Category: Psychology

Imagine two people: one from the upper classes and one from the lower classes. Let’s say our lower class individual works in a factory, lives in a small house in an average area and receives a relatively small salary.

Our upper class individual, though, has inherited money, lives in a large house in a beautiful area and doesn’t need to work for money.

Now let’s say both these individuals are driving along in their cars (one cheap, one expensive), when they approach a pedestrian crossing (crosswalk for our US friends). There’s someone there waiting to cross and, by law, they are obliged to stop. And let’s say we’re in a country where generally people obey these sorts of rules.

On balance, who do you think is more likely to cheat and cut off the pedestrian? The upper class person or the lower class person?

Well, wonder no more because this exact observational study was carried out by Piff et al. (2012) in California. They stood at a junction watching who cut off pedestrians and how expensive their cars were.

The results were pretty clear. Overall about a third of drivers failed to stop for pedestrians, but it was those in the most expensive cars that were disproportionately represented amongst the discourteous drivers. About 30% of drivers in the cheapest cars failed to stop compared with over 45% of those in the most expensive cars.

Piff and colleagues then retired to the laboratory to see if they could catch upper class people cheating more than the lower classes on other sorts of tests. Sure enough, they could:

“…upper-class individuals were more likely to exhibit unethical decision-making tendencies (study 3), take valued goods from others (study 4), lie in a negotiation (study 5), cheat to increase their chances of winning a prize (study 6), and endorse unethical behavior at work (study 7) than were lower-class individuals.”

Perhaps the stereotype of the money-grabbing Mr Burns-type has some truth after all.

The authors think that all kinds of factors probably contribute to this finding. Here are a few:

• Upper class people are more insulated from ordinary society and tend to think the rules don’t apply to them.
• Upper class people have the resources to make problems ‘go away’, so they are less exposed to the adverse consequences of their unethical behaviour.
• They care less about what other people think.

Of course none of this is to say that all upper class people are cheats. That’s far from the truth.

What this study is finding is a trend amongst some upper class people. There are plenty of examples of upper class people acting in ethical and praiseworthy ways, it’s just that this is more unusual than the rest of us might like.

The authors conclude by saying:

“Although greed may indeed be a motivation all people have felt at points in their lives, we argue that greed motives are not equally prevalent across all social strata. As our findings suggest, the pursuit of self-interest is a more fundamental motive among society’s elite, and the increased want associated with greater wealth and status can promote wrongdoing.”

Image credit: Die Jugend

It might seem like a question that’s too obvious to ask. Practically every job description ever written demands ‘a good team player’.

Teams of all kinds pop up everywhere in organisations and the assumption is that they enhance organisational performance.

In fact the evidence for the supposedly stupendous power of teams is pretty weak. Hundreds of studies have been carried out examining people’s performance in groups.

Far from finding a huge boost to performance from teamwork, the studies are neutral or only show small benefits (Allen & Hecht, 2004). Here are some typical characteristics of groups from Hackman (1990):

• High performing groups are not normal, instead groups often have huge variations in ability from top to bottom.
• People in groups often waste time squabbling over goals.
• Groups frequently suffer downward performance spirals.

The message from the research is clear: the benefits of teamwork are nowhere near as clear as the fashion would suggest. Worse, sometimes the arbitrary implementation of teams reduces organisational performance. The classic example is group brainstorming which just doesn’t work (see my article on brainstorming).

There’s no ‘I’ in ‘team’

Obviously sometimes people do work together much better in teams. Some jobs are like team sports, they need close co-ordination between people to achieve their goals.

But many, many jobs don’t have these characteristics. Academics and call-centre workers don’t need to be in teams or groups, neither do sales, HR or many other standard corporate departments.

Indeed many people belong to multiple teams, many of which may have very little meaning for them. And when there’s little meaning, there’s little effort (see: social loafing).

So is teamwork just a management fad or is there a deeper psychological function?

