May 06, 2008

CIA guide to optimised thinking:

The CIA have released the full text of a book on the psychology of analysing surveillance data. While aimed at the CIA's analysts, it's also a great general guide on how to understand complex situations and avoid our natural cognitive biases in reasoning.

I've not read it all, but it aims not only to give the reader an understanding of the limitations of our reasoning, but also how to overcome them when trying to think about tricky problems.

A central focus of this book is to illuminate the role of the observer in determining what is observed and how it is interpreted. People construct their own version of "reality" on the basis of information provided by the senses, but this sensory input is mediated by complex mental processes that determine which information is attended to, how it is organized, and the meaning attributed to it. What people perceive, how readily they perceive it, and how they process this information after receiving it are all strongly influenced by past experience, education, cultural values, role requirements, and organizational norms, as well as by the specifics of the information received.

The chapters on cognitive biases seem particularly good, and the book consistently grounds the abstract concepts in accessible examples.

It's interesting that patients who undertake cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) to help with emotional or psychiatric difficulties will learn how to identify and avoid many of these exact same biases.

However, in the clinical situation the idea is that mood or emotion is in a pathological feedback loop which makes biases more likely (e.g. anxious people will tend to focus on threatening things), which in turn reinforces the emotional state.

The CIA book doesn't seem to mention emotion or mood at all, despite the fact that the same effects are known to occur in all of us, even if they don't get to the level of illness or impairment.

Secret service analysts must surely work in high-emotion environments (and the fact that the UK's secret services regularly advertise for clinical psychologists seems to bear this out), so this would seem to be a crucial aspect not covered by this otherwise very comprehensive guide.

Link to full text of CIA book 'Psychology of Intelligence Analysis'.

—Vaughan.

April 16, 2008

Cognitive biases as public policy:

The LA Times has an interesting article on whether the sorts of decision-making biases identified by behavioural economists should be used to promote public policy objectives.

The idea is based on the fact that we are more likely to choose certain options depending on how they're presented. In fact, supermarkets take advantage of this in how they lay out their products to maximise the chances of us buying the premium brands.

The LA Times piece argues that this could be used for government objectives, such as increasing the number of people who take out pensions, while still maintaining the freedom to choose and without using explicit incentives.

The libertarian aspect of the approach lies in the straightforward insistence that, in general, people should be free to do what they like. They should be permitted to opt out of arrangements they dislike, and even make a mess of their lives if they want to. The paternalistic aspect acknowledges that it is legitimate for choice architects to try to influence people's behavior in order to make their lives longer, healthier and better.

Private and public institutions have many opportunities to provide free choice while also taking real steps to improve people's lives.

* If we want to increase savings by workers, we could ask employers to adopt this simple strategy: Instead of asking workers to elect to participate in a 401(k) plan, assume they want to participate and enroll them automatically unless they specifically choose otherwise.

The article gives several more examples and defends its use of the term 'libertarian paternalism' for the idea.

I'm left wondering whether governments shouldn't be adopting exactly what the commercial sector have been doing for years, or whether we're naive to think political choice engineering isn't being used already.

Link to LA Times article 'Designing better choices'.

—Vaughan.

April 12, 2008

The psychology of magical thoughts:

Psychology Today has a great article that covers the length and breadth of magical thinking - the tendency to see patterns and causality where none exists.

Magical thinking is described in a number of ways. Superstition is the most common, where we assume rituals will somehow affect the future despite having no causal connection to what we want to change.

Apophenia or pareidolia describe the effect where we see meaningful information where none was intended. The Fortean Times has a wonderful collection of photographs that depict 'faces' or other forms in clouds, trees, rock formations or even food.

Superstition and apophenia are an interesting contrast, because superstition can be more easily rejected than apophenia. Our perceptual systems are just set up to detect patterns, and so the perception of 'faces' is unavoidable.

Often we don't even register our wacky beliefs. Seeing causality in coincidence can happen even before we have a chance to think about it; the misfiring is sometimes perceptual rather than rational. "Consider what happens when you honk your horn, and just at that moment a streetlight goes out," observes Brian Scholl, director of Yale's Perception and Cognition Laboratory. "You may never for a moment believe that your honk caused the light to go out, but you will irresistibly perceive that causal relation. The fact remains that our visual systems refuse to believe in coincidences." Our overeager eyes, in effect, lay the groundwork for more detailed superstitious ideation. And it turns out that no matter how rational people consider themselves, if they place a high value on hunches they are hard-pressed to hit a baby's photo on a dartboard. On some level they're equating image with reality. Even our aim falls prey to intuition.

The article looks at seven types of magical thinking, and discusses some of the key psychology experiments that have shown us how magical thinking is influenced.

One of my favourites is an experiment by psychologist Emily Pronin who found that people would readily attribute another person's headaches to sticking pins in a 'voodoo doll'.

Interestingly, the effect was much stronger when the other person (actually a stooge) was deliberately annoying. The irritating actor increased the likelihood of participants' wishing them harm, and so increased the perceived connection between their 'voodoo doll' pin-sticking and the actor's feigned headache.

Link to Psychology Today article on magical thinking.

—Vaughan.

March 31, 2008

Predictably irrational, variably dishonest:

Behavioural economist Dan Ariely was the guest on the latest edition of ABC Radio National's All in the Mind where he discusses why we're so bad at predicting what's best for us, and why honesty is a shifty behaviour.

As well as being a researcher, Ariely is also author of a psychology book called Predictably Irrational which is currently riding high in the book charts.

It's worth catching the mp3 version of the programme, as it's slightly extended, and I found the last part, where Ariely talks about honesty, the most interesting.

Using various experimental conditions where participants are given varying degrees of room for dishonesty, Ariely notes that people tend to be dishonest enough to give themselves an advantage, but suggests we're not so dishonest to feel bad about ourselves.

In other words, he's suggesting that honesty is a cognitive dissonance style reasoning process, balancing our desire for personal gain against our willingness to believe in ourselves as a 'good person' - an idea explored further in a forthcoming paper [pdf] by Nina Mazar and Dan Ariely.

If you're interested in a good overview of the psychology of honesty and deception, I've just read a fantastic paper [pdf] by the same pair, which is fascinating as much for its insights into what influences our level of honesty for its recommendations about applying the research to encourage people to be more honest.

It notes that getting people to focus on themselves increases honesty, as does getting them to focus on moral ideas, such as the Ten Commandments.

In their experiment, participants were told to write down either as many of the Ten Commandments as they could remember (increased self-awareness of honesty) or the names of ten books that they read in high school (control). They had two minutes for this task before they moved on to an ostensibly separate task: the math test. The task in the math test was to search for number combinations that added up to exactly ten. There were 20 questions, and the duration of the experiment was restricted to five minutes. After the time was up, students were asked to recycle the test form they worked on and indicate on a separate collection slip how many questions they solved correctly. For each correctly solved question, they were paid $.50.

The results showed that students who were made to think about the Ten Commandments claimed to have solved fewer questions than those in the control. Moreover, the reduction of dishonesty in this condition was such that the declared performance was indistinguishable from another group whose responses were checked by an external examiner. This suggests that the higher self-awareness in this case was powerful enough to diminish dishonesty completely.

However, I wonder whether the effect of focusing on the Ten Commandments was due to their moral or supernatural associations.

I am reminded of Eric Schwitzgebel's ongoing project on why ethics professors, who think about moral issues a lot, are no more moral (and perhaps less!) than other people, and a study [pdf] by psychologist Jesse Bering that found that simply telling participants that the lab was haunted increased honesty in a computer task.

Link to Dan Ariely on All in the Mind.
pdf of Mazar and Ariely's paper on the psychology of dishonesty.

—Vaughan.

March 17, 2008

Beyond belief:

Salon has a provocative article by neurologist Robert Burton who discusses what the neuroscience of belief means for how we understand the world, drawn from his new book, On Being Certain.

We're going to be posting an interview with Burton on Mind Hacks in the near future, but the Salon article should give you a flavour of some of his thoughts the brain and belief.

What's most curious about work on the neuropsychology of belief is that it barely touches upon the memory research where they've had many of these things under the microscope for years.

I'm a huge fan of the work of Israeli psychologist Asher Koriat who has done some absolutely stunning work on the control of memory.

This may seem a relatively dry topic, but think for a minute about how you use your memory.

For example, you've almost certainly had the experience where you know that you know something but can't remember the details, or that you know you recognise something, but can't remember the occasion when you encountered it before.

