Category: Psychology

I’m not, as they say, a betting man; but if I were I’d put down the form book and spend my time studying a new paper by Yoon et al. (2013) published in Psychological Science.

The Korean researchers are fascinated by the question of whether thinking more carefully about a bet can actually make you less likely to win.

In their first test of the idea they looked at 1.9 billion bets placed on baseball and soccer through a Korean company called “Sports ToTo”. They wanted to see how people did when betting just on who won compared with when they tried to predict the exact score.

Obviously getting the final score right is harder than just predicting the outcome; but when you guess the score, you are also predicting the outcome.

What they found was that across all the games, when people made a bet on the score they won 42.2% of the time, but when they just tried to predict the outcome they were right 44.4% of the time.

Not a massive difference admittedly and it could just be a statistical anomaly or something to do with the way people bet through this company. So they then took this finding to the lab to see if they could replicate it under controlled conditions…

The experiments

Participants in three experiments made predictions on the 2010 World Cup, the 2012 European Football Championship and the 2011 Asian Cup. For each event, half the participants tried to predict the score, while the other half just tried to predict the outcome.

This time the superiority of just predicting the outcome rather than the exact score was clearer. On the World Cup performance went up from 41.4% for the exact sore to 46.5% for the outcome; on the European Championship it went up from 47.8% to 53.5% and on the Asian cup it went up from 45.8% to 50.4%.

In other words people predicting just the outcome rather than the score increased their chances of being correct by about 5%.

Think global

What’s going on here? Why do people do better at calling these matches when they just predict the score rather than being more specific?

The researchers think it’s essentially because by trying to be too specific, we trip ourselves up. For example when you try to guess the score of a soccer match, you are more likely to focus on specific factors like the form of the striker, their goalie’s recent divorce settlement or the colour of the manager’s shirt. In doing so you neglect the fact that the match is an away fixture.

When you just try to predict the outcome of the match, though, you’ll tend to take a more global view. This encourages you to concentrate mainly on really important factors.

So, will these results generalise to other decisions outside sporting events? Is it better not to think too specifically about a job candidate’s skill-set or a potential partner’s Toby jug collection?

Who knows? But it’s a nice example of when concentrating too much on specific details gets in the way of effective decision-making. And we’ve all done that.

Image credit: Roger Price

Sometimes psychologists come up with such good names for their findings that I’m powerless to resist. Take this newly minted expression: ‘the temporal Doppler effect’.

This really appeals to both the psychologists in me and my inner physics geek.

Here’s a reminder of the Doppler effect, which I’m sure you’ve experienced even if you haven’t heard of the Austrian physicist Christian Doppler (click here for YouTube video):

(In case you can’t see the video: the Doppler effect is most often experienced when an ambulance with siren blaring travels past you. The pitch of the siren shifts downwards as it whizzes past. The siren’s notes aren’t actually changing in pitch; it’s the effect of the ambulance’s movement on the sound-waves reaching your ear that produces the effect.)

So, what is a temporal Doppler effect and what does this have to do with psychology?

It seems to suggest that as events approach us from the future they feel closer, compared with events in the past, which feel further away as they recede. In other words: one week in the future feels closer in time than one week in the past.

How far away does it feel?

Could that be true? For example, imagine I ask you one week before Valentine’s Day how psychologically distant that feels to you. Then, imagine I ask you the same question one week after Valentine’s Day. Surely they should feel about the same distance?

What the temporal Doppler effect suggests is that Valentine’s Day will feel closer in time one week beforehand than one week after.

Sounds mad? Well this is exactly the experiment that Caruso et al. (2013) carried out. And guess what? They got this temporal Doppler effect. On a 1 to 7 scale, where 1 means it feels close in time and 7 means it feels far in time, people rated an upcoming Valentine’s Day an average of 3.9 when it was one week in the future, but an average of 4.8 when it was one week in the past.

They got similar results for comparisons of time-points both one month and one year in the future and the past. This temporal Doppler effect kept showing up: the future seems to feel psychologically closer to people than the past, despite the fact we know it’s exactly the same.

Metaphors of time and space

So why does it happen? Caruso et al. put forward two explanations, one more abstract than the other. I’ll do the abstract one first but feel free to bail out and get on to the concrete one if it gets too much!

