Category: Psychology

Making comparisons between goods and services is supposed to get us a better deal but it doesn’t always work that way. That’s because of the weird way our brains make mountains out of molehills.

The potato chip study

Consider a study by Morewedge et al. (2010). Participants were asked to predict how much they would enjoy a potato chip. Half the participants were in a room that also happened to contain other superior snacks like a luxurious chocolate bar; others were in a room with inferior snacks, like sardines and spam.

People in the room with the superior snacks thought they’d enjoy the chip less than those in the room with the inferior snack. They were wrong. In fact they liked the snacks exactly the same, no matter the surrounding snacks.

Here’s the moral: when you enjoy whatever you choose, you’re mostly not comparing it with other options: you enjoy it for what it is. Comparisons mess with your mind.

The tyranny of small differences

When we go to buy a car, a house or a snack we tend to make a big deal out of the differences between similar products. We notice that this car is faster, or this house is slightly bigger, or this chocolate bar is bigger. In reality the differences in our enjoyment are much smaller than we imagine; maybe no more than a hill of beans.

If you’re the kind of person that really sweats over their comparison shopping, then take note. This research suggests: don’t bother, let it go, it won’t matter. Sure, get the lowest price for the same goods or service, but don’t go crazy choosing between models or features, it really won’t make that much difference.

The danger is that the tyranny of relatively small differences will force you to spend more money than you want or can afford. Then you end up having to pay for something that makes you no happier than a cheaper option. Indeed, when you consider the extra effort required to pay for expensive things like houses and cars, it may even make you less happy in the long-run.

So, be happier, do what psychologists call ‘satisficing’ (a combination of satisfy and suffice): get something that does the job but don’t torture yourself, it’s not worth it.

Image credit: Yampee Yankee

We’re always hearing about how many billions it costs the economy when workers go off sick. Annually it could be as much as $350 billion in the US and $66 billion in the UK.

But what aspects of work make people sick?

Nixon (2011) looked at 72 studies of the effect of occupational stress on physical symptoms including headaches, backaches, sleep disturbances and gastrointestinal problems. Here are the associations with physical symptoms in decreasing order of strength:

1. Organisational constraints

Overall the factor most strongly associated with physical symptoms was organisational constraints. These are the aspects of a workplace environment that stop you getting your job done. It could include things like not having the time, materials or the authority to reach the goals that have been set for you. It seems that this is likely to be the strongest cause of physical symptoms (although we can’t say much about causality as this was a correlational study).

The types of physical symptoms most associated with organisational constraints were tiredness and gastrointestinal problems.

2. Role conflict

This is where one boss tells you to do one thing and another tells you to do something else. Infuriating. This was most associated with gastrointestinal problems.

3. Interpersonal conflict

Interpersonal conflict covers anything from rude or unthinking behaviour by co-workers up to all-out bullying. Interpersonal conflict was most associated with sleep disturbances.

4. Workload

This is the first one that you might expect to appear higher up the list. We tend to think that it’s having too much work that makes us ill. It certainly contributes but not as much as organisational constraints or role conflict. Unsurprisingly workload was most associated with fatigue.

5. Role ambiguity

Role ambiguity occurs when you don’t quite know what the job is. And when you don’t know what’s expected of you, the stress it causes is associated with illness. In fact in this analysis it was most associated with fatigue.

6 & 7. Work hours & lack of control

Work hours is most interesting because of how far down the list it comes. You might imagine that working hours would be at the top but it comes down at the bottom with lack of control, which had a similar association with physical symptoms. Both associations were weak, but still there.

Work hours were most associated with eye strain while lack of control was most associated with backache and problems sleeping.

Image credit: Peter Hellberg

A strange thing happens when we imagine doing some exercise.

That’s what Ruby et al. (2011) found when they had people think about an upcoming session of exercise. Each person tried to predict how much they would enjoy their workout—whether it was Pilates, yoga, weight training, running or something else. Then after the workout they rated it again.

On average people’s predictions were too pessimistic: they actually enjoyed their workouts more than they had guessed. This was true across lots of different types of people. It was true for both moderate and challenging workouts, whether people exercised on their own or in the gym and even when people had designed their own workouts.

The reason was that they focused heavily on the relatively unpleasant start of the exercise session rather than the enjoyable middle section.