Also, we seem able to judge when we've remembered something to our satisfaction, but this is quite a remarkable feat in itself. Think about how we could possibly do this.

You could say we know because the memory matches other memories we have in mind, but then these are subject to the same problem - how do we know that we've remembered them correctly?

In other words, there must be another system at work, and one of the primary components of this is what psychologists call the 'feeling of knowing' that communicates between our unconscious pool of stored information and our conscious sense of how successfully our memory is operating.

Koriat discussed these processes in a 2000 paper [pdf] that was a revelation for me when I read it. It convinced me of the importance of these wormhole-like processes that connect the conscious and unconscious mind.

In his article, Burton suggests what social implications arise from the science of belief, suggesting we should be a little more humble when we state what we 'know'.

Link to Salon article 'The certainty epidemic'.
pdf of Koriat's 2001 paper on the 'feeling of knowing'.

—Vaughan.

February 27, 2008

Behavioural Obamanomics:

Theories are made great by those whom they inspire. Perhaps then, it is not surprising that the fresh new face of the US presidential race has been inspired by behavioural economics, one of the fresh new faces of cognitive science.

The New Republic magazine has an article on how the Obama campaign have adopted behavioural economics - the science of how people actually reason about money, as opposed to how they should - as their mainstay of economic policy.

Unsurprisingly, The New Republic, generally a centre-left publication, hold out great hope for the partnership of this new science and an Obama government.

You can find subtle evidence of this influence across numerous Obama proposals. For example, one key behavioral finding is that people often fail to set aside money for retirement even when their employers offer generous 401(k) plans. If, on the other hand, you automatically enroll workers in 401(k)s but allow them to opt out, most stick with it. Obama's savings plan exploits this so-called "status quo" bias.

What is more interesting though is that cognitive science is starting to make inroads into policy development outside the traditional area of defence (where psychology, and more recently neuroscience, have traditionally been key in driving defence spending).

Link to The New Republic article 'The Audacity of Data'.
Link to intro to behavioural economics (both via MeFi).

—Vaughan.

January 01, 2008

Sampling risk and judging personal danger:

We live in a dangerous world and we've learnt to judge risk as a way of avoiding loss or injury. How we make this appraisal is crucial to our survival and an innovative study published in December's Risk and Analysis investigated what influences risk perception in everyday life and has shown that our retrospective estimations of risk are quite different from how we judge them at the time.

Many studies on the psychology of risk ask people to look back on past situations or judge risk for hypothetical or lab-based situations.

The trouble is, imaginary or lab-based situations may not be a good match to real-life (after all, what's really the danger?) and our perceptions when looking back might be influenced by the outcome - perhaps we judge things as less risky if they turned out OK in the end.

One way of trying to get a handle on how people feel during the flow of everyday life is to use a method call 'experience sampling'.

This usually involves giving participants a pager, an electronic diary or just sending them texts to their mobile phone.

Participants are alerted at random times during the day by whatever method is chosen and they're asked to rate how they feel there and then, or as soon as safely possible (I discussed how this has been applied to psychotic experiences in a BPSRD article in 2006).

In this study, participants were asked to rate their mood, what activity they were doing, what is the worst consequence that could occur, how severe that consequence could be, how likely it is to happen and what would the risk be to their well-being.

Generally, risks were perceived to be short term in nature and involved "loss of time or materials" related to work and "physical damage".

Interestingly, everyone rated the severity of risk as about the same, but women were more likely to think that the worst consequence was likely to occur.

Furthermore, the better the mood of the participants (both male and female), the less risky they thought their activity was.

As an additional part of the study, participants were asked to look back and re-assess some of the situations they rated on the spot. These ratings tended to be much lower, showing that people tend to judge things to be more risky 'in the heat of the moment'.

Both of these findings demonstrate the importance of emotion in risk judgements, suggesting that it forms another source of information, along with more calculated rational estimates.

In fact, this is one of the key ideas behind understanding anxiety disorders.

Anxiety acts as an emotional risk warning, but it can get massively 'out of synch' with our rational judgements, so even when we 'know' that (for example) the risk of air travel is smaller than the risk of driving a car, 'in the heat of the moment', the information from our emotions overrides this in our judgement of risk in the form of anxiety.

Of course, risk perception in itself is an important topic to understand, particularly as risk judgements are the basis of safety decisions in many professions.

Link to PubMed abstract of paper.
pdf of full-text of paper.

—Vaughan.

December 27, 2007

Beliefs about intelligence affect mental performance:

I've just found a fascinating five minute NPR radio report on work by psychologist Carol Dweck that has found that if a child thinks that intelligence is something that can change throughout life, they do better in school.

Dweck has been doing some fascinating work on what affects children's academic performance.

We've reported on some of her earlier work, including the fact that praising children for their intelligence actually makes them perform worse in certain situations, whereas praising them for their hard work encourages them to tackle adversity when it occurs.

This NPR radio slot covers some work she published with colleagues in a freely available paper looking at the fact that children who believe that intelligence is flexible seem to do better as they "tend to emphasize ‘learning goals’ and rebound better from occasional failures".

Dweck and her colleagues then tested the idea that if they taught children that intelligence could grow, their performance would improve. As predicted, it did.

It's a really great example of carefully targeted cognitive science research. It's a counter-intuitive finding that has direct practical application to improving children's academic performance in both the long- and short-term.

It's also a lovely example of a self-confirming belief. Children who believe intelligence is fixed are more likely to have fixed performance, whereas children who believe intelligence can grow are more likely to show performance growth.

The implications for the psychology of teachers are also interesting, because it would seem to be self-confirming for them as well. Teachers who believe that poorly performing children may have hidden potential might see them improve when they pass this on to the child.

Teachers who believe that poorly performing children are unlikely to change may actually limit a child's performance if the child picks up on this and begins to believe the same.

So it might be worth testing whether teachers' beliefs about intelligence affect their students' performance as well.

Link to NPR on 'Students' View of Intelligence Can Help Grades'.
Link to paper 'Why do beliefs about intelligence influence learning success?'.

—Vaughan.

December 25, 2007

Kids' letters to Santa as advertising psychology study:

A completely charming study looking at how television advertising influences children by examining the toys they request in their letters to Santa Claus.

The study was led by Prof Karen Pine and has just been published in the Journal of Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics.

The Relationship Between Television Advertising, Children's Viewing and Their Requests to Father Christmas.

J Dev Behav Pediatr. 2007 Dec;28(6):456-61.

OBJECTIVE:: Children's letters to Father Christmas provide an opportunity to use naturalistic methods to investigate the influence of television advertising.

METHODS:: This study investigates the number of toy requests in the letters of children aged between 6 and 8 (n = 98) in relation to their television viewing and the frequency of product advertisements prior to Christmas. Seventy-six hours of children's television were sampled, containing over 2,500 advertisements for toys.

RESULTS:: Children's viewing frequency, and a preference for viewing commercial channels, were both related to their requests for advertised goods. Gender effects were also found, with girls requesting more advertised products than boys.

CONCLUSION:: Exploring the children's explicit understanding of advertising showed that children in this age group are not wholly aware of the advertisers' intent and that, together with their good recall of advertising, this may account for their vulnerability to its persuasive messages.

Link to abstract on PubMed.

—Vaughan.

November 02, 2007

Black humour perks up the inevitable:

Time magazine has a short article on an interesting finding: after thinking about their own death, participants in a psychology study were more likely to respond unconsciously in ways that suggested a boost in mood.

The study was led by psychologist Nathan DeWall and asked one group of students to think about a painful dental procedure, and another about their own death.

The participants were then asked to complete questionnaires that rated their mood. In terms of their conscious reporting, there was no difference between the groups.

However, when asked to do some simple tasks that are known to be affected by unconscious emotional biases, the group who had thought about death showed a consistently positive effect:

Students in the death-and-dying group, it turns out, had all gone to their happy place — at least in their unconscious. There was no difference in scores between the groups on the explicit tests of emotion and affect. But in the implicit tests of nonconscious emotion — the wordplay — researchers found that the students who were preoccupied with death tended to generate significantly more positive-emotion words and word matches than the dental-pain group. DeWall thinks this mental coping response kicks in immediately when confronted with a serious psychological threat. In subsequent research, he has analyzed the content of the volunteers' death essays and found that they're sprinkled with positive words. "When you ask people, 'Describe the emotions that the thought of your own death arouses in you,'" says DeWall, "people will report fear and contempt, but also happiness that 'I'm going to see my grandmother' and joy that 'I'm going to be with God.'"

