Reasoning – Page 4

BBC Column: Can glass shape really affect how fast you drink?

My latest column for BBC Future. The original is here. I was hesitant to write this at first, since nobody loves a problemmatiser, but I figured that something in support of team “I think you’ll find its a bit more complicated than that” couldn’t hurt, and there’s an important general point about the way facts about behaviour are built from data in the final paragraphs, and why theory is important.

Recent reports say curved glasses make you drink beer quicker. But, we must be cautious about drawing simple conclusions from single studies.

We all love a neat science story, but even rock solid facts can be less revealing than they seem. Let’s take an example of a piece of psychology research reported recently: the idea that people drink faster from curved glasses.

Hundreds of news sources around the globe covered the findings, many of them changing the story slightly to report that people drink more (rather than faster) from a curved glass. At first it seems like a straightforward piece of psychology research, with clear implications: curved glasses will make pacing yourself harder, so you’ll end up drinking more than you should. Commentators agreed with the research (funded by Alcohol Research UK) – beverage manufacturers were probably onto this before, and will now be rushing to make us take our favourite tipple out of a curved glass.

But before we change our drinking habits or restock our glass collections, let’s look at what the scientists actually did.

Luckily for us the team of researchers from the University of Bristol, UK, published their paper in an open access journal, which means the research details are free for all to read.

The Bristol team invited participants into the lab and asked them to drink lager (or lemonade) from a straight class or a curved one, while watching a nature documentary (a BBC one, I’m happy to report). They also asked their volunteers to judge when the glass was half full. The results of both were clear, participants finished their drink of lager sooner in the curved glass. They also judged the halfway point as being lower down the curved glass than the straight glass – suggesting a reason for the faster drinking: if people thought the glass was fuller than it really was when then they would underestimate the rate at which they were drinking.

Human factor

Now this is all well and good, but there are many reasons why the results don’t mean that we can make people drink more by changing the shape of their glass. Importantly, none of these reasons would have to do with this research being wrong or inexpertly done. I’m absolutely certain that if we did the study ourselves we’d find exactly the same thing.

No, the reasons you can’t jump to conclusions from this kind of study is because, inevitably, a single study can only test one aspect of the world, under one set of circumstances. This makes it hard to draw general conclusions of the sort that get reported. Notice how the psychologists measured one thing (rate of drinking lager), for just two different glasses, over a single drink, for one set of people (volunteers in Bristol, in 2012), and yet a generalised truth stating that “people drink more from curved glasses” emerged from a specific set of circumstances.

Now obviously, the aim of science is to come up with answers to questions that become generalised truths, but psychology is a domain in which it is fiendishly hard to establish them. If you are studying a simple system, then cause and effect is relatively easy to establish. For instance, the harder you throw a rock, the further it tends to travel in distance. The relation between the force you put in and the acceleration of the rock you get out is straightforward. Add a human factor into the equation, however, and such simple relations begin to disappear. (Please don’t experiment by throwing rocks at people.)

To see how this limits the conclusions that can be drawn from the drinks study, think of even the most trivial factor that could change these results. Would you get the same result if people drank ale rather than lager? Probably. If they drank two pints rather than one? Maybe. If they drank in groups rather than watching TV (arguably closer to the circumstances of most drinking)? Who knows! It seems to me perfectly plausible that a social situation would produce different effects than a solo-drinking experience.

We could carry on. Would the effect be the same if we tried it in Minneapolis? In Lagos? In Kuala Lumpur, Reykjavik or Alice Springs? Most psychology studies are carried out on urban, affluent, students of the western world – a culturally unusual group, if you take a global or historical perspective. All the subjects studied were “social drinkers”, presumably with some learnt associations about curved and straight glasses. Maybe the Brits had learnt that expensive beer came in curved glasses. If this is the case, the result might be true for everyone who has a history of drinking from straight glasses in the UK, but not for other cultures where alcohol isn’t drunk like that.

Little things, big effect

Software entrepreur Jim Manzi calls the rate at which small changes can have surprising effects on outcomes, and the consequent difficulty in drawing general conclusions, “causal density”. It’s because human psychology and social life is so causally dense that we can’t simply take straight reports that X affects Y and apply them across the board. But there are hundreds of these relationships reported all the time from the annals of psychology: glass shape affects drinking time, taller men are better paid, holding a hot drink makes you like someone, and so on. Surface effects like these are vulnerable to small changes in circumstances that might remove, or even reverse, the effect you’re relying on.

Psychology researchers know all these arguments, and that’s why they’re cautious about drawing simple conclusions from single studies. The challenge of psychology is to track down those results that actually do generalise across different situations.

The way to do this is to report findings that are about theories, not just about effects. The Bristol researchers show the way in their paper: as well as testing drinking speed, they relate it to people’s ability to estimate how full a glass is. They could have just measured drinking speed, but they knew they had to relate it to a theory about what people really believed to come up with a strong conclusion.

If we can find the right principles that affect people’s actions, then we can draw conclusions that cut across situations. Unless we know the reasons why someone does something, we’ll be tricked time and time again when we try to infer from what they do.

Does social psychology have a prejudice problem?

The Weekly Standard has a scorching article that takes ‘liberal psychopundits’ to task for suggesting that science supports their view that conservatives are ‘heartless and stupid’.

