Category: Psychology

Until now people have been gathering around tables and whiteboards without properly understanding what is going on in ‘The Meeting’.

Perhaps that’s why so many of them feel like a complete waste of time. As ‘The Meeting’ stretches out, participants start to feel lost, adrift, confused and unsure of the point.

But now, thanks to an analysis of 95 meetings by researchers at MIT, we understand this strange beast a little better (Kim & Rudin, 2013).

‘The Meeting’, it seems, sends out little clues about what stage it’s at through the language of those at ‘The Meeting’.

Although it sounds incredible, by close textual analysis of the words being used, you can tell when a decision is being made.

Usually, of course, decisions are avoided at all costs in ‘The Meeting’ in case anyone has to actually do anything as a result of ‘The Meeting’.

But if you listen carefully enough, you can hear the almost imperceptible signal that agreement is being reached. That signal, according to the MIT researchers, is when people start asking each other for specific information:

“As it turns out, the important parts of the meeting are characterized mostly by information and information request dialogue acts, and very few offers, rejections, or acceptances. We hypothesize that at the important parts of the meeting, when the decisions have been narrowed down and few choices remain, the meeting participants would like to ensure that they have all the relevant information necessary to make the decision, and that the outcome will fit within all of their constraints.”

The question is, then, how can you persuade other people to reach one of these mythical ‘decisions’ which we hear so much about, yet which are so elusive in ‘The Meeting’?

The researchers argue that top of the potential list comes the word ‘yeah’. Apparently when people start their utterances with ‘yeah’, this is a particularly good signal that ‘The Meeting’ is creeping ever-so-slowly towards this so-called ‘decision’.

OK, it’s a miracle and ‘the meeting’ has made its ‘decision’, now, how long ’till I can get out of here? Not so fast, now we’ve got the wrap-up.

The MIT researchers found that how long the wrap-up lasts depends on how long it’s taken to reach a decision. Once ‘The Meeting’ was over 14 minutes, the longer it was, the shorter the wrap-up. After the decision was made, people in ‘The Meeting’, if it was 14 minutes long, took 18 further minutes to wrap-up.

But, if ‘The Meeting’ went to 35 minutes, the wrap-up normally only lasted about 10 minutes.

Over to you…

Why not conduct your own experiments in meeting science? All you need is a boring meeting to go to and a keen eye for details:

• How long until people start asking each other for detailed information? (Here comes the decision.)
• How long until people keep starting their sentences with ‘yeah’? (This is it, we’re making a decision now.)
• How long does the wrap-up take as a proportion of total meeting length? (And then bliss, sweet freedom, ‘the meeting’ is over.)

Please send your results to MIT, not me.

Image credit: Kevin Dooley

Although our bodies might still be (sort of) working as we approach 100-years-old,  many wonder whether their minds will be sharp enough to appreciate life.

A new Danish study has looked at this by comparing the brainpower of two groups of nonagenarians (Christensen et al., 2013):

• The first group were born in 1905 and assessed at 93-years-old.
• The second group were born in 1915 and assessed at 95-years-old.

To see how dramatically lifespan is increasing, the chances of people in this study reaching 90 increased by almost 30% in just those ten years between 1905 and 1915.

But the main question is: did people born 10 years later perform any differently on standardised cognitive tests?

Indeed they did:

“…the 1915 cohort performed significantly better than did the 1905 cohort both in cognitive functioning and activities of daily living.”

So, being born just 10 years later meant that, by the time they got to 95, their minds were sharper. This improvement in scores of cognitive functioning is known as ‘the Flynn effect’ and has been demonstrated on young and middle-aged people repeatedly. The reasons for it are hotly debated:

“Improvements in education are likely to be a major underlying factor for the Flynn effect at younger ages, but even after adjusting for the increase in education between the 1905 and 1915 cohorts, the 1915 cohort still performed better in the cognitive measures, which suggests that changes in other factors such as nutrition, burden of infectious disease, work environment, intellectual stimulation, and general living conditions also play an important part in the improvement of cognitive functioning.”

Whatever the explanation, the results of this study suggest that as we approach old age, on average, we should arrive in better shape mentally than any previous generation.

Image credit: Patrick

In a survey of 30 professionals, here are the top 5 career regrets:

1. I wish I’d quit to pursue my passion sooner

Around one-third of employees are dissatisfied with their jobs (here are 10 keys to job satisfaction). Not everyone wants to quit the day job, but amongst those people who have quit to follow their passion, almost all wish they had done it earlier.

