We're Only Human...

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, he 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 instruments 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.

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 reign 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.

Seeing the World in Black and White

noreply@blogger.com (Wray Herbert) — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 20:16:00 +0000

When the Chrysler car company released its new model Dodge Coronet in 1967, the theme of its ad campaign was the �White Hat Special.� Some of the ads featured cartoon cowboys riding around �keepin� the prices low,� while others had the ubiquitous �Dodge Girl� in her signature white Stetson, chirping: �Only the good guys could put together a deal like this.�

These ads didn�t need any elaboration. Madison Avenue knew the potential buyers had all been raised on film and TV Westerns, and knew the symbolism of white hats. Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, the Lone Ranger�cinematic heroes wore white hats, and bad guys wore black. It was all very simple.

Simple, but maybe not all that original. The colors white and black have carried layers of moral meaning since long before American� infatuation with cowboys and automobiles, and some scientists believe that those associations may be automatic and universal and ancient. Indeed, blackness and whiteness may be wired into our neurons, and tightly tangled up with notions of sin and virtue and cleanliness and dirt.

Two University of Virginia psychologists recently decided to explore this provocative idea in the laboratory. Gary Sherman and Gerald Clore wanted to know if common metaphors may be more than mere rhetorical devices, if in fact they might be deep embodiments of moral thinking. They decided to test the link between white and virtue (and black and sin) as part of this larger question.

To do this, the psychologists adapted a reaction-time test from the 1930s, called the Stroop Test. Readers may know this from the Internet, where it circulates as a kind of parlor game. It�s the one in which the names of colors are printed in different colors�say the word blue in yellow ink�and you must very rapidly indicate the ink color rather than the meaning. It�s hard, because our mind wants to read the word�and slow reaction time is taken as a sign of cognitive disconnect or conflict.

In Sherman and Clore�s version of the Stroop, volunteers read not the names of colors but words with strong moral overtones: greed and honesty, for example. Some of the words were printed in black and some in white, and they flashed rapidly on a screen. As with the original Stroop, a fast reaction time was taken as evidence that a connection was mentally automatic and natural; hesitation was taken as a sign that a connection didn�t ring true. The researchers wanted to see if the volunteers automatically linked immorality with blackness, as in black ink, and virtue with whiteness.

And they did, so quickly that the connections couldn�t possibly be deliberate. Just as we unthinkingly�almost unconsciously��know� a lemon is yellow, we instantly know that sin and crime are black; grace and virtue, white.

Why would this be? Well, one possibility is that the metaphor is more complex, embodying not just right and wrong but purity and contagion, too. Think of the metaphor �new fallen snow�: It�s not only white, it�s virginal and unadulterated, like a wedding dress. And blackness not only discolors it; it stains it, taints its purity. With this in mind, the psychologists ran another experiment, adding this idea of contagion, feeling morally dirty. They deliberately primed some volunteers� immoral thoughts by having them read a story about a self-serving, immoral lawyer, and compared them to volunteers primed for ethical thinking.

The idea was that people who were feeling morally dirty would be quicker to make the connection between immorality and blackness on the moral Stroop test, which is exactly what they found. And what�s more, they found this with much looser definitions of morality and immorality�including words like dieting, gossip, duty, partying, helping, and so forth. In other words, those primed for misbehavior linked blackness not only with crime and cheating but with being irresponsible, unreliable, self-centered slackers.

This is pretty convincing in itself, but the researchers wanted to look at the question yet another way. If the association between sin and blackness really does reflect a concern about dirt and impurity, then this association should be stronger for people who are preoccupied with purity and pollution. Such fastidiousness often manifests as personal cleanliness, and a proxy for personal cleansing might be the desire for cleaning products. They tested this string of psychological connections in a final study, again ending with the Stroop test.

The results were unambiguous. As reported on-line in the journal Psychological Science, those who expressed the strongest desire for an array of cleaning products were also those most likely to link morality with white, immorality with black. But here�s the really interesting part: The only products with this power were Dove soap and Crest toothpaste, products for personal cleanliness; things like Lysol and Windex did not activate the sin-blackness connection. In short, concerns about filth and personal hygiene appear central to seeing the moral universe in black and white.

