Category: Reasoning

The Frontal Cortex blog has a fantastic piece on ‘loss aversion’ – the cognitive bias where try to we avoid losses more than we try to obtain gains – and its origin in the Allais Paradox.

The crucial thing about loss aversion is it is not about just losing things – it’s also about the perception that we might be losing something, regardless of the actual impact on our resources.

For example, people tend to be less keen to undergo surgery when it is described as having a 20% death rate than when described as having a 80% survival rate, even though both mean exactly the same thing.

The post over at the Frontal Cortex does a great job of weaving together the psychology of the effect, the story of how it was discovered, and it’s impact on our lives, in an excellent brief article.
 

Link to Frontal Cortex on the the Allais Paradox and loss aversion.

In the light of several celebrities who have excused racist comments by saying they were drunk, tired or under stress, Time magazine has an excellent article examining how we can indeed become more prejudiced when run-down. Contrary to what some might think, this is not a get-out card for racism but may be key to understanding how best to challenge prejudice.

The piece riffs on findings from the Implicit Association Test or IAT that measures how quickly we pair concepts with positive or negative attitudes. It has found, for example, that negative biases towards black people are present in a large proportion of the population, including black people themselves.

The idea is not that all of these people are racist, but that we have absorbed negative cultural associations that tend to push our thinking in the direction of prejudice and we need to make a conscious effort to act even-handedly to counter-balance this tendency.

This effort, however, is hard mental work, and several studies have shown that this control can be weakened simply by altering the resources available to the brain.

It’s probably worth saying that one example in the article has been a bit mangled in the retelling. The study on ‘how elderly people given full sugar lemonade expressed fewer racist sentiments than those given diet lemonade’ wasn’t actually on elderly people or racist remarks.

But it did show that students given real lemonade were less likely to make homophobic remarks when asked to write as essay about a gay man than those given a sugar-free soft-drink.

However, it has been found that we are more likely to show racial bias as we age – likely because the circuits most involved in self-control heavily rely on the frontal lobes – which tend to become less efficient as we head into our twilight years.

In other words, we are all more likely to be prejudiced when we’re not firing on all cylinders and this is where it gets interesting.

The article raises the issue of which is the authentic you – the socially acceptable on-the-ball you, or the run-down prejudice-prone you?

Clearly, we would prefer the former, but its notable that much of the anti-racism rhetoric has pointed out, quite rightly, that we can be biased despite our best efforts, suggesting the latter.

It is also the case that people who have become notorious for outbursts of prejudice are often condemned as ‘racists’ rather than criticised for having made a mistake.

This is important, but it turns out that thinking of someone as characteristically prejudiced, rather than someone subject to the wax and wane of bias, is likely to mean racist acts go unchallenged.

A person’s attitude toward bias may help reduce it as well. Carol Dweck, a professor of psychology at Stanford, and her colleagues recently published a study illustrating why some people confront racism and others do not. Dweck found that those who believed racism was a permanent characteristic (“that person is a racist”) were four times less likely to confront research assistants who made racist statements than those who saw racism as changeable…

Further, Dweck’s study found that it’s relatively easy to get people to change their views about the changeability of racism, at least in the short term. After researchers asked participants to read a report emphasizing studies showing that people can change, they were 20% to 25% more likely to say they would confront prejudice.

Condemning people rather than actions may make it more likely that racism goes unchallenged. Scientific backing for the words of Jay Smooth.
 

Link to Time on prejudice and the ‘authentic self’.
Link to Jay Smooth on challenging racism.

Expertise seems to work most effectively in the unconscious mind. An intriguing new study on predicting the outcome of football matches suggests that a period of unconscious thought, at least for experts, is most effective for accurately calling the result.

The research was led by Dutch psychologist Ap Dijksterhuis and involved asking hundreds of Dutch students to rate how much they knew about football and call the outcome of four matches from the football league in Holland.

In the first experiment, the participants were split into three groups, and after being given the matches to predict, were either asked to respond immediately, or were asked to give their answer after thinking about the outcomes for two minutes, or, alternatively, after completing a ‘2-back’ working memory task for two minutes – designed to keep the conscious mind occupied.

