Speak and write using unambiguous language and people will believe you.
Speak and write using unambiguous language and people will believe you.
I’ve just deleted a rather abstract introduction I wrote to this article about truth. The reason? I noticed I wasn’t taking the excellent advice offered in a recent article published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. That advice is simple: if you want people to believe you, speak and write concrete.
There are all sorts of ways language can communicate truth. Here are some solid facts for you:
People usually judge that more details mean someone is telling us the truth,
We find stories that are more vivid to be more true,
We even think more raw facts make unlikely events more likely.
But all these involve adding extra details or colour. What if we don’t have any more details? What if we want to bump up the believability without adding to the fact-count?
Just going more concrete can be enough according to a recent study by Hansen and Wanke (2010). Compare these two sentences:
Hamburg is the European record holder concerning the number of bridges.
In Hamburg, one can count the highest number of bridges in Europe.
Although these two sentences seem to have exactly the same meaning, people rate the second as more true than the first. It’s not because there’s more detail in the second—there isn’t. It’s because it doesn’t beat around the bush, it conjures a simple, unambiguous and compelling image: you counting bridges.
Abstract words are handy for talking conceptually but they leave a lot of wiggle-room. Concrete words refer to something in the real world and they refer to it precisely. Vanilla ice-cream is specific while dessert could refer to anything sweet eaten after a main meal.
Verbs as well as nouns can be more or less abstract. Verbs like ‘count’ and ‘write’ are solid, concrete and unambiguous, while verbs like ‘help’ and ‘insult’ are open to some interpretation. Right at the far abstract end of the spectrum are verbs like ‘love’ and ‘hate’; they leave a lot of room for interpretation.
Even a verb’s tense can affect its perceived concreteness. The passive tense is usually thought more abstract, because it doesn’t refer to the actor by name. Perhaps that’s partly why fledgling writers are often told to write in the active tense: to the reader it will seem more true.
Hansen and Wanke give three reasons why concreteness suggests truth:
Our minds process concrete statements more quickly, and we automatically associate quick and easy with true (check out these studies on the power of simplicity).
We can create mental pictures of concrete statements more easily. When something is easier to picture, it’s easier to recall, so seems more true.
Also, when something is more easily pictured it seems more plausible, so it’s more readily believed.
So, speak and write solidly and unambiguously and people will think it’s more true. I can’t say it any clearer than that.
Why we are more creative when mind and body are out of step.
Why we are more creative when mind and body are out of step.
Usually we perform best with mind and body in sync. With our thoughts tied to our actions decisions are made faster, we are more engaged and we feel at one with ourselves.
If you want to be creative, though, sometimes it pays to be out of sync according to a recent study by Huang and Galinsky (2011). They had some people recalling a happy time in their life while at the same time frowning. Another group recalled sad memories while smiling. The idea was to get their minds going one way and their bodies going the other.
In two comparison groups, participants were told to produce consonant mind-body states, i.e. happy memory plus happy face and sad memory plus sad face.
After this participants had to make judgements about how typical words were of a particular category. For example, how typical a vehicle is a camel? How typical a piece of furniture is a telephone? And how typical a vegetable is garlic? These are all weak examples of each category compared with more typical examples of a car, a table and a potato.
The results showed that when participants were in a dissonant frame of mind (say smiling while thinking sad thoughts) they were more likely to judge camels, telephones and garlic as relatively typical examples of a vehicle, piece of furniture and vegetable. On the other hand, those whose minds and bodies were coherent thought they were less typical examples of those categories.
Participants in the dissonant conditions, then, were thinking more expansively. Expansive thinking is very useful in the early stages of the creative process. It allows two previously unconnected ideas to be brought together in new and exciting ways.
As creatures of habit people automatically go down the same avenues of thought time after time. It’s why creating something new is so difficult. Mind-body dissonance, though, sends a signal that we are outside of our comfort zone, that a new type of response is required.
Contrary to our intuition, research suggests that more trusting people are better than cynics at detecting when others are lying.
Contrary to our intuition, research suggests that more trusting people are better than cynics at detecting when others are lying.