For more insights into the quirks of human nature, visit the �We�re Only Human� blog at www.psychologicalscience.org/onlyhuman. Selections from the blog also appear regularly at Newsweek.com and in the magazine Scientific American Mind.

The Narrative in the Neurons

noreply@blogger.com (Wray Herbert) — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 20:53:00 +0000

Frank and Joe Hardy clutched the grips of their motorcycles and stared in horror at the oncoming car. It was careening from side to side on the narrow road.
�He�ll hit us! We�d better climb this hillside�and fast!� Frank exclaimed, as the boys brought their motorcycles to a screeching halt and leaped off.
�On the double!� Joe cried out as they started up the steep embankment.

Some readers will recognize the quick-witted motorcyclists here as the Hardy Boys, brothers and heroes of a long-popular series of kids� mystery books. The amateur teenage sleuths do manage to escape the reckless driver in this scene, but the close call entangles them in a perilous adventure involving stolen jewels, false accusation, deathbed confession, and clever detective work. Good stuff.

These are actually the opening lines of The Tower Treasure, first published in 1927. I read this passage in the 1950s, and kids are apparently still getting sucked into the story even today. What is it about narratives like these that grab our attention? We may quickly move on to more sophisticated tastes in literature, but even a simple story such as this has power to grab our attention, engage our brains. But what�s the brain responding to exactly?

Psychologists are very interested in this question, and have some ideas. One theory is that we all have many �scripts� stored in our neurons. These scripts are derived from past experiences, and words activate these scripts, transforming the printed text into something more like a real-life experience. The opening scene from The Tower Treasure is actually rather spare in its language, yet for the reader it can be a rich encounter. We visualize a narrow road, perhaps one that we have actually known from somewhere. We feel our grip on the motorcycle handlebars, and hear the screech of the tires; we imagine leaping and the difficult pitch of the embankment and the effort of climbing.

At least that�s the idea, which a team of psychologists at Washington University in St. Louis decided to test in the lab. Jeffrey Zacks and his colleagues suspected that several different regions of the brain collaborate in the reading of a tale, each supplying a specialized script based on a particular kind of real-world experience. So, for example, one group of neurons might supply a story�s sense of space and movement (the careening car on a narrow road), while another might contribute the sensation of handling objects (clutching the grips), and still another, the characters� goals (climbing to safety).

To test this idea, the scientists used a brain scanner to see what regions lit up during the reading of a story. They watched the brains of volunteers as they read four short narrative passages. Each clause in each story was coded for the script it should theoretically trigger: movement in space, sense of time passing, characters� goals, interaction with physical objects, and so forth. The idea was to see if different parts of the brain lit up as the reader�s imagined situation unfolded.

And they did. The details of the brain anatomy aren�t important here, but clearly there are several different neuron clusters involved in story comprehension. For example, a particular area of the brain ramped up when readers were thinking about intent and goal-directed action, but not meaningless motion. Motor neurons flashed when characters were grasping objects, and neurons involved in eye movement activated when characters were navigating their world.

These findings, reported on-line in the journal Psychological Science, strongly suggest that readers are far from passive consumers of words and stories. Indeed, it appears that we dynamically activate real-world scripts that help us to comprehend a narrative�and those active scripts in turn enrich the story beyond its mere words and sentences. In this way, reading is much like remembering or imagining a vivid event.

It�s possible, the psychologists say, that not just reading but all thinking may be similarly embodied in stored, real-life experiences. In this sense, language may have been an adaptive strategy for efficient and vivid communication of experiences to others. Put another way, storytelling may have evolved as a tool of survival.

For more insights into the quirks of human nature, visit the �We�re Only Human� blog at www.psychologicalscience.org/onlyhuman. Selections from the blog also appear regularly in the magazine Scientific American Mind and at Newsweek.com.

The Paradox of Loyalty

noreply@blogger.com (Wray Herbert) — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 15:47:00 +0000

A curious thing happened among my friends during the Bush-Cheney years. Some, especially those who opposed the invasion of Iraq, disengaged from American symbols and traditions. They didn�t celebrate the 4th of July; indeed wouldn�t even watch a fireworks display or fly a flag. But others, also no fans of the war or the administration�s torture policies, did the opposite: They became more patriotic, or at least more public in their displays and declarations of loyalty to country.

