Category: Social psychology

The cheerleader effect in psychology is that people appear more attractive in a group. It is explained by the averaging effect of the group.

The so-called ‘cheerleader effect’ is the phenomenon that people seem more attractive when they are in a group than when they are alone.

At least, so urban legend has it.

But now the cheerleader effect has scientific backing from a study published recently in Psychological Science (Walker & Vul, 2013).

In fact, the study finds that both men and women are perceived as more attractive when they are in a group than when alone.

What is the cheerleader effect?

The effect is the result of the way we look at groups and what people, on average, deem an attractive face.

Generally people find ‘average’ faces most attractive.

When psychologists say ‘average’ in this sense, they mean if you average out the faces of lots of different people.

They don’t mean people who are average-looking.

Lead author of the study, Drew Walker, explains:

“Average faces are more attractive, likely due to the averaging out of unattractive idiosyncrasies.

Perhaps it’s like Tolstoy’s families: Beautiful people are all alike, but every unattractive person is unattractive in their own way.”

The cheerleader effect comes about, then, because when we look at a group of people, we see them as a group, and our brains average out their facial features.

In the study, people’s faces were shown to participants either alone or in group photos.

Sure enough, both men and women were rated more highly when presented in a group than when alone.

The effect was small but still noticeable.

The study’s co-author, Edward Vul, joked:

“The effect is definitely small, but some of us need all the help we can get.”

This leads to the idea that you might try to hang out with people whose ‘less average’ features complement your own.

The authors hint at some future research:

“If the average is more attractive because unattractive idiosyncrasies tend to be averaged out, then individuals with complementary facial features — one person with narrow eyes and one person with wide eyes, for example — would enjoy a greater boost in perceived attractiveness when seen together, as compared to groups composed of individuals who have more similar features.”  (Walker & Vul, 2013).

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How selfish people justify their behaviour to both themselves and others.

Selfish people tend to forget their selfish acts, research finds.

It is a psychological mechanism that helps the selfish maintain a positive view of themselves.

However, only a minority of people are selfish and this bias only applies them.

The majority of people are generous and recall their behaviour accurately.

The conclusions come from a study motivated by the question of how selfish people can live with themselves.

The answer, it emerges, is partly through self-deception.

People who are selfish often justify their selfish behaviour to both themselves and others.

For example, they might justify giving a small tip by saying the service was poor.

However, selfish people also rely on ‘motivated misremembering’ to deny that it even happened.

Dr Molly Crockett, study co-author, said:

“When people behave in ways that fall short of their personal standards, one way they maintain their moral self-image is by misremembering their ethical lapses.”

For the research, five separate experiments that tested generosity were carried out on 3,190 people.

Across the studies, stingier people tended to recall giving more than they actually had.

This was despite being motivated to tell the truth by the offer of financial reward.

In a twist, two of the studies sometimes instructed people to be less generous.

Then, selfish people tended to recall exactly how much they had given.

The reason is that this time they were not morally responsible for the choice, so there was no need to ‘forget’ their selfish behaviour.

Mr Ryan Carlson, the study’s first author, said:

“Most people strive to behave ethically, but people sometimes fail to uphold their ideals.

In such cases, the desire to preserve a moral self-image can be a powerful force and not only motivate us to rationalize our unethical actions, but also ‘revise’ such actions in our memory.”

The study was published in the journal Nature Communications (Carlson et al., 2020).

The above-average effect or better-than-average effect explains why some people consider themselves superior at everything.

The above-average effect, sometimes known as illusory superiority or the better-than-average effect, is a finding in social psychology that people tend to overestimate their abilities.

Whether it is driving ability, estimating IQ, health, memory, relationships and even happiness, people consistently rate themselves as better than others.

For example, 93 percent of people think their driving abilities are better than average.

Naturally, we cannot all be above average — unfortunately, by definition some of us have to be below average.

Above-average effect vs. below-average

People do not always assume themselves to be above average, though.