Humans can be an untrusting race. People are often very cynical about human nature, tending to think that strangers will happily lie to us if there is something in it for them.
We intuitive believe that being cynical is an advantage in detecting lies. Or so Nancy Carter and J. Mark Weber found when they asked a group of MBA students whether people high or low in trust would be better at detecting lies in others (Carter & Weber, 2010).
The results were as we’d expect: 85% thought low trusters are better than high trusters at lie detection.
Is this the right answer though? Are low-trusters really better at detecting lies?
Liar liar
Carter and Weber weren’t so sure, so they measured how trusting 29 participants were and had them watch videos of a staged job interview.
In these videos, interviewees had been told to do their best to get the job, but half were told to tell three lies in the process.
These videos were then shown to participants who rated the honesty of the interviewees, along with how likely they would be to hire them.
Surprisingly, it was those highest in trusting others that emerged as the superstar lie detectors. High trusters were more sensitive to deceit and more accurate at detecting which of the interviewees were lying.
Contrary to our expectations it was those low in trusting others who performed worst. They were least accurate at spotting liars and most likely to hire one of the interviewees who had been lying.
It seemed that the high-trusters were more likely to pay attention to the classic signs of lying, which include fidgeting and changes in vocal intonation and quality.
This leaves us with a counter-intuitive finding to explain: high-trusters, rather than being poor at spotting lies, actually outperform their less trusting counterparts. We’d expect low trusters to be more on the lookout for deceptive behaviour and yet they don’t perform as well as those who are more trusting.
What is going on? Why is our intuition so wrong?
Social intelligence
Although this research can’t tell us why—it only gives us the result—it does suggest a couple of reasons why high-trusters might be better at detecting lies:
Sensitivity: People may become more trusting of others because they are sensitive to lies. Since they are better able to detect them, they have to worry less about being duped.
Risk-taking: On the other hand, through taking social risks, some people may learn how to detect lies more accurately. Those who don’t practice because they never take any social risks, never learn how to discern lie from truth.
On top of these two factors we also have to take into account people’s innate ability. Some people are naturally gifted at reading body language and have higher social intelligence, while others have to work more at it.
Risk and reward
Whatever the explanation, it emphasizes how automatically trusting others—sometimes without due cause—can be beneficial. The problem for the low truster is that without trusting strangers a little, it’s very hard to take social risks.
Say you are invited out by someone you hardly know to a restaurant. Refusing on the basis that they must have some evil ulterior motive might be safer, but you might miss out on a great new friend.
The same goes in business. Trust is the basis for commercial relationships: good deals rely on both parties doing their bit, often without knowing that much about each other. A business person who doesn’t trust anyone will find it harder to succeed.
While low trusters avoid being duped they also miss out on potential opportunities. High trusters, on the other hand, get the best of both worlds: they frequently spot when someone is lying to them, and they are able to take social risks earlier in the relationship and so can reap the rewards, whether social or financial.
People react to ideas they find offensive by reasserting familiar structures of meaning.
People react to ideas they find offensive by reasserting familiar structures of meaning.
The human mind is always searching for meaning in the world. It’s one of the reasons we love stories so much: they give meaning to what might otherwise be random events.
From stories emerge characters, context, hopes and dreams, morals even. Using simple structures, stories can communicate complex ideas about the author’s view of the world and how it works, often without the reader’s knowledge.
And when stories embody values in which we don’t believe, we tend to reject them. But, according to a new study published in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, it goes further than just rejection, psychologically we push back against the challenge, reasserting our own familiar structures of meaning.
In their research Proulx et al. (2010) used two stories that illustrate divergent views of the world to explore how people react to offensive ideas.
The Tortoise and the Hare
The first story was Aesop’s fable The Tortoise and the Hare. I’m sure you know it (if not, it’s here) so I’ll cut straight to one of its morals: if you keep plugging away at something, like the tortoise, you’ll eventually get there, even if you’re obviously outmatched by those around you.
