Mind Hacks

There’s a brief but interesting article in The New York Times about how we use consumer goods to ‘send signals’ to other people. It illustrates this with a fantastic example and then misses the point. Luckily another recent study on unconscious influences on doctors hits the punchline.

The idea that each product has a meaning and that we use our purchases to construct an identity from the ‘language of brands’ is not completely new, indeed, we’ve covered it before on Mind Hacks, but there’s a nice illustration of this in the most recent NYT article:

Most of us will insist there are other reasons for going to Harvard or buying a BMW or an iPhone — and there are, of course. The education and the products can yield many kinds of rewards. But Dr. Miller says that much of the pleasure we derive from products stems from the unconscious instinct that they will either enhance or signal our fitness by demonstrating intelligence or some of the Big Five personality traits: openness, conscientiousness, agreeableness, stability and extraversion.

In a series of experiments [pdf], Dr. Miller and other researchers found that people were more likely to expend money and effort on products and activities if they were first primed with photographs of the opposite sex or stories about dating.

After this priming, men were more willing to splurge on designer sunglasses, expensive watches and European vacations. Women became more willing to do volunteer work and perform other acts of conspicuous charity — a signal of high conscientiousness and agreeableness, like demonstrating your concern for third world farmers by spending extra for Starbucks’s “fair trade” coffee.

Unfortunately, the article then goes on to say that we may do these things because we try and send signals to others but that people don’t notice because who can really remember whether the guy we met the other day was wearing a designer shirt or not?

The reason this misses the point is that the influence can be both dramatic and entirely conscious as nicely demonstrated by a recent study on doctors that was also reported in the NYT and, ironically, seems to have done unnoticed.

Researchers asked medical students about their attitudes to two blockbuster anticholesterol drugs: Lipitor and it’s competitor, Zocor.

The students were tested in two groups, but in one the researchers incidentally used Lipitor branded pens, clipboards and the like – the typical sort of banal junk that drug companies leave scattered around a typical doctor’s office.

The researchers then tested unconscious associations using the IAT and found that students in the condition where researchers used the branded promotional material had much stronger positive associations with Lipitor.

Interestingly, the students reported no explicit preference for the drug, suggesting that the effect of the branding slipped in under the radar of consciousness. The message got through despite it being not being held as a conscious memory.

Social psychology has taught us that we are more much complex than we can understand at any one moment, but many of those messages still get through.

Link to NYT piece on consumer signalling.
Link to NYT piece on small gifts influencing doctors.
Link to full-text of study.

Dr Petra has alerted me to an excellent article in The Boston Globe about a new campaign to get the ‘doctor out of the bedroom’ and de-medicalise sex and sexual problems.

The piece is particularly focused on how sex is being increasingly portrayed in terms of physiology, bodily mechanics and disorders while ignoring the role of psychology and relationships.

This is particularly pertinent at the moment, owing to millions being pumped into the so-far fruitless search for a ‘female Viagra’ intended to increase sexual desire in women.

Eager to replicate the outsized profits that erectile dysfunction drugs have brought, several pharmaceutical firms are in hot pursuit of a women’s version. Because female sexual desire is far less straightforward than men’s, success has been thus far elusive, but there are several candidates in the pipeline. Whether any of them will work well enough – and without significant adverse health effects – to gain FDA approval remains to be seen. (In Europe, a testosterone patch to boost sex drive in post-menopausal women has been approved, but its efficacy is debated.)

For critics, the problem is not whether a women’s Viagra will work, but what happens if it does. They argue that the very concept of “female sexual dysfunction,” the condition that such drugs would be targeting, is not an actual medical condition so much as a creation of the pharmaceutical industry. While surveys show that 20 to 40 percent of women describe themselves as having a lack of interest in sex (the higher figures tend to come from studies funded by pharmaceutical companies), only about a quarter of those women describe that as a problem. It’s hard to call something a disorder or a dysfunction, some sex researchers argue, if the people who experience it don’t tend to see it that way.

The piece looks at a group of sex researchers and clinicians who are arguing for a ‘New View’ that doesn’t think of all sexual difficulties as medical disorders and focuses upon the important role of psychology in sexual arousal, motivation and exploration.

As Petra notes, it’s unusual to see a mainstream article straying from the now well-worn path so get it while it’s, er, hot.

Link to Boston Globe article ‘The New Romantics’.
Link to Dr Petra on the piece.

I’ve just found Steven Okazaki’s 1999 documentary Black Tar Heroin: The Dark End of the Street on YouTube that follows the chaotic lives of heroin addicts in Southern California.

It’s not polemic and tries as much as possible to simply document, but it’s a dark journey into the void with many of the people involved in the 1990s heroin scene.

It’s not easy to watch, but it is a rare insight into the lives of people who are often hidden in plain sight.

Link to Part 1 (links to other parts on right).

If you’re all aflutter over the recent news reports that ’emotionally intelligent women have more orgasms’ you may be interested to know that these sexual adventures have been exaggerated in the re-telling.

I really recommend Petra Boyton’s analysis of the study which picks up on what was actually done and where its drawbacks were. As it turns out it was a postal survey of over 2,000 female twins, with a fairly low response rate and not particularly well-pitched questions on sexual experiences.

It also included an emotional intelligence measure, and found a small but statistically reliable link between ‘EQ’ and orgasm frequency during masturbation and sex.

