Category: Social psychology

It is remarkably easy to disguise yourself — indeed, to make yourself look unrecognizable, research finds.

Simple disguises, like a new hairstyle and makeup, are surprisingly effective at making people unrecognizable, research finds.

Makeup, hair style and colour and even facial hair growth or removal can make someone difficult to recognise.

For the study, models were recruited and told to try and change their appearance — to look unrecognizable.

Hats and dark glasses were not allowed as these are prohibited in real-life security settings.

Here are some examples:

The results showed that disguises reduced people’s ability to spot the same person by 30 percent.

This was despite the fact that they were warned the target’s appearance may have changed.

Participants were only able to see through disguises when they knew the person well.

Dr Rob Jenkins, study’s co-author, said:

“We shouldn’t be complacent about deliberate disguise in criminal and security settings. When someone puts their mind to concealing their identity, it can be very effective.

Familiarity with the people who are disguising themselves improves accuracy.

When you are unfamiliar with a face you are easily fooled by superficial changes in hairstyle or colouration.

However, when you ‘know’ a face you tend to rely more on internal facial features — the eyes, nose and mouth — which are much harder to alter.”

Evasion is the best way to make yourself look unrecognizable

The most effective form of disguise, to make people look unrecognizable, was trying not to look like yourself.

This is known as an evasion disguise.

In comparison, impersonating someone else was not as effective.

Dr Eilidh Noyes, the study’s first author, said:

“With evasion disguise, you can change your appearance in any way you like.

With impersonation, you can only change your appearance in ways that resemble your target, so your options are much more constrained.

Deliberate disguise poses a real challenge to human face recognition.

The next step is to test automatic face recognition on the same tasks.”

The study was published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied (Noyes & Jenkins, 2019).

Beard psychology: what psychological effects does a beard have? Heavy vs light stubble vs clean shaven. All important questions answered!

If you’re having trouble telling men from women, here’s a clue.

Men are the ones with hair sprouting from their faces (alright more hair sprouting from their faces).

Some men attempt to cover up the effect of all those androgens by shaving off their beards.

Others prefer to send out manly signals in all directions (well, either that or they can’t be bothered to shave).

Who is right? What are the facts about beards everyone should know?

Here are four very important facts about beards.

1. Beards are attractive…or are they?

Whether or not beards are attractive to women is a big area of controversy in beard-related psychological research.

Some studies find that bearded men are more attractive to women than the clean-shaven, others not (e.g. Reed & Blunk, 1990; Muscarella & Cunningham, 1996).

The most recent research goes against both beards and being clean-shaven and is starting to show the benefits of stubble.

But do women prefer light stubble or heavy stubble?

The jury is still out, with one study suggesting light stubble (Neave & Shields, 2008) and another heavy stubble (Dixson & Brooks, 2013).

Just a matter of fashion?

Well, probably best for men to cover all bases by letting it grow through light to heavy stubble and into a full beard.

See what effect it has on the women in your life and adjust to taste.

It’s a social psychological experiment that’s easy to do and saves precious moments in the morning.

2. Fact about beards: increase age, social status and aggressiveness

Dixson and Vasey (2012) found that (European) women from New Zealand and Samoan Polynesians both thought that men with beards looked older and that they looked of higher social status.

On top of this, when men look angry and have a beard, they look even more angry than clean-shaven men.

Why not test this out by poking a bearded man with a stick.

How angry does he look?

Make sure to note down your results before being knocked unconscious.

Science is important.

3. Fact about beards and babies

Men with beards are good with babies, or at least that’s women’s perception according to Dixson and Vasey (2012).

This is a little mysterious given that beards are associated with masculinity and very masculine men are, on average, less likely to be good long-term bets.

But perhaps the beard as ‘good-daddy-signal’ operates through other variables.

Because men with beards look older and of higher social status, they are more likely to be able to provide for their offspring.

Or it could be, as Dixson and Vasey (2012) say, that it’s because they used pictures of bearded men who were smiling and this is a strangely potent combination.

Like a cage fighter baking a cake.

Or a fireman writing a poem.

You get the picture.

4. Fact about beards and fighting

Finally, let’s take an evolutionary perspective on the beard. What signal does it send?