Another interpretation is that the hare loses the race because he is overconfident. Either way, both the hare and tortoise get what they deserve based on how they behave. This is the way we like to think the world works: if you put in the effort, you’ll get the reward. If not, you won’t. The lazy, overconfident hare always loses, right?
An Imperial Message
Quite a different moral comes from the second piece the researchers used: a (very) short story by Franz Kafka called ‘An Imperial Message’. In this story a herald, sent out by the Emperor, is trying to deliver an important message to you. But although he is strong and determined, no matter how hard he tries, he will never deliver it (you can read the full story here).
Contrary to Aesop’s fable, Kafka is reminding us that effort, diligence and enthusiasm are often not rewarded. Sometimes it doesn’t matter if we do or say the right things, we won’t get what we want.
In many ways Kafka’s story is just as true as Aesop’s fable, but it is a much less palatable truth. Aesop’s fable seems to make sense to us while Kafka’s story doesn’t, it feels empty and absurd. Consequently we’d much rather hold on to Aesop’s fable than we would Kafka’s depressing tale.
Unconsciously threatening
These two stories were used by Proulx et al. to test how people reacted firstly to a safe, reassuring story and, secondly, to a story that contains a threat to most people’s view of the world. They thought that in response to Kafka’s story people would be unconsciously motivated to reaffirm the things in which they do believe. In their first experiment the researchers used measures of participant’s cultural identity to test this affirmation.
Twenty-six participants were given Aesop’s advert for hard work and another 26 were given Kafka’s more pessimistic tale. As predicted participants who read Kafka’s story perceived it as a threat to the way they viewed the world. They reacted to this threat by affirming their cultural identities more strongly than those who had read Aesop’s fable, which didn’t challenge their world-view.
In other words the participants in this study were pushing back against Kafka’s story by reaffirming their cultural identity.
Absurd comedy
In two more studies Proulx et al. addressed a couple of criticisms of their first study: that participants might have found Kafka’s story (1) too unfair and (2) too unfamiliar. So, in a second study they used a description of a Monty Python sketch which participants weren’t told was supposed to be a joke. In the third study they used Magritte’s famous absurdist painting of a bowler-hatted gentleman with a big green apple in front of his face.
The idea of using absurdist stimuli like Monty Python and the Magritte painting is that, like Kafka’s short story, they challenge our settled perceptions of the world.
The research backed up this idea. Both Python and Magritte produced the same counter-reaction in people, leading them to restate values in which they believed. Similar but non-absurd stimuli didn’t have the same effect.
Instead of using cultural identity, though, the researchers measured notions of justice and need for structure. Participants reacted to the meaning threat implicit in Python by handing out a larger notional punishment to a lawbreaker. Here the threat of the absurd caused participants to re-affirm their belief in justice.
In the third study participants reacted to the meaning threat of the Magritte painting by expressing a greater need for structure. They were suddenly craving meaning; something, anything that makes sense, instead of this bowler-hatted man with an apple in front of his face.
Absurd truth
What this research underlines is that we push back against threats to our world-views by reasserting structures of meaning with which we are comfortable.
The researchers measured cultural identities, ideas of justice and a generalized yearning for meaning, but they probably would have found the same results in many other areas, such as politics, religion or any other strongly held set of beliefs.
When there’s a challenge to our established world-view, whether from the absurd, the unexpected, the unpalatable, the confusing or the unknown, we experience a psychological force pushing back, trying to re-assert the things we feel are safe, comfortable and familiar. That’s a shame because stories like Kafka’s contain truths we’d do well to heed.
Experimental participants told they were wearing fake designer sunglasses twice as likely to cheat on a test.
Participants told they were wearing fake designer sunglasses twice as likely to cheat on a test.
The line between real and fake has never been so blurred.
In the cinema, on television, in the newspapers, in public life: can we tell what’s real and what’s fake and does it matter? Perhaps authenticity is more important now that so much can be faked so easily? Maybe the psychological costs of inauthenticity are greater than we might imagine?
A fascinating new study published in the journal Psychological Science hints at an answer by examining the effects of wearing fake designer sunglasses on the self (Gino et al., 2010).