I count myself in the second group, yet I admit to being perplexed by this phenomenon. Why would disappointment in one�s country inspire increased loyalty? Doesn�t it seem more natural to disavow the country as a protest against its unjust actions, or at least to disengage a bit?

Well, it turns out that loyalty is a complex and paradoxical emotion. Psychologists have been studying the interplay of social injustice, righteous anger and group allegiance, and it appears that loyalists are not simply apologists for anything and everything the group stands for. In fact, ramped-up loyalty may be a predictable step toward taking a firm and principled stand.

New York University psychologists Heather Barry and Tom Tyler have been exploring this phenomenon in the laboratory, focusing on students� loyalty to their university. In one study, for example, they used an elaborate procedure to measure the strength of students� group commitment�that is, how important the university was to the individual students� sense of identity. Once the students were sorted out according to their group allegiances, they were all asked to review the university�s grievance procedures. This was actually a laboratory ruse: In fact, some read procedures that seemed just and fair, while others read a version that clearly disrespected students� rights, along with fellow students' complaints about unfair treatment.

The psychologists wanted to see how the students would react to unfavorable revelations about their university. Would seeing their group in a bad light change their sense of loyalty? Would they remain team players, with a shared sense of common purpose? They measured this in two ways. First, they asked them a series of questions about their willingness to serve their schools and fellow students in selfless ways: Would they tutor another student if asked? Would they help a professor with some photocopying? That kind of thing. The researchers wanted to get a general measure of how cooperative and service-oriented the students were feeling. In addition, one of the experimenters deliberately dropped her pen during the experiment, to see which of the students were spontaneously helpful.

The findings were provocative. As reported on-line in the journal Psychological Science, the students who were the most devoted to their school to begin with were also the most cooperative and helpful when forced to confront the school�s failings. That is, those truest to their group redoubled their sense of service and commitment when faced with injustice. They didn�t criticize, nor did they distance themselves from the others in the group.

These results were immediate and short-term. The psychologists emphasize this, and find the results encouraging. It means that the group members� loyalty is not so fragile that they jump ship with just a little disillusionment; they stay to help strengthen the group and correct its course. But this pumped-up loyalty is unlikely to last for long: If confronted with continued evidence of unfairness and injustice, many will stop compensating for the group�s shortcomings�and leave. What�s unclear is how long this will take�or how unjust a group must be before it squanders its members� loyalty.

For more insights into the quirks of human nature, visit �We�re Only Human� at www.psychologicalscience.org/onlyhuman. Selections from the blog also appear regularly in the magazine Scientific American Mind and at Newsweek.com.

Bending Time's Arrow

noreply@blogger.com (Wray Herbert) — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 18:58:00 +0000

Among my parenting memorabilia is an illustrated timeline my son made back in the second grade. It starts with his 1986 birthday on the left and proceeds through various milestones of his first years�first day of kindergarten, T-ball, and so forth�ending on the far right with another celebration at the ripe old age of seven. I treasure this.

But how did he know that life unfolds from left to right, and not the other way around? Sure, his teacher instructed him and his classmates to draw the timeline this way, but why? Why do we accept without question that left equals early while right equals late, far off in time? More fundamentally, why do we entwine time and space?

Psychologists suspect that this space-time continuum may be more than a social convention, an artifice that we all simply agree to. Perhaps the brain has wired our perceptions of space and time together for some reason. A team of researchers has been exploring this question in the laboratory, using an unusual pair of spectacles.

Psychologist Francesca Frassinetti of the University of Bologna and her colleagues wanted to see if deliberately distorting space perception would also distort perception of the passage of time. They had a group of volunteers look at an image on a computer screen for different intervals of time�say two seconds. Then a different image appeared on the screen, and the volunteers tried to keep it on the screen for exactly the same amount of time, using a controller. In other words, they tried to duplicate the interval of time they had just perceived.

Most of the volunteers were pretty good at this, but that wasn�t the point. After the initial test, all of the volunteers put on special glasses, called prismatic lenses. These glasses shifted the volunteers� perception of the image horizontally, either to the left or to the right; that is, they would look at the image just as before, but it would appear to the left or the right. They were basically forced to shift their spatial attention. Then they all did the same time estimation task as before.