When a task is particularly difficult, such as a mathematical problems or playing chess, people assume they will do worse than average (see: worse-than-average effect).

Suddenly, instead of overestimating their abilities, people start underestimating their abilities.

This creates an apparent contradiction: how can people assume they are better-than-average, but suddenly lose their confidence when the task is difficult?

Better than average

A study seeks to resolve this contradiction in the above-average effect by surveying runners about how they expected to do in an upcoming and challenging race (Engeler & Häubl, 2021).

Their estimates were then compared to their actual times.

The results showed that some of the runners showed the better-than-average effect: they thought they would do better than others.

The better-than-average effect was mainly driven by overconfidence, they predicted they could run faster than they really could.

The runners who underestimated their ability, though, were mainly driven by their expectations about other competitors.

In other words, they assumed other runners would be faster than they actually were.

Professor Gerald Häubl, study co-author, said:

“Our work identifies two distinct sources of bias or two different reasons for why people might not be well calibrated: they can be biased in their self-assessment, and they can be biased in their assessment of others.”

Overconfidence vs. under confidence

Fascinatingly, the runners who were worst were also the most overconfident.

This is another demonstration of the Dunning-Kruger effect, the findings that the poorest performers are unaware of their shortcomings.

Put more crudely, it is why the incompetent don’t know they’re incompetent.

Overconfidence, or the above-average effect, is not always bad, it depends on the circumstances, said Professor Häubl:

“Some of humankind’s greatest achievements were probably fuelled by some form of overconfidence.

But then, so were some of humankind’s most spectacular failures.

In very general terms, well-calibrated confidence, based on an accurate assessment of both one’s own and others’ abilities, is what people should strive for.”

In contrast, under confidence has more obvious disadvantages:

“The problem with under confidence, however, is that it can prevent people who actually have the potential to excel at something—a particular job or career—from even trying, because they falsely believe there are many others who are better than they are.”

The study was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (Engeler & Häubl, 2021).

Research in the psychology of attitudes reveals why people say one thing, but do another.

The word for when someone says one thing but does another is hypocrisy.

But why are people often so hypocritical?

It’s only natural to think a person’s attitudes and behaviours are directly related.

If someone says, while truly believing it, that they’re not a racist, you’d expect them to behave consistently with that statement.

Despite this, psychologists have found that the link between a person’s attitudes and their behaviours is not always that strong.

People frequently say one thing but do another.

In fact, people have a nasty habit of saying one thing and then doing the exact opposite, even with the best of intentions.

You see it all the time:

• People say they’re worried about global warming and yet they drive around in a big gas guzzler.
• They say that money isn’t their God, yet they work all the hours.
• They say they want to be fit but they don’t do any exercise.

Say one thing, do another

The discovery of the extent of people’s blatant hypocrisy goes back to 1930s America and the work of a Stanford sociology professor, Richard LaPiere (LaPiere, 1934).

In the early 30s he was on a tour across California with some close friends who happened to be Chinese.

LaPiere was worried that they would encounter problems finding welcoming restaurants and hotels because of his Chinese friends.

At that time in the US there had been lots of stories in the media about how prejudiced people were against Chinese people.

LaPiere and his friends were, therefore, pleasantly surprised to find that out of the 128 restaurants and hotels they visited, all but one served them courteously.

Nowadays the fact that one place refused to serve them would rightly be considered an outrage – but those were different times.

So it sounds like a happy ending: perhaps the papers had just exaggerated people’s negative attitudes towards Chinese people?

The gap between attitudes and behaviour

But when LaPiere got home he started to wonder why there was such a gap between what the newspapers were reporting about people’s attitudes and their actual behaviour.

Why do people say one thing, then do another?

To check this out he decided to send out a questionnaire to the restaurants and hotels they had visited along with other similar places in the area.

The questionnaire asked the owners about their attitudes, with the most important question being: “Will you accept members of the Chinese race in your establishment?”

The answers they could give were:

• Yes.
• No.
• Depends upon the circumstances.