Most people stick to the safe job in the hope of relatively small increases in their pay and conditions and are put off change by fears about insecurity.

2. I wish I’d worked harder at college

Most people value a higher education and those that benefited from it wished they’d appreciated it more at the time. People thought they’d been in too much of a hurry to get through college and did not fully understand how good the experience was at the time.

They also regretted not using their education more in their chosen careers.

3. I wish I hadn’t focused so much on the money

People who decided on high-paying but dissatisfying careers regretted their decision. Money doesn’t really motivate, especially if you can earn enough in a variety of different lines of work.

Many people wanted to leave their high-paying jobs but had built up too many financial commitments and were unsure if they’d be suited to other jobs.

4. I wish I’d followed my hunches

Looking back on their careers, people perceived vital opportunities they didn’t take. Sometimes these opportunities looked risky but it turned out that they would have created big leaps forward in their careers.

These turning points were amongst the things that people regretted the most.

5. I wish I’d started my own business

People wanted more control over their lives and were fed up with being beholden to their managers. Naturally, then, they wanted to start their own business.

While many people think about starting their own business, only a fraction (perhaps 15%) think they have what it takes. People regretted not having the guts to do it.

Regrets shape the future

It’s clear that people’s regrets shaped how they thought about their careers in the past. But regret can also shape how we think about the future.

We actually anticipate regretting certain decisions, and this anticipated regret can paralyse decision-making. But research has shown that the regret we will actually experience isn’t as bad as we anticipate:

“Anticipated regret is such a powerful emotion that it can cause us to avoid risk, lower our expectations, steer us towards the familiar and away from new, interesting experiences. We anticipate more regret when we go against the grain, when we make positive decisions ourselves, rather than letting the chips fall as they may. And all for what? So that we can avoid something that won’t be that bad anyway and might not happen at all?” (from: The Power of Regret to Shape Our Future)

Image credit: Sodanie Chea

Although women can only conceive during a relatively short window during their monthly cycle…

“…scientists have not found any clearly observable, objective behavioral display associated with ovulation in humans.” (Beall & Tracy, 2013)

From an evolutionary point of view it’s mysterious, given the continuance of the species and so on. For one thing studies have not consistently found that women dress more sexily when they are more fertile.

But according to a new study, apparently women do provide a clue about their fertility:

“Across two samples (N = 124), women at high conception risk were more than 3 times more likely to wear a red or pink shirt than were women at low conception risk, and 77% of women who wore red or pink were found to be at high, rather than low, risk.” (Beall & Tracy, 2013)

Perhaps, whether consciously or unconsciously women use it as a more subtle signal than dressing more sexily, which in itself tends to be associated with social stigma. And red works to attract men:

“Individuals across cultures associate red with love and passion (Aslam, 2006). Studies using a range of methods and populations have demonstrated that women’s use of red is linked to sex and romance (e.g., Elliot & Pazda, 2012; Greenfield, 2005) and that men find women wearing or surrounded by red particularly attractive and sexually desirable (Elliot & Niesta, 2008).”

Although when they followed up this finding in another study, the researchers found the red signal for fertility was strongest in the winter compared with the summer. They guessed that this is because women can use other signals in the summer when less clothing needs to be worn.

Image credit: Mait Juriado

Nowadays it’s hardly news that self-control is vital to success in many areas of life.

The studies bear this out with boring monotony in education, in health, in terms of how much money you earn, in personal relationships and even mental health.

Consciously or otherwise, people with low self-control know it’s a disadvantage to be weak-willed. To make up for it they seek out others who do possess this magical property, both socially and as dating partners (Shea et al., 2013).

But, according to studies published in the last six months, a more subtle picture is emerging of the advantages and disadvantages of having, or lacking, self-control. These provide new answers to what self-control can do for you and what it can’t.

1. Can it make you happier?

One stereotype of people with high self-control is that they are boring killjoys. After all, how much fun can you have if you’re so in control all the time?

But, according to a new study by Hofmann et al., (2013), this stereotype is now being attacked. Their research showed that people with high self-control are happier because it helps them deal better with goal conflict.

Instead of agonising over whether to indulge in fattening foods, extra-marital affairs or cheap reality TV, people with high self-control find it easier to make the right choice. This is part of the reason they are happier. That and the fact they got better grades at school, earn more money, have better physical and mental health and so on.

2. Can it stop you lying?

Have you ever used a drug called ‘clorovisen’, also known as ‘zens’? And how many times have you used the drug in the last month?