And this is where it gets a bit over-the-top. The authors suggest, rather cautiously in the research article and, rather more strongly in the press reports, that higher emotional intelligence may help women communicate what they want in the bedroom and hence lead to more orgasms.

I shall now present the correlations between EQ and orgasm frequency as reported in the study:

EQ and frequency of orgasm during intercourse 0.13
EQ and frequency of orgasm during masturbation 0.23

If you’re familiar with how to read correlations, you’ll notice that the link is very small.

The correlation was done using a Spearman correlation that ranks everyone by EQ and then ranks everyone by orgasm frequency, and then sees how the rankings match.

A result of 1 mean the rankings are identical, a result of -1 means that one ranking is in exactly the opposite order to the other, and a result of 0 means there is no link at all between the two rankings. So in this case, the relationship is very minor.

And here’s a neat trick you can do with the results of correlations. If you square them, you get the amount of variability or change in one value accounted for by change in the other as a percentage.

This means EQ accounts for 1.7% of self-estimated intercourse orgasm frequency and 5.3% of self-estimated masturbation orgasm frequency.

It’s also worth noting that the relationship is stronger for masturbation than orgasm during intercourse, which kinda pours cold water on the ‘asking for what you want in bed’ angle.

Interesting, these results are statistically reliable, and the small but reliable effect was confirmed by a regression analysis, meaning that they are reasonably unlikely to have occurred by chance.

As Petra notes, it’s an interesting preliminary study that merits further investigation, but even if we could be completely confident in the methods, the effect is nothing to shout about.

Link to Dr Petra on ‘Do high EQ women have better sex?’
Link to study.
Link to DOI entry for same.

It is not often that articles on psychology studies are described as beautiful, but a piece in The Atlantic on the Harvard Study of Adult Development is quite sublime.

The project has followed two groups of men for almost seventy years, tracking physical and emotional health, opinions and attitudes, successes and failures, all in the hope of understanding what makes us happy.

It weaves the staccato train of numerical data with reflections and insights from the men themselves to attempt the impossible – it hopes to record lives.

From their brash early adulthood to their deaths or dotage the stories are brief but profound, sometimes tragic, sometimes joyful, sometimes mundane.

The study itself has generated some remarkable findings, such as the massive impact of relationships, the fading long-term effects of childhood experiences, or the role of defences in managing emotional well-being, but the piece is as much about the life of the project as its conclusions.

It serves as a meditation on the tension between meaning and measurement when trying to understand the individual, and on the potentially futile attempt to extrapolate an experience of a generation to a world of other times, people and places.

But the article also about psychiatrist George Valliant, who has been coordinating the study for over 40 years, and whose life is intricately woven into the project.

The ending of the article is both surprising and poignant, because it questions what we can truly learn from the lives of others.

Link to Atlantic article ‘What Makes Us Happy?’

There’s more to alcohol than getting pissed but you’d never know it from the papers. In a period of public hand wringing over ‘binge drinking culture’, our understanding of the ‘culture bit’ usually merits no more than an admission that people do it in groups and this is often implicit in the work of psychologists.

In a recent Psychological Bulletin review on the determinants of binge drinking, psychologists Kelly Courtney and John Polich devote only a few sparse paragraphs to the social issues in an otherwise impressive review, despite the fact that drinking alcohol is one of the most socially meaningful and richly symbolic activities in our culture.

In the UK at least, the social meaning of booze is often hidden behind the ordinariness of day-to-day consumption. If you can’t quite see past the barrier of banality, try buying one of your male colleagues a Babycham in public view and the symbolism of alcohol will quickly be made apparent.

But it is not just the meaning of drinks which determine the role alcohol plays in our lives, it is the meaning of drinking as well. Sociologists have been exploring this territory for years and we would do well to read their maps, because it shows us how culture influences not only our views on drunkenness, but the experience of being intoxicated itself.

In their classic 1969 book Drunken Comportment, MacAndrew and Edgerton compared alcohol use in cultures around the world, finding that what concerns us most today, drunken disorderliness, is not an inevitable result of getting pissed. A striking example was the Papago people of Mexico, who, during their traditional cactus-wine ceremonies, would imbibe so much as to become “falling-down drunk”.

Despite the large scale community boozing, the events were exclusively peaceful, harmonious and good tempered. Later, the availability of whisky brought with it the cultural connotations of European-style drinking, meaning it ‘produced’ an aggressive, anti-social drunkenness, despite it being the same chemical in a different style.

Recent research on binge-drinking in Western youth has indicated that the negative effects, both personally toxic and anti-social, have been reframed as an adventure and bonding experience.

While health campaigns are focusing on risk reduction, research by Sheehan and Ridge with teenage girls in Australia found that any harm encountered along the way tends to be “filtered through a ‘good story,’ brimming with tales of fun, adventure, bonding, sex, gender transgressions, and relationships”.

Puking in the gutter has been turned into Sex and the City. Not the complete story, of course, but we neglect the culture of alcohol at the cost of failing to understand why binge drinking is in fashion.

This is one of the occasional columns I write for The Psychologist and the editor, Jon Sutton, has kindly agreed for them to be posted on Mind Hacks as long as I include the following text:

The Psychologist is sent free to all members of the British Psychological Society (you can join here), or you can subscribe as a non-member by emailing sarsta[at]bps.org.uk.

He’s also said that he might print particularly good or insightful comments in the magazine, after which fame and fine living will surely follow. If he’s interested in publishing your comment, he’ll contact you first to get permission.