The abstract argument goes like this: we don’t directly experience time although we see its effects. Unlike space, which we can clearly see, time is invisible. In contrast, you can reach out and touch objects and feel the space between them.

Because time is abstract we try to understand it psychologically using metaphors. We say that ‘time flows like a river’, ‘time marches on’ or ‘time flies’. These are all spatial ways of thinking about an abstract idea.

The result is that we unconsciously apply the same spatial rules to time. Just like things that are coming towards us sound higher in pitch and appear to us closer in space than things going away, so we intuit that things ahead of us in time are also closer than things in the past.

Convinced?

If not you’ll be interested in a further experiment Caruso et al. carried out where they tried to reverse the temporal Doppler effect with a simple manipulation: they had people walking backwards in virtual reality (VR).

Compared to those walking forwards in VR, those walking backwards showed no tendency towards thinking the future was closer than the past. This helps support the idea that how we think about time is linked to how we think about space and why the temporal Doppler effect occurs.

Future-facing

Now here’s the more concrete explanation. The temporal Doppler effect is also highly adaptive. It’s very useful for our survival and success in life that the future seems closer than the past. What happens tomorrow we can plan for, what happened yesterday is just a memory.

Yes, it’s important to understand where you’ve come from, but without a plan, you can’t know where you’re going. The temporal Doppler effect is one example of how we’re future-oriented creatures; always scheming for, worrying about, plotting and simulating the future. So that hopefully, when we get there, we’ve got some kind of plan.

Image credit: Myxi

No matter what it is—a pair of jeans, a car or even a house—in that moment when an object becomes your property, it undergoes a transformation.

Because you chose it and you associate it with yourself, its value is immediately increased (Morewedge et al., 2009). If someone offers to buy it from you, the chances are you want to charge much more than they are prepared to pay.

That is a cognitive bias called ‘the endowment effect’.

It’s the reason that some people have lofts, garages and storage spaces full of junk with which they cannot bear to be parted. Once you own something, you tend to set its financial value way higher than other people do.

When tested experimentally the endowment effect can be surprisingly strong. One study found that owners of tickets for a basketball match overvalued them by a factor of 14 (Carmon & Ariely, 2000). In other words people wanted 14 times more than others were prepared to pay. However, this is a particularly high one and the ratio will vary depending on what it is.

The endowment effect is particularly strong for things that are very personal and easy to associate with the self, like a piece of jewellery from your partner. Similarly we also overvalue things we’ve had for a long time.

Sometimes, of course, the sentimental value of things is justified; but more often than not people hold on to old possessions for no good reason. So if you’re surrounded by rubbish, ask yourself: do I really need all this, or is it the endowment effect?

After all, it’s just stuff.

Image credit: Kevin Utting

If you were to undergo brain surgery, would you care if the surgeon regularly carried out mental practice of the operation? Or, would you only be interested in the physical practice?

(By mental practice I don’t mean getting ‘psyched up’ or making plans or getting in the right frame of mind; I mean mentally running through the physical movements required for the operation.)

Quite naturally you’d probably be much more interested in how often the surgeon had carried out the operation in real life, rather than in his imagination.

But should you be? What is the value of mental practice, not just in surgery, but in life in general? How much benefit is there to mental rehearsal and do we undervalue the power of mental practice?

Rehearsal

For neurosurgery specifically there is no study looking at what difference mental practice can make (although some surgeons do carry out this sort of rehearsal). But we do know that for basic surgical techniques, mental practice can benefit performance.

One study by Sanders et al. (2008) was carried out on medical students. On top of their usual training—which included physical practice—half were trained in mental imagery techniques, while the other half studied their textbooks.

When the students carried out live surgery, those who’d used mental imagery performed better, on average, than those assigned the book learning.

Another study looking at laparoscopic surgery has also shown benefits for mental practice for novice surgeons (Arora et al., 2011).

Away from the operating theatre, the main way we’re used to hearing about mental rehearsal is in sports. Whether it’s an amateur tennis player or Roger Federer, sports-people often talk about how mental rehearsal improves their performance.

