volunteers take a perception test specifically designed to differentiate these cognitive styles. That is, some people perceive patterns where others see independent components, and this is taken as a measure of either a relational or individualistic worldview. And once again, temperature showed a clear and direct connection to how volunteers processed what they saw. As reported on-line in the journal Psychological Science, warmth made volunteers see the connections between things, while the chilly were more individualistic in their perceptions of the world.

So affection, concrete language, communitarian worldview�that�s a lot to hook to the simple rising and falling of mercury. But perhaps it shouldn�t be surprising, the researchers say. After all, the mind evolved along with the body over millions of years, so the way we think and feel was no doubt shaped by real and important experiences in the world. What could be more basic than staying warm?

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

The Myth of Binge Eating

noreply@blogger.com (Wray Herbert) — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 17:42:00 +0000

An inviolable principle of most addiction recovery programs is total abstinence. It appears that for true addicts, one drink or one toke or one line is enough to trigger a binge�and a likely relapse. This dogma is not so hard and fast when it comes to food because . . . well, because we all have to eat.

Still, chronic overeaters do often embrace a version of the abstinence dogma, treating certain foods like Johnny Walker to an alcoholic. It might be an economy-sized bag of potato chips or a
hot fudge sundae or a double order of Buffalo wings. Every foodie has a taboo food or two that will predictably shatter his or her discipline and will power and send the dieter into face-stuffing freefall.

Or so the wisdom goes. But is it true? Surprisingly, this idea has never been tested in a real-life situation, so a team of psychologists decided to do just that. Traci Mann of the University of Minnesota and several colleagues suspected that the notion of catastrophic relapse was too simplistic for a complex behavior like eating. Food-minded people do violate their own rules, of course, but perhaps they make up for their transgressions with a little deprivation later on. This is the idea they wanted to explore.

To do so, the psychologists recruited a large group of college undergrads�all women. They deliberately chose college-age women because as a group they tend to be more weight-conscious and to diet more than the general population. They also questioned each of the volunteers individually to identify their attitudes toward eating, how often they dieted, their weight fluctuations, and so forth. The women thought they were taking part in a broad study of �health habits.�

To make the situation as realistic as possible, the women simply went about their days�going to class, studying, socializing, whatever�but they carried electronic �diaries� with them at all times. The psychologists paged the women once an hour during waking hours, and asked them a variety of questions, including queries about eating and snacking and�importantly�about diet violations. The study took two days, and the results showed no evidence that eating a forbidden food triggers binge or relapse. This was true even among the women most preoccupied with weight and dieting.

The researchers wanted to double-check this finding. So they did a second study, this one lasting eight days, during which the women kept detailed logs of their food consumption. In the first study, it was unclear how each of the volunteers defined a food violation. It might have been a single bite of a Snickers bar, or an entire tray of lasagna. So in this study, the researchers created a ruse that required about half the volunteers to drink an 8-ounce milkshake; they figured this would be a eating violation to most weight-conscious college women. They then compared their post-milkshake calorie consumption to their calorie consumption for the week before, and they also compared the violators to those who had not violated their diet.

And guess what? Drinking the forbidden milkshake was not a dietary catastrophe. Indeed, as reported on-line in the journal Psychological Science, the women who drank the shake ate no more calories overall than the other women, and their calorie consumption the day of the violation was no greater than their typical daily consumption had been for the prior week�about 1,400 calories. In other words, they somehow compensated for the milkshake later in the day�skipping an evening snack, going light at dinner�and as a result got themselves back on track without delay.

This is good news. It�s not clear from this study if the women deliberately compensated for the taboo milkshake, or if that caloric balancing act takes place on an unconscious level. Perhaps that doesn�t matter. The bottom line is that a milkshake is just that and no more. It�s not symbolic of weakness or failure, and doesn�t have to ruin a day or a week or a lifetime commitment.