The initial results are a blow to sports pundits everywhere. Overall, expertise barely accounted for any ability to predict matches accurately. In fact, knowledge of football accounted for less than 2% of overall match calling success.

Nevertheless, when experts were compared to non-experts, the ability to strike home with a prediction was significantly improved by a period of non-conscious thought – that is, spending two minutes doing the ‘2-back’ task before answering.

The amount of success predicted by expertise was still low, just under 7%, but the power of expertise more than tripled.

In contrast, deliberately analysing the matches for two minutes or responding immediately made expert predictions worse. This is also evidence against the ‘blink effect’, popularised by writer Malcolm Gladwell, as instant responses were not a success.

The researchers also ran a second experiment on World Cup matches to better understand why the unconscious mind was doing so well. They additionally asked participants to guess the world ranking of each team – the biggest single predictor of match success in the tournament.

For immediate responders and conscious thinkers, the rankings they gave didn’t show much relation to the outcome of matches. Unconscious thinkers, on the other hand, showed a strong link between ranking and match outcome.

World ranking was the single most useful piece of information in guessing World Cup scores, but even when people had accurate rankings, they tended to discount this information when given time to consciously mull it over. Perhaps there were distracted by a star player being off-form, or tabloid revelation about the team, or superstitions about playing in the away strip.

It’s not that these don’t have an effect, but that the conscious mind can give them undue weight.

The idea is that the unconscious mind is ticking away in the background and working on the problem, and that this is more effective than giving a rushed answer or one where the conscious mind is given free reign to override what’s going on in the ‘back of our minds’ with potentially irrelevant detail.

Looking at the bigger picture, the researchers used a similar choice for picking match outcomes as the football pools – a popular lottery-style form of gambling where punters predict matches as a wins, losses, draws and so on.

On the individual level the absolute boost in accuracy is small, but over the long-term or in syndicates, punters could significantly raise their chances by relying on unconscious deliberation.

Although it’s probably worth saying that chances are likely raised from minuscule to tiny, so you’re unlikely to be cashing in big time.
 

Link to study abstract and DOI entry.

An interesting point made in a new book about the psychology of being wrong, appropriately called Being Wrong by author Kathryn Schulz.

Taken from The New York Times book review:

Schulz begins with a question that should puzzle us more than it does: Why do we love being right? After all, she writes, “unlike many of life’s other delights — chocolate, surfing, kissing — it does not enjoy any mainline access to our biochemistry: to our appetites, our adrenal glands, our limbic systems, our swoony hearts.” Indeed, as she notes, “we can’t enjoy kissing just anyone, but we can relish being right about almost anything,” including that which we’d rather be wrong about, like “the downturn in the stock market, say, or the demise of a friend’s relationship or the fact that at our spouse’s insistence, we just spent 15 minutes schlepping our suitcase in exactly the opposite direction from our hotel.”

The NYT also has an excerpt of the book available online.

Link to New York Times book review (via 3QuarksDaily).
Link to book’s website.

Psychologists have longed talked about ‘goal gradient’ which describes how we work harder to achieve a goal as we get closer to it. I just came across a fantastic study published in the Journal of Marketing Research which shows that we can be convinced to shift into a higher gear of work and spending, even when the perception of progress is a complete illusion.

The ‘goal gradient hypothesis’ was original discussed in the 1930s with regards to rats in mazes, based on the observation that the animals ran more quickly when they got nearer the end.

Ran Kivetz and colleagues wondered whether this would apply to shopping behaviour and ran a series of experiments to show that this was the case.

One was to see how quickly people with ‘coffee shop loyalty cards’ would fill up their cards as they got nearer to the ‘buy ten get one free’ goal. Sure enough, the last few stamps were acquired more quickly than the first ones.

But here’s the clever bit. They did an experiment where they gave some customers a ‘buy ten get one free’ card, while others got a ‘buy twelve get one free card’ but with the first two stamps already filled in.