The results were clear, and a bit spooky. As reported in the June issue of the journal Psychological Science, when the glasses shifted the volunteers� attention to the right, they overestimated time. Not to put too fine a point on it, time hurried by; it expanded in their minds. Similarly, shifting the brain�s focus to the left compressed time; time intervals seemed shorter than they were in fact.

This doesn�t explain why time�s arrow moves from left to right, but it does show that time's on a horizontal line in the mind's eye. And it does help explain something else about my son�s timeline. A lot of time and experience is compressed into a very small space early on in his young life, with each year taking up more space as he gets older. It makes intuitive sense that we would experience time as expanding into the future, where the exact dimensions of our experience are as yet unknown.

For more insights into the quirks of human nature, visit �We�re Only Human� at www.psychologicalscience.org/onlyhuman. Selections from the blog also appear regularly in the magazine Scientific American Mind and at Newsweek.com.

"I am a lovable person." "Not."

noreply@blogger.com (Wray Herbert) — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 18:17:00 +0000

A milestone in the self-help movement was the publication of Norman Vincent Peale�s The Power of Positive Thinking in the early 1950s, which encouraged Americans to both think and talk positively about their lives and themselves. By the mid-1980s, that therapeutic philosophy had become so pervasive in American society that the Saturday Night Live comedian Al Franken wickedly parodied self-glorification through his alter-ego Stuart Smalley, who wrote the quintessential self-help volume: I�m Good Enough, I�m Smart Enough, and Doggone It, People Like Me!

A lot has changed since the 80s. Comedy writer Franken is now the junior Senator from Minnesota, and will soon be writing laws instead of SNL skits. But one thing has not changed appreciably: Americans are still being urged�through self-help books, TV therapists and the like�to think positively and make daily affirmations of their self-worth.

But do they work? Is self-affirmation a sound scientific idea, or just more of our therapeutic culture�s gobbledygook? Interestingly, despite its broad popularity, the effectiveness of positive self-talk has never been rigorously tested. Until now. Psychologist Joanne Wood of the University of Waterloo and her colleagues recently decided to explore the idea in the laboratory. They report their surprising findings in the July issue of the journal Psychological Science.

There�s scientific reason to be skeptical about the value of self-affirmation. Psychologists know, for example, that people have a great deal of difficulty balancing two contradictory ideas. We may try to tell ourselves we�re something we�d like to be, but most of us are deeply resistant to ideas that violate our true sense of identity. Based on this theory, Wood reasoned that forced affirmations might merely remind some people of how they are not measuring up�and indeed might boomerang and make them feel worse. Here�s the experiment:

Wood gave a group of volunteers a standard test for self-esteem, and selected those who scored highest and lowest. Then they all participated in a writing exercise, but half got this instruction: Every time you hear a bell sound, repeat to yourself: �I am a lovable person.� The bell sounded about every 15 seconds during the exercise, and afterward she measured their mood and self-esteem. She also had the volunteers think about the words �I am a lovable person�; but some thought only about why the statement might be true, while others thought about why the statement might be either true or false.

The results were unambiguous and ironic. Those who already felt good about themselves got a slight boost from self-loving talk, but those who had low self-esteem to begin with got worse�more depressed and more self-critical. But interestingly, the volunteers who tried to focus on only positive thoughts about themselves did worse than those who were encouraged to think both good and bad things about themselves. Those preoccupied with self-affirmation were probably unsuccessful at suppressing all negative thinking, giving the negativity more power�power enough to trump the self-loving words.

For more insights into the quirks of human nature, visit �We�re Only Human� at www.psychologicalscience.org/onlyhuman. Selections from the blog also appear regularly in the magazine Scientific American Mind and Newsweek.com.

In the Eye of the Storm

noreply@blogger.com (Wray Herbert) — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 14:09:00 +0000

In the Eye of the Storm from Assn. for Psych Science on Vimeo.

Hurricane Katrina was the largest natural disaster in U.S. history, killing more than 1,800 and causing well over $100 billion in damage along the Gulf coast from Florida to Texas. The 2005 storm breached every levee in New Orleans, flooding almost the entire city as well as the neighboring parishes. Yet many residents chose to stay at home and ride out the perilous winds and water.