Is it costly to produce in some way and therefore an ancient signal of good genes?

Perhaps.

Like a lion’s mane, beards may be a way of showing off.

Since one man can easily grab another’s beard in a fight, they could be a disadvantage.

So, any man with a long beard is saying: “I’m so good in a fight that even grabbing on to this beard won’t help you!”

(I’m not totally convinced by this argument, although the thought of men fighting by grabbing each other’s beards is inherently funny. You really don’t see enough beard-fights in movies nowadays do you?).

→ Read on: What A Hairy Chest Says About A Man’s Intelligence

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Teamwork is more important than ever — especially now that some of it has moved online.

Failures in teamwork have caused accidents in nuclear power stations, planes to crash and businesses to fail.

Many organisations are trying to do more with less by relying on the efficiency of teamwork.

However, a collection of individuals doesn’t become a team just because it’s a called ‘a team’.

There are a whole range of psychological processes that need to be nurtured in order for ‘teamwork to make the dream work’, as the saying goes.

While all teams are different, there are some universals that all teamwork need, or at least can benefit from.

Here is what psychologists have discovered over the decades:

1. Prioritise social skills for great teamwork

Surely if you want to build a fantastic group whether online or offline, you put the smartest people together?

Not necessarily.

According to research conducted by Woolley et al. (2010), highly performing groups need social sensitivity.

In their study, 699 people were observed working in groups of two to five.

They found that the intelligence of the group is…

“…not strongly correlated with the average or maximum individual intelligence of group members but is correlated with the average social sensitivity of group members…”

And this finding is not an isolated one.

The importance of social skills emerges in the research again and again.

So, it’s not about putting all the biggest brains together, it’s thinking about the social dynamic:

• Who will listen to others?
• Who will share criticism constructively?
• Who will have an open mind?
• Whose will back other people up?

Great teamwork requires great social skills.

Teamwork quote:

“If everyone is moving forward together, then success takes care of itself.” – Henry Ford

2. Mix genders in teams

Since women’s social skills tend, on average, to be a little stronger than men’s, including women is one way of prioritising social skills for better teamwork.

Woolley et al.’s study reached the same conclusion: teams which included women did better than men-only teams.

But, that doesn’t mean you should take it to the logical extreme and build women-only teams: it’s all about the mix.

For example, Hoogendoorn et al. (2011) found that teams with equal gender mixes outperformed male-only and female-only groups in a business exercise.

Similarly, this Credit Suisse Research Institute report found that companies with at least some female board members have better share price performance than those that are men-only.

So, it makes sense to mix up the genders for effective teamwork.

Teamwork quote:

“A diverse mix of voices leads to better discussions, decisions, and outcomes for everyone.” — Sundar Pichai

3. Build trust for better teamwork

It’s very hard for people to work together effectively if they don’t trust each other — and this can be even harder online.

They also have to appear trustworthy to others or it may be difficult for them to do their job.

Teams that appear more trustworthy (hopefully because they are!) have been shown to perform better when negotiating with other groups (Naquin & Kurtzberg, 2009).

After all, would you do business with a team you don’t trust?

Not if you can avoid it.

The problem is that in groups people perceive the trustworthiness of the group by assessing the least trustworthy member.

So, in terms of trustworthiness, one bad apple really can spoil the bunch.

Teamwork quote:

“Teamwork begins by building trust. And the only way to do that is to overcome our need for invulnerability.” – Patrick Lencioni

4. Build teamwork with humour

If group members don’t seem to trust each other, then perhaps it’s humour that’s missing.

One study by Professor William Hampes has found that people whose sense of humour is stronger are rated more trustworthy by others (Hampes, 1999).

Similarly, when teamwork is strong, people start joking around together and will tend to talk to each other outside work.

Humour can be a signal that groups are getting along and can even help create that buzz that makes some group’s teamwork so effective.

Humour has all sorts of benefits including reducing stress, boosting creativity, communication and team cohesiveness (Romero & Pescosolido, 2008).

Some studies have even found that humour can increase teamwork performance and the effectiveness of leadership.

It has to be the right type of humour though—not (all) put-downs.