I would like to think that this will come as welcome news to the people who protested against a funeral parlour being built near their homes because of concerns about a 'negative psychological impact', although, I suspect it will be of little comfort.

Experimental evidence is remarkably unconvincing to some.

It reminds me of when Tom Gilovich did an analysis of the 'hot hand' in professional basketball (where players who have scored several points are supposedly 'on a run'). His study [pdf], published in the journal Cognitive Psychology, found that the effect was just the misperception of random variation.

When asked about the research, Red Auerbach, coach of the Boston Celtics, reportedly responded "Who is this guy? So he makes a study. I couldn't care less".

Another example of the fly of empirical evidence being crushed against the windscreen of self-confidence. Well, at least Stephen Colbert would be proud.

Link to Time article 'Are We Happier Facing Death?'.

—Vaughan.

October 29, 2007

Decision-making special issue in Science:

This week's Science has a special selection of papers on the psychology and neuroscience of decision making. While most of the articles are closed-access, one on how game theory and neuroscience are helping us understand social decision-making is freely available.

It is a great introduction to 'neuroeconomics', a field that attempts to work out how the brain supports cost-benefit type decisions.

This can be directly applied to financial decision-making, but also to other types of situations where weighing possible gains and losses is important, whether the gains and losses are in the form of money, time, social advantage or status - to name just a few.

One of the crucial discoveries of recent years is that people do not act as rational maximisers - making individual decisions on how to get the most benefit out of each choice. In fact, social influences can be huge and often lead people to reject no-risk economic gains when then feel it is socially unjustified.

This had led the field into interesting territory, both informing models of the economy, and illuminating how we make social decisions.

As part of the neuroeconomic approach, researchers have begun to investigate the psychological and neural correlates of social decisions using tasks derived from a branch of experimental economics known as Game Theory. These tasks, though beguilingly simple, require sophisticated reasoning about the motivations of other players. Recent research has combined these paradigms with a variety of neuroscientific methods in an effort to gain a more detailed picture of social decision-making. The benefits of this approach are twofold. First, neuroscience can describe important biological constraints on the processes involved, and indeed, research is revealing that many of the processes underlying complex decision-making may overlap with more fundamental brain mechanisms. Second, actual decision behavior in these tasks often does not conform to the predictions of Game Theory, and therefore, more precise characterizations of behavior will be important in adapting these models to better fit how decisions are actually made.

Link to Science special issue on decision making.
Link to article 'Social Decision-Making: Insights from Game Theory and Neuroscience'.
Link to previous Mind Hacks post on game theory and (ir)rationality.

—Vaughan.

September 05, 2007

Infowar: strike early, strike often:

The Washington Post has a timely article about the psychology of believing news reports, even when they've been retracted - suggesting that if false information is presented early, it is more likely to be believed, while subsequent attempts to correct the information may, in fact, strengthen the false impression.

The article starts with results from a study [pdf] by psychologist Norbert Schwarz who looked at the effect of a government flier that attempted to correct myths about the flu vaccine by marking them 'true' or 'false'.

Unfortunately, the flier actually boosted people's belief in the false information, probably because we tend to think information is more likely to be true the more we hear it.

Negating a statement seems just to emphasise the initial point. The additional correction seems to get lost amid the noise.

One particularly pertinent study [pdf] not mentioned in the article, looked at the effect of retractions of false news reports made during the 2003 Iraq War on American, German and Australian participants.

For example, claims that Iraqi forces executed coalition prisoners of war after they surrendered were retracted the day after the claims were made.

The study found that the American participants' belief in the truth of an initial news report was not affected by knowledge of its subsequent retraction.

In contrast, knowing about a retraction was likely to significantly reduce belief in the initial report for Germans and Australians.

The researchers note that people are more likely to discount information if they are suspicious of the motives behind its dissemination.

The Americans rated themselves as more likely to agree with the official line that the war was to 'destroy weapons of mass destruction', whereas the Australian and German participants rated this as far less convincing.

This suggests that there may have been an element of 'motivated reasoning' in evaluating news reports.

Research has shown that this only occurs when there's sufficient information available to create a justification for the decision, even when the information is irrelevant to the main issue.

There's a wonderful example of this explained here, in relation to men's judgements about the safety of sex with HIV+ women of varying degrees of attractiveness.

So, if you want your propaganda to be effective get it in early, repeat it, give people reasons to be believe it (however irrelevant), and make yourself seem trustworthy.

As I'm sure these principles are already widely known among government and commercial PR departments, bear them in mind when evaluating public information.

Link to Washington Post article on the persistence of myths.
pdf of study 'Memory for Fact, Fiction, and Misinformation' in the Iraq war.
Link to info on motivated reasoning and example.

—Vaughan.

August 27, 2007

Sufficiently advanced madness:

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from madness."

Ashley Pomeroy, riffing on Arthur C. Clarke's third law.

—Vaughan.

August 04, 2007

The obvious and not-so-obvious in psychology:

Tom has written an excellent article for The Psychologist on the not-so-obvious findings in psychology which has just been made freely available.

There are certain predictable responses you get if you introduce yourself as a psychologist.

The most common is "are you analyzing me?", followed by "can you read my mind?". The best answer to both, of course, is 'sometimes'.

Occasionally, a bright spark will tell you "psychology, well, it's just obvious isn't it?", which, to be frank, I wish it was. But sadly, it's fiendishly complicated.

Tom's article gathers a whole bunch of counter-intuitive research findings for exactly such situations:

I used to keep a stock of ‘unobvious’ findings ready to hand for occasions like this. Is it really obvious that people can be made to enjoy a task more by being more poorly paid to recruit for it (cognitive dissonance: Festinger & Carlsmith, 1959)? That a saline solution can be as effective as morphine in killing pain (the placebo effect: Hrobjartsson, 2001)? That students warned that excessive drinking is putting many of their peers at risk may actually drink more, whereas advertising the fact that most students don’t drink, or drink in moderation, is the thing that actually reduces binge drinking (Perkins et al., 2005)? That over a third of normal people report having had hallucinations, something we normally experience solely with mental illness or substance abuse (Ohayon, 2000)? Or that the majority of ordinary Americans could be persuaded to electrocute someone to death merely by being asked to by a scientist in a white coat (Milgram, 1974)?

There's many more great examples, including touching on the cognitive bias that leads people to think they understand more than they do when they have little knowledge.

Priceless stuff.

Link to article in The Psychologist on the 'obvious'.

—Vaughan.

August 01, 2007

The modern science of subliminal influence:

The New York Times has a great article on how our actions and decisions can be subconsciously 'primed' by the world around us.

Priming is a well-established effect in psychology. It describes the effect whereby encountering one thing activates related mental concepts in the mind.

Because they've been activated, they influence other mental processes that happen to be occurring at the same time, influencing decision making and desire, even if we're not aware of it.

New studies have found that people tidy up more thoroughly when there's a faint tang of cleaning liquid in the air; they become more competitive if there’s a briefcase in sight, or more cooperative if they glimpse words like "dependable" and "support" — all without being aware of the change, or what prompted it.

Psychologists say that "priming" people in this way is not some form of hypnotism, or even subliminal seduction; rather, it's a demonstration of how everyday sights, smells and sounds can selectively activate goals or motives that people already have.

More fundamentally, the new studies reveal a subconscious brain that is far more active, purposeful and independent than previously known. Goals, whether to eat, mate or devour an iced latte, are like neural software programs that can only be run one at a time, and the unconscious is perfectly capable of running the program it chooses.

It's great to see this article is largely based on published experiments.

Often, experiments tell their own stories and very little is needed to make them 'accessible' to the public. Just a bit of light and attention.

Link to NYT article 'Who’s Minding the Mind?'.

—Vaughan.

June 26, 2007

Why don't ethics professors behave better?:

If you spent your whole life trying to work out how to be ethical, you would think you'd be more moral in everyday life. Philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel has found that this isn't the case, and asks the question "Why don't ethics professors behave better than they do?".

Initially, this was based on a hunch, but Schwitzgebel, with colleague Joshua Rust, has begun to do research into the question. They've found some surprising results.

At a recent philosophy conference, he offered chocolate to anyone who filled in a questionnaire asking whether ethicists behaved better than other philosophers.