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

The Science of Kids

noreply@blogger.com (Wray Herbert) — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 15:37:00 +0000

Nick is a 6-year-old boy who doesn�t lie. At least according to his father, Steve. So imagine Steve�s chagrin when he witnessed what a hidden camera had documented in the McGill University laboratory of psychologist Victoria Talwar. In order to win a prize, Nick readily cheated in a game, then lied to cover up his cheating. When pressed, he elaborated on his lie, and he showed not a glimmer of remorse. Indeed, he was gleeful.

Is Nick a �young sociopath in the making?� Probably not. In fact, he�s fairly typical of 6-year-olds, who lie about once an hour, usually to cover up a transgression of some kind. That�s about twice as much lying as 4-year-olds do, which suggests that kids are learning to lie. Looking at kids of all ages, fully 96 percent are liars. Indeed, Talwar views lying as an important developmental milestone, linked to intelligence.

That doesn�t mean lying is okay, and both father and son know this. It�s uncomfortable to watch Nick squirm through his lies as he digs himself in deeper. And Steve is a fairly typical parent too, in the sense that all parents are very bad at lie detection. What�s more, Nick likely learned to lie from watching his parents tell white lies. Parents typically view precocious lying as innocent, something that will correct itself; but in fact a lot of kids get �hooked� on lying very early.

Nick�s story comes from science writers Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman, who include it in NurtureShock, their delightful new collection of essays on the �science of kids.� Though not exactly a parenting manual, the book does offer a lot of useful information on why kids do what they do. For example, Talwar and her colleagues have tried using stories to teach kids like Nick to curb their lying. In one study, they had kids listen to either "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" or "George Washington and the Cherry Tree"; they heard the story after they had cheated, but before the psychologist asked them about cheating.

For those who don�t recall: In "The Boy Who Cried Wolf," the shepherd boy lies repeatedly about a wolf, and in the end is eaten by a wolf when nobody believes his calls for help. So it�s about severe punishment for lying. George Washington, by contrast, tells his father the truth about chopping down the tree, and is forgiven and praised for his truthfulness. When Bronson and Merryman conducted a survey, three of four respondents said the wolf story would be the more effective teaching tool, but in fact it was the opposite. The honest George tale cut lying by 75 percent in boys, and 50 percent in girls.

Why? Probably because kids already know that lying is a punishable offense; they�re not learning anything new there. What�s new�and welcome information�is that honesty might bring them both immunity from punishment and parental praise.

Bronson and Merryman�s essay on lying is representative of this engaging volume, in its mix of pitch-perfect science writing and soft-pedaled guidance for parents. Many of their essays�on sleep, racial attitudes, self-control, sibling relations, and more�are animated by actual flesh-and-blood kids, who we meet on an excursion through many of the nation�s top child psychology laboratories. It�s a rewarding and entertaining excursion. NurtureShock is published by Twelve Books, and is in bookstores now.

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

A cognitive metamorphosis

noreply@blogger.com (Wray Herbert) — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 15:30:00 +0000

Franz Kafka�s 1919 short story �A Country Doctor� is a tale about . . . well, who knows what it�s about really? The bare-bones plot involves a physician who must make his way through a blizzard to tend to a young boy who is ailing. Or might be ailing, or might not; it�s not clear. Beyond that it is hard to describe, much less interpret the string of absurdities and nonsense that make up this short piece. Time and traditional narrative break down entirely. It�s a disorienting assault on meaning.

That won�t surprise any reader familiar with the works of Kafka and other existentialist writers, who deliberately toyed with reality in order to disorient the reader. Indeed, the word Kafkaesque has come to be a synonym for bizarre, confusing, surreal.

But why is this great literature rather than just gibberish? What is its effect on the reader�s mind? How does a surreal tale like �A Country Doctor� work on a psychological level?

We may never know Kafka�s intentions, but psychologists are beginning to get some insight into the mental dynamics of reading such absurdist writing. One recent study suggests that Kafkaesque threats on life�s meaning might actually prime our need for (and perception of) order and pattern in the world. So paradoxically, experiencing meaninglessness may inspire a keener search for meaning. Here�s the evidence.