That’s the question Meldrum et al. (2013) put to a group of 1,600 adolescents at a school in the US. Of these, 40 students admitted they had used the drug.

The weird thing is that the drug doesn’t exist. The researchers had made it up to see if anyone would admit to using a totally fictitious drug.

Apparently some people just can’t help lying and it’s those who have low self-control that succumb to the temptation more easily, even if, as in this situation, there was absolutely nothing to gain from it. It was just lying for the sake of lying.

3. Can it make you willing to sacrifice for others?

The benefits of self-control have become so well-known that it’s easy to overlook the disadvantages of iron self-control, because there are a few.

One comes out in neat research by Righetti et al., (2013) who found that in close personal relationships it was the people who had low self-control who were more willing to make sacrifices for their partner.

This is because sometimes that first instinctual reaction is to sacrifice your own interests to someone else. This happens before boring old self-interest kicks in.

But those lovely people with low self-control just can’t help themselves. Before they know what they’ve done, they’ve done something nice.

4. Can it make you fairer?

Another advantage of people currently low in self-control emerged in a study by Halali et al. (2013): they are fairer. Or at least they acted more fairly in an economic game played in the lab called ‘the ultimatum game’.

The findings took the authors by surprise. To explain them they think that those low in self-control acted more fairly because of fear of having less fair offers rejected.

Perhaps, but that’s a rather weaselly explanation. Maybe it was like the last study: the first instinctual reaction is to act fairly and this is only tempered by later, more selfish thoughts.

Whatever the explanation, it seems in some circumstances people with low self-control act more fairly.

5. Can it help you quit smoking?

Sure, self-control is handy when you’re trying to give up smoking, or any other long-standing bad habit. But how can you boost your self-control when it’s been depleted by a long, stressful day?

One way of fighting back against low self-control is to use abstract thinking. When we are thinking abstractly we are more connected to our overall goals.

This was recently tested for people who were trying to quit smoking (Chiou et al., 2013). Participants who concentrated on why they were quitting smoking managed to smoke fewer cigarettes. This was because it boosted their depleted self-control.

(Find out more about self-control and abstract reasoning.)

6. Can it improve your mental focus?

One of the major benefits of self-control is it enhances mental focus and the ability to ignore anxious thoughts.

Just this process was seen in a study by Bertrams et al. (2013) who had participants trying to do maths in their heads while under pressure. Those with low self-control in the moment were more distracted by negative thoughts and performed worse in the task.

Much the same was true in another study on dart tossing (McEwan et al., 2013). Here participants whose self-control was depleted were less accurate and less consistent at throwing darts.

7. Can it stop you snooping on your partner?

Have you ever read your partner’s email or text messages, or searched their pockets or been too inquisitive about where they were last night? It’s pretty common, with one survey suggesting two-thirds of young adults have invaded their partner’s privacy at some point.

Relationships without trust are hard. But perhaps it’s about more than just trust, it’s also about self-control. Maybe some people trust their partner, but can’t restrain themselves from a little snooping.

Brand new research by Buyukcan-Tetik et al., (2013) found that, amongst married couples, snooping behaviours were only lower when a person both trusted their partner and was high in self-control.

So it seems that snooping on your partner doesn’t necessarily mean you don’t trust them, it might be that you can’t resist (even though you don’t expect to find anything).

8. Can it be replenished with sugar?

Perhaps you’ve heard of the studies which show that people’s self-control is replenished by eating something, especially something sugary? The idea being if you’re feeling low on self-control, a glass of orange juice will do the trick.

But the idea that there is some physiological connection has now been questioned, with some believing that really it’s all about what you believe.

There’s evidence for this in a new study by Hagger & Chatzsiarantis (2013) who used a glucose mouth rinse to try and boost the self-control of those who were feeling mentally weak. It worked. By contrast they found that using an artificially sweetened placebo did not work to boost weakened self-control.

So maybe it’s not really the sugar that replenishes self-control, it’s the idea of sugar. In other words self-control is much less about what’s in your stomach than was previously thought.

9. Can it make leaders unethical?

Leaders are often under a lot of pressure to perform. This tends to sap their willpower meaning that under some circumstances it’s hard to make the right decisions.

For those low in moral convictions, perhaps this makes them more likely to make unethical decisions.

Joosten et al. (2013) found that when leaders who had high moral standards were under pressure, they still generally did the right thing. But, for those leader whose morals were questionable, low self-control made it much more likely they would slip over the line into unethical behaviours.

So, low self-control can make leaders unethical if they’ve got low moral standards.