It wasn't long before an ethics professor stole a chocolate without filling in a questionnaire. (This reminds me of a famous psychology study that found that trainee priests on their way to give a talk on 'The Good Samaritan' mostly ignored someone in need if they were in a hurry!).

When the results came in, ethicists rated other ethicists as behaving better, but other philosophers rated them as no more moral than everyone else.

In another study, Schwitzgebel investigated whether people interested in moral issues are more likely to steal books. By looking at library records, he's found that books on ethics are more likely to be stolen than other philosophy books.

So why aren't ethics professors more ethical than the rest of us? Schwitzgebel wonders whether it is because there is a difference between emotional engagement with moral issues and a more detached reasoning style that is necessary for careful analysis, but which may not make someone feel compelled to act more ethically.

Ominously, he notes that "More and more, I'm finding myself inclined to think that philosophical reflection about ethical issues is, on average, morally useless".

It is interesting that there are similar problems in other professions. For example, doctors don't follow health advice adequately and are much more likely to suffer from mental illness.

As an aside, Schwitzgebel has made all his papers and publications available online and has a fantastic blog that is well worth keeping tabs on.

Link to Schwitzgebel's articles on 'The problem with ethics professors'.
Link to Schwitzgebel's homepage with publications and blog links.

—Vaughan.

June 20, 2007

What aliens taught us about self-justification:

Newsweek has a brief but interesting article on the new generation of research focused on cognitive dissonance - our desire to reconcile ill-fitting beliefs and actions which can lead us to self-justify in the most curious ways.

The theory is one of the most important in psychology but has a rather unusual origin.

It originated with psychologist Leon Festinger who came up with the idea after studying a UFO cult.

The cult believed in a prophecy that aliens would land at a certain date and destroy the earth. The date came and went and no aliens appeared, but a curious thing happened.

While some believers became disillusioned and left, others strengthened their beliefs. Festinger asked 'why would your belief strengthen if there's evidence against it?'.

He thought that it might result from a process of trying to make sense of two conflicting things - in this case, acting as a cult member, but having your belief in a prophecy disproved.

Perhaps to reconcile these positions and make yourself feel more at ease, you could either change your actions (leave the cult), or, change your other beliefs to fit (maybe the prophecy was a test of faith?).

Festinger set decided to test this idea in the lab with a now classic experiment.

He asked groups of students to volunteer for an experiment. In the study the students were asked to complete a dull and repetitive task.

Afterwards they were asked to persuade another student to volunteer. For this, half the students were paid one dollar, half twenty dollars.

The students were put in the position that their actions (persuasion) conflicted with their belief that the task was boring.

The students who were paid only one dollar rated the task as more enjoyable than the twenty dollar students.

While the paid students could justify their persuasion by telling themselves they were doing it for the money, the unpaid students justified it to themselves by changing their opinion of the task - "Actually, it wasn't that boring after all".

Many more studies have born out the theory, suggesting that we are motivated to reduce conflicts in our actions and beliefs, partly because we feel discomfort when they do not adequately match.

The Newsweek article looks at some of the more recent research in this area, and touches on some of the neuroscience studies which are trying to work out how the brain is involved in this process.

Incidentally, the author of the piece, Wray Herbert, also has a blog that is full of other great articles.

Link to Newsweek article 'Toothless is Beautiful'.

—Vaughan.

May 29, 2007

The paradoxes of mental accounting:

The Washington Post has a fascinating article on the psychology of mental accounting - a seemingly simple process but one which seems to have curious effects on how we decide to spend our money.

The article suggests we mentally divide our money for different purposes, and tend to be reluctant to change our thinking, even when it is against our interests.

There's a nice example of turning up to the cinema and discovering you've lost your $20 ticket. How would you feel about shelling out for another one?

Compare this situation to one in which you turn up to the cinema to buy a ticket, but find you've lost a $20 bill. How would you feel about buying a cinema ticket in this situation?

Intuitively, it seems as if the first situation is worse, because you're buying another ticket, when, in fact, the loss is exactly the same in both situations.

It also seems that we assign different sources of money to different purposes, despite the fact that money is completely interchangeable:

Arkes and his colleagues once cited an anecdote in a study: Employees of a publishing firm who were in the Bahamas for an annual meeting were each given a cash bonus for getting a big contract. Almost to a person, the bonus recipients took the money to a local casino and blew it. What is interesting is that most of these people did not lose more than the $50 -- they slowed down or stopped when they felt they were playing with their "own" money rather than with the $50 of "free" money. The irony, of course, is that the $50 these people lost was their own money, too.

The article has got some more great examples of how we make spending decisions based on our own idosyncratic internal accounting schemes.

UPDATE: An interesting note from jswolf19, grabbed from the comments:

In my mind, the loss of the ticket and the loss of $20 are not the same. It's possible that I might find either the ticket or the $20 later (that it's misplaced instead of lost). However, the ticket will have become useless to me whereas the $20 will not have.

Link to Washington Post article 'mental accounting' (thanks Enchilada!)

—Vaughan.

May 23, 2007

The irrational guide to gaming the system:

The latest edition of Scientific American has a freely available feature article on how our decisions are often irrational in game theory terms, but can still be more beneficial than the supposed rational choice.

Game theory tries to understand choices when individuals are working independently and each choice affects the other person's gains or losses.

In other words, it asks the question 'considering I don't know what choice the other person is going to make, what is the best option to maximise my own outcome?'.

This was famously the basis of the American Cold War policy of stockpiling huge amounts of nuclear missiles.

Obviously it would be better if there were fewer nuclear weapons in the world, but if the USA decided to reduce the number of missiles, how could it trust the Soviets to do the same?

Game theory suggested that the best option was to have so many weapons that they could destroy the other country. This way, if the other country reduced their stockpile, they were safe, and if they didn't, both countries were equally armed.

If this were the case, the potential outcome for starting a nuclear war would be the destruction of both countries. As each wanted to avoid this fate, the idea was that it resulted in a stable but uneasy standoff.

Without a hint of irony, the policy was called MAD, short for Mutual Assured Destruction.

While this is perhaps an extreme example of game theory in action, it can be applied to many situations in which gains and losses are dependent on another person's choices.

In essence, it's a mathematical take on a psychological guessing game.

The SciAm article looks at how there are many situations where game theory predicts the most rational outcome, but which may actually lead to much less gains for everyone than if people make an irrational response.

One version of the most rational outcome is the Nash equilibrium, named after Nobel-prize winning mathematician John Nash, who was also the subject of the film A Beautiful Mind.

This is where everyone has settled on a choice where no one has anything to gain by choosing something else.

As the article discusses, this rarely happens in practice, however, and in many cases people just take the risk that they may get screwed over and maximise their benefits as a result.

This suggests that game theory can be a narrow view of human interaction (for example, it doesn't account for the role of dialogue in the arms race).

This was also a criticism made by Adam Curtis, producer of documentary series The Trap, who argued that game theory had given a cynical and oversimplified view of human psychology that has been disastrously applied to politics.

Whether you buy Curtis' political view or not, it's a fascinating example of how trying to model psychological decision making can have a huge influence on world politics.

Curtis' documentary is variously available online, but unfortunately, video streaming sites are blocked from work, but it seems to turn up quite frequently on a Google search.

And if you want more on economics and rationality, ABC Radio National's The Philosopher's Zone just had a programme on the ethics of economic rationalism.

UPDATE: The Trap episode 1, episode 2 and episode 3 are available on Google video. From some reason episode 3 is in three 20 minutes chunks, but the next chunk is linked from each page.

Link to SciAm article 'The Traveler's Dilemma'.
Link to The Philosopher's Zone on economic rationalism.

—Vaughan.

March 18, 2007

On not drowning in a teaspoon of water:

The Stanford Magazine has an article an the work of psychologist Prof Carole Dweck who argues that the key to success lies in how you deal with failure.

Dweck's research was recently the subject of a great deal of interest after it was discussed in a widely read New York Magazine article on the sometimes paradoxical effects of praising children in certain ways.

In the Stanford Magazine article, Dweck discusses how her findings have been applied to achievement in general, and how we attribute or give credit for success has a significant impact on our future successes.

A 60-year-old academic psychologist might seem an unlikely sports motivation guru. But Dweck's expertise — and her recent book, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success — bear directly on the sort of problem facing the Rovers. Through more than three decades of systematic research, she has been figuring out answers to why some people achieve their potential while equally talented others don't — why some become Muhammad Ali and others Mike Tyson. The key, she found, isn't ability; it's whether you look at ability as something inherent that needs to be demonstrated or as something that can be developed.

