Category: Reasoning

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’.

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!)

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.

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 ‚Äî and her recent book, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success ‚Äî 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 ‚Äî 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.

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’.

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.

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’.

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.

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’.

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 ‚Äî 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’.

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’.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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’.