It comes on the heels of a new study that found that social psychology professors were more likely to be liberal (no surprise there) but rather more shockingly were prepared to openly discriminate against conservative colleagues.

The ‘science blind Republicans’ idea has become particularly popular in some corners of the blogosphere, but as psychologists will tell you, people in White Houses shouldn’t throw stones.

If you want an excellent discussion of why everyone, regardless of their political stripe, is susceptible to the denial of science, a recent edition of BBC Radio 4’s Analysis on the psychology of political prejudice is one of the best cognitive science documentaries I’ve heard in ages.

Right wingers prefer to deny the science of evolution and global warming, while left-wingers prefer to ignore the evidence on the genetic influence on behaviour and IQ.

Reality, of course, is bipartisan and will smack you in the nose regardless of how you vote.

Link to edition of BBC Radio 4 Analysis on political prejudice.
Link to podcast download page for same.

Sleight-of-hand causes a moral reversal

Just over half of participants in survey of moral opinions argued for the reverse of what they first claimed when their answers were secretly switched.

The thoroughly delightful study is open-access from PLOS One but is also described in a news piece for Nature.

The researchers, led by Lars Hall, a cognitive scientist at Lund University in Sweden, recruited 160 volunteers to fill out a 2-page survey on the extent to which they agreed with 12 statements — either about moral principles relating to society in general or about the morality of current issues in the news, from prostitution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.

But the surveys also contained a ‘magic trick’. Each contained two sets of statements, one lightly glued on top of the other. Each survey was given on a clipboard, on the back of which the researchers had added a patch of glue. When participants turned the first page over to complete the second, the top set of statements would stick to the glue, exposing the hidden set but leaving the responses unchanged.

Two statements in every hidden set had been reworded to mean the opposite of the original statements. For example, if the top statement read, “Large-scale governmental surveillance of e-mail and Internet traffic ought to be forbidden as a means to combat international crime and terrorism,” the word ‘forbidden’ was replaced with ‘permitted’ in the hidden statement.

Participants were then asked to read aloud three of the statements, including the two that had been altered, and discuss their responses.

About half of the participants did not detect the changes, and 69% accepted at least one of the altered statements.

Don’t miss the video of the ‘trick questionnaire’ in action.

Link to Nature News coverage of the study.
Link to full text of study.

BBC Column: auction psychology

My BBC Future column from last week. The original is here

The reason we end up overspending is a result of one unavoidably irrational part of the bidding process – and that’s ourselves.

The allure and tension of an auction are familiar to most of us – let’s face it, we all like the idea of picking up a bargain. And on-line auction sites like eBay cater for this, allowing us to share in the over-excitement of auction bidding in the privacy of our homes. Yet somehow, despite our better judgement, we end up paying more than we know we should have done on that piece of furniture, equipment or clothing. What’s going on?

One estimate states that about half of eBay auctions result in higher sale prices than the “buy it now” price. This is a paradox. If the people going into the auction really wanted the item so badly, why didn’t they get it for less by paying the “buy it now” price?

This has nothing to do with the way the eBay bidding system works. In fact, unlike most auctions, the eBay auction process is actually perfectly designed to allow rational outcomes. By allowing you to set a private “maximum bid” in advance, eBay auctions are better for individual buyers than public auctions where everyone has to shout out their bid in public. No, the reason auctions – both on and offline – produce higher sale prices than any bidder originally imagined they would pay is because of one irreducibly irrational part of the bidding process: the bidders themselves.

Auctions push a number of our psychological buttons, and in fact the phenomenon of “auction fever” is well documented. They are social occasions, with lots of other people around, and this tends to increase your physiological arousal, an effect called social facilitation. As your adrenaline pumps, your heart beats faster, and your reactions quicken. This is ideal for something like sports, but makes cool rational decision making harder. The very rich often send delegates to auctions, and as well as avoiding the paparazzi I suspect this is also a strategy to combat the over-excitement induced by being physically present in the situation.

On top of this, auctions are time pressured, and – by definition – you’re bidding on something you value highly. These factors create excitement whether you are in the room or not.

Persuasive powers

Another psychological bias that operates in auctions is the endowment effect, where we tend to over-value things we already possess. By encouraging us to connect the bid (our money) with the sale item, bidding on items lets us fantasise about owning them – stimulating a kind of endowment effect. This is why the auction catalogue (or the item picture and description on a website) is so important. This forms part of the psychological journey the seller wants you to go on to imagine owning this item in advance, so you’ll place a higher value on it, and so pay more to make imagination reality.

Persuasion plays a huge part here, and the best book you can read on the psychology of the subject is Robert Cialdini’s Influence. Cialdini is a Professor of Social Psychology at Arizona State University, and he lists six major ways you can make yourself persuasive. Auctions hit at least two of these six principles square on the nose.

First, auctions use the principle of scarcity, whereby we overvalue things that we think might run out. Auction items are scarce in that they are unique (only one person can have it), and scarce in time (after the bids are finished, you’ve lost your chance). Think how many shop sales successfully rely on scarcity heuristics such as “Last day of sale!”, or “Only 2 left in stock!”, and you’ll get a feel for how powerful this persuasion principle can be.

The other principle used by auctions is that of “social proof”. We all tend to take the lead from other people; if everybody does something, or says something, most of us join in before we think about what we really should do. Auctions put you in intimate contact with other people who are all providing social proof that the sale item is important and valuable.

