Category: Social psychology

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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Media bias seems greater when you hold stronger beliefs about the subject, psychological research finds.

Media bias is a bias among journalists and news producers that affects which news stories they report and how they choose to report them.

Some of the most common ways in which media bias occurs are:

• Mainstream bias: the bias to report the same stories other outlets are reporting.
• Corporate bias: reporting stories that please the owners of media.
• Statement bias: when coverage is biased either for or against particular issues or actors (for example, political coverage).

There are many more types of media bias.

Media bias certainly exists in the media: in fact it would be a miracle if it were permanently and perfectly balanced, that isn’t what this article is about.

Instead, this is about how you and I perceive the presence or absence of bias in the media.

This study, conducted in the 1980s, helps to explain a lot of the heat and light that gets produced by those commenting on media bias across the political spectrum, including the remarkably vitriolic outpourings often seen in the comment sections of newspaper websites and across the internet.

Media bias and the Beirut massacre

Robert P. Vallone and colleagues from Stanford University invited 144 Stanford undergrads who held a variety of views on the continuing Arab-Israeli conflict to watch some of the news coverage of the Beirut massacre (Vallone et al., 1985).

The Beirut massacre was the killing of between 328 and 3,500 Palestinian and Lebanese civilians by Lebanese militia forces in September 1982.

At the time the story received huge media coverage around the world with much speculation about whether Israeli forces had allowed it to happen (a subsequent commission held the Israeli government indirectly responsible).

Some of the participants recruited for the study were moderate in their initial views, others were specifically recruited from both the pro-Arab and pro-Israeli student associations.

Each was asked for their views about the conflict, its history and where their sympathies lay.

Here’s what they found:

• 68 were pro-Israeli,
• 27 were pro-Arab,
• 49 had mixed feelings.

All the participants then watched a series of news segments taken from US networks (NBC, ABC and CBS).

Afterwards they were asked to rate whether overall it was for or against Israel.

They used a scale of 1 (heavy pro-Arab bias) to 9 (heavy pro-Israel bias) where a rating of 5 was fair and impartial.

The results

Here are the average ratings for the news coverage from each group:

• Pro-Israeli: 2.9 (perceived a marked pro-Arab bias)
• Neutral: 3.8 (perceived a slight pro-Arab bias)
• Pro-Arab: 6.7 (perceived a marked pro-Israeli bias)

As you can see the pro-Israeli participants thought the news reports were biased against Israel while the pro-Arab participants thought the news reports were biased against Arabs.

This is impressive because everyone was watching exactly the same news reports.

Even more surprising was that each thought that when someone neutral saw the coverage, it would persuade them to side with the opposite position.

Notice that those who claimed to be neutral thought the coverage had a slight pro-Arab bias.

This could be a hint of actual media bias or could be just an unacknowledged bias in those initially declaring themselves neutral.

Causes of the hostile media bias phenomenon

The study demonstrates what the authors call the ‘hostile media phenomenon’: people’s tendency to view news coverage about which they hold strong beliefs as biased against their own position.

There were two mechanisms at work here:

1. The truth is black and white: partisans generally thought that the truth about the Arab-Israeli debate was black and white. Any hint of shades of grey in the news reports was interpreted by partisans as bias towards the other side. In other words: any balanced report will seem biased to partisan viewers.
2. The news report was too grey: as well as thinking the Arab-Israeli issue was either black or white, partisans also perceived that the specific news report they watched was too grey.

Put simply: when we care about an issue, we tend not to notice all the points we agree with, and focus on the ones we don’t.

Admitting media bias

Whether the news actually is biased in one particular outlet about an issue that you care about can be very hard to quantify.

What we can say from this study is that people who care about a particular issue will tend to find media bias everywhere, whether or not it really exists.

Not only that but they are unlikely to admit this fact to themselves since this study, amongst others, also shows how remarkably resistant we are to admitting to our own biases, even when they are categorically demonstrated to us.

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The top five list of personal fears of Americans: public speaking is at number 5.

The first comprehensive survey of what Americans are afraid of has revealed that top of the list of personal fears is ‘walking alone at night’, not ‘public speaking’.

The full top 5 list of personal fears is:

1. Walking alone at night.
2. Becoming the victim of identity theft.
3. Safety on the internet.
4. Being the victim of a mass/random shooting.
5. Public speaking.

People in the Chapman University survey were asked separately about fear of crime, and the researchers were surprised by the results.

Dr Edward Day, who led this part of the study, said:

“What we found when we asked a series of questions pertaining to fears of various crimes is that a majority of Americans not only fear crimes such as, child abduction, gang violence, sexual assaults and others; but they also believe these crimes (and others) have increased over the past 20 years.