Teamwork quote:

“If you can laugh together, you can work together.” – Robert Orben

5. Mix introverts and extroverts

We tend to think of the extroverts as superior at teamwork: they mix better, pipe up more in meetings and generally seem to be getting on with others more smoothly.

But introverts have their place in effective teamwork as well.

Introverts certainly don’t blow their own trumpets and aren’t often noticed at the outset, perhaps even more so online, yet eventually the group comes to value them.

That’s what Bendersky and Shah (2012) found in their study of introverts and extroverts working together.

In general, as the team evolves, extroverts do worse than people expect and introverts do better.

The quiet ones can come through in the end to boost teamwork.

Teamwork quote:

“Great things in business are never done by one person; they’re done by a team of people.” – Steve Jobs

6. Define goals for effective teamwork

One of the greatest barriers to effective teamwork is pretty simple: they don’t know what the goal is.

This problem can be even worse when teamwork is carried out online.

A study of 500 managers and professionals in 30 different companies found that it was an unclear vision of the goal that was stopping them performing effectively.

But, it is not only goals that must be defined for good teamwork…

Teamwork quote:

“There is immense power when a group of people with similar interests gets together to work toward the same goals.” – Idowu Koyenikan

7. Define roles

OK, everyone knows the goal, but do they know what they’re supposed to be doing to achieve this goal?

It seems like a pretty basic step, yet it’s frequently unclear to team-members exactly what their role is.

Unclear roles become particularly problematic when the situation changes and teamwork has to adapt.

If the roles aren’t clear then each person doesn’t know what they’re supposed to be doing.

And that’s a recipe for disaster.

Teamwork quote:

“The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing.” – Walt Disney

8. Teams need a story

For people to work together effectively, in particular online, they need to know what the story is in a more general sense.

Where have we come from and where are we going?

It’s about more than just goals and roles, it’s about the assumptions we are using and the knowledge that we share (or don’t).

Psychologists sometimes refer to these ‘stories’ as mental models.

We construct these mental models of the world outside to help us navigate it and work out what to do next.

When the mental models of groups are better aligned, they perform better.

For example, Westli et al. (2010) found that when medical staff at a trauma centre shared mental models their performance was better, over and above specific teamwork skills.

People who share the same story are more likely to know what to do automatically, almost without thinking about it.

Psychologists call this implicit coordination and it is the key to great teamwork.

Teamwork quote:

“It is the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) that those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.” – Charles Darwin

9. Teamwork requires concise communication

When teams make mistakes, one of the most common reasons is that they failed to communicate effectively.

In complex environments, information will often be coming from many different sources online and off — this makes teamwork harder.

We’re all awash in information nowadays, or maybe drowning is a better word; emails get cc’d to everyone, and who knows what’s important?

Teams that perform best clearly communicate the most important information before they’ve even been asked for it and filter out the junk.

Teamwork quote:

“The kinds of errors that cause plane crashes are invariably errors of teamwork and communication.” — Malcolm Gladwell

10. Leadership enhances teamwork

Teamwork invariably benefits from good leadership.

Naturally it’s about motivation, structuring tasks, analysing what needs to be done, allocating goals and so on, but it’s more than that.

The best leaders are also trying to nurture their teams by addressing some of the soft skills above.

They are getting the mix of personnel right, encouraging concise communication, spreading the group’s story, using humour and building trust.

How do you do that? Well, leaders aren’t all born, some are made.

So you can learn the right way (How To Be a Great Leader) and the wrong way (7 Reasons Leaders Fail).

Teamwork quote:

“Leadership is about making others better as a result of your presence and making sure that impact lasts in your absence.” — Sheryl Sandberg

→ This post draws on work published by Salas et al. (2000)

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Opening umbrellas indoors – why do even the most rational people have superstitious instincts?

Superstition means beliefs or practices that are false or irrational, including magic, astrology, luck and fortune telling.

For example, put your rational hat on, if you will, and consider these questions:

• Will leaving your umbrella at home make it more likely to rain?
• Can simply pointing out an athlete’s run of success, ‘jinx’ them?
• Does swapping your lottery ticket make you less likely to win the jackpot?

My head gives me the same answer to all these questions: no.