This perplexed many commentators at the time, including the top officials of the Bush administration. FEMA director Michael �Brownie� Brown blamed the rising death toll on those who refused to take prudent action, as did homeland security chief Michael Chertoff, who told CNN: �Officials called for a mandatory evacuation. Some people chose not to obey that order. That was a mistake on their part.� Many others chimed in, asking in so many words: What were they thinking?

What were they thinking? The general consensus seemed to be that they were irresponsible, indecisive�perhaps even lazy or stupid. Anyone with an ounce of sense would take action in the face of such a threat, make a plan, solve the problem. Passivity was widely denounced as a character flaw.

The problem with these instant analyses is that nobody bothered to ask the people themselves, the ones paddling the boats and clinging to the rooftops. Until now. Stanford University psychologist Nicole Stephens and her colleagues decided to compare the views of outside observers with the perspective of the New Orleans residents who actually rode out Katrina. They suspected that these people had not simply thrown up their hands, but rather that they had a different concept of conscientious action.

To find out, they conducted two surveys, one of observers and one of survivors, to see how they perceived both those who fled and those who did not. The study of observers�including a large group of relief workers, firefighters, physicians, and so forth�basically confirmed the pop wisdom. That is, these close-up observers� views matched those who watched the tragedy from afar: They perceived those who evacuated their homes in a much more positive light in general�more self-reliant, hardworking. Those who stayed put were described as careless and dependent. Those who stayed were also seen as depressed and hopeless, where the evacuees were characterized as self-righteously angry, primed for action. But here�s perhaps the most interesting point: These observers derogated those who stayed even though they were well aware that these residents lacked the resources to leave�money, transportation, out-of-town relatives. Their disadvantages didn�t soften the view that they were somehow responsible for their own suffering.

The survivors themselves told a very different story, however. When the psychologists surveyed actual Katrina survivors, they found that those who stayed behind did not feel powerless or passive. To the contrary, they saw themselves as connected with their neighbors�communitarian rather than self-reliant. Their stories emphasized their faith in God and their
feelings of caring for others. In short, they didn�t see themselves as failing to take action, but rather as taking a different kind of action�adapting to life�s travails and staying strong despite hardship.

The psychologists also took detailed measures of all the survivors� well-being�their mood, life satisfaction, mental health, drug and alcohol use. As they report in the July issue of the journal Psychological Science, there was absolutely no difference between those who stayed in New Orleans and those who high-tailed it out. It seems their different �choices� did not reflect differences in well-being. Rather, they were different kinds of actions suitable to different life circumstances.

For more insights into human nature, visit �We�re Only Human� at www.psychologicalscience.org. Selections from this blog also appear regularly in the magazine Scientific American Mind and at the website Newsweek.com.

A Confidence Gene?

noreply@blogger.com (Wray Herbert) — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 18:34:00 +0000

Smart kids tend on balance to do well in school. That may seem obvious, but there are a lot of exceptions to that rule. Some kids with high IQs don�t ever become academic superstars, while less gifted kids often shine. Why would this be?

Psychologists have focused on things like self-esteem and confidence�how good kids think they are�to explain these outcomes. And the assumption has always been that such psychological traits are shaped mostly by parenting�by parents� beliefs and expectations and modeling. But surprisingly this idea had never been scientifically tested.

Until now. Behavioral geneticist Corina Greven of King�s College London and her colleagues decided to do the first rigorous analysis of the heritability of confidence�and its relationship to IQ and performance. To do so, they studied more than 3700 pairs of twins, both identical and fraternal twins, from age seven to ten. Comparing genetically identical twins to non-identical siblings allows scientists to sort out the relative contributions of genes and environment, and when they did this they came up with surprising but unmistakable findings.

Contrary of accepted wisdom, the researchers found (and report in the June issue of Psychological Science) that kids� confidence is heavily influenced by heredity�at least as much as IQ is. Indeed, as-yet-unidentified confidence genes appear to influence school performance independent of IQ genes, with shared environment having only a negligible influence.

The fact that confidence is heritable does not mean it is unchanging, of course. Siblings share a lot of influences living in basically the same home and community, but there are always worldly influences pulling them apart. A genetic legacy of self-confidence merely opens up many possible futures.