In practical terms, the loyalty scheme was identical, but the customers bought coffees more quickly to full up the ‘buy twelve’ cards in less time – in line with ‘goal gradient hypothesis’ – despite the fact that the actual progress towards the goal was no different.

The researchers call this the ‘illusory goal progress’ effect and shows that our perception of how close we are to achieving something can be easily manipulated by shifting the goal posts.

The full study is available online as a pdf and Kivetz discusses the study (albeit in passing) on a recent ABC Radio National programme on ‘Reward, regret and consumer behaviour’.

Link to study summary.
pdf to scientific paper.
Link to ABC RN on ‘Reward, regret and consumer behaviour’.

The latest Wired UK has an interesting piece by behavioural economist Dan Ariely who notes that we are now more likely than ever to be the agents of our own demise – through the poor choices we make.

“One of the most interesting analyses on the ways in which our decisions kill us is by Ralph Keeney (Operation Research, 2008). He puts forth the claim that 44.5 per cent of all premature deaths in the US result from personal decisions — choices such as smoking, not exercising, criminality, drug and alcohol use and unsafe sexual behaviour…

Using the same method to examine causes of death in 1900, Keeney found that only around ten per cent of premature deaths were caused by personal decisions. Compared to the more recent proportion of 44.5 per cent of premature deaths caused by personal decisions, it seems that we have “improved” in making decisions that kill us (meaning that we’ve actually got worse). And no, this is not because we’re now all binge drinking, murderous smokers. It’s largely because potentially fatal illnesses, such as tuberculosis and pneumonia (the most common causes of death in the early 20th century), are far more rare these days, and the temptation and our ability to make erroneous decisions (driving while texting, say) have increased dramatically.

What this means is that instead of relying on external factors to keep us alive and healthy for longer, we can (and must) learn to rely on our decision-making skills in order to reduce the number of stupid and costly mistakes that we make.”

This reflects the fact that clinical and health psychologists are now increasingly working with patients who have ‘physical’ illness rather than ‘mental’ illness.

The field has come to be called ‘behavioural medicine‘ and can include working with people who have conditions like diabetes, heart problems or transplants to help them tackle any cognitive biases, emotional influences or behavioural tendencies that lead to poorer health decisions.

Link to Wired UK piece ‘Do the right thing’.

Full disclosure: I’m a contributing editor for Wired UK.

Staying calm is a car thief’s biggest challenge, according to a study published in the British Journal of Criminology that explored the psychology of looking inconspicuous when driving a stolen vehicle.

Criminologists Michael Cherbonneau and Heith Copes interviewed 54 car thieves from Tennessee and Louisiana about their experience of stealing automobiles, particularly focusing on what strategies they use to maintain an appearance of normality while driving away with a stolen vehicle.

Perhaps the most striking point to come out of the interviews is that dealing with the psychological pressure of the drive is by far the biggest challenge. As one offender noted “that‚Äôs where the adrenalin is, it‚Äôs in the drive. The actual theft is really no big deal.”

Some of these strategies were common sense, for example, not doing too much damage when breaking in or driving recklessly, but others were clearly thought out with ideas of how other people would perceive what a ‘normal’ driver would look like.

This can involve thinking about the sort of driver that would be in the type of car the person wants to steal – and dressing accordingly. Offenders reported that they specifically ‘dressed up’ to match their target car and avoided stereotypically gangsterish clothing, while another reported that instead of changing his appearance to fit the car, he made sure he stole cars to fitted his day-to-day look.

This could even take even involve thinking about the potential prejudices of the police, with one offender reporting that he avoided specific types of car “because if police see a young black person like me in a nice car they will easily pull me over”.

But these more practical measures also needed to be accompanied by the right psychological approach which was seen as the most challenging aspect of stealing cars. ‘Police panic’, even if only internal, is common and offenders not only had to conceal the fact they were spooked but conceal the fact they were trying to hid their stress.

This often involved specific mental strategies to focus on certain aspects of behaviour to dampen the effect of emotions:

Some car thieves often respond to the physiological arousal of police encounters by ‘covering their concern with a tightly held cloak of unconcern’, but to over-perform complacency invites suspicion and magnetizes observers doubt as ‘[t]hose who treat the presence of the police as other than normal are seen as other than normal themselves’. A delicate balance must be struck.

