Should you really question everything? Here’s a simple tip for those prone to over-thinking…
Should you really question everything? Here’s a simple tip for those prone to over-thinking…
A little critical, analytical thinking is a good thing. Without doubting ourselves sometimes we’d find it difficult to make good decisions.
Too much doubt, though, can stop us living our lives to the full. Some people can never make up their minds about their careers, their love lives or much else.
Unfortunately that sense that you’re not quite sure can leave you living in permanent limbo, never taking that final decisive step.
The problem is that we can we never really know what the outcome of our decisions will be, that’s the nature of life. But the person who never takes a risk, however small, never gets anywhere. At some point, after a little looking, you’ve got to leap.
Psychologists have found that people who doubt themselves too much end up engaging in excessive information processing which leads to procrastination and self-handicapping.
Self-doubters are also more likely to suffer from depression and social anxiety. Some soul-searching and self-analysis can be useful, but too much is a recipe for stagnation.
Shake your head
A recent study, though, points to a possible path for escaping the doubt habit.
For their research Wichman et al. (2010) recruited people who were chronically uncertain. They were then given a test which unconsciously encouraged them to be uncertain about their uncertainty. This was done by getting them to unscramble sentences which were related to uncertainty, like: “her speaker doubt I explanations” (you’re allowed to drop one word, in this case ‘speaker’).
Ironically it didn’t increase their uncertainty further but reduced it. This suggests that doubting your doubt can be useful. Of course this wasn’t a permanent solution, but it did momentarily reduce their levels of uncertainty.
Just the same effect could be seen when participants in a second study shook, rather than nodded their heads. The physical action of shaking their head while thinking about their uncertainty caused one to cancel out the other. Through this they temporarily reduced their doubts.
Doubt your doubt
This is a fascinating counter-intuitive case when lack of confidence in your own thoughts is beneficial. For some people having confidence in their doubts just leads to more procrastination, self-handicapping and worse.
Perhaps learning to doubt the doubt more will offer one way of helping to escape from some of the crippling effects of excessive self-doubt.
While shaking your head can’t be considered a miracle cure, it is interesting that doubting your doubt can work to dispel the original doubt.
It seems I hardly even scratched the surface. Here are 10 even weirder psychology studies that have mostly been published in academic journals, some more reputable than others…
1. Cerebral activation during micturation in normal men
Nour et al. (2000) had people urinating in a PET scanner. And from this they tell us:
“We conclude from this study […] that the onset and maintenance of micturation in normal men is associated with a vast network of cortical and subcortical regions, confirming observations from clinical and animal studies”
…and also that their PET scanner now has a funny smell.
2. Unwanted intrusive thoughts and the growth of facial hair
You’re going to think I’ve just made this one up, but I haven’t. From Durac (1997):
“An increase in hair production on the end of one’s nose or ear can produce an automatic negative cognition. Equally, a negative automatic thought can produce an immediate increase in hair growth on the outer surface at the tip of the nose…”
So what happens when you clip your nasal hair? Do all those bad thoughts immediately evaporate? If only it were that easy.
3. Men and women holding hands: whose hand is uppermost?
“A combined total of 15,008 handholding couples were observed in six studies, and across differences in height, age, hand preference, ethnicity, culture, and sex of the initiator of handholding in public, men were significantly more likely than women to have the uppermost hand.”
I’ve never noticed this before, but I’ll definitely be on the lookout now.
4. Does smelling granny relieve depressive mood?
Black (2001) wins the prize for the most unusual abstract for a study:
“Chen and Haviland-Jones claim if you’re down
You needn’t be depressed and mope around
Check out Granny’s smell
It’ll make you feel well
One problem: no supporting evidence was found”
There’s your answer: granny may smell wonderful but sniffing her won’t cheer you up. Better to speak to her instead.
5. Neurological and cognitive abnormalities associated with chronic petrol sniffing
“…subtle neurological and cognitive abnormalities do occur in individuals who abuse petrol but who do not have acute toxic encephalopathy and that the severity of these abnormalities is reduced with abstinence.”
Not exactly earth-shattering news that sniffing petrol isn’t good for your brain and you’ll probably get better if you quit. Still, good to know that someone is on the case.
6. Farting as a defence against unspeakable dread
Sidoli (1996) tell us about the defence mechanism of boy who was had been a victim of abuse and neglect:
“When feeling endangered, Peter had developed a defensive olfactive container using his bodily smell and farts to envelop himself in a protective cloud of familiarity against the dread of falling apart, and to hold his personality together.”
Childishly I found the title funny but reading the abstract made me feel bad for Peter. But when the authors start talking about a fart holding someone’s personality together, I had to stifle a giggle.
“The results show our study replicated Jenni’s: females use Type I (books in front of body), males preferred Type II (books at side of body). For bag carrying, males prefer backpacks, while females prefer one/two-strap bags. However, no differences exist in carrying style.”