Allen and Hecht do point out that teams can be psychological beneficial. The research suggests that people draw both confidence and satisfaction from being in a team, even if it doesn’t boost performance much.

But they also caution that not everyone responds well to teams and their benefits have been overinflated.

Image credit: Thomas Cunningham

Last week I asked you the following question:

Say you’re in your car, sitting at a red light behind another car. The lights turn green but the car in front doesn’t move. Twelve seconds go by. Do you think you’d be more likely to honk if the car was an old Ford or if it was a brand new Porsche?

Over the weekend 1,313 people took part and the results were clear-cut. Here’s what you said: 781 people thought they’d be more likely to honk at the high-status car and 532 said it would be the low-status car.

Statistically this is a significant difference which means we wouldn’t expect to get these results by chance, so it probably means there’s something going on here.

Now let’s look at the breakdowns by gender:

• Men, high-status: 408
• Men, low-status: 331
• Women, high-status: 373
• Women, low-status: 201

So the pattern is the same across men and women, although stronger for women (again differences within genders are significant).

For real

This is just the result I was expecting as when participants were asked this question by Doob and Gross (1968), they got a similar result. More people thought they would honk at the high-status car.

The difference is that Doob and Gross carried out the experiment for real. As well as asking, they wanted to see what people would really do in the situation. They had drivers pausing at intersections in either expensive or cheap cars and waiting to see if the person behind honked.

Overall what they found was that when the car was low-status, 84% of drivers honked at least once within 12 seconds. But, when the car was high-status, only 50% of drivers honked. Indeed people honked faster and more often at the low-status car. These results were also replicated in a later study (Deaux, 1971).

So, in reality people’s collective tendency was the exact reverse of their prediction and also what PsyBlog readers predicted.

Why?

The explanation for why people honk less at high-status cars is simple.

It’s the same reason you don’t tell your boss what you really think: unconsciously (or otherwise) we fear what high status people can do to us. We may be frustrated by the car in front pausing at the lights, but that frustration is inhibited by any signals that the car’s driver is high-status.

Status is just one example of how our aggressive behaviour is curbed by aspects of the situation. For example people are generally less aggressive towards polite people and more aggressive towards members of their own sex (Harris, 1974).

So, how do you explain people’s inaccurate prediction? Perhaps we like to think we’re not cowed by authority, that people who are richer have no effect on us and so we compensate too much. On the other hand maybe we feel more affiliation with the driver of the cheaper car—they are more like us.

Whatever the explanation, it’s a good example of how our predictions of our own behaviour can be biased in the wrong direction. It’s also a good example of when crowds are not so wise.

Image credit: D. Sharon Pruitt

Say you’re in your car, sitting at a red light behind another car. The lights turn green but the car in front doesn’t move.

Twelve seconds go by. Do you think you’d be more likely to honk if the car was an old Ford or if it was a brand new Porsche?

You might say in reality I would never honk or you might say it is 50/50, but let’s say I force you to choose?

Vote now and I’ll tell you why I ask in the next post (if you don’t see the poll below then you’ll need to visit the website here to vote).

There are four options, answer one of the first two if you’re female and one of the second two if you’re male.

Image credit: Ashley Rose

I’ve read and heard all kinds of rubbish about how to detect lies. Apparently you should look for sweating, which way people’s eyes move, whether they make too much eye contact or too little…and so on.

Ironically advice to look for individual ‘tells’, like a poker player is supposed to, is a mug’s game.

Certainly under laboratory conditions people are very poor at detecting when other people are lying. Across 206 studies people’s hit rates for detecting lies was 54%, which seeing as you’d get 50% right by pure chance is not very impressive (Bond & DePaulo, 2006).

So, why is it so difficult to tell when people are lying? That’s what Hartwig & Bond (2011) examine in a meta-analysis of dozens of studies. They looked at all kinds of different cues to lying like fidgeting, postural shifts, head movements, gaze aversion and speech rate.