A final ingredient in the magic-spell cast by auctions was uncovered by researchers from Princeton. Their experiments asked volunteers to play on-line auctions with different rules. Some of these auctions had rules that encouraged over-bidding (like typical open auctions, which most of us are familiar with from movies), and some had rules that encouraged rational behaviour (like the eBay structure). With enough guidance from the auction rules, the bidders didn’t end up paying much more than they originally thought was reasonable – but only if they thought they were bidding against a computer programme. As soon as the volunteers thought they were bidding against other live humans they found it impossible to bid rationally, whatever the auction rules.

This implies that the competitive element of auctions is crucial to provoking our irrational buying behaviour. Once we’re involved in an auction we’re not just paying to own the sale item, we’re paying to beat other people who are bidding and prevent them from having it.

So it seems Gore Vidal had human nature, and the psychology of auctions, about right when he said: “It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.”

BBC Future column: What a silver medal teaches us about regret

Here’s my column from last week for BBC Future. The original is here

The London 2012 Olympic Games are almost over now, and those Olympians with medals are able to relax and rest on the laurels of victory. Or so you might think. Spare a thought for the likes of Yohan Blake, McKayla Maroney, or Emily Seebohm – those people who are taking home silver.

Yes, that’s right, I’m asking you to feel sorry for silver medallists, not for the bronze medallists or for those who didn’t get the chance to stand on the podium at all.

Research has shown that silver medallists feel worse, on average, than bronze medallists. (Gold medallists, obviously, feel best of all.) The effect is written all over their faces, as psychologists led by Thomas Gilovich of Cornell University found out when they collected footage of the medallists at the 1992 Olympic games in Barcelona. Gilovich’s team looked at images of medal winners either at the end of events – that is, when they had just discovered their medal position – or as they collected their medals on the podium. They then asked volunteers who were ignorant of the athlete’s medal position to rate their facial expressions. Sure enough, the volunteers rated bronze medallists as consistently and significantly happier than silver medallists, both immediately after competing, and on the podium.

The reason is all to do with how bronze and silver medallists differ in the way they think events could have turned out – what psychologists call “counterfactual thinking”. In a follow-up study, the team went to the 1994 Empire State Games and interviewed athletes immediately after they had competed. Silver medallists were more likely to use phrases like “I almost…”, concentrating their responses on what they missed out on. Bronze medallists, on the other hand, tended to contemplate the idea of missing out on a medal altogether. These differences in counterfactual thinking make silver medallists feel unlucky, in comparison to a possible world where they could have won gold, and make bronze medallists feel lucky, in comparison to a possible world where they could have returned home with nothing.

So the research seems to add a bit of scientific meat to Hamlet’s famous line “there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so“, as well as revealing something about the psychology of regret. Even though we must deal with the world as it is, a vital part of life is imagining the world as it could be – thinking about a job you should have applied for (or said “no” to), or someone you should (or shouldn’t) have asked out on a date, for instance.

Haunted by the past

Different possible worlds crowd compete, some seeming closer than others, and this is what drives regret. This is illustrated by a study that asked volunteers to read a story about a plane crash survivor who walked through the wilderness for days, collapsing and die before reaching civilisation. They were then asked how much compensation the victim’s family should receive. People who read a version where the survivor collapsed 75 miles (120 kilometres) from safety awarded less compensation than those who read that the survivor collapsed just a quarter of a mile from safety.

Both scenarios ended the same, but the second version seems more tragic to us because the person seemed so much closer to safety. Remember that the next time you see a Hollywood film that plays with your emotions in this manner.

Understanding the psychology of regret also helps to put our own thoughts and emotions into context. We’re all haunted by things we could have done, or shouldn’t have done. What’s the point in dwelling on such matters, we may ask, when we can’t change the past? But the study of the Olympic medallists gives us two thoughts that might help us deal with regret.

The first is that regret, like imagination generally, exists for a reason – this amazing cognitive ability is what allows us to plan for the future and, with luck, change things based on how we imagine they might turn out. Medallists who feel more regret may well go on to train harder, and smarter, and so be better able to win gold at the next Olympics. Regret, like so many of the territories of the mind, can hurt. It hurts whether we can change how things have worked out, or not, but the feeling is built into our brains for a good reason (however little comfort that provides).

The second thought that might help us deal with regret is to realise that there are many possible worlds we could compare events to. It’s natural for many silver medallists to feel that they’ve missed out on gold, and to the extent we can choose what we compare ourselves to, we can choose how we feel about our regrets. We can use them to drive us to future success, but also to appreciate what we do have.

So maybe it isn’t all bad for Blake, Maroney or Seebohm after all?

BBC Future column: Wear red, win gold?

My latest column for BBC Future, a cautionary tale of scientific research, with an Olympic theme. Original here.

Studies show that wearing a particular colour increases the chances of winning a gold medal. Why this is the case serves as a timely reminder that we should always be wary of neat explanations for complex phenomena.

What does it take to be an Olympic winner? Skill? Yes. Dedication to training? Definitely. Luck? Perhaps. What colour kit you wear? Possibly.

Research conducted during the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens showed that competitors in taekwondo, boxing and wrestling who wore red clothing or body protection had a higher chance of winning. The effect wasn’t large, but when the statistics were combined across all these sports it was undeniable – wearing red seemed to give a slightly better chance of winning gold. The effect has since been shown for other sports, such as football.