Incredibly, 90 percent of respondents answered, no, they wouldn’t accept members of the Chinese race into their establishments.

Imagine LaPiere’s surprise when he looked at the results.

People genuinely did say one thing and do the complete reverse.

They didn’t even select ‘it depends’.

What on Earth was going on?

Problems with the study

LaPiere himself argued that the problem lay in the questionnaire.

The questions themselves cannot represent reality in all its confusing glory.

What probably happened when people were asked if they accept Chinese people was that they conjured up a highly prejudiced view of the Chinese which bore little relation with what they were presented with in reality.

Here was a polite, well-dressed, well-off couple in the company of a Stanford University professor.

Not the rude, job-stealing, yobbish stereotype they had in mind when they answered the questionnaire.

This study has actually been subsequently criticised for all sorts of reasons.

Nevertheless its main finding – that people say one thing and do another in many situations – has been backed up by countless later studies, although in more sophisticated fashion.

The question is: why?

Snapshot of prejudices

Many psychologists effectively agree with LaPiere that it all depends on how you ask the questions and what stereotypes people are currently imagining when they give their answers.

In some ways an attitude is like a snapshot of the prejudices the respondent has available to memory just at the moment they are questioned.

This has led to a whole raft of studies and theories searching for connections between people’s attitudes and their behaviour.

Many a lengthy tome has been dedicated to explaining the divergence.

Some of the factors that have been found important are:

• Social norms.
• Accessibility of the attitude.
• Perceived control over behaviour.

Despite these findings, the picture is extremely complicated and frustratingly inconclusive.

Perhaps as a result interest in this area has been waning amongst psychologists.

The exact way in which people’s attitudes and behaviour are connected remains a mystery.

All we can say with certainty is that people are frequently extremely inconsistent.

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The process of lie detection has nothing to do with supposed ‘tells’ like avoiding eye-contact or sweating.

Despite all the advice about lie detection going around, study after study has found that it is very difficult to spot when someone is lying.

Previous tests involving watching videos of suspects typically find that both experts and non-experts come in at around 50/50: in other words you might as well flip a coin.

A study published in Human Communication Research, though, has found that a process of active questioning yielded almost perfect results, with 97.8 percent of liars successfully detected (Levine et al., 2014).

The process of lie detection has nothing to do with supposed ‘tells’ like avoiding eye-contact or sweating, and everything to do with the way the suspect is questioned.

The Reid Technique

In the series of studies, participants played a trivia game in which they were secretly offered a chance to cheat.

In one experiment 12 percent cheated and in another 44.9 percent chose to cheat.

Participants were then interviewed using a variety of active questioning techniques.

One group were interrogated using the Reid Technique, which is employed by many law enforcement professionals in North America.

It involves tactics like presuming the suspect is guilty, shifting the blame away from the suspect and asking loaded questions like “Did you plan this or did it just happen?”

This technique was 100 percent effective with all 33 guilty participants owning up to their ‘crime’.

A second group were interviewed by US federal agents with substantial experience of interrogation.

They were able to detect 97.8 percent of people that cheated — in reality all but two of 89 people.

Bear two things in mind, though:

• The Reid Techniques’ detractors say that it can lead to false confessions.
• Participants in this study did not have that much to lose by admitting their guilt. It wasn’t as if they’d murdered their spouses.

Active questioning

Across the different types of interrogation, though, the important factor was that the questioning was active and of the kind used in real interrogations.

Professor Timothy Levine of Michigan State University, who led the study, said:

“This research suggests that effective questioning is critical to deception detection.”

Asking bad questions can actually make people worse than chance at lie detection, and you can make honest people appear guilty.

But, fairly minor changes in the questions can really improve accuracy, even in brief interviews.

This has huge implications for intelligence and law enforcement.”

Presumption of honesty

Professor Levine believes lies are partly so difficult to detect because in normal, everyday life we have a presumption of honesty.

“The presumption of honesty is highly adaptive.

It enables efficient communication, and this presumption of honesty makes sense because most communication is honest most of the time.