Link to Stanford Magazine article 'The Effort Effect'.
Link to details on Dweck's book Mindset.

—Vaughan.

February 08, 2007

The psychology of risk and security:

Security expert Bruce Schneier has written a remarkably insightful article on the psychology of security trade-offs and risk assessment.

He's not a psychologist by trade, although has obviously spent a lot of time researching the various studies that are relevant to the sort of decision making we engage in when trying to estimate how risky something might be.

Errors or cognitive distortions are also discussed in detail, particularly with regard to how these might bias our reasoning to make certain things seem more or less risky, even if there's no change in actual risk.

One crucial concept that Schneier talks about is that security is a feeling, generated by a complex interplay of innate and calculated responses.

Something similar has been discussed in the clinical literature, particularly in a theory of obsessive-compulsive disorder put forward by Henry Szechtman and Erik Woody [pdf].

Obsessive-compulsive disorder or OCD is a disorder where people can feel they have to repetitively do certain actions - often some sort of checking or washing

Szechtman and Woody argue that most drives, such as hunger or sex, have a specific end point behaviour that leads to a feeling of goal satisfaction.

In contrast, the drive for safety has no specific action associated with it that 'completes' the desire (because you can always try and be more safe), and so they argue we've developed a feedback system (a 'security feeling') that signifies when we've done enough to be reasonably secure.

In OCD, this might go wrong. So even when the door is locked or you've washed your hands, the security feeling doesn't kick in and you still have the strong desire to do it again.

Anxiety can make the feeling needed all the more, so when we're anxious, we might need to check the door more, even though we specifically remember locking it.

It's no surprise that OCD is an anxiety disorder and this may fuel the cycle.

Schneier isn't discussing mental illness, but it's interesting that this sort of approach can be widely applied as so much of our behaviour involves risk judgements.

Link to Bruce Schneier article 'The Psychology of Security'.
pdf of paper 'Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder as a Disturbance of Security Motivation'.

—Vaughan.

February 02, 2007

All shopped out?:

Science and Consciousness Review has a short but interesting piece by neuroscientist Bernard Baars on recent findings on the neuroscience of buying.

An fMRI brain-scanning study published earlier this year in science journal Neuron [pdf] reported that when someone was making a decision to buy something or not, the brain activity could be reliably tracked through the buying process.

Crucially, when the product was first presented, activity in the nucleus accumbens was strongest. This area is often typecast as the 'pleasure centre' of the brain.

Later, other areas in the brain seemed to inhibit the nucleus accumbens when other factors, such as price, were considered to override the desire to buy.

However, Baars notes that there are other interpretations of the data as the method for brain scanning, fMRI, only gives an indirect measure of brain activity.

For example, the brain activity could be equally related to attention or anxiety.

This is a typical problem with new findings in cognitive neuroscience. With potentially important findings, much later work will try and determine to what extent these other factors are involved.

Link to SciCon Review article 'Shopping Centers in the Brain'.
Link to SciAm write-up of original study.
pdf of full-text of scientific paper.

—Vaughan.

January 29, 2007

Working in the future imperfect:

The aesthetically and intellectually compelling PsyBlog has a great article arguing that long-term career planning is often a waste of time as research has shown that we are unlikely to be able to predict what will make us happy in the future.

The research was a paper from Daniel Gilbert's lab, that specifically studies happiness, how we understand it, and how it is affected by life events and our choices.

Gilbert has written a book about his research called Stumbling on Happiness that discusses the fact that although we think we know what will make us happy, it rarely does.

PsyBlog notes one particular experiment that highlights this effect:

My favourite is a simple experiment in which two groups of participants get free sandwiches if they participate in the experiment - a doozie for any undergraduate.

One group has to choose which sandwiches they want for an entire week in advance. The other group gets to choose which they want each day. A fascinating thing happens. People who choose their favourite sandwich each day at lunchtime also often choose the same sandwich. This group turns out to be reasonably happy with its choice.

Amazingly, though, people choosing in advance assume that what they'll want for lunch next week is a variety. And so they choose a turkey sandwich Monday, tuna on Tuesday, egg on Wednesday and so on. It turn out that when next week rolls around they generally don't like the variety they thought they would. In fact they are significantly less happy with their choices than the group who chose their sandwiches on the day.

The PsyBlog post draws these findings out and applies them to making career choices.

How will we know what make us happy in even 5 years away if we can't even predict what sandwiches we'd be most happy with during the following week?

Link to PsyBlog post 'Why Career Planning Is Time Wasted'.

—Vaughan.

January 23, 2007

Magic in mind:

The New York Times has an article on magical thinking - the mental process of making connections between unrelated or loosely-related things.

Magical thinking is thought to exist on a spectrum, from hunches, creative leaps and superstitions at one end, to frank psychosis at the other - where the connections become so odd as to lead to delusions.

As children we, perhaps, experience magical thinking at its strongest. Children live in magical worlds where moving trees cause the wind to blow and toys come to life after dark.

The link between magical thinking in children in adults is rarely discussed, but it was the subject of an 2004 article published in The Psychologist.

The NYT article looks at magical thinking in all its guises, and discusses its possible roles in religion and spirituality, and how it is affected by stress and coincidence.

Link to NYT article 'Do You Believe in Magic?'.
Link to 'Magical thinking - Reality or illusion?' from The Psychologist.

—Vaughan.

January 09, 2007

Ironically, pessimists are more likely to die early:

According to a brief article in the New York Times, research has shown that pessimists are, ironically, more likely to die earlier than optimists.

The article discusses some research on dispositional optimism and pessimism and how it relates to health and risk for mortality.

The study, led by Dr. Erik J. Giltay of the Psychiatric Center GGZ Delfland and published in The Archives of General Psychiatry, followed 941 Dutch subjects, ages 65 to 85, from 1991 to 2001. Subjects were ranked in quartiles as pessimistic or optimistic on the basis of their reactions to statements like, "I still have positive expectations concerning my future" and, "I often feel that life is full of promises."

Dr. Giltay and his colleagues found that subjects with the highest level of optimism were 45 percent less likely than those with the highest level of pessimism to die of all causes during the study. For those in the quartile with the highest optimism score, the death rate was 30.4 percent; those in the most pessimistic quartile had a death rate of 56.5 percent. There were 397 deaths in the study, and prevention of cardiovascular mortality accounted for nearly half of the protective effects of optimism.

In fact, Giltay has published a few studies which have shown similar findings.

However, one of the difficulties with these sorts of studies is determining causality.

Does being pessimistic make you more likely to have poor health, or does having poor health make you more likely to be pessimistic, or might it be a combination of both, perhaps working as a self-reinforcing cycle?

These sort of self-sustaining negative cycles are exactly the sort of things that clinical psychologists tend to target when they are treating patients, often with substantial benefits for physical and mental health.

Link to NYT article 'Yet Another Worry for Those Who Believe the Glass Is Half-Empty'.

—Vaughan.

December 11, 2006

Work, play and the vagaries of regret:

The New York Times has a piece on thought-provoking research suggesting that while we are glad we resisted the temptation to party in the short-term, in the long-term we regret the missed opportunity for enjoyment.

They say that no-one on their death bed says "I wish I'd spent more time in the office". A study by Ran Kivetz and Anat Keinan seems to suggest that this attitude holds, even over shorter periods of time.

Kivetz interviewed 63 subjects and asked half of them to recall a time in the previous week when they had to choose between work or pleasure — and then to rank how they felt about their decision on a scale from "no regret at all" to "a lot of regret." Then Kivetz asked the other half to do the same for a similar decision five years in the past. When the moment in question was a week before, those who worked industriously reported that they were glad they had. Those who partied said they regretted it. But when the subjects considered the decision from five years in the past, the propositions reversed: those who toiled regretted it; those who relaxed were happy with their choice.

They suggest that this occurs because time dulls what they call 'indulgence guilt', but accentuates the feeling of 'missing out'.

Guilt, it seems, is more of an emotional reaction that is tempered in hindsight, whereas the feeling of 'missing out' is a more reflective reaction based on a longer-view of the preceding years.

The moral of the story is, er... party now, or, alternatively try and get a job you enjoy.

The researchers' paper, published in the Journal of Consumer Research, is available online as a pdf file.