10. Can it make you easier to hypnotise?

You might imagine—I certainly did—that being hypnotised is all about giving up your self-control to someone else. That suggests it would be easier to hypnotise someone who has low self-control.

That’s the theory Ludwig et al. (2013) had when they hypnotised 154 participants and also measured their self-control.

Contrary to their expectations—and mine—they found that having higher self-control made people easier to hypnotise.

The explanation they put forward is that people high in self-control try harder to ‘do well’ when they are hypnotised. People lower in self-control, however, get distracted and don’t pay so much attention to the hypnotic induction so are less hypnotisable.

Image credit: Bellah

Five things we didn’t know last week from the world of psychology:

Meeting online = (slightly) longer marriages

Did you know that one-third of people who get married in the US originally met online? And it seems these marriages are slightly less likely to fail. In this sample of almost 20,000 people in the US:

“…marriages that began on-line, when compared with those that began through traditional off-line venues, were slightly less likely to result in a marital break-up (separation or divorce) and were associated with slightly higher marital satisfaction among those respondents who remained married.”

See: the internet isn’t all bad…

Internet banging

…although, since all human life is online, a lot of stuff is quite bad. Just like everyone else, gang members now do a lot of their ‘business’ online. As a new paper entitled “Internet Banging: New trends in social media, gang violence, masculinity and hip hop” puts it: gang members now carry guns and Twitter accounts.

“Gang members now occupy two spaces: the “streets” and the internet. Data from the National Gang Threat Assessment suggest that gang members uses social medial to conduct drug sales, market their activities, communicate with other members, coordinate gang actions, recruit new members and to brag about acts of violence or make threats.”

Suicides peak in spring

Very counter-intuitive this one because spring is the season of new life and new hope. Except it turns out that suicides peak in spring.

Although it’s an established finding from around the world, going back centuries in some cases, we still don’t really know why. Here are a couple of candidate explanations:

“One traditional candidate [..] is the “broken promise effect” — the sometimes crushing disappointment that spring fails to bring the relief the sufferer has hoped for. In addition, psychiatrists have long observed that for patients with bipolar disorder and depression, spring can create a manic agitation that amplifies the risk of suicide.”

If you need emotional support, try Befrienders Wordwide.

The power of cutlery

There’s too much emphasis on food nowadays and not enough on cutlery. Something as simple as cutlery has quite noticeable effects on taste perceptions:

“…when the weight of the cutlery confirms expectations (e.g. a plastic spoon is light), yoghurt seemed denser and more expensive. Color contrast is also an important factor: white yoghurt when eaten from a white spoon was rated sweeter, more liked, and more expensive than pink-colored yoghurt. Similarly, when offered cheese on a knife, spoon, fork or toothpick, the cheese from a knife tasted saltiest.”

Throw away all those stupid cook-books and instead try experimenting with different coloured plates.

When uncertain we choose narcissistic leaders

As I’ve covered here before, narcissists seem to have a strange attraction for us. For a while at least we find ourselves drawn to their charm, their self-obsession and their entitled behaviour. Just the same effect is seen when people are looking for a leader, especially during times of uncertainty:

“…individuals were shown to be aware of the negative features of narcissistic leaders, such as arrogance and exploitativeness, but chose them as leaders in times of uncertainty, regardless. Thus, a narcissistic leader is perceived as someone who can help reduce individual uncertainty.”

Image credit: dierk schaefer

Here’s a common experience for motorists: you are driving somewhere new and you’re late.

As you drive down unfamiliar roads it seems that everything is conspiring against you: other cars, the road-layout, the traffic lights and even suicidal cyclists. You know it’s only a few more miles, but it seems to be taking for-e-e-e-e-e-ever.

Psychologically there are all sorts of things going on to make the journey seem longer than it really is, but let’s just isolate one of those: the unfamiliarity of the route.

Unknown routes peak our curiosity; they are filled with new names, landscapes and landmarks, all of which attract the interest. The fact that our attention is engaged with all this newness has a subtle effect on how much time we think has passed.

To see why, let’s take the opposite perspective for a moment.

Think about driving a route that’s very familiar. It could be your commute to work, a trip into town or the way home. Whichever it is, you know every twist and turn like the back of your hand. On these sorts of trips it’s easy to zone out from the actual driving and pay little attention to the passing scenery. The consequence is that you perceive that the trip has taken less time than it actually has.

This is the well-travelled road effect: people tend to underestimate the time it takes to travel a familiar route. The corollary is that unfamiliar routes seem to take longer.