For more insights into human nature, visit the �We�re Only Human� blog at www.psychologicalscience.org/onlyhuman. Versions of the blog also appear regularly in the magazine Scientific American Mind and on Newsweek.com.

The Power of Backward Thinking

noreply@blogger.com (Wray Herbert) — Mon, 18 May 2009 19:39:00 +0000

Our bodies shape our emotions and thoughts and language. Just consider a few common phrases: He was a forward thinker. She is way ahead of her time. We are an advanced civilization. Like locomotion, our minds seem naturally to value what lies in front of us.

Psychologists think this powerful bias may have deep evolutionary roots. Forward motion is what our ancient ancestors did when they felt safe, unthreatened. When they confronted something aversive or perilous, they would retreat. Over eons our evolving brain added layer upon layer of emotion to these deep-wired impulses to approach and avoid.

A team of Dutch psychologists took this basic idea and ran with it. If avoidance and retreat have to do with danger, they wondered, is it possible that backward motion might actually recruit more brain power than forward motion? If threats are problems to be solved, shouldn�t actual and emotional retreat require greater concentration and attention? They decided to explore this possibility in the lab.

Psychologist Severine Koch and her colleagues at Radboud University Nijmegen ran this simple experiment. They had volunteers walk just a few steps, either forward, backward, to the left or to the right. Then they immediately took the Stroop test. This is the test with the names of colors printed in different color inks; the word blue, for example, might be printed in blue�or it might be printed in red or yellow. The volunteers try very quickly to name the color of the ink rather than read the word. It�s cognitively very difficult to quash the impulse to read, so fast and accurate responses are taken as an indicator of focus and concentration.

The results, reported in the May issue of the journal Psychological Science, were intriguing. Those who had walked just a few steps backward were far more focused and attentive than were any of the others. That is, their physical retreat triggered increased mental control�presumably because of the ancient link between threat and vigilance. Confronted with a problem or difficulty, it made be advisable to take a step back and think about the situation�literally.

For more insights into the quirks of human nature, visit �We�re Only Human� at www.psychologicalscience.org/onlyhuman. Selections from the blog also appear regularly in the magazine Scientific American Mind and at www.sciam.com.

Cuteness With a Purpose

noreply@blogger.com (Wray Herbert) — Tue, 12 May 2009 15:50:00 +0000

Fans of the old TV sitcom Seinfeld will recall the episode in which Jerry and Elaine visit their friend Carol and her newborn baby Adam in the Hamptons. The proud Mom wants to show Adam off, but when she ushers Jerry and Elaine into the nursery, they are dumbstruck with horror at the baby�s looks. They manage to hide their feelings and say a few polite words, but when they�re out of earshot they can�t hold back:

Jerry: �Is it me or was that the ugliest baby you have ever seen?
Elaine: �Uh, I couldn�t look. It was like a Pekinese.�
Jerry: �Boy, a little too much chlorine in that gene pool. And you know, the thing is, they�re never going to know. No one�s ever going to tell them.�

Jerry�s right. Nobody is going to tell them�or any parent for that matter�that their baby isn�t cute. That would be cruel, and parental love trumps any objective, universal standard of cuteness anyway. But cruel or not, the fact is that some babies are cuter than others. Unless it�s your own kid, most people agree that features like big eyes, a large forehead and pinchable cheeks add up to cute.

But what is cuteness for? Psychologists have speculated that cuteness might trigger emotional bonding and nurturance in parents, and there is some evidence that women have keener perceptions than men when it comes to subtle variations of cuteness. But no clear biological link has been found between cuteness and womanhood and mothering�until now.

Psychologist Reiner Sprengelmeyer of the University of St. Andrews and an international team of colleagues decided to explore the possibility that female hormones might be linked to perception of facial cuteness. They used photographs of babies that had been manipulated by computer to very subtly alter the level of cuteness, and tested the perceptions of both women and men of various ages.

Their findings were intriguing. Young women, from 19 to 26 years old, were much more sensitive to nuances of cuteness than were either young or older men. That�s interesting in itself, but it gets better: Women who were between ages 45 and 51 were just like the younger women in their sensitivity, but women 53 to 60 were just like the men. The dividing line is right around the typical time of menopause, suggesting that female reproductive hormones may play a role on cuteness perception.