Link to NYT article.
pdf of paper 'Repenting Hyperopia: An Analysis of Self-Control Regrets'.

—Vaughan.

August 01, 2006

SciAm on the expert mind:

This month's Scientific American has a fantastic article on the psychology of expert skills which they've made freely available online.

It discusses how research into the cognitive processes and neuropsychology of chess masters is informing wider questions of how experts differ from novices and what mental skills underlie the mastering of a subject.

...much of the chess master's advantage over the novice derives from the first few seconds of thought. This rapid, knowledge-guided perception, sometimes called apperception, can be seen in experts in other fields as well. Just as a master can recall all the moves in a game he has played, so can an accomplished musician often reconstruct the score to a sonata heard just once. And just as the chess master often finds the best move in a flash, an expert physician can sometimes make an accurate diagnosis within moments of laying eyes on a patient.

But how do the experts in these various subjects acquire their extraordinary skills? How much can be credited to innate talent and how much to intensive training? Psychologists have sought answers in studies of chess masters. The collected results of a century of such research have led to new theories explaining how the mind organizes and retrieves information.

Link to SciAm article 'The Expert Mind'.

—Vaughan.

June 08, 2006

Caffeine makes people more open to persuasion:

Dosing someone with coffee or another strongly caffeinated drink may make them more susceptible to persuasion, according to a recent study, reported in New Scientist.

Previous studies have show that consuming caffeine can improve one's attention and enhance cognitive performance, with 200 milligrams (equivalent to two cups of coffee) being the optimal dose.

Moderate doses of caffeine can also make you more easily convinced by arguments that go against your beliefs, say Pearl Martin of the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, and her colleagues.

In 2005, her team published a paper suggesting that the compound primes people to agree with statements that go against their typical views because it improves their ability to understand the reasoning behind the statements.

After a bit of a search, it seems the full paper is freely available online.

Link to news story from New Scientist.
Link to page with full-text paper.

—Vaughan.

April 24, 2006

Uncovering hidden biases:

Science News has got an excellent article on one of psychology's most recent developments - the Implicit Association Test - a computerised task that claims to measure hidden or unadmitted biases.

The test involves reacting to (usually) words as they appear on-screen by classifying them into categories. The categories are altered to draw out differences in reaction time, which supposedly relate to the difficulty of associating certain concepts with each other.

The idea is that the measure of reaction time makes it particularly difficult to fake, and the association should be detectable even if it is usually over-ridden by the conscious mind.

The IAT has been used for everything from detecting hidden racial prejudices to examining violent associations in psychopaths.

It is still controversial, however, because it is not clear exactly what is being measured, other than some general concept of an 'association'.

Whether this is predictive of explicit beliefs or attitudes, or future action and risk (such as violence - particularly importantly in forensic psychology) is still an open question.

If you want to try the test yourself, there's an online version at Project Implicit.

Link to 'The Bias Finders' from Science News.
Link to Project Implicit.

—Vaughan.

April 20, 2006

Lingerie sharpens the financial mind:

According to recent news reports, the sight of lingerie or a sexy woman significantly impairs male decision making. Unfortunately, the details have got a little blurred in the re-telling from the original research paper - to the point where most reports flatly contradict the study's conclusions.

The study involved a well-researched financial task known as the ultimatum game where one participant is given a sum of money (10 euros in this study) and has to decide how to split it with another. If the other participant accepts the split, both get to keep the money. If they don't, no one gets anything.

Researchers Bram van den Bergh and Seigfried Dewitte asked heterosexual male participants to play the game in pairs.

Before they started the game, they were variously shown pictures of sexy women in bikinis, landscapes, older women, younger women, or given t-shirts or lingerie to handle.

When participants saw gratuitous pictures of bikini-clad girls (like the one on the right), lingerie and the like, they were more likely to accept unfair splits than in the other conditions.

Although the average difference in the lowest accepted offers between 'sexy' and 'unsexy' conditions was pretty small (only 0.39 euros), the researchers could be statistically confident that the difference was reliable.

One frequently repeated claim in the news stories is that men with higher levels of testosterone were particularly likely to be affected in this way.

This was never actually measured in the study, however. What was measured was the difference in length between the second and fourth finger (digit ratio) which is thought by some to indicate the amount of testosterone the person was exposed to as a developing child in the womb.

This is one subtlety that many news reports left out, as firstly, it's controversial as to whether digit ratio does relate to testosterone exposure in the womb, and secondly, it's not clear how this relates to current levels of testosterone at all. In fact, immediate levels of testosterone can fluctuate wildly.

Probably, the study is best thought of as an interesting but preliminary finding, as there are many questions that could be asked about the study design and experience of the participants that might have affected the results.

Petra Boynton has a good analysis of some of these, including why the story has proved so popular with the media.

The best write-up of the study's details I've found is from Nature, who do the study justice and point out that the results actually contradict the idea that sexy images makes men less rational. In the study, they actually made men more rational.

If you're being offered money in the ultimatum game, for each offer, the single most rational thing to do is accept money every time, no matter how low the offer is, because if you don't, you get nothing. You're given the choice between something and nothing - a no brainer.

In reality, people don't do this, a sense of fair play stops most people accepting paltry offers. Actually, this probably makes sense in everyday life (who wouldn't want to enforce fairness in society) but in terms of the experiment, it can be self-defeating.

The fact that men who saw sexy images were more likely to accept lower offers rather than reject them and get nothing at all, suggest that their short-term rationality was actually enhanced.

Perhaps it is no co-incidence that the bikini celebrated its 60th birthday this week. I shall be monitoring the economy carefully for any signs of change.

Link to write-up of study from Nature.
Link to analysis from Petra Boyton.
Link to abstract of original research paper.

—Vaughan.

April 13, 2006

Mixing Memory on the 'hostile media effect':

Cognitive science blog Mixing Memory highlights the hostile media effect whereby people assume a report of an event is biased towards an opposing view if it appears in the mass media.

This is despite the fact that when the same report is presented in another format (as an essay, for example) it is assumed to be neutral, or even supportive of the reader's view.

The effect is particularly apparent when the report concerns some sort of conflict and the viewer is already aligned to one side. Interestingly, it doesn't matter which side, the bias will be attributed to the opposition regardless. When neutral people view the report, bias is rarely reported.

Serious psychological study of perceived media bias began in the mid-1980s with studies by Vallone, Ross, and Lepper, and by Perloff. In both studies, pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian participants were presented with television news coverage of Israel's invasion of Lebanon and subsequent fighting. The pro-Israeli participants believed that the coverage was biased in favor of the Palestinians, and that it would make neutral observers feel less favorable towards their side, while the pro-Palestinians were convinced the coverage was biased in favor of the Israeli side, and that it would hurt their image in the eyes of neutral observers. This is despite the fact that when neutral observers did view the coverage, in Perloff's study, they failed to perceive any bias, and their opinions of the two sides stayed the same.

As always, there's more careful analysis and detailed references to the supporting research in the full post on Mixing Memory.

Link to 'Hostile Media Effects' on Mixing Memory.

—Vaughan.

April 11, 2006

Impulsive acts:

The New York Times has an article which examines the sometimes contradictory psychology of impulsivity.

Doing new things is often among lists which promise us 'ways to happiness' in magazines and books, and yet problems with impulse control have been cited as a major factor in everything from ADHD to drug and gambling addiction.

One problem for researchers is this type of impulsiveness is not present in every facet of life and can be quite difficult to pin-down experimentally.

One reason true impulsivity has been difficult to capture in the lab, said Dr. Martha Farrah, director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania, is precisely because "it is most manifest in these very high-stakes situations, when people are trying to get what they want, to stay focused, maybe trying to kick a drug habit." And that is when they break down.

Link to 'Living on Impulse'.

—Vaughan.

March 21, 2006

(un)emotional investment:

Here's a spin on the depressive realism story. Shiv et al (2005) found that substance abusers and those with brain damage affecting their emotions had enhanced performance on an investment task. According to the authors of the study, the normal controls were actually distracted from making optimum decisions by their emotional involvement in the task.