When we looked at statistical data from police and FBI records, it showed crime has actually decreased in America in the past 20 years.

Criminologists often get angry responses when we try to tell people the crime rate has gone down.”

Here is the percentage of people who thought different crimes were on the increase:

In fact, crime is decreasing in the United States:

Fear factors

Across the different types of fears, the researchers looked at what characteristics of individuals predicted fear.

Dr. Christopher Bader, one of the study’s authors, explained:

“Through a complex series of analyses, we were able to determine what types of people tend to fear certain things, and what personal characteristics tend to be associated with most types of fear.”

What emerged were two factors that most consistently predicted high levels of fear:

• Low levels of education.
• High levels of TV viewing.

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Self-deception research in psychology suggests people find it relatively easy to pull the wool over their own eyes, when motivated.

Self-deception, meaning lying to ourselves, seems like the last thing we should do.

Surely self-deception is counter-productive and full self-awareness should be the aim?

Like calmly and deliberately shooting yourself in the foot or taking a hot toasting fork and plunging it into your eye?

But look around and it’s not hard to spot the tell-tale symptoms of self-deception in other people.

So perhaps we are also practicing self-deception ourselves in ways we can’t clearly perceive?

But is that really possible and would we really believe the lies that we ‘told’ ourselves anyway?

That’s what Quattrone & Tversky (1984) explored in a classic social psychology experiment published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Examples of self-deception

Any study of self-deception is going to involve a fair amount of bare-faced lying, and this research was no different.

They recruited 38 students who were told they were going to take part in a study about the “psychological and medical aspects of athletics” — no mention of self-deception.

Not true, in fact the researchers were going to trick participants into thinking that how long they could submerge their arms in cold water was diagnostic of their health status, when really it showed just how open people are to self-deception.

This is how they did it.

The experiment

The participants were first asked to plunge their arms into cold water for as long as they could.

The water was pretty cold and people could only manage this for 30 or 40 seconds.

Then, participants were given some other tasks to do to make them think they really were involved in a study about athletics.

They had a go on an exercise bike and were given a short lecture about life expectancy and how it related to the type of heart you have.

They were told there were two types of heart:

• Type I heart: associated with poorer health, shorter life expectancy and heart disease.
• Type II heart: associated with better health, longer life expectancy and low risk of heart disease.

Half were told that people with Type II hearts (apparently the ‘better’ type) have increased tolerance to cold water after exercise while the other half that it decreased tolerance to cold water.

Except, of course, this was all lies only made up to make participants think that how long they could hold their arm under water was a measure of their health, with half thinking cold-tolerance was a good sign and half thinking it was a bad sign.

Now time for the test: participants had another go at putting their arms into the cold water for as long as they could.

The graph below shows the average results before and after all the blatant lying (in the name of science of course!):

As you can see, the experimental manipulation had a strong effect.

People who thought it was a sign of a healthy heart to hold their arms underwater for longer did just that, while those who believed the reverse all of a sudden couldn’t take the cold.

That’s all well and good, but were these people really lying to themselves or just the experimenters and did they believe those lies?

Results of the research

After the arm-dunking each participant was asked whether they had intentionally changed the amount of time they held their arms underwater.

Of the 38 participants, 29 denied it and 9 confessed, but not directly.

Many of the 9 confessors claimed the water had changed temperature.

It hadn’t of course, this was just a way for people to justify their behaviour without directly facing their self-deception.

All the participants were then asked whether they believed they had a healthy heart or not.

Of the 29 deniers, 60 percent believed they had the healthier type of heart.

However of the confessors only 20 percent thought they had the healthier heart.

What this suggests is that the deniers were more likely to be truly practicing self-deception and not just trying to cover up their a half-truth.

They really did think that the test was telling them they had a healthy heart.

Meanwhile, the confessors tried to tell a lie back to the experimenter (seems only fair!), but privately the majority acknowledged they were practicing self-deception.

Levels of self-deception

This experiment is neat because it shows the different gradations of self-deception, all the way up to its purest form, in which people manage to trick themselves hook, line and sinker.

At this level people think and act as though their incorrect belief is completely true, totally disregarding any incoming hints from reality.

What this study suggests is that for many people self-deception is as easy as pie.

Not only will many people happily lie to themselves if given a reason, but they will only look for evidence that confirms their comforting self-deception, and then totally believe in the lies they are telling themselves.

Explains a lot, don’t you think?

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Negotiation has two major pitfalls: when people do not communicate with each other and when they start using threats.

Negotiation is one of those activities we often engage in without quite realising it.

Negotiation doesn’t just happen in the boardroom, or when we ask our boss for a raise or down at the market, it happens every time we want to reach an agreement with someone.