My favourite example is the British Formula 1 driver, Jenson Button. In practice he sits on an inflatable gym ball, with a steering wheel in his hands, shuts his eyes, and drives a lap of the circuit, all the while tapping out the gear changes. He does this in close to real time so that when he opens his eyes he’s not far off his actual lap time.

Powerful pinkies

The reason that sports-people, surgeons and many others are interested in the benefits of mental practice is that they can be so dramatic, plus they are effectively free.

Here’s a great example from a simple study in which some participants trained up a muscle in their little fingers using just the power of mental practice (Ranganathan et al., 2004). In the study participants were split into four groups:

1. These people performed ‘mental contractions’ of their little finger. In other words, they imagined exercising their pinkies.
2. Same as (1), but they performed mental contractions on their elbows, not their little fingers.
3. Did no training at all.
4. Carried out physical training on their little finger.

They all practised (or not) in the various different ways for four weeks. Afterwards, the muscle strength in their fingers and elbows was tested. Unsurprisingly those who’d done nothing hadn’t improved, while those who’d trained physically improved their muscle strength by an average of 53%.

The two mental practice groups couldn’t beat physical training, but they still did surprisingly well. Those imagining flexing their elbow increased their strength by 13.5% and those imagining flexing their little finger increased their strength by 35%. That’s surprisingly close to the 53% from physical training; I bet you wouldn’t have expected it to be that close.

Thinking practice

This is just strength training, but as we’ve seen there’s evidence that mental rehearsal of skills also produces benefits. Examples include mentally practising a music instrument, during rehabilitation from brain injuries and so on; the studies are starting to mount up.

Indeed some of these have shown that mental practice seems to work best for tasks that involve cognitive elements, in other words that aren’t just about physical actions (Driskell et al., 1994).

So it’s about more than mentally rehearsing your cross-court forehand. Rehearsal could also be useful for a job interview or important meeting; not just in what you’ll say but how you’ll talk, carry yourself and interact with others. Mental rehearsal could also be useful in how you deal with your children, or make a difficult phone call or how you’ll accomplish the most challenging parts of your job.

Notice the type of mental imagery I’m talking about here. It’s not so much about visualising ultimate success, with all its attendant pitfalls, but about visualising the process. What works is thinking through the steps that are involved and, with motor skills, the exact actions that you will perform.

To be effective, though, mental practice has to be like real practice: it should be systematic and as close to reality as you can make it. Just daydreaming won’t work. So if you make a mistake, you should work out why and mentally correct it. You should also make the practice as vivid as possible by tuning in to the sensory experience: what you can see, hear, feel and even smell, whatever is important.

If it can work for surgeons, elite athletes and little-finger-muscle-builders, then it can work for all of us.

Image credit: Adam Rhoades

With the rise of credit cards, PayPal and other ways of transferring cash electronically, real cash-money is in decline. Like CDs and books before it, the folding stuff looks certain to be another victim of technological advances.

But not just yet.

We still love our cash and it turns out that money’s physical manifestation has all sorts of interesting psychological effects on us.

For example, people tend to spend more when they have larger denomination notes, even if the amount is the same. In other words they spend more when using one $20 bill than if they have four $5 bills.

We are also emotionally attached to our currency. Americans continue to resist the introduction of a dollar coin, preferring the dollar bill, and British people like their pound over the euro.

Dirty money

So what about the effects of dirty money? I don’t mean money that’s the result of criminal activities; I mean, literally, money that is soiled.

As bills circulate, they pick up all sorts of muck, including bacteria and traces of illegal drugs. In fact, in the UK 80% of banknotes contain traces of illicit substances, usually cocaine—surprisingly it’s not an urban myth. Similar rates have been found in the US and elsewhere around the world.

Naturally dirty bills are periodically replaced. The average $1 bill in the US is in circulation for about 18 months while for the less-used $100 bill it’s about nine years.

This means that when you go to the cash machine, sometimes you get a bunch of crisp, new notes and sometimes it’s a little wedge of crinkled up scraps that look like they’ve been around the block more than a few times.

Surely everyone prefers to get the crisp new notes from the machine. But does it make any difference to how we spend it whether money looks new and crisp or old and soiled?

Out with the old

In a new study by Muro and Noseworthy (2012) they found that it does. Across a series of experiments, when people were given old, worn bills they usually spent more than when given crisp new ones.