The effect is caused by the way we allocate our attention. When we travel down a well-known route, because we don’t have to concentrate much, time seems to flow more quickly. And afterwards, when we come to think back on it, we can’t remember the journey well because we didn’t pay much attention to it. So we assume it was proportionately shorter.

The well-travelled road effect has an odd consequence. When you estimate how long it takes to travel a familiar route, typically you’ll underestimate it. Because of its familiarity the travelling time feels shorter than it really is. This means that when you travel a familiar route, unless you adjust for this effect, you’re more likely to be late.

Routine makes time fly

Actually the well-travelled road effect is a specific example of the fact that we tend to underestimate how long routine activities take. Or, put the other way around: time seems to fly when we’re engaged in automatic, routine tasks.

This means that people often find the last part of their holiday tends to go quicker than the first part (Avni-Babad & Ritov, 2003). That’s because as the holiday goes on, we settle into a routine, so time seems to go quicker towards the end.

The same happens at work, where people report routine activities as taking proportionately less time than those that require more deliberate, conscious attention.

Familiarity, then, with routes travelled, holidays and work activities, tends to speed up our perception of time.

Maybe this all helps explain why the latter parts of our lives–which are more likely to be filled with routine, predictable events–seem to skip by much quicker than our earlier years. As the roads of our lives become well-worn we take less notice of the landscape.

One way to avoid this is to expose yourself to more unexpected, unpredictable experiences…

…but probably not being late and getting stuck in traffic.

Image credit: James Vaughan

Not long ago I reported on a study which found that guitar cases have considerable power over women when they are asked on a date.

The French psychologist who conducted that study, Nicolas Gueguen, has been up to his old tricks again on the Atlantic Coast of France.

In a new experiment, reported in the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior, he had some women lying on a beach, face-down, reading a book (Gueguen, 2013). Sometimes they displayed a 10cm x 5cm temporary tattoo of a butterfly on their lower backs and sometimes not.

Then another research assistant counted how many times a man came up to them and tried to start a conversation.

Without a tattoo they were approached 10% of the time, but with the tattoo this shot up to 24%. Not only that but the tattoo increased the speed with which men approached from 35 minutes up to 24 minutes.

I will pass no judgement on the rights or wrongs of tattoos, the types of men that might have been approaching or anything else, but simply leave this for you to interpret as you will.

Oh wait; one final fact does need mentioning. When men were asked to evaluate the women with or without the tattoo, they judged that the women with tattoos were more likely to say yes to their advances and were probably more promiscuous.

Whether or not either of these assumptions is actually true is a totally different matter. It may well be that men misinterpret tattoos and/or that women don’t realise how men perceive them.

OK, now discuss.

Image credit: Stephanie Wallace

One of the mind’s great talents is to simulate events that haven’t happened. Projected into the future, our imaginative power helps us plan everything from our weekends to the construction of our homes and cities.

But when our minds turn towards the past, our ability to simulate alternative realities seems less useful. What use is it to imagine how things could have been? Do we not learn more from our pasts by analysing the reasons for either success or failure?

A recent study by Kray et al. (2010), though, demonstrates a role for thinking about what might have been that doesn’t invoke that horrible word: regret.

Instead they wonder if thinking about what might have been actually helps us make more sense of our lives.

In the first of four studies they had students think about the sequence of events that had led them to attend that particular college. Half the participants then wrote about all the things that could have gone differently. Finally, everyone completed measures of meaning and significance of events in their lives.

The results showed that those who had considered counter-factuals—how their lives might have been different—gave higher ratings to the significance of their choice to attend that particular college and to how meaningful this was in their lives.

Psychologically, then, thinking about how life could have been different, made people feel that what did actually happen was more special in comparison.

In three mores studies they confirmed this finding and looked at what mechanisms connected counter-factual thinking with meaning-making. Two emerged:

1. Fate. Thinking about what might have been makes us feel that major events in our lives were ‘fated’. This is because counter-factuals make you more aware of all the other things that could have happened.
2. Finding the upside. When people thought about counter-factuals, they noticed more positive aspects to the true chain of events. Many people were even able to find the upside of apparently negative events (things like: “If I hadn’t broken my leg, I wouldn’t have met my husband”).

As Kray et al. conclude:

“Mentally veering off the path of reality, only briefly and imaginatively, forges key connections between what might have been and what was meant to be, thereby injecting our experiences and relationships with deeper meaning and significance.”

Image credit: pedro veneroso