Unlike the handholding study, which I hadn’t noticed, this one I remember from school days. The key for young men is to hold the books as nonchalantly as possible, as though you’ve forgotten they are there.
“Watching a rubber hand being stroked, while one’s own unseen hand is synchronously stroked, may cause the rubber hand to be attributed to one’s own body, to “feel like it’s my hand.”
These sorts of illusions are fascinating and have a corollary in the phenomenon of phantom limbs. There people who’ve had limbs amputated find that they still have sensations from it. This is very irritating if they get an itch which they’ll never be able to scratch.
“…participants read passages from either a book about wizards (from the Harry Potter series) or a book about vampires (from the Twilight series). Both implicit and explicit measures revealed that participants who read about wizards psychologically became wizards, whereas those who read about vampires psychologically became vampires.”
I’m too old for vampires and Harry Potter but I remember just this effect from watching Superman, Star Wars, James Bond and the rest.
10. A phenomenological investigation of being bored with life
If all these weird studies are getting you down then remember that everything is interesting if you look hard enough. Even studying gender differences in book carrying is better than being bored. As Bargdill (2000) explain:
“Boredom is equivalent to the freeze response. In this response, people ignore the possibility of taking creative steps toward making their lives meaningful. Instead, they wait for others–for outside assistance to a very personal insight. Like a deer in the headlights, these people freeze. They hope that the intrusive danger, meaninglessness, will disappear and that they will be able to return to their daily lives. [Instead] they are no longer in motion. They are aware, but paralyzed. They are bored.”
Can we improve our own and other people’s lives with the simple power of suggestion?
Can we improve our own and other people’s lives with the simple power of suggestion?
How strong is the power of suggestion? Is it really possible to change how people think by making small changes to their expectations?
One of the most famous demonstrations is the placebo effect: the idea that fake drugs can make us better.
But psychological research is filled with all sorts of other findings about how simple suggestions can affect the way people think and perceive the world.
Here are nine examples from a new article published in Current Directions in Psychological Science (Michael et al., 2012):
1. Intelligence boost
You can boost intelligence by handing out a placebo and telling them it’s cognition enhancing:
“….when people take the phony cognition-enhancing drug R273, they tend to expect it to improve their alertness, so they engage in more effortful monitoring but misattribute their improved performance to R273 (Clifasefi et al., 2007).”
It would probably do the opposite if you told them the drug would make them more stupid. In fact this has been done, sort of, with alcohol…
2. More gullible
Just as you can make people think they’re more intelligent, you can also make them more gullible:
“…giving people phony vodka tonics made them more susceptible to misleading information…” (Assefi & Garry, 2003)
Of course you can get the same effect with several real vodka tonics, but this way is healthier (and cheaper).
3. Hallucinations
Want to get hallucinogenic effects without all the bother of actually taking illegal drugs? Use the power of psychology:
“We administered suggestions to see a gray-scale pattern as colored and a colored pattern in shades of gray to 30 high suggestible and eight low suggestible students.” The highly suggestible individuals saw colour in the shades of gray. (Mazzoni et al, 2009)
OK, it’s not a very exciting hallucination, but maybe with practice you could work up to full Hunter S. Thompson-type madness (or maybe not!).
4. Tasty chocolate
Telling people how luxurious and expensive food is makes them experience it as more luxurious. So, tell them their chocolate is Swiss, not Chinese:
“…when students tasted unbranded chocolate and were told, either before or after tasting, that it was from Switzerland or from China, those who were told beforehand that the chocolate was Swiss reported that they liked it more.” (Wilcox, Roggeveen, & Grewal, 2011).
5. I’m watching you
The ‘Hawthorne effect’ is one of the most famous in psychology. This is the idea that people’s behaviour changes simply as a result of being observed.
In the original studies on factory workers at the Hawthorne factory in Illinois, researchers found that changing the physical working conditions (like lighting) did not have consistent effects on productivity.
Instead it was the very fact that people were being studied and were receiving attention from their managers that affected how hard they worked.
6. I expect better
Our expectations of others affect how they perform:
“…when teachers hold expectations that students are high performers, they unwittingly provide those students with an enhanced learning environment that produces better performance (see Rosenthal, 2003, for a review).”
When you know something, you can unconsciously transmit that knowledge to other people. The most dramatic example is…
“…when lineups are conducted by people who know who the suspects are, the rate of false identifications of innocent people can skyrocket to more than 300 percent the rate of false identification when lineups are double-blind (Loftus, Wells, & Stahl, 2012).”
Sports people are notoriously superstitious. They’re not the only ones. Experiments have found that people in general…
“…make more successful putts when they are told that a golf ball is lucky, solve motor-dexterity puzzles better when experimenters make a “good luck” hand gesture, and shine on a memory game when they are in the presence of their lucky charm (Damisch et al., 2010).”