For example, participants given a crisp $20 bill spent an average of $3.68 but those given the old one spent an average of $8.35.

The same was true when participants were offered a chance to gamble. A new bill proved a way more tempting prize than an old soiled one, with 80% of participants willing to gamble away an old one to get a new one, compared with only 23% willing to gamble a new one to get an old one. It seems crazy because the amount of money on offer was exactly the same.

So it seems we generally prefer to get rid of old notes and keep the new ones. But this isn’t always true; sometimes the dirty money stays in our pockets.

All of the transactions in the previous study were made by people on their own. What happens when there are others around?

The researchers found that in public our preferences reverse. When we think other people are watching us, we are more likely to spend the crisp new notes, rather than the old crinkled ones, if we have a choice.

This study demonstrates two interesting things. Firstly, we find soiled bills disgusting and want to get rid of them. Secondly, when other people are watching we prefer to show off our crisp, new bills, despite the fact it means we have to keep the dirty bills instead.

Once again it shows the emotional attachment we have towards inanimate objects that, on the face of it, seem interchangeable. People in this study felt measurably more pride towards their crisp bills than the dirty ones.

It’s the same reason some people still love vinyl and the traditional dead-tree-type-book: the physical form that things take has a strong effect on us; it’s not just about the information that’s contained within.

Image credit: Adrian Clark (Detail from a £20 note)

Most people hate public speaking. The very idea starts the palms sweating and the stomach churning.

It makes sense: with everyone’s eyes on you, the potential for embarrassment is huge. Crowds, we are told, can sense our nerves.

Or can they? We may feel terribly nervous here on the inside, but what can other people read from our facial expressions, speech patterns and general demeanour?

When this is tested experimentally we find an interesting thing.

In one study in which people gave extemporaneous speeches, participants were asked to rate their own nervousness (Savitsky & Gilovich, 2003). This was then compared with audience ratings.

The results showed that people tended to over-estimate just how nervous they appeared to others. And this is a consistent finding. We think others can read more from our expressions than they really can.

In other studies people have been tested trying to hide the lies they are telling, as well as their disgust at a foul-tasting drink and even their concern at a staged emergency. In every case people think their emotions are more obvious to others than they actually are (Gilovich & Savitsky, 1999).

Sometimes simply knowing this can help. In a follow-up to the public speaking study, some participants were told that they didn’t look as nervous as they felt. These people went on to deliver better speeches as their nerves didn’t get to them so badly.

Tap out a song

Psychologists call this the ‘illusion of transparency’. It’s the idea that we feel our emotions are transparent to others when in fact they are not, or at least not as much as we think.

You can test this illusion by tapping out the rhythm to a song and getting a friend to try and guess what it is.

When this study was carried out, people guessed that those listening would get it about 50% of the time (Newton, 1990; PhD dissertation). In fact it’s incredibly hard to guess. Listeners in this study got it right less than 3% of the time.

This was true even though the songs were incredibly well-known—in this case it was “Happy Birthday To You” and “The Star-Spangled Banner”.

When you do this with a friend, you find yourself staring in amazement at them because it seems so obvious. You can hear the chords thundering away in your head as you tap, but you forget that they can’t.

Just the same is true of written communication. When you write an email it seems perfectly obvious to you what you meant but language is open to interpretation and sometimes the meaning gets twisted or lost in the journey from one mind to the next.

None of this means, of course, that our thoughts and feelings are totally impenetrable to others. Nevertheless the illusion of transparency is worth bearing in mind as it affects so much of our everyday life and helps explain arguments that begin with: “But I thought it was obvious how I felt…”

Image credit: KnockOut_Photographs

Have you got enough time for everything you want to do? If this survey is correct then about half of us are ‘time-poor’, as the expression goes, or worse, are experiencing a ‘time famine’.

So, what if I said there was a solution to feeling continuously short of time, and it involved giving your free-time away to others?

No, you might say, quite rightly, that doesn’t make sense. If I give away my free-time to others then I will have less time for myself and so I will feel even more rushed. It doesn’t add up.

This is a perfectly logical response, except that it doesn’t take into account the weird way in which the mind works.