The researchers had a straightforward explanation for why wearing red makes a difference. Across the animal kingdom, red colouration is associated with male dominance, signalling aggression and danger to others. The vividness of the red displayed by individuals of various species has been shown to relate to the amount of the hormone testosterone they have in the bodies, which also correlates with their physical health and eventual breeding success. The researchers claimed that humans too are subject to this “red = dominance” effect, and so, for combat sports, the athlete wearing red had a psychological advantage.

In competitive sport, small advantages like this matter. The difference between winning and losing can be milliseconds, or millimetres. So, should every country be fighting for the right for their sportspeople to wear red?

Maybe they should, but not for the reasons the study authors claimed. What happened next is a textbook case of the way in which research happens, showing us why we should always be wary of neat explanations for complex phenomena.

Close calls

Like all good science, once someone has proposed a theory, others can hold it up to scrutiny. And so it was the case with the red=dominance explanation. Another research group analysed data from a different sport at the Athens Olympics, Judo, but they found that contestants who wore either white or blue had an advantage. Instead of being an effect of evolutionary colour signals, the new claim was that the difference in performance was due entirely to the visibility of the different colours. In a combat sport the person wearing the brightest clothing will be at a disadvantage – their opponent will find it slightly easier to see where they are and anticipate their next move.

Convinced? Don’t make up your mind yet, because there’s a further twist to the tale.

This debate was resolved in the most interesting way at around the time of the Beijing Olympics in 2008. A new study suggested that the previous theories based on dominance or visibility of the competitor were wrong. The effect wasn’t anything to do with the effect of colour on the athletes, but instead to do with the effect on the referees.

I’ve written before about how we all have a tendency to look for causes that are somehow part of the essence of a person, and this seems to be another example. The statistics were correct, contestants wearing red really do win more, but we had been looking in the wrong place for an explanation. This study used digital manipulation to show experienced taekwondo referees fights that were identical, except for the colours worn by the contestants. Judging the same fights, referees awarded more points to contestants who had been photoshopped red than to contestants who had been photoshopped blue.

In any competitive sport there will be close calls, situations where the margin of victory is small, and a referee has to make a judgment to the best of their abilities in the blink of an eye. It seems that because red does have an association with victory and dominance, the judgement of these marginal situations can, occasionally, be influenced by the contestant’s clothes colour. Colour does produce a psychological effect, but it is a bias in the refs, not in the contestants.

Horse play

This story provides a classic warning for anyone trying to find psychological causes for things: the effect can just as easily be in the observers as in the thing we observe. Psychology students around the world are taught the story of Clever Hans, a horse that many believed could do arithmetic. Huge crowds would pay to see Hans, held by his trainer, being asked questions such as “what is five plus two”, and answer by stamping his foreleg seven times.

This seemed like a wondrous example of animal intelligence, until a psychologist showed that Hans was performing his trick by reading the body language of his trainer. Hans would start tapping his foot. When he got to the correct number his trainer would relax, and Hans would read this signal and stop. What looked like a miraculous ability to do maths, was really a clever – but not miraculous – ability to act according to what his trainer did.

So there the matter rests – for the moment at least. Wearing red could give you an advantage in competitive sports, but it’s because of the effect it has on the observers, not the observed. And, just maybe, we’ll try to be a bit more careful about calling victory as we watch contests happening in the London Olympics.

BBC Future column: Why we love to hoard

Here’s last week’s column from BBC Future. The original is here. It’s not really about hoarding, its about the endowment effect and a really lovely piece of work that helped found the field of behavioural economics (and win Daniel Kahneman a Nobel prize). Oh, and I give some advice on how to de-clutter, lifehacker-style.

Question: How do you make something instantly twice as expensive?

Answer: By giving it away.

This might sound like a nonsensical riddle, but if you’ve ever felt overly possessive about your regular parking space, your pen, or your Star Wars box sets, then you’re experiencing some elements behind the psychology of ownership. Our brains tell us that we value something merely because it is a thing we have.

This riddle actually describes a phenomenon called the Endowment Effect. The parking space, the pen and the DVDs are probably the same as many others, but they’re special to you. Special because in some way they are yours.

You can see how the endowment effect escalates – how else can you explain the boxes of cassette tapes, shoes or mobile phones that fill several shelves of your room… or even several rooms?

No trade

To put a scientific lens on what’s going on here, a team led by psychologist Daniel Kahneman carried out a simple experiment. They took a class of ordinary University students and gave half of them a University-crested mug, the other half received $6 – the nominal cost of the mug.

Classic economics states that the students should begin to trade with each other. The people who were given cash but liked mugs should swop some of their cash a mug, and some of the people who were given mugs should swop their mugs for some cash. This, economic theory says, is how prices emerge – the interactions of all buyers and sellers finds the ideal price of goods. The price – in this case, of mugs – will be a perfect balance between the desires of people who want a mug and have cash, and the people who want cash and have a mug.

But economic theory lost out to psychology. Hardly any students traded. Those with mugs tended to keep them, asking on average for more than $5 to give up their mug. Those without mugs didn’t want to trade at this price, being only willing to spend an average of around $2.50 to purchase a mug.