The psychologists ran a second test to double-check these findings, this time comparing pre- and post-menopausal women of the same age. They also tested young women who were (or were not) taking oral contraceptives, which artificially boost female hormones. The findings confirmed the link: As reported in the journal Psychological Science, older pre-menopausal women and younger women on the pill were much more sensitive to subtle variations in babies� cuteness.

These studies do not show how hormones shape women�s judgments of cuteness. But since all the volunteers could see equally well, it�s likely that cuteness also elicits heartwarming emotions, and that the emotional response is entangled with actual perception of cuteness. Whatever the exact mechanism, it appears that cute babies are well designed by nature to make the rewards of motherhood outweigh all the hard work.

For more insights into the quirks of human nature, visit "We're Only Human" at www.psychologicalscience.org/onlyhuman. Excerpts from the blog also appear regularly in the magazine Scientific American Mind and at http://www.sciam.com/.

Don't Know Much Of Biology

noreply@blogger.com (Wray Herbert) — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 18:27:00 +0000

Just think about what it takes to learn biology. Not textbook biology, the kind you learn in high school with microscopes and dissecting kits. Rather, the kind you learn on your own, as a young child encountering the vast and diverse world of living things. How does the human mind link together things as varied as hippos and lichen and mosquitoes and rhododendrons? And how do we sort this diversity into meaningful categories? In short, how do we think about life?

Psychologists are very interested in how the mature mind sorts the living world, and where we put ourselves in relation to other life forms. That�s the stuff of philosophy and religion and morality. But it�s not as obvious as one would think. Take motion, for example. Many living things move, but so do rivers and clouds and rocket ships. And some living things, like coral, don�t appear to move at all. So it�s not just the fact of motion that defines life, but the why and how. Young children find this confusing and make a lot of mistakes about what�s animated and what�s not. Only over time do we outgrow our primitive, childish ideas and replace them with a sophisticated view of the natural world.

Or do we? Do we really discard all our naive thinking as we experience the world and learn about its complexity? University of Pennsylvania psychologists Robert Goldberg and Sharon Thompson-Schill have been exploring these questions in the laboratory, with intriguing results. Here�s one of their experiments:

The psychologists showed a group of college students a long list of words, one at a time and very rapidly. Some were the names of plants, others animals, and still others non-living things. The non-living things were further divided into non-moving objects like brooms; non-moving natural things, like boulders; moving artifacts like trucks; and finally, natural moving things, like rivers. The idea was to see how quickly and accurately the volunteers used movement and �naturalness� to classify these various things as living or non-living.

The scientists were particularly interested in how we think about plants, where we put them in the grand scheme of things. Plants are an interesting anomaly because�at least to young children�they don�t �do� anything; instead, we do things to them, like climb them and water them and prune them. If they move at all, their movement is very subtle. Not surprisingly, kids often misclassify plants as non-living.

But how about college students? Well, it appears that they too make mistakes, even with all that formal education: The volunteers in the study were much more hesitant in classifying plants, suggesting that they had to slow down to deliberately overrule their na�ve taxonomy; and they also made more outright errors. They were also slower to size up moving things in general, and non-living natural things�suggesting that movement and naturalness were the features that stymied them.

To be fair, these weren�t biology majors. And we all know that kids can slip into college without much in the way of rigorous scientific training. But here�s the really interesting part. The psychologists ran basically the same experiment with biology professors, people who make their living teaching university students about the natural world. Indeed, the volunteers in this second study had been teaching college-level biology for a quarter century, on average, and at highly prestigious schools.

And guess what. As reported in the April issue of the journal Psychological Science, the profs did better than the undergraduates, but not as brilliantly as one might from the scientific elite. Even these experts were significantly worse at classifying plants than they were at categorizing animals. That is, even a lifetime of advanced scientific training didn�t trump the na�ve impulse to view plants as artifacts.

Children may be natural-born taxonomists, but they�re not all that good at it. That�s because they have a deep-wired urge to see the world as designed and simple, and to be at the center of it all. Apparently that impulse never goes away entirely.

For more insights into the quirks of human nature, visit �We�re Only Human� at www.psychologicalscience.org/onlyhuman. Selections from the blog also appear regularly in the magazine Scientific American Mind and at www.sciam.com.