I don’t believe in fate so it’s not possible to tempt it.

And yet I get a muffled message – call it instinct or call it superstition – from the depths of my mind about how deeply I would regret it if it did actually rain, my team lost or my (old) ticket won the lottery.

It would be as though I had tempted the gods and been punished for my arrogance.

Psychologists Jane Risen and Thomas Gilovich were intrigued by just how many otherwise rational people seem to hold superstitious beliefs, and what causes them.

In their research, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, they wanted to find out if people really do believe that negative outcomes tend to follow actions that tempt fate.

And, if so, what psychological processes are responsible for this strange superstition.

Could it be that both rationality and instinct have some role to play?

Superstitious about tempting fate

First, Risen and Gilovich wanted to see whether a (presumably) reasonably intelligent bunch of Cornell University students thought tempting fate was bad luck.

Sixty-two students were approached randomly on campus and told about a scenario where a fictional ‘Jon’ had applied to Stanford University.

Jon’s mother, being confident in his ability, sends him a Stanford t-shirt.

Participants then read either one of these two endings to the story:

1. Jon wears it while he’s waiting for the decision from Stanford, thereby tempting fate (gods are angered).
2. Jon stuffs the t-shirt in the drawer, not tempting fate (gods are mollified).

Participants were asked to rate his chances of being offered a place on a scale of 1 to 10.

People told he’d stuffed the t-shirt in the drawer responded that his chances were an average of 6 out of 10 – seems reasonable given there’s little other information provided.

But when Jon tempted fate people only rated his chances at 5 out of 10, a full point lower.

On average, then, this sample of Cornell University students believed tempting fate can increase the chances of a negative outcome.

This is surprising given that these students probably consider themselves intelligent and rational human beings.

Nevertheless a second experiment backed up this finding with a further 120 students.

It also tested an alternative explanation for the results: that participants were not reporting what they thought would happen, but what they wanted to happen.

No support was found for this alternative explanation suggesting participants really were displaying superstitious attitudes.

Are negative outcomes more accessible?

Next, Risen and Gilovich wanted to find out the reason for people’s superstitious behaviour.

They thought it might be because negative outcomes come to mind very easily.

To test this a further 211 participants were shown the start of 12 stories in some of which people tempted fate, and in others they didn’t.

They were then shown the ending of these stories and asked to indicate as quickly as possible whether it was ‘logical’.

Half of the stories were not logical – for example the main character changed or the topic was completely different – while the other half were logical.

Whether or not the endings were logical, though, was a bit of a red herring for the participants.

The experimenters weren’t so much interested in people getting the answer right, but in how quickly they did so.

Risen and Gilovich thought that if negative outcomes were more accessible when people tempted fate, then participants should correctly respond more quickly to those scenarios in which negative outcomes did actually follow tempting fate.

And that’s exactly what they found.

When people saw the outcome which didn’t ‘punish’ the characters in the story for tempting fate, they were slower to respond by almost half a second.

This suggested the negative outcome was more accessible so that participants were quicker to respond when the characters had tempted fate.

A further study confirmed that there was a causal link between people thinking negative outcomes were more likely and their accessibility.

Superstitions operate unconsciously

In many ways, these are strange findings.

In an age when many of us claim to be rational and free of superstition, it seems we still have some quite mysterious and irrational beliefs about how the universe works.

This naturally raises the question of what is going on here.

So, in a final study the experimenters examined the psychological process that might be responsible for this connection between tempting fate and negative outcomes.

They hypothesised that the connection is due to automatic, associative processes which occur outside of conscious awareness.

These instinctually create the link between tempting fate and negative outcomes.

To test this idea they carried out an experiment similar to those before.

This time, though, in some conditions participants were placed under ‘cognitive load’ (i.e. they were given something else effortful to do at the same time).

The results showed that when under cognitive load people were even more likely to behave as though tempting fate leads to negative outcomes.

The experimenters argue that they successfully disrupted the rational, deliberate thinking processes which were trying to tell participants that tempting fate is superstitious rubbish.

Consequently, people were more likely to rely on their intuition – but it’s these fast automatic processes which tend to conjure up negative visions of the future, make people superstitious.