Remember that the mugs were distributed at random. It would be weird if, by chance, all the “mug-lovers” ended up with mugs, and the “mug-haters” ended up without. Something else must be going on to explain the lack of trading. It seems the only way to understand the high-value placed on the mugs by people who were given one at random is if the simple act of being given a mug makes you value it twice as highly as before.

This is the endowment effect, and it is the reason why things reach a higher price at auctions – because people become attached to the thing they’re bidding for, experiencing a premature sense of ownership that pushes them to bid more than they would otherwise. It is also why car dealers want you to test drive the car, encouraging you in everyway to think about what it would be like to possess the car. The endowment effect is so strong that even imagined ownership can increase the value of something.

Breaking habits

The endowment effect is a reflection of a general bias in human psychology to favour the way things are, rather than the way they could be. I call this status quo bias, and we can see reflections of it in the strength of habits that guide our behaviour, in the preference we have for the familiar over the strange or the advantage the incumbent politician has over a challenger.

Knowing the powerful influence that possession has on our psychology, I take a simple step to counteract it. I try to use my knowledge of the endowment effect to help me de-clutter my life. Perhaps this can be useful to you too.

Say I am cleaning out my stuff. Before I learnt about the endowment effect I would go through my things one by one and try to make a decision on what to do with it. Quite reasonably, I would ask myself whether I should throw this away. At this point, although I didn’t have a name for it, the endowment effect would begin to work its magic, leading me to generate all sorts of reasons why I should keep an item based on a mistaken estimate of how valuable I found it. After hours of tidying I would have kept everything, including the 300 hundred rubber bands (they might be useful one day), the birthday card from two years ago (given to me by my mother) and the obscure computer cable (it was expensive).

Now, knowing the power of the bias, for each item I ask myself a simple question: If I didn’t have this, how much effort would I put in to obtain it? And then more often or not I throw it away, concluding that if I didn’t have it, I wouldn’t want this.

Let this anti-endowment effect technique perform its magic for you, and you too will soon be joyously throwing away things that you only think you want, but actually wouldn’t trouble yourself to acquire if you didn’t have them.

And here’s the thing… it works for emails too. If someone sends me a link to an article or funny picture, I don’t think “I must look at that”, I ask “If I hadn’t just been sent this link, how hard would I endeavour to find out this information for myself?”. And then I delete the email, thinking that however fascinating that article on the London sewerage system sounds or that funny picture of a cat promises to be, I didn’t want them before the email was in my possession, so I probably don’t really want them now.

That’s my tip for managing my clutter. If you have any others, let me know.

BBC Future column: Why I am always unlucky but you are always careless

From lost keys to failed interviews, we blame other people for mishaps but never ourselves, because assuming causes helps us to make sense of the world.

When my wife can’t find her keys, I assume it is because she is careless. When I can’t find my keys I naturally put it down to bad luck. The curious thing is that she always assumes the opposite – that she’s the one with the bad luck, and I’m the careless one.

When we observe other people we attribute their behaviour to their character rather than to their situation – my wife’s carelessness means she loses her keys, your clumsiness means you trip over, his political opinions mean that he got into an argument. When we think about things that happen to us the opposite holds. We downplay our own dispositions and emphasise the role of the situation. Bad luck leads to lost keys, a hidden bump causes trips, or a late train results in an unsuccessful job interview – it’s never anything to do with us!

This pattern is so common that psychologists have called it the fundamental attribution error. And there’s a whole branch of psychology that investigates how we reason about causes for things called attribution theory. The fundamental attribution error is a good example of a quirk in the way we reason about causes, but it isn’t the only one. Despite the name, it may not even be the most fundamental.

Seeking causes

Psychologists are interested in attribution of causation because it tells us important things about how the mind works. To illustrate this, imagine you see a man asleep under a tree, and a leaf fluttering down to land on his head. As the leaf touches his head he wakes up and shouts “Yikes”. Anyone watching this scene would assume the man woke up because of the falling leaf.

But this simple statement is remarkably difficult to prove – you have no direct access to the cause, just the before (a leaf) and after (“Yikes”). We automatically assume the cause. We talk about it like it is a thing – somehow in the middle between the leaf and the man, but really it is just an assumption, not a thing. And indeed, some new information could come along and force us to reconsider our assumptions. We might find out later that a philosophically-minded ant had come along and, just at that minute, decided to bite the sleeping man’s hand.

So our causes are assumptions, based on what we perceive but with an extra bit of imagination. They are necessary assumptions. Without looking for causes we would be stuck with a confusing picture of the world. Rather than say “the falling leaf caused the man to wake up”, we have to take everything into account and say the following. “The leaf fell. The grass did the same as before. A bird flew between two trees one hundred and thirty yards away. I lost my keys. My Romanian aunt’s clock in my Romanian aunt’s house continued ticking (on and on and on). The man woke up.”

Assuming causes in this way lets us make sense of the world. Not only is it easier to describe, the descriptions tell you how to make things happen (or avoid them – for instance, if you want the man to stay asleep next time, catch the leaf). In this way, attributions are psychological magic that help us control the future. No wonder psychologists find them interesting.

Built on sand

The fundamental attribution error is just a continuation of a wider pattern: we blame individuals for what happens to them because of the general psychological drive to find causes for things. We have an inherent tendency to pick out each other as causes; even from infancy, we pay more attention to things that move under their own steam, that act as if they have a purpose. The mystery is not that people become the focus of our reasoning about causes, but how we manage to identify any single cause in a world of infinite possible causes.