The researchers christened this effect ‘forecasting myopia’ and tried to identify ways to combat it.

Focus on the whole

In a final study Ruby et al. asked people to think about their whole exercise routine, including the warm-up, main workout and cool-down. It emerged that this method encouraged people to make more positive predictions of how much they would enjoy their exercise. This also had the effect of boosting people’s intention to exercise in the future.

So it seems that the short-sighted forecasting of how much we’ll enjoy exercising can be overcome. We can do this by focusing on the exercise session as a whole rather than just the (relatively) painful beginning.

Image credit: Patrick Hoesly

The old joke goes like this: What’s a procrastinator’s busiest day? Answer: tomorrow.

If you’re a procrastinator then you’re not alone: 75% of college students consider themselves procrastinators and 50% are problem procrastinators.

According to Steel (2007), there are four pillars of procrastination and so four potential ways to fight it:

1. Low task value

The value of the goal naturally affects our procrastination, for example we procrastinate more on unpleasant tasks. Tasks that are unpleasant because they’re boring can be made more difficult artificially to help us avoid procrastination, say by using time limits or unusual conditions.

Otherwise you can try and tie an aversive task to something attractive. Students who enjoy socialising often create study groups: they can enjoy socialising at the same time as revising for exams.

Or, just treat yourself like a dog: small rewards for the right activities, punishment for procrastination.

2. The procrastinator’s personality

Some people are born procrastinators. They have low self-control, are easily distracted and impulsive. There is not much we can do about our personalities but we can adjust our surroundings.

Standard advice is to put yourself in the right environment, i.e. one that reinforces work and avoids temptation. A favourite for writers is to pull out the internet cable from the back of the computer and hide it at the furthest reaches of your house. While you’re at it, hide your smartphone there too.

Procrastination tends to occur whenever you have to stop and think. Even quite small decision in your work can prompt procrastination. So have everything you need to hand and develop automatic habits of work so there’s no need to stop and think.

3. Expecting success?

If you expect to complete a task easily, then you are less likely to procrastinate. So increasing expectations of success should reduce procrastination. Unfortunately expectations mostly change with experience, i.e. experience of completing the task. It’s a Catch-22.

Still it’s useful to know that once you do get going on a task and successfully complete it, you’re unlikely to procrastinate as much in the future on that same task.

4. Goal failure

Almost by definition procrastination is a failure to meet goals. So setting goals in the right way is crucial. You should use short-term as well as long-term goals and even artificial deadlines can be helpful. There’s loads more on setting goals in this article: 11 Goal Hacks: How to Achieve Anything.

Forgive yourself

Don’t be too hard on yourself: there’s evidence that forgiving yourself for procrastinating can help stop the cycle. See my previous article: Procrastinate Less By Forgiving Yourself.

Image credit: Rishi Bandopadhay

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When a person meets you for the first time they ask themselves two questions. The answers to these two questions will have all sorts of knock-on effects for how they think about you and how they behave towards you.

Professor Susan Fiske of Princeton University has shown that all social judgements can be boiled down to these two dimensions (Fiske et al., 2007):

1. How warm is this person? The idea of warmth includes things like trustworthiness, friendliness, helpfulness, sociability and so on. Initial warmth judgements are made within a few seconds of meeting you.
2. How competent is this person? Competency judgements take longer to form and include things like intelligence, creativity, perceived ability and so on.

Susan Fiske’s research has looked at different cultures, times and types of social judgements, but these two concepts come up again and again in slightly different guises. Not only do we make these judgements about other people, but we frame their behaviour using these two questions; we ask ourselves whether it was friendly, moral, sincere, clever etc..

The primacy of warmth and competence may reflect evolved, instinctual reactions to these two questions about others:

1. Friend or foe? Is this person going to hurt me or help me?
2. Capable of hurting or helping? Can this person help me if they’re friendly or hurt me if they’re not?

How warm and competent do other people find you? According to new research by Carlson et al. (2011) you probably know quite well how other people view you.

Image credit: Marco Bellucci

We have to make a lot of complicated decisions in life. Some are made in a hurry and most involve situations in which we don’t have all the information.

Surgeons have to make split-second decisions in emergencies and fire-fighters have to decide which route is safest. Less dramatically we have to work out the right arguments at a business meeting, at home we have to negotiate over the weekend’s activities and in the store we have to calculate the best deals.