In effect, the extra task they were given limited their ability to think rationally and override their superstitious instincts.

Cognitive processing: fast versus slow

This explanation of the roots of superstition is built on the now popular idea in psychology that many cognitive processes run at two levels:

• Associative processing: a fast, parallel processing mode characterised by spreading activation based on memory. This type of processing occurs outside focal awareness.
• Reasoning: a slow, serial type of processing that occurs within focal awareness and requires an active effort.

Our superstitions (‘don’t tempt fate!’) come from the fast, associative, parallel processing part of the mind, while our rational, logical side comes from the (relatively) slow, deliberate processing (‘come on, there’s no such thing as fate!’).

Rationally we know it is no more likely to rain if we don’t take our umbrella, but our mind can’t help reminding us how bad we’ll feel if we tempt fate.

Roots of superstition

What this research demonstrates beautifully is how easy it is for superstitions like tempting fate to be formed.

We absorb superstitions from around us, especially vigilant for their occurrence and reinforced by any events that fit the pattern, conveniently forgetting events that don’t fit.

Then the fast, automatic processes of our minds automatically anticipate the regret we might feel in the future, trapping us in a reinforcing loop.

Risen and Gilovich point to the importance of culture in this process: our shared cultural imagination provides a major source of superstitions about tempting fate.

But we also each have a private menagerie of superstitions, sometimes manufactured from only the tiniest fragments of personal experience.

Whatever their original source, all manner of negative events can find fertile breeding ground in our already suspicious minds.

This can give even the most rational person pause for thought while the mind’s rational systems work to overcome its intuitive superstition.

Given this model it’s a miracle that human societies have escaped as far as they have from the age of superstition.

Or perhaps we haven’t come that far at all and our age-old superstitions are now just wrapped in cloaks of rationality?

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Consumerism promises happiness through purchasing, but psychologists find six reasons why it is unsatisfying and how to fix it.

Consumerism is the idea that the consumption of goods is economically desirable.

Some would go further and say that consumerism means people’s happiness relies on acquiring goods — that people need to buy things in order to be happy.

Not everyone uses the word consumerism with this meaning.

Consumerism has also become a pejorative term since the 1970s, used to mean a frivolous and selfish collecting of products which has little regard for its effect on society or the environment.

The psychology of consumerism

Whatever the political angles on consumerism or anti-consumerism, psychologists have focused on some of its real-world effects on our happiness.

In the first place, everyone knows that buying stuff can be disappointing.

After swallowing the hype, checking out the options and trolling for bargains, finally you’ve got it; your brand new whatever-it-is.

Before long, though, the excitement fades.

Your whatever-it-is isn’t so great any more.

They’ve brought out a newer model with more features and anyway you’ve seen it cheaper elsewhere.

It’s happened to all of us.

Psychological research on consumerism tells us that this disappointment is particularly pronounced when people buy things like electronic devices or watches, compared with experiences like vacations or concert tickets (see: experiences beat possessions).

A study by Carter and Gilovich (2010) explores six reasons that material purchases are less satisfying than experiential purchases, and what we can do about it.

1. Consumerism encourages unfavourable comparisons

In their first study on consumerism, participants recalled past experiential and material purchases costing at least $50 and were asked to rate their satisfaction with them.

People were consistently more satisfied with their experiential purchases compared with their material purchases.

The reason is that experiential purchases are difficult to compare.

The band you went to see on that wet Tuesday after work on the spur of the moment is likely to be literally incomparable.

On the other hand, phones are much easier to compare: one has more memory while another looks prettier.

When it’s easy to compare two things, like salaries, dissatisfaction isn’t far away because there’s always someone who earns more than you or, in this case, has a better phone than you.

And if they don’t have it now, they will in six months because that’s the nature of consumerist culture.

2. Consumerism: the research is exhausting

There’s a crucial difference in the way we make decisions about material and experiential purchases, as revealed by the second study on consumerism.

When people choose material purchases they tend to use a strategy psychologists call ‘maximising’.

This means comparing all possible options.

But, because consumerism means we live in a world of endless choices, maximising takes a long time and is hard work; so people often end up irritated and unsatisfied even when they chose the best possible option.