'The dark side of emotion in decision-making: When individuals with decreased emotional reactions make more advantageous decisions' Baba Shiv, George Loewenstein and Antoine Bechara. Cognitive Brain Research, 23(1), April 2005, Pages 85-92. summary here

Abstract:

Can dysfunction in neural systems subserving emotion lead, under certain circumstances, to more advantageous decisions? To answer this question, we investigated how individuals with substance dependence (ISD), patients with stable focal lesions in brain regions related to emotion (lesion patients), and normal participants (normal controls) made 20 rounds of investment decisions. Like lesion patients, ISD made more advantageous decisions and ultimately earned more money from their investments than the normal controls. When normal controls either won or lost money on an investment round, they adopted a conservative strategy and became more reluctant to invest on the subsequent round, suggesting that they were more affected than lesion patients and ISD by the outcomes of decisions made in the previous rounds.

Link: a related post at mindhacks.com

—tom.

March 14, 2006

Why can't we choose what makes us happy?:

This from Hsee, C. K. & Hastie, R. (2006). Decision and experience: Why don't we choose what makes us happy? Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 10(1), 31-37

Another common belief is that more choice options are always better. In reality, having more options can lead to worse experiences. For example, if employees are given a free trip to Paris, they are happy; if they are given a free trip to Hawaii, they are happy. But if they are given a choice between the two trips, they will be less happy, no matter which option they choose. Having the choice highlights the relative deficiencies in each option. People who choose Paris complain that ‘Paris does not have the ocean’, whereas people who choose Hawaii complain that ‘Hawaii does not have great museums’ .
(my emphasis)

The reference is:
Luce, M.K. et al. (2001) The impact of emotional tradeoff difficulty on decision behavior. In Conflict and Tradeoffs in Decision Making (Weber, E.U. and Baron, J., eds), pp. 86–109, Cambridge University Press

Seems opportunity cost isn't just something that bothers economists!

—tom.

March 05, 2006

the endowment effect & marketing:

The endowment effect is that we value more highly what we already have. It's a variation on the status quo bias that we talk about in Mind Hacks (Hack #74). This cognitive bias is of particular interest to economists, because it has implications for how eonomies work. If it is strongly in effect then people will trade less than is required to bring about the optimal resource allocation that free market's are theoretically capable of. The most famous demonstration of the endowment effect directly addresses the operation of the endowment effect in a market trading situation [1] - showing that even though preferences for a small arbitrary item (a coffee mug) are randomly distributed, if you give half of the group one and allow them to trade less trading happens than you would predict. In other words more people want to hold on to their mug now they've got one, than people without a mug want to get hold of one. The preferences of the group have been realigned according to initial resource distribution.

This is all relevant to marketing, as well as economics of course. You can see why car-salespeople are keen for you to take a test-drive before you purchase, or why shops are happy to offer a money-back-with-no-questions-asked option. You figure the money-back option into your cost-benefit calculation about whether to take something home, but once you've got it home your preferences realign - that item is now "yours", so you're far less likely to take it back to the shop, even if it doesn't turn out to be as good as you thought when you bought it.

Refs and Links:

[1] Kahneman, D., J.L. Knetsch and R.H. Thaler (1990). Experimental Tests of the Endowment Effect and the Coase Theorem. Journal of Political Economy. link
Wikipedia: The Endowment effect: : link
Experienced traders can overcome the endowment effect : Economist article
References at behaviouralfinance.net

[Cross-posted at idiolect.org.uk]

—tom.

February 28, 2006

the price is right regardless of the cost:

Zac at ortholog.com writes about an experimental test of buying irrationality using Ebay. Quoting:

Test auctions on eBay showed that most people prefer to pay a low price for an item and also pay postage (American: "shipping") than pay a higher price and get free postage, even when the former added up to more than the latter. A CD for $5+$6 postage is preferred to a CD for $10+freepost. It wasn't presented as that stark a choice: multiple auctions with different price-postage ratios revealed a net preference for low item price and a poor correlation between auction success and stated postage costs. Interesting but hardly surprising: the salience of the price is greater than the cost of shipping (the anchoring cognitive fallacy), and people in general are not as rational or systematic as they/we believe.
(Zac's links. read the full post here)

In Influence, Cialdini highlights scarcity as one of the six principle factors of persuasion. In an auction they combine particularly strongly: scarcity of time (the item is only on sale for a limited period), scarity of product (items are sold individually, not just as one-of-many 'off the shelf') and competition (from other buyers). Add to this heady mix the price/postage sleight of hand and it is no wonder you get choice irrationalities.

—tom.

February 27, 2006

Influence (by Robert Cialdini):

Influence by Robert Cialdini is an excellent, excellent, book. Not only does it present voluminous evidence on the social psychology of persuasion and compliance, but it does succinctly and engagingly, mixing academic references with historical vignettes and personal anecdotes. The book discuss how techniques of persuasion work, grouping them under six major headings, and for each heading the book provides a 'defence against' section detailing how to stop yourself being unduly influenced. The final, glorious, touch is that in order to write the book Cialdini - who is a professor of social psychology - engaged in a three-year project of going undercover to explore first-hand how techniques of persuasion are used in the real world: applying for a waiter's job to study how to increase customers' tipping, attending tupperware parties, going on training programmes with door-to-door salesmen...it makes the book a wonderful blend of thorough research and astutely observed practice.

The book has been extensively and excellently summarised here, at happening-here.blogspot.com, so I'm just going to pull out some particularly fun examples of persuasion techniques, particularly as the relate to advertising and marketing.

Notes on Cialdini, R.B. (2001). Influence: Science and Practice. Forth Edition. Allyn & Bacon

A key idea is that we all use various cognitive 'shortcuts' (heuristics) we use to decide on what to buy. Advertisers can take advantage of these short-cuts to skew our behaviour. For example, there is a price-as-an-indicator-of-quality heurstic which means, if we're not thinking carefully about a purchase decision, we might just use the assumption that “better things are more expensive”, so if we want a 'better' thing we will just look at the prices to work out which product is better.

[Chivas Regal Scotch Whiskey] "had been a struggling brand until its managers decided to raise its price to a level far above its competitors. Sales skyrocketed, even though nothing was changed in the product itself (Aaker, 1991)" [1]

Or the coupons-give-you-a-bargain heuristic:

"A tire company found that mailed-out coupons which, because of a printing error, offered no savings top recipients produced just as much customers response as did error-free coupons that offered substantial savings" [2]

It's easy enough to think of other common examples - supermarkets which use three for the price of two offers, or put up signs saying things like "Two for £1". Next time you see one of these check the price for how much just one costs - it might stem your enthusiasm for the seeming bargain you thought you were being offered

Here's another trick, which takes advantage of another natural inclination - that of sticking by our word. Cialdini accuses toy producers of undersupplying stores with 'craze' toys just before Christmas - after a barrage of advertising parents promise their kids the toy but then can't get hold of one. They buy them a substitute at Christmas and then also have to buy the craze toy in January. He cites the example of the Cabbage Patch Kids, dolls which were heavily advertised one year in the mid-1980s, and undersupplied during the holiday season. $25 toys were selling at auction for $700. (A charge was later brought against company for advertising something that was unavailable). In 1988, a spokesperson for Hasbo, which made the Furby toy (which also sold out at Christmas), advised parents to say I'll try, but if I can't get it for you now, I'll get it for you later [3]

The same consistency principle lies behind the advice an encyclopaedia company gives during its sales-program: make the customs fill out the sales agreements themselves. Once they've 'owned' the action by doing it themselves they are far more likely to stick by it. ("There is something magical about writing things down" says Amway Corporation literature). Cialdini explains the popularity (with companies) of testimonial contests – those where you think of 50 words why the product is good and stand a chance of winning something. The contest is not for the company to get a single winning entry, but for them to induce all the entrants of the competition to enhance their commitment to the product by writing a testimonial. Influence has an extended discussion of this, and how the power of small, initial, public voluntary actions can be used to produce later compliance to much larger requests for action

"Commitment decisions, even erroneous ones, have a tendency to be self-perpetuating because they can 'grow their own legs'"
(page 97)

"You can use small commitments to manipulate a person's self-image; you can use them to turn citizens into "public servants", prospects into "customers", prisoners into "collaborators." And once you've got a man's self-image where you want it, he should comply naturally with a whole range of your requests that are consistent with this view of himself".
(page 74)

"...compliance professionals love commitments that produce inner change. First, that change is not just specific to the situation where it first occurred; it covers a whole range of related situations, too. Second, the effects of the change are lasting. So, once a man has been induced to take action that shifts his self-image to that of, let's say, a public spirited citizen [or a guru's disciple], he is likely to be public-spirited in a variety of other circumstances where his compliance may also be desired, and he is likely to continue his public-spirited behavior for as long as his new self-image holds."
(page 84)

Social proof (social influence) is another extremely strong heuristic: “if everyone else is doing it, I should do it to”

This too can be used unfairly - for example Evangelist Billy Graham has been known to 'seed' visits to towns in advance so that his arrival is met an outpouring of thousands of the faithful - apparently spontaneous, but actually highly organised. (p 101)

Positive association is also a powerful, and potentially automatic (see also) decision -shortcut

In one study, men who saw a new-car ad that included a seductive young woman model rated the car as faster, more appealing, more expensive-looking, and better designed than did men who viewed the same ad without the model. Yet when asked later, the men refused to believe that the presence of the young woman had influenced their judgments. [4]

The same kind of, automatic associations, lie behind findings that people leave larger tips if paying by credit card (credit cards associated with big spending, not always with paying back) and that "that when asked to contribute to charity (the United Way), college students were markedly more likely to give money if the room they were in contained MasterCard insignias than if it did not (87 percent verses 33 percent)." (p164). Funnily enough this didn't hold for people with troubled credit histories!