In managing composure, some offenders prefer to focus more on the task at hand than on the interactional pressures of the abrupt threat. ‘When I see police,’ explained one thief, ‘I would just maintain my composure and do everything a driver is supposed to do.’ Attending less to the emotional sensations associated with the encounter and monitoring more controllable behaviours instead allows offenders to maintain composure and exhibit normal reactions. Doing so helps minimize the urge to immediately flee when police are in sight.

Some auto thieves were very confident in their ability to act normally, stating that ‘police are only as smart as you make them’. The ability to maintain composure by removing feelings of inferiority provided offenders with a sense of confidence, which in turn made it easier for offenders to act normally.

The study, published in 2006, counters the idea that such crimes are purely opportunistic that require little skill or ability. Instead, while the technical aspects of stealing a car are relatively trivial, the psychological challenges require significant effort.

Link to DOI and summary of study.

The Boston Globe has an interesting piece on democracy, knowledge and reasoning biases, highlighting the fact that we can often decide facts are true based more on our pre-existing political biases than the evidence for their accuracy.

The article is full of fascinating snippets from recent studies. One, for example, finding that people who are the least well-informed are the ones most likely to be believe their opinions on the topic are correct.

However, there is also some intriguing discussion about how we filter, fudge and integrate new information into our existing beliefs:

New research, published in the journal Political Behavior last month, suggests that once those facts — or “facts” — are internalized, they are very difficult to budge. In 2005, amid the strident calls for better media fact-checking in the wake of the Iraq war, Michigan’s Nyhan and a colleague devised an experiment in which participants were given mock news stories, each of which contained a provably false, though nonetheless widespread, claim made by a political figure: that there were WMDs found in Iraq (there weren’t), that the Bush tax cuts increased government revenues (revenues actually fell), and that the Bush administration imposed a total ban on stem cell research (only certain federal funding was restricted). Nyhan inserted a clear, direct correction after each piece of misinformation, and then measured the study participants to see if the correction took.

For the most part, it didn’t. The participants who self-identified as conservative believed the misinformation on WMD and taxes even more strongly after being given the correction. With those two issues, the more strongly the participant cared about the topic — a factor known as salience — the stronger the backfire. The effect was slightly different on self-identified liberals: When they read corrected stories about stem cells, the corrections didn’t backfire, but the readers did still ignore the inconvenient fact that the Bush administration’s restrictions weren’t total.

It turns out that new information doesn’t always persuade us but the article does a good job of outlining how both psychological and situational factors influence our openness to updating our knowledge about the world.

Link to Boston Globe piece ‘How facts backfire’.
Link to study on facts and political bias (open access).

The Economist has an excellent special report on gambling that covers everything from what makes slot machines attractive to the psychology of poker.

If you read the lead article there are links to the whole series in a sidebar embedded in the text. However, those particularly interested in the psychology of gambling may want to check out some specific pieces.

A short article looks at how compulsive gambling has become medicalised as it has been changed from a moral failing to a psychiatric problem.

Is poker a game of skill, as enthusiasts claim, or chance, as law defines it? An interesting discussion ensues on experience, success and gambling choices.

A computer system called ‘Polaris’ that claims to be the ‘Deep Blue’ of poker is also helping us understand the science of decision-making and is tackled by a particularly good article.

Another piece looks at the history of lotteries, the worst value gambling that money can buy and also the most popular.

I also liked this story on how slot machine companies sell you a guaranteed long-term loss.

When it comes down to it, over the longer term slot machines keep 5% of your money in return for a light show and a slimmish chance to win. But people keep playing. Slots pit humans against maths, and the maths always win. But successful slot machines get players to “like the feel of the maths”, explains Chris Satchell, chief technology officer for International Game Technology.

There are many more articles that explore wider issues such as economics, law and gambling’s effect on society. A really well-done series, as you’d expect from The Economist.

Link to Economist special report on gambling.