However, when people choose experiential purchases they tend to use a strategy psychologists call ‘satisficing’.

This means setting a minimum standard for a purchase then choosing the first option that fits the bill.

Studies show that this leads to greater satisfaction with purchases and people are relatively untroubled by the existence of slightly better options.

Although maximising seems the better strategy, paradoxically it leaves people less satisfied than settling (sorry ‘satisficing’, ugh).

3. Finding it cheaper after purchasing is depressing

Consumerism means that it’s not just before purchasing that the availability of endless possibilities is problematic.

After purchasing, consumerism causes problems as well.

Imagine you buy a new electronic gadget costing $1,000.

After you’ve bought it, do you ever go back to look at the other options, just in case?

Would that change if it was a vacation you’d bought instead at the same price?

When researchers simulated the situation they found that, having bought a gadget, participants were more likely to continue investigating the alternatives than if they’d bought a vacation, despite not being explicitly asked to do so.

We automatically re-evaluate material purchases after we’ve made them.

In comparison, decisions about experiential purchases, once made, are not revisited and so we have less opportunity for disappointment.

4. Consumerism always produces new options

It’s always the way: right after you buy it they bring out a new, improved model, or introduce better options.

The nature of consumerism and consumerist culture means there are always plenty of new ‘better’ options.

When Carter and Gilovich simulated this situation in the lab, participants reported that the new option effect was more disturbing when buying a watch, a pair of jeans or a laptop than when buying a holiday, movie ticket or fancy dining experience.

Once again experiential beat material purchases.

5. The reduced price effect and 6. A cheaper rival

Like the introduction of new options, retailers also have a habit of dropping the price right after you buy something — that is the nature of consumerism.

Worse, the next day you spot it cheaper somewhere else.

Carter and Gilovich found that people were more troubled about the reduced price of laptops and watches than they were about cheaper holidays or meals out.

Similarly, participants reported being jealous of rivals who’d paid less for material purchases at another retailer, but weren’t so jealous when it came to experiential purchases.

Making consumerism more satisfying

Since consumerism is clearly with us to stay, this all begs the question of how we can be more satisfied with material purchases, other than simply trying to avoid all the above.

Carter and Gilovich wondered if it comes down to how we view our consumerist purchases.

Take music for example.

Buying music can be viewed as both an experiential and a material purchase in consumerism; it’s an object (even if digital), and it’s the experience of listening to the music: where you are, how it makes you feel and what you’re doing at the time.

Perhaps thinking experientially can help us avoid the disappointments inherent in consumerism?

In their last experiment on consumerism, the researchers encouraged half their participants to think of music as a material purchase and the other half as an experiential purchase.

They were then told the price had been reduced.

Sure enough participants who were thinking in experiential terms were less bothered by missing out on a bargain and therefore likely to be more satisfied with their purchase.

This experiment on consumerism suggests that thinking of material purchases in experiential terms helps banish dissatisfaction.

Try thinking of jeans in terms of where you wore them or how they feel, the phone in terms of how it changes your mood or outlook, even your laptop in terms of all the happy hours spent reading your favourite blog.

By thinking experientially we can make more of what we already have and ward off the invidious comparisons that can make the treadmill of consumerist culture so unsatisfying.

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Psychologists are particularly interested in why people have these sorts of beliefs in telepathy and ESP.

One common explanation is that people’s natural desire to make sense of what is a fundamentally random and confusing world is so strong that patterns are seen where there are none.

It’s like when we look at a visual illusion or watch a good magician: we’re easily tricked.

How to make people believe in telepathy

So what kinds of situations make us more prone to this magical thinking?

This is the question that inspired Fred Ayeroff and Robert P. Abelson to carry out a classic social psychology experiment on a group of students at Yale University in the 1970s (Ayeroff & Abelson, 1976).

They wanted to see if a simple experimental manipulation could be used to get people to act as though they believed in telepathy.

For their experiment they used 32 participants and a fairly standard set-up for a parapsychological ESP study.

One participant, the sender, was sent to a soundproof room and told to transmit a series of images telepathically.

The other participant, the receiver, was sent to another soundproof room and told to get ready to receive (this was the 70s remember!).