Psychologists Travis Proulx of UC-Santa Barbara and Steven Heine of the University of British Columbia ran an experiment in which volunteers actually read a modified version of �A Country Doctor,� this one illustrated with a series of drawings as nonsensical as the text. Other volunteers read a short story roughly like the Kafka tale, but more conventional in form. When they were done reading, all the volunteers took a difficult test that required them to identify patterns in long and seemingly random strings of letters. The psychologists expected that those who were disoriented by the Kafkaesque prose would be more earnest in searching�and more successful in spotting order in the chaos.

And that�s exactly what they found. As reported on-line in the journal Psychological Science, those who were unmoored by Kafka found more of the hidden patterns that actually existed, but they also identified more patterns overall, correctly and incorrectly�suggesting that they were highly motivated to seek and find order. But here�s the most intriguing aspect of these findings: A disorienting literary experience appears to have sharpened the volunteers� yearning for meaning on a fundamental cognitive level; it�s unlikely that the volunteers even thought of themselves as searching for meaning, yet their neurons seemed primed to make order anywhere and everywhere they could.

Proulx and Heine ran another similar experiment and got the same results. Taken together, the studies suggest that we humans are irrepressible meaning makers. Indeed the need for order and predictability may be fundamental to the human condition, and challenging the world�s predictability may be one key to art�s psychological power. Kafka apparently had this uncanny insight into the human mind nearly a century ago, at age 36.

For more insights into the quirks of the human mind, 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.

Carpe diem! Did our ancient ancestors have personalities?

noreply@blogger.com (Wray Herbert) — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 19:17:00 +0000

I have high school friends who are dead already, as a direct result of their chosen lifestyle. They drank too much, drove too fast, ate whatever they craved at any given moment. They were impulsive, live-for-today types, and they paid a price for these traits. Nobody�s shocked that they died early.

We all know people like this. We also know people who are conscientious workers, homebodies and parents, committed partners and committed bachelors, workaholics, health nuts, easy-going and neurotic. There�s no denying the stark individual differences in personality. �Who we are� seems to emerge early in life, and to endure through the lifespan. It shapes our life choices, from health to family to work and finances.

But why do we have personality at all? It wouldn�t seem to make sense from an evolutionary point of view. The traits that have been wired into our genes and neurons over the millennia tend not to be differences, but things we all share in common--habits of mind that have helped the entire human species survive and adapt. That�s why evolutionary psychologists have tended to dismiss personality traits as irrelevant �noise.�

Until recently. Now a small cadre of psychologists has been revisiting personality, to see how it might fit into an evolutionary understanding of humanity. One of the leaders in this effort is University of Texas psychologist David Buss, who lays out several emerging ideas in the April issue of the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science. Here�s just one:

Each of us has a finite supply of time and energy. Think of a hypothetical young man making his way in the modern world. He might choose to put his energy into prospering�being healthy and well-fed�or he might instead choose the life of a romantic gadabout. Or perhaps he�ll opt for being a devoted parent and provider. But he probably can�t do all these things well. He has to make choices.

So it was with our ancient ancestors. They were similarly called upon to make tradeoffs, spending their time and energy on one life �problem� or another. They probably weren�t as aware of making choices as we are today, but they were nevertheless prioritizing things like romance, parenting, and social climbing.

So the constant challenge that all early humans faced was making the optimal energy tradeoff. The individual choices they made�and continue making today�were shaped by their supply of energy and time, their personal qualities, and their circumstances. Very attractive men, for example, might put a lot of their energy into mating rather than parenting, while people with bleak mating prospects might opt for career or nurturing others� children.

And those who lack energy, or who perceive the future as short, might discount mating and parenting and career, and squander their limited energy now. Those are the live-for-today types, according to Buss: In that sense, what is often disparaged as a maladjusted personality marked by poor self-control might more generously be viewed as a realistic adaptation to what life throws at you. Carpe diem.