9. Implanting false memories
Do you sometimes wonder if some of your childhood memories are real, or whether they’ve been constructed from stories you’ve been told?
“Nearly two decades of research on memory distortion leaves no doubt that memory can be altered via suggestion. People can be led to remember their past in different ways, and they even can be led to remember entire events that never actually happened to them.” (Loftus, 1995)
For one of the experiments on this, check out my previous ‘lost in the mall‘ article. In another, the power that therapists can wield was shown in this study on dream interpretation:
“An experiment by Giuliana Mazzoni from the University of Florence and colleagues demonstrates the power psychotherapists potentially wield with a mere 30 minute interpretation of a dream […] fully half of the dream interpretation group reported increased confidence in their [false] belief that they were either lost in a mall or had been bullied by an older child before the age of 3.” (read my full article on false beliefs and memories)
Look into my eyes…
Don’t take these effects too lightly. In medicine the placebo effect has been shown to rival those of medication or even surgery.
Still, it depends on how suggestible the person is, which is something we vary on.
One method stage hypnotists use to test suggestibility is asking audience members to clasp their hands together while suggesting they are stuck together. The more suggestible you are the harder it is to unclasp your hands.
But in general Shakespeare was right when he said:
People underestimate their ability at stereotypically difficult tasks like playing chess, telling jokes, juggling or computer programming.
People underestimate their ability at stereotypically difficult tasks like playing chess, telling jokes, juggling or computer programming.
Recently I covered the Dunning-Kruger effect which explains why the incompetent don’t know they’re incompetent.
But there’s a flip-side to the Dunning-Kruger: sometimes the competent don’t know when they’re competent.
This is the worse-than-average effect. This means that when you’re good at something, you tend to assume that other people are good at it as well. So, when you’re faced with a difficult task that you are good at, you underestimate your own ability.
It doesn’t just kick in when we have special skills, but also when we think that the odds are long, say because the task is particularly difficult. For example Kruger (1999) found that people underestimate their ability at stereotypically difficult tasks like playing chess, telling jokes, juggling or computer programming.
On the other hand they overestimate their ability at stereotypically easy tasks like using a mouse, driving a car or riding a bicycle.
Here’s another example, described by Moore (2007):
“University of Iowa students report believing that they stand only a 6% chance of beating fellow University of Iowa students in a trivia contest featuring questions on the history of Mesopotamia (Windschitl et al., 2003). In contrast, a trivia contest featuring questions on TV sitcoms inspired an average estimated probability of winning of 70%. Naturally, these beliefs are erroneous because the tests will be simple or difficult for everyone. On average, the actual probability of winning must be 50%.”
How can we explain all this?
“When people compare themselves with their peers, they focus egocentrically on their own skills and insufficiently take into account the skills of the comparison group.” (Kruger, 1999)
In other words we tend to forget how good other people are at riding bicycles and how bad they are at telling jokes or computer programming.
The same is true of judgements we make about ourselves. For example older people tend to assume they are less attractive and athletic than other people their own age (Zell & Alicke, 2011).
The moral of the story is simple: sometimes we do ourselves down, especially when faced with a difficult task or when we have special skills. Under these circumstances we are better than we know.
“Most powerful is he who has himself in his own power.”
“Most powerful is he who has himself in his own power.” ~Seneca
The Roman philosopher Seneca knew the benefits of self-control, as do modern psychologists:
“…self-control is strongly associated with what we label success: higher self-esteem, better interpersonal skills, better emotional responses and, perhaps surprisingly, few drawbacks at even very high levels of self-control (Tangney et al., 2004). (From: How to Improve Your Self Control)
But in a new study they’ve found that the merest suggestion of money is enough to help people recover from the ego-depletion effect (i.e. when your self-control ‘muscle’ is tired from too much exertion):
“Across two experiments using varied operationalizations of self-control, participants completed an initial task that depleted self-control resources or not, were then reminded of money or neutral concepts, and finally, completed a second task requiring self-control. In both experiments, among depleted participants, those reminded of money performed better on the second self-control task than those reminded of neutral concepts.” (Boucher & Kofos, 2012)
Does what goes around come around? Do you get what’s coming to you? Do you reap what you sow?
Does what goes around come around? Do you get what’s coming to you? Do you reap what you sow?
Children are often heard to whine to their parents: “But that’s not fair!” and their agitated parents reply: “Tough, life’s not fair.”
With age you hear people express less and less surprise at life’s unfairness. We still whine about it, but we’re less surprised.