Even the way I described cause-seeking as an “inherent tendency” is part of this pattern. I have no direct access to what causes the results of experiments that have made me think this, just as I would have no direct access to what caused the man to wake as the leaf fell. I assume a thing, hidden, somehow, underneath the experiments – an inherent tendency for humans to identify each other as causes – which I then rely on to tell you what I’m thinking.

That thing might not exist, or might have a reality very different from how I describe it, but we are forced to rely on assumptions to make sense of the world, and these assumptions create a reality of causes and essences that seems solid, despite its uncertain foundation.

This all might sound overly philosophical, but once you are switched on to this tendency to invent essences you’ll hear them everywhere. Generalisations or stereotypes such as “women can’t do maths” or “Americans don’t have a sense of humour” also rely on an invented essence of a sex, or of a nationality, a term that some psychologists have called ultimate attribution error. These views don’t have a concrete existence. They are based in imagination, and are subject to all the psychological forces that are at play there.

In more prosaic domestic moments, when it feels like such bad luck that I can’t find my keys, yet my wife seems so careless when she can’t find hers, I know I’m performing psychological magic. I’m observing the myriad events in the world and imagining things – my bad luck, her carelessness – which I use to explain the world with.

With the knowledge that these explanations can only ever be built on sand, I know to be a bit more careful about how I use them.

My most recent column for the BBC Future website, the original is here

Less thinking biases in a foreign tongue

A fascinating study just published in Psychological Science has found that solving problems in a foreign language reduces cognitive biases.

The Foreign-Language Effect: Thinking in a Foreign Tongue Reduces Decision Biases

Psychological Science, Published online before print, April 18, 2012

Boaz Keysar, Sayuri L. Hayakawa, Sun Gyu An

Would you make the same decisions in a foreign language as you would in your native tongue? It may be intuitive that people would make the same choices regardless of the language they are using, or that the difficulty of using a foreign language would make decisions less systematic.

We discovered, however, that the opposite is true: Using a foreign language reduces decision-making biases. Four experiments show that the framing effect disappears when choices are presented in a foreign tongue. Whereas people were risk averse for gains and risk seeking for losses when choices were presented in their native tongue, they were not influenced by this framing manipulation in a foreign language.

Two additional experiments show that using a foreign language reduces loss aversion, increasing the acceptance of both hypothetical and real bets with positive expected value. We propose that these effects arise because a foreign language provides greater cognitive and emotional distance than a native tongue does.

Link to study summary (via @ProfessorFunk)

The lie detector paradox

I’ve got an article in today’s Observer about the unreliability of ‘lie detectors’ but why people still tend to spill the beans when wired up to them.

It turns out that polygraphs have a sort of placebo effect, where people are more truthful because they believe that they work. In fact, studies show that people are more truthful when wired up to a completely bogus ‘lie detector’ look-alike.

Worryingly though, law enforcement is staring to use this effect, which is based entirely on ignorance, to monitor sex offenders and evaluate their risk of carrying out other sexual assaults.

Needless to say, I feel this is foolish. Read the article for the full details.

By the way, this is the first of an every-six-weeks column I’ll be writing for the paper. As my friends will tell you, I rarely manage to say anything interesting that frequently, so wish me luck.

Link to Observer article ‘the truth about lie detectors’.

Works like magic

The New York Times has a short but thought-provoking piece on the benefits of supersition and magical thinking. This part particularly caught my eye:

For instance, in one study led by the psychologist Lysann Damisch of the University of Cologne, subjects were handed a golf ball, and half of them were told that the ball had been lucky so far. Those subjects with a “lucky” ball drained 35 percent more golf putts than those with a “regular” ball.

The results are from a 2010 study that looked at the effect of ‘lucky charms’ and good luck superstitions on performance, finding that they genuinely increase our ability to complete self-directed tasks through increased self-confidence.

It’s a fascinating result in light of the typical skeptical response that ‘lucky charms don’t work’ because in many cases they do. Importantly, however, they have their effect on tasks in which our own skill plays a significant part rather than those where random outcome is the prime factor.

In other words, they’d help you at poker but not at roulette.

And if you want to know more about how we acquire supersitions, Tom’s recent article for BBC Future breaks it down.

Link to NYT ‘In Defense of Superstition’.
Link to BBC Future article on supersitions acquisition.
Link to locked study.

Group sync

The New Yorker has a fantastic article on how creativity and innovation spring from group structure and social interaction.

The piece is framed as tackling the ‘brainstorming myth’ – as the well-known idea generation method has been comprehensively but unknowingly debunked many times – but the article is really much wider and explores what sort of social interactions lead to creativity and progress.

As well as looking at lab studies it also weaves in some wonderful historical examples of how diverse environments and relationships have led to everything from Broadway success to scientific advance.

A few years ago, Isaac Kohane, a researcher at Harvard Medical School, published a study that looked at scientific research conducted by groups in an attempt to determine the effect that physical proximity had on the quality of the research. He analyzed more than thirty-five thousand peer-reviewed papers, mapping the precise location of co-authors. Then he assessed the quality of the research by counting the number of subsequent citations.