The counterfeit self
Whether we consciously acknowledge it or not, part of the reason we buy certain goods is because of the message it sends to other people about our status. Counterfeiters exploit this by producing goods which send the same message at a fraction of the cost; effectively telling other people that we are richer than we really are.
As long as they are good fakes, other people won’t know any different. Even so,
“Although the wearer intends them to signal positive traits, wearing counterfeits can in fact send a negative signal to the self.”
So Gino et al. wondered if this has consequences for the self, like an increase in unethical behaviour.
To test this out four experiments were carried out in which participants were given designer sunglasses and told in some conditions they were real and in other conditions fake—actually they were always real.
The results showed that, when told the sunglasses were fake, people behaved in more unethical ways than when told they were real. In one experiment, those wearing sunglasses they were told were authentic cheated on a task 30% of the time, while those told they were fake cheated 71% of the time.
People even became more cynical:
“…participants who believed they were wearing fake sunglasses interpreted other people’s behavior as more dishonest, considered common behaviors to be less truthful, and believed that others would be more likely to behave unethically.”
Less authentic
In a final experiment the mechanism at work was tested. This suggested that people did feel less authentic when wearing the fake sunglasses, and this led to more unethical behaviour, which came as a surprise:
“…when we asked a separate set of students [..] to predict the impact of counterfeits, they were unaware of the consequences for ethical behavior.”
So it seems for designer clothes, far from shrugging off inauthenticity, people sending fake signals about their wealth to others make themselves feel fake, with negative consequences for their behaviour.
This study could well have been commissioned by Gucci, Armani or any other brand (it wasn’t), but still it raises the question of whether these types of findings would extend into areas of everyday life unrelated to branding. Perhaps in general faking it cues feelings of inauthenticity and consequently unethical behaviour? Given this research, I wouldn’t be surprised.
How to see yourself as others do: experiments suggest alternative to flawed intuitive technique.
How to see yourself as others do: experiments suggest alternative to flawed intuitive technique.
You and I can talk, we can reach out and touch each other on the arm and we can see each other, but we can never know exactly what’s going on in the other’s head.
It’s partly why psychological science is so hard and it’s why understanding how we are viewed by others is so hard.
Research shows that we normally try to work out how others see us by thinking about how we view ourselves, then extrapolating from that. The problem with this approach is that to varying degrees we all suffer from an ‘egocentric bias’: because we’re locked inside our own heads, we find it difficult to see ourselves objectively. In some ways all the information we have clouds our judgement.
Think abstract
In a new study published in Psychological Science, Eyal and Epley (2010) recommend using abstract thinking to get a better view of ourselves, as seen by others.
In one crucial experiment the researchers split 106 participants into two groups and asked them to judge how attractive they were to another person. The first group adopted the standard tactic of putting themselves in the other person’s shoes, while the second group were asked to imagine how they would be rated by the other person in several months’ time.
People trying to put themselves in the other person’s shoes were awful at the task. In fact there was no association between how they thought others would rate them and how they actually did rate them. It seems when trying to judge how attractive we are to others, putting ourselves in their shoes doesn’t work.
But, when participants thought about their future selves, a technique that encourages abstract thinking, suddenly people’s accuracy shot up. They weren’t spot on, but they did much better. A further experiment confirmed these findings in general evaluations, suggesting this effect wasn’t restricted to attractiveness.
Zoom out
The fine-grained, low-level way we tend to think of ourselves hinders us from understanding how others view us. You would think we would be able to judge how attractive we are to others – after all we’ve all got access to mirrors – but in reality we find it difficult. In some ways we are blinded by how much we know. Thinking about ourselves in the future, though, moves our mind to a more abstract level, allowing us to better see ourselves through others’ eyes.
Although not examined in this research, the technique of thinking abstractly is likely to work best for people we don’t know so well. On the other hand we are likely to have an accurate view of how our family or friends see us.
The yawning gap between the way we experience ourselves from the inside compared with how others see us is why we often have so much trouble working out how we are evaluated by others. When we look at ourselves, we can’t see the wood for the trees; thinking abstractly allows us to zoom out and get the big picture.