This agreement could be as simple as choosing a restaurant with a friend, or deciding which TV channel to watch.

At the other end of the scale, negotiation or bargaining can affect the fate of nations.

Big-scale or small-scale, negotiation is a central part of our lives.

Understanding the psychological processes involved in negotiation can provide us with huge benefits in our everyday lives.

In a classic, award-winning series of studies, Morgan Deutsch and Robert Krauss investigated two central factors in negotiation: how we communicate with each other and how we use threats (Deutsch & Krauss, 1962).

To do this, they used a game which forces two people to negotiate with each other.

Although Deutsch and Krauss used a series of different conditions – nine in fact – once you understand the basic game, all the conditions are only slight variations.

So, imagine you were a clerical worker at the Bell Telephone Laboratories in the late 1950s and you’ve been asked to take part in a psychology study.

Every psychology study has a story, and this one revolves around two trucking companies…

Negotiation experiment 1: Keep on trucking

Before the experiment proper starts, the researcher explains that you’ll be playing a game against another participant.

In the game you will run a trucking company.

The object of the game is the same as a real trucking company: to make as much money as possible.

Like the real-life trucking company you have to deliver as many of your goods as possible to their destination in the shortest possible time.

But in this game you only have one starting point, one destination and one competitor.

It looks like a pretty simple game.

Here’s the catch.

The road map your one truck has to travel across presents you with a dilemma.

You are the ‘Acme’ trucking company and your fellow participant is the ‘Bolt’ trucking company, although both of you have an identical problem.

Have a look below.

[Deutsch & Krauss, 1962, p. 55]

As you’ll see there are two possible routes you can take from the start to your destination: the short and the long.

Remember, time is money, so the longer it takes you to get to your destination, the less profit you make, which is the aim of the game.

Unfortunately the short route has a major shortcoming: it is one-way.

Only one of you can travel down it at a time towards your destination.

It seems you’ll be forced to work out some agreement through negotiation with your unknown rival to share this one-way route so that you can both make money.

How you’ll do this is another mystery, though, as there is going to be no communication between the two of you during the experiment.

You are to be seated in a cubicle from where you’ll only be able to see the control box for your ‘truck’ and the experimenter.

Threatening gates

You are to be given one method of communication with your rival, albeit indirect communication.

Each of you controls a gate at your own end of the one-way road.

Your gate can be opened or closed whenever you pass through it.

This will be your threat.

It is reinforced by the experimenter that you are out to make as much money as you can for yourself – the other person’s profit is not a concern.

Once the experimenter sets you off, it soon becomes clear you’re not going to make much money at all.

In the first of 20 trials, both you and your rival shut your gates, forcing both trucks onto the alternative route.

This is 50% longer and means you make a loss on the trip as a whole.

In the second trial your trucks meet head-on travelling up the one-way road.

You both have to reverse, costing you time and money.

The rest of the trials aren’t much better.

Occasionally you make a profit on a trip but more often than not it’s a bust.

You spend more time on the long route or reversing than you do chugging happily along the main route making money.

At the end of the experiment, the researcher announces how much profit you made.

None.

In fact you made a crippling loss.

Perhaps trucking companies aren’t so easy to run.

Comparing threats

You find out later that you were in one of three experimental conditions.

The only differences in the other two conditions were that in one there were no gates at either end of the one-way road.

In the other there was only one active gate controlled by one player.

Before I tell you the results of the other two conditions, try to guess.

One condition, which you’ve taken part in, contained bilateral threat – you could both threaten each other.

One condition had unilateral threat – only one could threaten the other.

And the final condition had no threat at all.

What was the order of profit?

In fact it turns out that your condition, of bilateral threat, made the least profit when both participant’s scores were added up.

The next most profitable was the unilateral threat condition, while the most profitable overall was the no-threat condition.

Here’s the first rather curious result.

While the person who had the threat – control of the gate – in the unilateral condition did better than the person who didn’t, they were still better off, individually and collectively, than if they both had threats.

What this experiment is showing is that the availability of threats leads to worse outcomes to the extent that unilateral threat is preferable to bilateral threat to both parties.

Negotiation experiment 2: Lines of communication

But surely a little communication goes a long way?

You weren’t allowed to talk to the other participant in this experiment, so your trucks had to do the talking for you.

Bargaining is all about reaching a compromise through negotiation – surely this should help?

To test the effect of communication Deutsch and Krauss (1962) set up a second experiment which was identical in all respects to the first except participants were given headphones to talk to each other.

Here’s the next curious result: allowing the two participants to communicate with each other made no significant difference to the amount of money each trucking company made.