The task, Kohane says, took a “small army of undergraduates” eighteen months to complete. Once the data was amassed, the correlation became clear: when coauthors were closer together, their papers tended to be of significantly higher quality. The best research was consistently produced when scientists were working within ten metres of each other; the least cited papers tended to emerge from collaborators who were a kilometre or more apart. “If you want people to work together effectively, these findings reinforce the need to create architectures that support frequent, physical, spontaneous interactions,” Kohane says. “Even in the era of big science, when researchers spend so much time on the Internet, it’s still so important to create intimate spaces.”

A compelling, comprehensive read.

Link to The New Yorker piece ‘Groupthink’.

The hot hand smacks back

The idea of the ‘hot hand’, where a player who makes several successful shots has a higher chance of making some more, is popular with sports fans and team coaches, but has long been considered a classic example of a cognitive fallacy – an illusion of a ‘streak’ caused by our misinterpretation of naturally varying scoring patterns.

But a new study has hard data to show the hot hand really exists and may turn one of the most widely cited ‘cognitive illusions’ on its head.

A famous 1985 study by psychologist Thomas Gilovich and his colleagues looked at the ‘hot hand’ belief in basketball, finding that there was no evidence of any ‘scoring streak’ in thousands of basketball games beyond what you would expect from natural variation in play.

Think of it like tossing a weighted coin. Although the weighting, equivalent to the players skill, makes landing a ‘head’ more likely overall, every toss of the coin is independent. The last result doesn’t effect the next one.

Despite this, sometimes heads or tails will bunch together and this is what people erroneously interpret as the ‘hot hand’ or being on a roll, at least according to the theory. Due to the basketball research, that seemed to show the same effect, the ‘hot hand fallacy’ was born and the idea of ‘scoring streaks’ thought to be sports myth.

Some have suggested that while the ‘hot hand’ may be an illusion, in practical terms, in might be useful on the field.

Better players are more likely to have a higher overall scoring rate and so are more likely to have what seem like streaks. Passing to that guy works out, because the better players have the ball for longer.

But a new study led by Markus Raab suggests that the hot hand does indeed exist. Each shot is not independent and players that hit the mark may raise their chances of scoring the next time. They seem to draw inspiration from their successes.

Crucially, the researchers chose their sport carefully because one of the difficulties with basketball – from a numbers point of view – is that players on the opposing team react to success.

If someone scores, they may find themselves the subject of more defensive attention on the court, damping down any ‘hot hand’ effect if it did exist.

Because of this, the new study looked at volleyball where the players are separated by a net and play from different sides of the court. Additionally, players rotate position after every rally, meaning its more difficult to ‘clamp down’ on players from the opposing team if they seem to be doing well.

The research first established the belief in the ‘hot hand’ was common in volleyball players, coaches and fans, and then looked to see if scoring patterns support it – to see if scoring a point made a player more likely to score another.

It turns out that over half the players in Germany’s first-division volleyball league show the ‘hot hand’ effect – streaks of inspiration were common and points were not scored in an independent ‘coin toss’ manner.

What’s more, players were sensitive to who was on a roll and used the effect to the team’s advantage – more commonly passing to those on a scoring streak.

So it seems the ‘hot hand’ effect exists. But this opens up another, perhaps more interesting, question.

How does it work? Because if teams can understand the essence of on court inspiration, they’ve got a recipe for success.

Link to blocked study. Clearing a losing strategy.
Link to full text which has mysteriously appeared online.

Games of Invention

I’ve been collecting card decks. First I got the Oblique Strategies, Brian Eno’s deck of worthwhile dilemmas. When I’m stuck with something I’m working on I sit completely still for a few moments, holding the problem in mind. Then I take a breath, draw a card and apply what’s written to my problem.

Trying this now I get:
“Make something implied more definite (reinforce, duplicate)”

Other cards say things such as “Remove elements in decreasing order of importance”, “Honour thy error as a hidden intention” or simply “Water”

Often as not this process frees me from the rut I’m in. I don’t always get the answer in a flash, but mentally I get moving again.

The Oblique Strategies work because they use our talent for justification to stimulate invention. Justification is the mental skill of tracing causes to understand a situation. It is closely related to deductive reasoning. Most of us get a lot of practice at justification and deduction. We’re used to tracing causation and necessity down the loops and chicanes of “if-then” rules, used to figuring out what is allowed, forbidden and required. These are useful skills for understanding laws, code and the bureaucracies of advanced industrial society, but it is a mental set for reducing possibility, not for increasing it.

Edward de Bono, the guy who invented the term “lateral thinking”, talks about how this talent we all cultivate for deduction and justification can be hijacked in the service of creativity and invention. Rather than ask of ourselves, with our highly cultivated deduction machinery, “what is the next best move?”, we instead make a blind move in the space of possibilities. We force ourselves, for example, to remove the most important element in our design, or to apply the idea of water. This blind move whatever it is shifts us to asking “how could the world get this way?” We can then use our deduction machinery to build a bridge back from the move we’ve forced ourselves to make, finding reasons why or how this could be the next best move. The results can be so inventive they feel like they come from outside ourselves, but they are really just our ordinary logical machinery thrown into reverse by the need to justify a blind move.

The next deck of cards I bought were Stephen Anderson’s Mental Notes, a set of 50 insights from psychology designed as prompts for web designers. The insights are grouped under categories such as “Persuasion” or “Attention” and each card gives has a short description of a psychological phenomenon and notes on how to create or encourage it.