Experiments reveal that simple superstitions like lucky charms can improve motor and cognitive performance.
Experiments reveal that simple superstitions like lucky charms can improve motor and cognitive performance.
Professional athletes are particularly prone to superstitions, perhaps because so much rides on split-second timing, or what seems like luck.
Two dominant US sportsmen with superstitious behaviour are golfer Tiger Woods who always wears a red shirt on Tournament Sundays and basketball player Michael Jordan who wore the same blue underwear throughout his career.
We tend to think of this behaviour as irrational, despite feeling the pull of superstition ourselves (see: why rational people hate to tempt fate). New research published in Psychological Science, however, asks whether these superstitions are irrational if they work.
Damisch et al. (2010) wanted to see if simple superstitions like crossing your fingers or using a lucky charm improved performance on both motor and mental tasks. The answer was a rather surprising yes.
In the first experiment, 28 participants made, on average, 33% more 1m putts when handed a ball branded ‘lucky’ by experimenters (6.4 compared with 4.6 without).
In two further experiments the effect of participant’s lucky charms on both memory and puzzle-solving was tested. Once again participants performed better in the presence of their lucky charms.
Confidence boost
To see why these superstitions improved performance, the researchers measured their self-efficacy (roughly equivalent to self-confidence) and goal-setting. This suggested that,
“The increased levels of self-efficacy that result from activating a superstition lead to higher self-set goals and greater persistence in the performance task.”
In other words, the lucky charms appeared to be giving people the confidence to aim higher and keep trying. The belief, however tenuous, that there may be something to a particular superstition could help release nervous tension.
This may be because superstitions allow us the illusion of control in what is a scary, random world. Perhaps that’s why superstitious behaviours to bring good luck are so common: they can sometimes work.
Without self-forgiveness procrastination enters a vicious circle.
Without self-forgiveness procrastination can snowball.
People often dislike, criticise and put themselves down for their procrastination.
In a new study, though, Wohl et al. (2010) wondered if this self-blame may be counter-productive. By following 119 first-year students through two midterm examinations, the researchers tested whether self-forgiveness about procrastination before the first midterm was associated with less procrastination before the second midterm.
Although we tend to think that letting ourselves off easy will lead to more procrastination, Wohl et al. found the reverse:
“Forgiveness allows the individual to move past their maladaptive behaviour and focus on the upcoming examination without the burden of past acts to hinder studying.”
This may work because:
“…forgiving oneself for procrastinating has the beneficial effect of reducing subsequent procrastination by reducing negative affect associated with the outcome of an examination.”
Another way of thinking of this is in terms of approach and avoidance behaviours. Because we tend to avoid things that make us feel bad, pent up guilt about a task will make us avoid that task in the future. Self-forgiveness, though, may reduce guilt and so make us more likely to approach the task.
This explanation highlights the fact that we don’t just have emotional relationships with people, we also have them with tasks. Some tasks we like and look forward to like trusted old friends, while others feel more like muggers stealing away hours of our lives.
The design of this study doesn’t tell us how easy it is for those who are hard on themselves to begin exercising self-forgiveness because it only examined what participants did naturally. Unfortunately psychologists have little evidence about the process of self-forgiveness, they only know it’s ‘A Good Thing’.
Perhaps just knowing that self-forgiveness is healthy is beneficial. I hope for all our sakes it is.
Humans produce about 50 distinct types of smiles but there’s one distinction that really matters: between real and fake.
Humans produce about 50 distinct types of smiles but there’s one distinction that really matters: between real and fake.
If we can tell the people who are showing what they’re feeling from the people who are faking it, then we’ve got a really good indicator of who to trust and work with.
Decision-makers move away from the default after a delay.
Decision-makers move away from the default after a delay.
On May 6th 2010 British voters go to the polls to choose a new government. Pundits predict the closest result in years with every chance of a ‘hung Parliament’, where none of the major parties hold enough seats in Parliament to wield absolute power.