What they found is that overall people do pay attention to many of the correct cues to lying. These include things like:

• Vocal immediacy, i.e. the extent to which someone replies directly to questions. The vaguer someone is, the more likely they are to be lying.
• Indifference: if the speaker seems unconcerned then this is associated with lying. It’s probably because they’re trying to play it cool.
• Thinking hard: lying is hard work so when a person has to think hard about a question, it might indicate they are lying.
• Being uncooperative: pretty obvious, but still being uncooperative is often a cue that someone is trying to conceal something.

Although people are generally good, they do overestimate the power of some cues, for example looking away is not a good cue to deception and neither is fidgeting with an object.

But if overall people seem to know what the right cues to lying are, why aren’t they better at detecting them?

What the research suggests is that although people generally use the right cues, the cues themselves are very ambiguous. In other words: usually there just isn’t enough information to go on.

Have another look at some of the apparently effective lying tells above and think of alternative explanations. For example, someone who is just tired might appear uncooperative, or they might look indifferent because they genuinely don’t care and they might think hard because they want to tell the truth as accurately as possible.

Away from the specifics of lying for a moment, we’re all used to how hard it is to read other people’s thoughts and feelings. Body language is ambiguous and anyone who tells you different is trying to sell you a system that doesn’t work.

Better lie detector

Given all that, how do you become a better lie detector? The answer is that (unfortunately) there’s no one magic bullet to detecting lies because lying tells are too weak.

One method for improving the odds is to try and increase the cues given off by suspected liars by putting more pressure on them. Short of waterboarding, one way of doing this is putting them under cognitive load. For example interrogators will get a suspect to tell their story backwards. A study has shown that lie catchers do a better job when people try to tell their story backwards (Vrij et al., 2008).

However these sorts of tricks only increase the chances of detecting lies from almost impossible to just very, very difficult.

The best advice is to rely on your instincts. Overall, in the studies, people do better at detecting lies if they rely on their instincts rather than specific tells.

Image credit: Juliana Coutinho

Here in the UK the weather feels depressing.

We’re in the middle of winter in the northern hemisphere and it’s cold and we’re being battered by gales and torrential rain. The sun, even when it does show its face, is setting at 4pm. It’s no wonder people in the street look fed up.

But according to most of the research on the connection between weather and mood, they shouldn’t be. I’ve covered these highly counter-intuitive findings before and the title of that article sums it up: Weather Has Little Effect on Mood.

When you tell people this, though, they don’t believe it. Most of us intuitively think the weather has quite a strong effect on our mood. Many assume that the rain and cold weather depresses us and sun and warmth perks us up.

So why don’t we see this effect in the research?

That’s the question a new study by Klimstra et al. (2011) tries to answer with a group of adolescents and their mothers. They tested the idea that although our reactivity to weather averages out across the whole population, there are large differences between individuals.

And it turns out this is true. In fact Klimstra et al. found four distinct groups:

1. Unaffected: about half the people in their study fell into this group. For these people it didn’t matter that much whether it was raining or sunny, hot or cold, their mood was mostly unaffected.
2. Summer lovers: here’s the group you’d expect. For these people, their mood improved with less rain, more sun and higher temperatures (15% of adolescents and 30% of their mothers fell into this category).
3. Summer haters: here’s a group of people you hear less about.  These were the exact opposite of the summer lovers so they were happier when there was more rain, less sun and lower temperatures. Summer haters were more prevalent amongst the adolescents (27%) than their mothers (12%).
4. Rain haters: this group’s mood didn’t change with the temperature, sunshine or the wind; they just hated the rain. These guys were in the minority, making up 8% of adolescents and 12% of their mothers.

This helps explain why studies keep finding that weather doesn’t have much effect on mood: it’s because we’re different and these differences were mostly being averaged out.