There were two experimental manipulations:

1. Good vibe. Some receivers and senders were sat down before the telepathy started to ‘practice’ together. This was designed to get a ‘good vibe’ going between sender and receiver.
2. Control. Some senders and receivers were allowed to choose which, from a set of cards, they actually used to transmit telepathically.

Then, once the experiment got under way, both sender and receiver were asked to say how confident they were that they had successfully transmitted (or received) each card.

Participants weren’t told how they had done on this apparent test of telepathy.

No evidence of telepathy, but something else…

Looking at the results, Ayeroff and Abelson found no support for telepathy.

The participants had done no better than chance.

But, when they looked at how confident the participants had been about their telepathic powers, they did find an interesting effect.

When participants had not been allowed to choose the cards nor allowed to speak to each other before the experiment, their confidence in their performance was absolutely accurate: they predicted they wouldn’t be able to beat chance.

But, when they spoke to each other first, and when they chose the cards to transmit and receive, their confidence in telepathy shot way up to almost three times that expected by chance (see graph above showing results for the 4 conditions).

Suddenly, participants were acting as though they had been converted into believers simply by chatting to their telepathic partner and choosing the cards.

Believers

So, no evidence of ESP via telepathy, but evidence of the kinds of social situations in which people can be induced to believe in telepathy.

1. When there is a good vibe between people they are more likely to believe that ESP or telepathy is possible.
2. When wannabe telepaths have control over the situation they are more likely to believe telepathy or ESP is possible.

What this experiment shows is how remarkably easy it is to (effectively) turn people into believers in telepathy.

This makes it much clearer why people have a tendency to grasp at straws when trying to make sense of what is a random and chaotic world.

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Playing hard to get means being coy and vague about your interest to keep a potential partner keen. This can work if it is done correctly.

Back in the 60s and 70s, before the sexual revolution had really taken hold, the standard dating advice for women was playing hard to get.

In some quarters it still is.

Social scientists in the 1960s accepted the cultural lore that women could increase their desirability by playing hard to get.

When interviewed, men seemed to agree: they said that women playing hard to get were probably more popular, beautiful and had better personalities.

Unfortunately every time psychologists used an experiment to test the idea that playing hard to get is a good dating strategy, their results didn’t make any sense.

At least not until 1973 when Elaine Walster and colleagues at the University of Wisconsin finally hit upon a method that teased out the subtleties (Walster et al., 1973).

Here’s what they did.

Playing hard to get the right way

Single young men were given a folder containing details of five fictitious single women with quite similar descriptions.

They were told the computer had matched them and that three of the women had already seen and rated their own details and those of four other rival suitors.

This was all a ruse, however, to set up a series of experimental conditions related to how hard to get each of the women appeared to be.

Each woman fell into one of the following categories:

• Easy to get: had apparently given high ratings to all five men, including the participant.
• Selectively playing hard to get: liked the participant but not the other four men.
• Always playing hard to get: didn’t like any of the men, including the participant.
• No information: there was no information provided about two of the women.

Each man saw the women’s ratings, including of themselves, then chose one to date.

One woman was far and away more popular than the others, and it had nothing to do with the small variations in their descriptions:

• Easy to get: 5
• Selectively hard to get: 42
• Always hard to get: 6
• No information: 11 and 7 for the two women for which no information was provided.

The woman who was apparently selectively playing hard to get, i.e. easy for you but hard for everyone else was the runaway winner for the men.

Not only that but men thought the selectively hard to get woman would have all the advantages of the easy to get woman with none of the drawbacks of the hard to get woman.

They thought she would be popular, warm and easy-going, but not demanding and difficult.

Being selective is most attractive

We have to be careful what conclusions we draw from this experiment: crucially it didn’t involve anyone meeting face to face, or address what happens when men play hard to get, plus it only looked at heterosexual matches.

But, a subsequent study on speed-dating has also found that showing selective interest is the best strategy (Eastwick et al., 2007).

Despite these drawbacks, once you’ve heard the results it’s difficult to imagine how it could have turned out any other way—after all, everyone wants to feel special.

So, this experiment suggests that playing hard to get only works in the sense that it signals selectivity.