Still, there’s some part of us that likes to believe the world should be fair. Psychologists call this kernel of teenage righteousness ‘the just-world hypothesis’. Here it is stated by Lerner and Miller (1978):
“Individuals have a need to believe that they live in a world where people generally get what they deserve”
This simple statement has all sorts of strange effects. Here’s a depressing one from Hafer and Begue (2005):
“A woman is raped by a stranger who sneaks into her apartment while she takes out the garbage […] The rape victim described how several people (even one close friend) suggested that she was partly to blame, in one case because of her “negative attitude” that might have ‘attracted’ more ‘negativity’; in another, by choosing to live in that particular neighborhood.” (referring to: After Silence: Rape & My Journey Back)
Clearly these are terrible, terrible judgements to make about someone who has been raped. But people still make these sorts of attributions in all sorts of situations. They think that ill people deserve their illness, that poor people deserve their poverty and so on.
But why? What does the just-world belief do for people? Here’s what:
“The belief that the world is just enables the individual to confront his physical and social environment as though they were stable and orderly. Without such a belief it would be difficult for the individual to commit himself to the pursuit of long-range goals or even to the socially regulated behavior of day-to-day life.” (Lerner & Miller, 1978)
We naturally vary in the amount we believe in the just-world hypothesis, so not all of us are under the same delusion. But the bias does help to explain why some people continue to attribute blame where there is none.
“On average participants caught themselves zoning out approximately 5.4 times during the 45 min reading period. Several findings were consistent with the hypothesis that people are often (at least initially) unaware of the fact that they are zoning out.”
This means you’re not always aware of when you’re zoning out. To combat this the experimenters used a system to catch people zoning out. This found that they were zoning out from reading about 13% of the time. And what were they thinking about while zoning out?
“…they were only very rarely (less than 3%) thinking about what they were reading when they reported zoning out. Although they sometimes reported thinking about nothing at all (18%), more often participants reported thinking about specific things, such as school-related topics (27%), fantasies (19%), and themselves (11%).” (Schooler et al., 2004)
So we are often unaware that our minds are wandering from what we are reading, even when it’s a gripping Amazon bestseller rather than a boring textbook.
In fact, mind wandering is very common:
“Killingsworth and Gilbert (2010) sampled the experience of 2,250 US adults at random intervals. Each time participants reported, through their smartphone, how they were feeling and what they were doing. Almost half the time people were asked, at that moment their minds were wandering from whatever they were doing—43% to pleasant topics, 27% to unpleasant topics and the rest to neutral topics. The only time their minds weren’t wandering was when they were having sex.” (From: Does Keeping Busy Make us Happy?)
If our minds wander only 13% of the time when we’re reading, that’s actually pretty good compared to an average of 50% for everyday life.
“In three studies, we found that people literally feel colder in response to inappropriate amounts of behavioral mimicry”
That’s because:
“There exist implicit standards for how much nonverbal behavioral mimicry is appropriate in various types of social interactions”
So, how much is too much?
“Our results also highlight the importance of (implicitly) knowing when to mimic other people and when it is okay to be mimicked by them…”
In other words: it depends on the situation and you have to trust your instincts, but be aware that blanket mirroring of other people’s body language can come across as plain weird. People who mimic body language indiscriminately literally give us chills.
What would this guy do? Perspective taking offers a way around the egocentric bias.
What would this guy do? Perspective-taking offers a way around the egocentric bias.
Most people are pretty bad at taking advice from others. People don’t mind hearing the advice, they just hate to take it. This is one facet of what psychologists call the ‘egocentric bias’: the general rule that we think we know better.
The egocentric bias strikes in the boardroom, in schools, in hospitals and everywhere where two or more people are gathered together and one turns to the other and says: “What do you think?”
It’s the reason why every person and every generation has to make its own mistakes. People have a tendency not to listen until after it’s too late.
This is a real shame because a lot of the time other people have really important insights or experience that we don’t have ourselves (e.g. The Impressive Power of a Stranger’s Advice). We can’t hope to know everything ourselves.
So how can we force ourselves to properly weigh other people’s advice?
An approach that’s recently come to the fore in psychological research, and popular culture, is perspective-taking. You simply imagine someone who is like you faced with the same question and then you ask yourself what they would do.
It’s the secular equivalent of the Christian question: “What would Jesus do?”
Now it’s been tested in psychological research by Yaniv and Choshen-Hillel (2012). Across three studies they had some participants make choices from their own perspective and some from the perspective of another person who is similar to themselves.
What they found was that taking another imaginary person’s perspective had the desired effect of encouraging participants to take other people’s advice.
It’s a fascinating finding but it only tests people’s judgements in a relatively simple situation: guessing the amount of calories in a foodstuff. We’ll have to wait for further research to look at more complicated or nuanced decisions.
Still, the procedure is so simple it’s unlikely to do any harm. Plus anything that helps us think outside ourselves is very likely to be helpful since there are quite a few other studies which have found robust benefits for perspective-taking.
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rather than a boring textbook.