In fact the experimenters found no relationship between words spoken and money made.

In other words, those who communicated more did not manage to reach a better understanding with each other.

They did little negotiation.

Like the experimenters themselves, I find this result surprising.

Surely allowing people to communicate let’s them work out a way for them both to make money?

And yet this isn’t what happened in the experiment at all.

Instead it seems that people’s competitive orientation was stronger than their motivation to communicate.

On the other hand, perhaps something specific to the situation in this experiment is stopping people talking?

Participants in the second study reported that it was difficult to start talking to the other person, who was effectively a stranger.

As a result they were considerably less talkative than normal.

Could it be that it was this situational constraint that meant little talking, and therefore little bargaining was going on?

Nnegotiation experiment 3: Forced communication

Deutsch and Krauss decided to test the effect of forced communication in their third experiment.

Again the procedure is the same as last time but now participants are instructed that on each of the 20 trials they have to say something.

If they don’t talk on one of the trials they are gently reminded by the experimenter to do so.

They are told they can talk about whatever they like, as long as they say something.

The results finally showed some success for communication.

Performance in the one-gate (unilateral threat) condition came close to that achieved in the ‘no-threat’ condition (remember the no-threat condition has the best outcomes).

Forced communication didn’t have much effect on the ‘no-threat’ condition when compared with no communication, and neither did it improve the bilateral threat condition much.

It still seems that people are so competitive when they both have threats it’s very difficult to avoid both sides losing out.

In negotiation, threats cause resentment

The most surprising finding of this study is how badly people do under conditions of bilateral threat.

In this experiment not even forcing communication can overcome people’s competitive streaks.

Deutsch and Krauss provide a fascinating explanation for this.

Imagine your neighbour asks you to water their plants while they’re on holiday.

Socially, it looks good for you if you agree to do it.

On the other hand if they ask you to water their plants otherwise they’ll set their TV on full blast while they’re on holiday, it immediately gets your hackles up.

Suddenly you resent them.

Giving in when there is no threat is seen by other people as pro-social.

Duress, however, seems to make people dig in their heels.

Applying the brakes to negotiation

Before drawing some general conclusions from these studies, we should acknowledge the particular circumstances of this research.

Deutsch and Krauss’s experiment covers a situation in which negotiation is carried out under time pressure.

Recall that the longer participants take to negotiate, the less money they make. In real life, time isn’t always of the essence.

The present game also has a relatively simple solution: participants make the most profit if they share the one-way road. In reality, solutions are rarely that clear-cut.

Finally, our participants were not professional negotiators, they were clerical and supervisory workers without special training.

Real-life implications

Despite these problems the trucking game has the advantage of being what game theorists call a non-zero-sum game.

In other words if you win, it doesn’t automatically mean the other person loses.

When you total the final results, as you sometimes can in a financial sense, they don’t add to zero.

In real life many of the situations in which we find ourselves are of this nature.

Cooperation can open the way to more profit, in financial or other form, for both parties.

As a result the trucking game has clear implications for real life:

• Cooperative relationships are likely to be much more beneficial overall than competitive relationships. Before you go ‘duh!’, remember that increasing proportions of the world’s societies are capitalist. Deutsch and Krauss’s experiment clearly shows the friction caused by competitive relationships, such as those encouraged by capitalism. I’m not saying capitalism is bad, I’m just saying competition isn’t always good. This simple fact is often forgotten.
• Just because people can communicate, doesn’t mean they will – even if it is to their advantage.
• Forcing parties to communicate, even if they already have the means to communicate, encourages mutually beneficial outcomes.
• In competitive relationships, communication should be aimed at increasing cooperation. Other methods will probably create more heat than light.
• Threats are dangerous, not only to other’s interests, but also to our own.

Remember all these the next time you are bargaining with your partner over a night out, about to shout a threat at a motorist blocking your path on a one-way road, or even involved in high-level political negotiations between warring factions with nuclear capabilities.

It could save you, and the other side, a lot of trouble.

→ This post is part of a series on the best social psychology experiments:

1. Halo Effect: Definition And How It Affects Our Perception
2. Cognitive Dissonance: How and Why We Lie to Ourselves
3. Robbers Cave Experiment: How Group Conflicts Develop
4. Stanford Prison Experiment: Zimbardo’s Famous Social Psychology Study
5. Milgram Experiment: Explaining Obedience to Authority
6. False Consensus Effect: What It Is And Why It Happens
7. Social Identity Theory And The Minimal Group Paradigm
8. Negotiation: 2 Psychological Strategies That Matter Most
9. Bystander Effect And The Diffusion Of Responsibility
10. Asch Conformity Experiment: The Power Of Social Pressure

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