But for the person you are after, you should be easy to get because otherwise they’ll assume you’re hard work.

Forbidden fruit

The Roman poet Ovid wrote around 2,000 years ago:

“Easy things nobody wants, but what is forbidden is tempting.”

In the light of this experiment we can remix Ovid’s quote to:

“Easy things are tempting, but only if they are forbidden to others.”

There’s a maxim to live by.

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Self-awareness is being in touch with one’s own feelings, behaviours and traits.

High levels of self-awareness are often linked to high emotional intelligence.

However, many people seem blissfully ignorant of certain aspects of their own personalities.

Examples of lacking self-awareness

Take an everyday example of lack self-awareness: there are some infuriating people who are always late for appointments.

A few of these people explain it by saying they are ‘laid-back’, while others seem unaware that they’re always late.

For laid-back people, their lateness is a part of their personality, there is self-awareness and presumably they are not worried about appearing unconscientious.

For the unaware it’s almost as if they don’t realise they’re always late — they lack self-awareness.

How is that possible?

Self-schema theory

It’s probably because they’ve never noticed or paid attention to the fact that they are always late so they never learn to think of themselves as lacking conscientiousness.

Or, so suggests a psychological theory describing how we think about ourselves called self-schema theory.

This theory says that we have developed ‘schemas’, like internal maps of our personalities, which we use to understand and explain our current and future behaviour to ourselves, e.g. I’m always on time for meetings so I’m a conscientious person.

These schemas, though, can cause problems for people’s self-awareness.

Schemas and self-awareness

However, schema theory also suggests that these maps have uncharted areas, leaving people with certain blind spots in their self-knowledge.

This aspect of self-schemas was investigated in a classic social psychology study by Professor Hazel Markus (Markus, 1977) who examined not conscientiousness, but whether people thought they had independent or dependent personalities.

To do this she gave 48 female participants questionnaires which assessed their self-perceived independence.

It asked whether they were individualists or conformists and whether they were leaders or followers.

From their answers the women were sorted into three groups:

1. independents,
2. dependents,
3. and a third group that showed no clear pattern.

This third group that showed no clear pattern was labelled ‘aschematic’, i.e. having no schema about independence or otherwise — for one reason or another it was a hole in their self-awareness.

Crucially, though, this group was only arrived at after discarding the people who thought the dependence/independence dimension was important but happened to think they were independent in some situations but not in others.

Only those who truly didn’t care either way were labelled aschematic.

So, there were some people who appeared not to notice or even care about their independence (or otherwise) while others did notice it.

Why some lack self-awareness

But Markus wanted to see if people were just saying these things, or whether they actually behaved as though they were true.

To find out she invited the same participants back to the lab a few weeks later to give them a few more tests.

This time she flashed up words on a screen, some of which were related to being independent, some dependent and some neither.

It emerged that participants who had said they were independent endorsed more words associated with being independent and did so quicker.

Dependents did the same with words related to being dependent but those who were aschematic showed no preference either way.

In further tests those who had identified themselves as independent remembered more examples of independent behaviour as well as resisting an experimental suggestion that they weren’t independent.

The same pattern was seen with the dependents.

The aschematics, however, could remember few examples demonstrating either dependence or independence and could easily be swayed by experimental suggestion towards believing they were dependent or independent.

It seemed they simply hadn’t been paying any attention to situations which marked them out as either dependent or independent people.

In other words, some people lack self-awareness.

Building self-awareness

What these results confirm is that the three groups of participants did actually think in different ways about the idea of independence.

Some believed they were independent, some not and the others didn’t know or, apparently, care.

In some ways the aschematics are the most fascinating category because they are the people that seemed not to realise whether or not they were independent.

And we all have these aschematic areas in our self-knowledge, traits which are blind spots to us but are perfectly obvious to others.

Unfortunately, the only way for us to find out is to ask other people, but this may prove difficult or embarrassing.

Still, while our hidden traits might be negative, they might also be positive: people are sometimes surprisingly unaware of their charm, warmth or conscientiousness.

Whether or not we pluck up the courage, this research reveals the fascinating and unnerving idea that some aspects of our own personalities may be completely mysterious to us only because we never bothered to take any notice of them.

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