Most surprising are not the group of winter SADs (seasonally affected disorder) but the summer SADs. We hear a lot about the former and nothing about the latter, but from this study the summer SADs look like a significant group of people, especially amongst adolescents.

There was also an association between how the adolescents and their mothers reacted to the weather. This suggests your weather type may well run in the family. If you’re a summer hater, it’s likely your parents are too.

Image credit: Noukka Signe

Here’s a little tip for life: try to always have something to look forward to, no matter how small. The power of anticipation in boosting our well-being is incredible.

You know that feeling you get when you’re dreading giving a public talk or going to the dentist? That is the negative power of anticipation, but it also works the other way. We get enormous amounts of pleasure from looking forward to good things in the future (Bryant, 2003).

This is part of the reason why our modern consumer society of ‘buy now and pay later’ robs us of pleasure. Part of the fun of purchasing both objects and experiences is in their anticipation. Waiting for good things to come is fun.

There’s a part of our minds that thinks we’ll enjoy it more if we get it right now, but that part is the greedy part. And it’s wrong.

Get it later

You might think that what we lose in anticipation, we’ll gain in reminiscences. In other words we’ll get the pleasure the other side of our purchase. But this doesn’t seem to be the case. The pleasure people get from their anticipation is stronger than from their reminiscences (Van Boven & Ashworth, 2007).

This may be partly to do with the Zeigarnik effect: the idea that something tends to stick in our mind until it’s completed. In the same way once objects or experiences are ‘obtained’ our mind forgets about them. But while they’re still in the future, we keep mulling them over.

There are two other added bonuses of paying now and getting it later:

• Better decisions: People make better choices for the future than they do for right now. Right now we’re more like greedy children who want everything that’s bad for us. When choosing for the future we’re like sensible grown-ups, choosing things we know are better for us. Economists call this ‘hyperbolic discounting’, psychologists call it ‘the present bias’ and I call it the ‘chocolate-now-fruit-next-week effect’.
• Pleasure of uncertainty: The process of choosing creates uncertainty about what we’re going to get. And this uncertainty heightens our pleasure (see this article on How to Feel More Pleasure).

We’re all well aware of how the culture of ‘buy now, pay later’ has got our economies into trouble. But this inability to wait for good things to come is also robbing us of what Dunn et al. (2011) call ‘free pleasure’.

If we can wait, then anticipation, uncertainty and better decisions will all contrive to give us more pleasure from our money.

Image credit: Mike Bitzenhofer

Everyone hates to lose out. Indeed in many circumstances we hate losses more than we love gains (it’s called risk aversion).

The insurance industry knows this only too well so it frames products in terms of losses:

• Worried you’re going to be robbed?
• Worried your holiday will be a disaster?
• Worried you’re going to die?

Well, worry no more! Insurance is the answer!

A lot advertising works like this, by creating a need and then (supposedly) satiating it. So far, so mundane. But insurance is particularly insidious because it purports to be selling ‘peace of mind’.

The question is whether our minds will really be as troubled as we imagine if (and when) things go wrong.

The extended warranty trap

Psychological research suggests the reality is that things aren’t usually as bad as we think they’re going to be. That’s because of the psychological immune system.

The article linked above has the full details but here’s the drift: when we predict how negative events will leave us feeling, we’re usually too pessimistic. The reason is that our unconscious is continually working to reduce the effects of negative events.

We rationalise, we avoid blaming ourselves and our own decisions, so we end up feeling less regret than we predict. In the end we are psychologically stronger than we imagine.

That doesn’t mean that all insurance is pointless. We still need car insurance or a similar system to spread the risk of driving, healthcare insurance in countries where it isn’t provided and other types of insurance can be useful…

But extended warranties are often a waste of time, as are many other types of insurance. Even if the product goes wrong, we won’t regret not getting the insurance nearly as much as we imagine. So save the money and take the risk.

Life is a lottery but, don’t worry, you’ll bear up better than you imagine.

Image credit: Jason Nicholls