For the mind, time is not always perceived in exactly the same way. I have written an article on this (10 Ways the Mind Warps Time) but suffice to say here that many things like our emotions and attention affect our perception of how much time has passed. To repeat Einstein’s quote:

“Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. That’s relativity.”

No matter how much free-time we actually have, what really matters is our personal perception. So how can we change our perception of how much time we have?

Giving time gives you time

That’s what was tested in a new study which gave people some time and had them either (Mogilner et al., 2012):

• spend it on themselves,
• waste it, or,
• spend it on others, whether friends or strangers.

What they found was that people who spent the time on others felt afterwards that they had more time in both the present and the future, compared with those who spent it on themselves or wasted it.

This seems odd and the opposite of how people intuitively deal with being short of time. A regular response to being rushed is to hoard spare time for ourselves. So why does giving it away help?

Here’s how the study’s authors answer this question:

“…spending time on others makes people feel like they have done a lot with their time – and the more they feel they have done with their time, the more time they will feel they have.”

It seems that time well spent expands in our mind, giving us the illusion of being time-rich. When we spend our time well, i.e. by giving it away, it makes us feel more effective and capable.

Of course there is an upper limit to how much giving time will make you feel you have more time yourself. Some people, like full-time caregivers, already give so much of their time away that giving more is detrimental.

But for the majority of us, when making decisions about how to spend our spare time, defaulting to ‘me-time’ may not be the best answer, either for others or for ourselves.

Image credit: themysteryman

After a long hard day’s work it feels good to flop down and enjoy your favourite TV show.

Is that so wrong? Or should we be doing something more challenging or creative with our time? Perhaps taking a spin class or learning the Peruvian nose-flute?

A new study, however, suggests that the ‘idiot box’ may have its psychological uses after all (Derrick, 2012).

Sense of belonging

The problem with stressful days is that they sap our self-control. This is a finite resource which easily runs down at the end of the day.

While you might start out with good intentions for what you’ll do in the evening, these are all shot once you’re worn out.

One way that we can replenish our self-control is to escape into a familiar social world. People we know well provide a sense of belonging, can give us energy, boost our mood and be self-affirming.

Since research has shown that people experience the characters in TV shows as real people, perhaps they can also provide this sense of belonging.

Where you know everybody’s name

When Jaye Derrick from the University at Buffalo tested this in an experiment, she found that after using up their self-control people did automatically seek out a familiar fictional world, such as those found on TV.

Not only that but this immersion in a fictional world also had positive effects. People did better at a difficult puzzle that required self-control once they’d watched a favourite TV program or read a favourite book.

A second study suggested it wasn’t just about watching any old TV show. It made a difference that the fictional world was a familiar one, such as you might enjoy in a well-established sitcom or drama series.

None of this is to say you should drop your real friends and rely totally on Frasier Crane, Jerry Seinfeld or Homer Simpson for your social interactions. But this research does suggest that, at least in the short-term, watching a familiar TV programme can have a restorative effect on self-control.

Image credit: Luca Rossato

Have you ever wondered why society hardly ever changes? I think most of us have.

One answer is that humans have a mental bias towards maintaining the status quo. People think like this all the time. They tend to go with what they know rather than a new, unknown option.

People feel safer with the established order in the face of potential change. That’s partly why people buy the same things they bought before, return to the same restaurants and keep espousing the same opinions.

This has been called the ‘system justification bias’ and it has some paradoxical effects (research is described in Jost et al., 2004):

• Poor people don’t strongly support the sorts of political policies that would make them better off. Surveys find that low-income groups are hardly more likely than high-income groups to want tax changes that mean they will get more money. Generally people’s politics doesn’t line up with their position in society.
• Oddly, the more disadvantaged people are, the more they are likely to support a system that is doing them no favours. This is because of cognitive dissonance. In one US example of this low-income Latinos are more likely to trust government officials than high-income Latinos.
• Most disturbing of all: the more unequal the society, the more people try to rationalise the system. For example in countries in which men hold more sexist values, women are more likely to support the system.

People seem to rationalise the inequality in society, e.g. poor people are poor because they don’t work hard enough and rich people are rich because they deserve it.

Incredibly, this means that some (but not all) turkeys will keep on voting for Christmas.

Image credit: kris krug