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

I learned it at the movies

noreply@blogger.com (Wray Herbert) — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 17:38:00 +0000

In the 2003 movie The Last Samurai, Tom Cruise plays a former US Army captain named Nathan Algren, an alcoholic and mercenary who in the 1870s goes to Japan to work for the Emperor Meiji. The young Emperor is facing a Samurai rebellion, and Algren trains a ragtag bunch of farmers and peasants in modern warfare, including the use of rifles. When Algren is captured by the Samurai, however, he is gradually converted to their ways, and ends up fighting with the warriors in a losing battle against the Imperial Army he helped create.

The movie was both a critical and popular success, and why not? Lots of exciting swordplay, exotic costumes, and a fascinating piece of history that was probably unfamiliar to most Americans before the film was released. Indeed, it�s fair to say that many Americans have learned much of what they know about the westernization of Japan from watching films like The Last Samurai.

That�s probably not a good thing, because the film is full of historical errors. Most notably, it was the French and Dutch, not Americans, who played the key role in Japan�s modernization in the late 19th century, and the Algren character is loosely based on a French officer named Jules Brunet. What�s more, the movie conflates two decades of military history for the sake of simplicity, and presents a highly romanticized view of the Samurai warriors.

I know, I know. The Last Samurai is not a documentary, and people go to the movies to be entertained, not to be instructed in history. No argument there. But films like The Last Samurai are increasingly used in the classroom as well, as adjuncts to textbooks and lectures. Educators believe that the vividness of film can be a valuable teaching tool, enlivening and reinforcing students� memories for otherwise dry historical text. But is that a good thing, if the facts are wrong? Are they doing more harm than good?

A team of psychologists has begun exploring these questions experimentally. Andrew Butler of Washington University in St. Louis and his colleagues decided to simulate a classroom where popular films are used as a teaching tool, to see if the practice improved or distorted students� understanding of history. The Last Samurai was in fact one of the films they used in the experiment, along with Amadeus, Glory, Amistad, and a few others. All of the films contained both accurate and inaccurate information about the historical incidents they depicted.

The students watched the film clips either before or after they read an accurate version of the historical events. So with The Last Samurai, for example, they read a version that accurately identified the hero as French, not American, and was faithful to the actual timeline of Japanese history. In addition, some of the students received a general warning about the inaccuracy of popular historical films, while others got very specific warnings, about changing the hero's nationality, for instance. The idea was to see which teaching method led to the most accurate comprehension of the events: reading or watching a movie or both, with or without the teacher's commentary.

When the psychologists tested all the students a week later, the verdict for classroom movies was one thumb up, one thumb down. Watching the films did clearly help the students learn more�but only when the information was the same in both text and film. Apparently the vividness of the film�and simply having a second version of the same facts�did help the students create stronger memories of the material. But when the information in the film and the reading were contradictory�that is, when the film was inaccurate�the students were more likely to recall the film�s distorted version. What�s more, they were very confident in their memories, even though they were wrong. This happened even when the students were warned that filmmakers often play fast and loose with the facts.

So should films be banned from the classroom? Not necessarily, and here�s why. As the psychologists report on-line in the journal Psychological Science, a good teacher can trump a movie's shortcomings. They found that when teachers gave the very detailed warnings about inaccuracies in the film version, the students got it. But those warnings had to be very precise, something like: Pay attention when you watch the film and you�ll see that the filmmaker has changed the nationality of the hero from French to American, which is not the way it was. With such warnings, the students apparently �tagged� the information as false in the minds�and remembered the accurate version when quizzed later on.

In this sense, the movie�s distorted version of history can be used as a teachable moment.* Students learn the truth by identifying the mistakes and labeling them, so their take-away learning is: the film says this, but in fact it�s that. Not a bad way to learn, assuming the classroom teacher knows enough to point out what�s this and that.

*For an entertaining guide to some historical inaccuracies in popular films, check out this slideshow at the Washington University in St. Louis website: http://news-info.wustl.edu/tips/page/normal/14418.html

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