These are complex decisions in which time is short. So, should you go with your gut and be done with it or try to use what little time you have to reason it out?

A new study by Mikels et al. (2011) supports the power of gut instincts for quick decisions. Across multiple studies they gave people a series of complex decisions including choosing between cars, apartments, vacations, physicians and treatments.

Overall they found that compared with trying to work out the details, using the emotions led to much better outcomes. In one of the studies the number of participants getting the right answer went up from only 26% in the detail-focused condition to 68% in the feeling-focused condition.

This held for both objective and subjective aspects of a decision (this covers the car that’s objectively best overall and the best car taking into account your preferences).

For quick decisions, then, this looks like good evidence that you should focus on feelings rather than thoughts.

On the other hand, if you’ve got more time—more time than it takes to just understand the problem—then a detail-focused approach is likely to be better. In one of Mikels et al.’s studies, when participants we are given extra time to think, a focus on feelings was positively detrimental to decision quality. With time in hand, the smart money was on the thinker rather than the feeler.

Why is it that our feelings should be most effective in the moment? Mikels speculates that it’s because they are more hooked in to the mind’s automatic, unconscious processes. In a short space of time our unconscious can signal through our emotions the best course of action.

Of course the unconscious is far from infallible, indeed the power of the unconscious mind has been overblown by some popular accounts (see: Can the Unconscious Outperform the Conscious Mind). Still, gut instinct is a remarkably effective resource given the short space of time and complexity of decisions it faces.

Image credit: Julia Manzerova

Sitcoms often take advantage of a very simple fact about human psychology to make us laugh. The set-up will go something like this: main character tells their partner: “I would never compromise my ethical principles for money!” Then that very same character is offered an opportunity to compromise their ethical principles for money…and they take it.

The joke is not just about hypocrisy but also about the main character’s complete unawareness of his or her hypocrisy.

Watching this we might assume it isn’t intended to be diagnostic of human psychology; rather it’s just a way of making a joke at the expense of the main character. But really it’s a perfectly realistic example of how people avoid the truth about themselves.

In a recent paper in the Review of General Psychology, Sweeny et al. (2010) outline the three main reasons that people avoid information:

1. It may demand a change in beliefs. Loads of evidence suggests people tend to seek information that confirms their beliefs rather than disproves them.
2. It may require us to take undesired actions. Telling the doctor about those weird symptoms means you might have to undergo painful testing. Sometimes it seems like it’s better not to know.
3. It may cause unpleasant emotions.

You can see all three of these motivations in play in the sitcom example. Weighed against them—motivating us to find out the truth—are all the reasons you’d expect like curiosity and hope for positive information. Whether we try to find out the truth or avoid the information depends on the following:

1. Expectation. Most obvious and maybe most powerful. The more we expect bad news, the more effort we make to avoid it.
2. Lack of control. Less obvious but it explain a lot. When we feel we have less control over the consequences of information, we are more strongly motivated to avoid it. Like when you could be getting news about a life-threatening disease. Because there may be little you can do about it, it may be better not to know.
3. Lack of coping resources. When people feel they can’t handle distressing information at the moment then they’re more likely to avoid it.
4. When the information is difficult to understand. The harder it is to interpret information, the less we want to know about it.

So people often do their best to avoid learning about themselves and sometimes this makes perfect sense. For example genetic testing may tell you that you have an increased risk of atrial fibrillation after the age of 70. Is that useful information or just one more thing to worry about? If there’s nothing you can do about it then perhaps it’s information that only worsens your quality of life.

Other times we hurt ourselves by avoiding information. Like when we refuse to get that strange mole checked out and end up delaying treatment for cancer.

The trick is to know which information to avoid and which to seek out. But we can’t know this without knowing what the information is. But once you’ve learnt the information you can’t unlearn it. It’s a problem.

I offer no answers, merely to point out that avoiding information is a much more rational strategy for dealing with the complexities of a frightening world than it might at first seem. There’s a good reason we value the innocence of youth: when you don’t know, you’ve got less to worry about.

When we laugh at the hypocrisies of a sitcom character, it’s also a laugh of uncomfortable recognition. As much as we’d prefer to avoid the information, in our heart of hearts we know we’re all hypocrites.

Image credit: Diego da Silva