What I love about the cards is that they capture a huge amount of information from the field of Psychology, but in a completely different way from the ways psychologist usually try and present the information. Experts write textbooks laboriously cataloguing phenomena, enumerating arguments for and against their nuances. The Mental Notes don’t do this – brevity is the soul of their wit. The other thing academic psychologists do, is try and reduce phenomena to their essences, sifting the real and eternal from the incidental, the ephemeral and secondary. The Mental Notes could have done this, but they don’t. To ask why there are separate cards “Scarcity”, “Limited Choice”, “Limited Duration” and “Limited Access” when these are describing essentially the same thing would be to miss the point. The way the cards are they present the information in a form which means it can immediately be taken and thought about in a concrete way and applied to the design problem you are dealing with. Reduction to essences would be counter-productive here.

The third set of cards I’ve bought are Dan Lockton‘s “Design with Intent” toolkit. These cards are an attempt to catalogue patterns in design which influence behaviour, things like “prominence”, “decoys” or “threat of injury”. What’s nice about these cards is that they recognise explicitly that the cards are prompts. The main text of each card is a question: “Can you direct users’ attention to what you want, by making it more prominent, obvious or exaggerated?”, “Can you add ‘decoy’ choices, making the others (which you want people to pick) look better in comparison?”

Collecting information like this in cards recognises that the creative process needs an element of randomness, that making thoughts physical makes it easier for us to play games of invention with ourselves, and that too much organisation can sometimes restrict what we know – the information might be all there in a textbook, but the ends are all tied off, stopping our current state of mind latching onto what is needed. Invention comes naturally from inside ourselves, but sometimes we need a spark to set it off. We need external prompts which ask us questions we didn’t think to ask of ourselves alone, which lift us into seeing more of ourselves than we would on our own.

Links

Oblique Strategies
Anderson’s Mental Notes
Dan Lockton’s website

This is the text of an article I originally wrote for the boys at Rattle, and their newspaper the Rattle Review. It is republished here with their permission

Entertainingly mislead me

A beautifully recursive study has shown that viewing an episode of the psychology of deception TV series Lie To Me makes people worse at distinguishing truth from lies.

The TV series is loosely based on the work of psychologist Paul Ekman who pioneered the study of emotions and developed the Facial Action Coding System or FACS that codes even the slightest of changes in facial expression.

Although in poplar culture Ekman and the FACS are often associated with the detection of lies through changes in ‘micro expressions’, there is actually no good research to show it can help detect falsehoods.

However, the TV series relies heavily on this premise and suggests that there is more of a scientific basis to lie detection than is actually feasible and that it is possible to detect deception through careful observation of specific behaviours.

This, however, is not very accurate. The authors of the study don’t mince their words:

Lie to Me is based on the premise that highly accurate deception detection is possible based on real-time observation of specific behaviors indicative of lying. The preponderance of research demonstrates that the exact opposite is true.

Lie to Me also suggests that certain people are naturally gifted lie detectors. This is also inconsistent with the preponderance of research. Thus, when looking at the evidence generated across several hundred individual studies, the idea of Lie to Me is highly implausible and almost certainly misleading.

Rather shrewdly, this new study, led by psychologist Timothy Levine, decided to test whether this misleading view of lie detection might actually influence the viewer’s ability to detect lies.

They split participants into three groups, one who watched and episode of Lie to Me, another an episode of Numb3rs – in which crimes are solved by a genius math professor, and a final group who didn’t watch anything.

Afterwards, everyone saw a series of 12 interviews – half of which were honest and half which involved lies – and were asked to rate the truthfulness of the interviewee.

Normally, when we do tasks like this where honesty and deception are present in equal numbers, we tend to over-rate how truthful people are – probably due to the fact that in everyday like most people are being genuine with us, so we have a tendency to assume people are telling the truth – even when we know there’s some falsehood to be found.

In the study, those who had just watched Lie To Me didn’t show this truth-accepting bias, they were more skeptical, but crucially, they were actually worse at distinguishing deception than the others.

They applied their skepticism in a blanket fashion and became less accurate as a result.

In other words, not only does the programme misrepresent the psychology of lie detection, but this has an effect on the psychology of the viewers themselves.

Which, by the way, would make a great plot device for Lie To Me.

Link to locked study (via @velascop)

False confession fishing in the lab

We’ve covered false confessions and how surprisingly common they are several times before on Mind Hacks but a new article from The Economist updates us on the latest lab studies.

DNA crime investigators The Innocence Project have discovered that about 25% of DNA exonerations have involved the accused making a false confession at the time of conviction.

This has sparked a great deal of interest into why people admit to crimes they haven’t committed and, along with studying real-life cases, researchers have been trying to encourage false confessions in the lab to see what influences the behaviour.

The Economist has a brief round-up of some of the most interesting lab studies.

In an as-yet-unpublished study, members of Dr Horselenberg’s group told 83 people that they were taking part in a taste test for a supermarket chain. The top taster would win a prize such as an iPad or a set of DVDs. The volunteers were asked to try ten cans of fizzy drink and guess which was which. The labels were obscured by socks pulled up to the rim of each can, so to cheat a volunteer had only to lower the sock.

During the test, which was filmed by a hidden camera, ten participants actually did cheat. Bafflingly, though, another eight falsely confessed when accused by the experimenter, despite participants having been told cheats would be fined €50 ($72).

Link to The Economist ‘False confessions: Silence is golden’.