Cialdini is quite clear that we can't avoid using these short-cuts - after all they work most of the time - but we must come down hard on those who exploit them

“The pace of modern life demands that we frequently use shortcuts” (p. 234)

"We are likely to use these lone cues when we don't have the inclination, time, energy, or cognitive resources to undertake a complete analysis of the situation. When we are rushed, stressed, uncertain, indifferent, distracted or fatigue, we tend to focus less on the information available to us. When making decisions under these circumstances, we often revert to the rather primitive but necessary single-piece-of-good-evidence approach." (p235)

“The real treachery, and what we cannot tolerate, is any attempt to make a profit in a way that threatens the reliability of our shortcuts” (p. 239)

I don't know how realistic this kind of individual/consumer vigilance is as a strategy, but Cialdini seems to believe that the only alternative is to change the whole pace of modern life

The evidence suggests that the ever-accelerating pace and informational crush of modern life will make this particular form of unthinking compliance [shortcuts] more and more prevalent in the future (introduction, p. x.)

My default assumption used to be that the careless use of decision heuristics probably only applies to unimportant decisions. This took quite a severe knock from Cialdini's discussion on the social-contagion of suicide [5]. If people can be influenced by publicity about a suicide to kill themselves (and all the evidence is that they are - and social proof is one of Cialdini's six discussed shortcuts), then all of the decisions we make in life are open to be exploited by irrational factors under the control of others.

Refs below the fold

[1] p6, in Influence. Ref: Aaker, D.A. (1991). Managing Brand Equity. New York: Free Press

[2] p7, in Influence. Ref: Zimmator, J.J. (1983) Consumer Mindlessness: I believe it, but I don't see it. Proceedings of the Division of Consumer Psychology, APA Convention, Aanheim, CA.

[3] p58 in Influence

[4] p164 in Influence. Ref: Smith GH and Engel R, 1968, Influence of a Female Model on Perceived Characteristics of an Automobile, Proceedings from the 76th APA Annual Convention, 681-682.

[5] See also in Gladwell's The Tipping Point

—tom.

February 09, 2006

when choice is demotivating:

Here's a way to make people buy more of your stuff - give them fewer options. Douglas Coupland called the bewilderment induced by there being too many choices 'option paralysis' ('Generation X', 1991). Now social psychologists have caught on ('When choice is demotivating', 2000, [1]). Offer shoppers a choice of 24 jams and they are less likely to buy a jar than if offered a choice of 6 jams. Offer students a choice of 6 essays, rather than 30 essays, for extra-credit and more will take up the opportunity if there is less choice of essay titles - and, what is more, they write better essays. Students given a similar choice of free chocolates (a restricted choice compared to an extensive choice) made quicker choices (not too suprising) and were happier with the choices they did make once they had made them.

ref

[1] Iyengar, S. S., & Lepper, M. R. 2000. When choice is demotivating: Can one desire too much of a good thing? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 79, 995-1006.

—tom.

February 08, 2006

advertising influences familiarity induces preference:

We probably like to think that we're too smart to be seduced by such "branding," but we aren't. If you ask test participants in a study to explain their preferences in music or art, they'll come up with some account based on the qualities of the pieces themselves. Yet several studies have demonstrated that "familiarity breeds liking." If you play snippets of music for people or show them slides of paintings and vary the number of times they hear or see the music and art, on the whole people will rate the familiar things more positively than the unfamiliar ones. The people doing the ratings don't know that they like one bit of music more than another because its more familiar. Nonetheless, when products are essentially equivalent, people go with what's familiar, even if it's only familiar because they know its name from advertising

Barry Schwartz. 'The Paradox of Choice' (2004)

I think the essential point is correct, but there is a sort of sneaking condescension here: All of you people (the 'test participants') only like the things you like because you're familiar with them, not because of any rational or emotional affection for them (that's just 'some account'). What's more - we (the psychologists) have done experiments which show (admittedly only in some circumstances) that familiarity leads to liking; and from this we're prepared to generalise to all other circumstances you're involved in. I parody, but I'm sure you see what I mean.

The fact that we tend to like the familiar isn't too surprising. There's even a good evolutionary reason for preferring what worked before - if it didn't kill you last time, why risk doing something else this time? The single most useful thing you can measure to predict what someone will do in the future is not what they want to do, nor is it what they say they'll probably do, nor what their friends and family will do, but simply what they did last time - such is the power of habit (For more on this see Hack #74 in Mind Hacks).

But the interesting thing about advertising and branding is the process of it making something familiar to us and us taking this as an indication of preference. In other words, we don't properly take into account that the brand is not familiar to us for any good reason.

Psychologically it's not too surprising that this should happen. The study [1] which revived the subliminal perception field involved this mere exposure effect. Participants were shown meaningless shapes for time-spans below the perceptual threshold and subsequently they preferred those shapes to other not previously displayed shapes - even though they had not consciously perceived either set of shapes before.

However, is there any evidence that this kind of familiarity effect can be shown to compete with, or even over-ride, actual good reasons for liking or disliking a brand? Perhaps people are happy to use a fairly arbitrary guideline (familiarity) for unimportant decisions, or decisions where the choices are all pretty good, but when more is at stake familiarity is relegated down the table of influencing factors?

Ref

[1] Kunst-Wilson WR, Zajonc RB (1980). Affective discrimination of stimuli that cannot be recognized. Science, 207(4430):557-8.

—tom.

December 31, 2005

an appropriate error:

Anna Airoldi, the translator of Mind Hacks into Italian has noticed a fantastic error in the published book. She writes

(170) 1st paragraph of "How it works"; I'm not entirely sure this is a real typo, considering the topic discussed in the paragraph, but "conservations" shouldn't just be "conversations"?

She's absolutely right - it should be 'conversations' not 'conservations'. But although it is an error, in this case it is an appropriate error, because it appears in Hack #52 'Robust Processing Using Parallelism' which discusses how we can read errorful or ambiguous sentences using multiple interacting levels of information to construct meaning. Normally this is a good thing, but it appears that in this particular instance the meaning was so obvious that our normally diligent editing process didn't spot the mistake (my mistake in origin, incidentally)!

—tom.

October 10, 2005

Ask philosophers about the mind:

Ask Philosophers is a site where anyone can pose a question to be answered by some of the leading lights in world philosophy, including specialists in the philosophy of mind.

Scientists are often disappointingly dismissive of philosophy, usually without a good understanding of the breadth and depth of the modern discipline.

Philosophers are increasingly taking the role of 'theoretical scientists' - by understanding the scientific data in great detail and applying the tools of conceptual analysis to make sure current theories are conceptually water tight (or highlighting areas where they are not).

This is particularly important in the cognitive and clinical sciences because many philosophical problems are encountered on a day-to-day basis.

For example, the mind-body problem - that tries to understand the relationship between physical biological processes and thought - comes into stark relief when a clinician encounters a patient with brain injury.

Similarly, the age-old philosophical problems of understanding belief and knowledge become particularly important when the medical community have to define what it is to have a delusion - something that is usually considered a form of 'damaged' belief.

In the Ask Philosophers philosophy of mind section there are already some fantastic questions and answers online.

One person asks if a person who is given medication to make her forget a potentially terrifying surgical experience was ever actually afraid, another asks about whether it is possible to think about the thought you are thinking.

Anyone can pitch a question, so if you have any burning queries, philosophy's finest are waiting for your challenge.