However, the presumption of honesty makes humans vulnerable to occasional deceit.”

The key, then, to detecting lies may be to assume someone is lying and then question them on that basis.

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Middlemist et al. designed a psychology experiment to test how men’s urination in public was affected by invasions of personal space.

Here’s a weird study that sometimes gets a mention in ethical discussions about psychology, and it’s not hard to see why.

Middlemist, Knowles & Matter (1976) designed an experiment to test how the speed and flow of men’s urination in a public lavatory was affected by invasions of personal space.

Personal space

To gather some preliminary data on men’s toilet habits, a pilot study stationed an observer in a public toilet at a US university.

He was instructed to look like he was grooming himself in the mirror, but was actually keeping a record of which urinals men stood at and their patterns of urination.

Timing them on his wristwatch, our intrepid toilet researcher measured the onset delay in micturition along with persistence of flow.

If you’re wondering how our correspondent measured these, it was by sound – which must have been no mean feat when there was multiple micturition in progress.

Sure enough the pilot study revealed men prefer not to stand next to each other in the urinals, and the closer other men are to each other, the longer it takes for them to begin urinating, and the shorter the persistence of their stream.

Spot the ethical issues

Middlemist et al. were not satisfied with this observational data, however, and decided to carry out a proper psychology experiment.

For this they required a more complicated setup, and a little covert action.

They forced unknowing urinators to spend their pennies in one (out of three) urinals that was closest to a single stall.

A confederate (who was in on the experiment) then either stood directly next to the various experimental subjects, one urinal away, or was not present at all.

Hidden in the stall was our urine measurement officer (grad students get all the best jobs).

Chief amongst his weapons was a specially designed periscope hidden in a stack of books so that the stream of urine could be directly observed.

The experimental version of the pilot study confirmed earlier findings.

With no one present, unselfconscious urinators’ average onset was 4.8 seconds, with a confederate present one urinal away, mildly self-conscious urinators’ average micturition onset was pushed up to 6.2 seconds.

Finally, with the confederate in the next urinal, it was 8.4 seconds before our bashful toilet-goer’s blessed relief began.

Urination and personality?

Rather than being left with the feeling, as you may be, that this was not only distasteful but also a bit of a waste of time, the psychologist in me comes out.

I’m wondering about personality correlates and personal space.

For example, is neuroticism positively correlated with increasing micturition onset, while extroversion is negatively correlated?

The problem is then you’ve got to get urinators to fill in a personality measure on the way out, which will expose all the periscope business, which in turn may lead on to a variety of uncomfortable conversations — both with participants and with ethics committees.

Perhaps we’ll just leave this one as it is.

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Unfortunately, this ignores another major influence on how people behave staring us right in the face: the situation.

Our personalities certainly have an influence on what situations we get into and how we deal with them, but situational factors — even relatively subtle ones — can completely obliterate the effects of personality.

Example of the fundamental attribution error

The fundamental attribution error, sometimes called the correspondence bias or over-attribution effect, helps explain why people blame others for things over which they have no control.

For example, people who have been the victim of an assault are frequently blamed by others for not taking precautions or failing to foresee the calamitous event, even when there was nothing the victim could do about it.

Don’t take my word for it, though, consider a modern take on an ancient bible story.

The fundamental attribution error and the good Samaritan

Prominent social psychologists Darley & Batson (1973) were interested in what influences people’s helping behaviours and decided to test the parable of the good Samaritan.

The parable is about a Jewish man travelling to Jericho who has been attacked by bandits and lies half dead at the side of the road.

A priest and temple assistant pass him by before finally a Samaritan (who stereotypically hated Jews) stops to offer his assistance.

The moral of the story is clear enough but, wondered Darley and Batson, have we judged the priest and the temple assistant too quickly, perhaps they were just in a hurry?

Taking the ‘Good Samaritan’ test

In their classic social psychology study the experimenters recruited 67 students from the Princeton Theological Seminary and told them it was a study about religious education and vocations.

They were asked to fill in some personality questionnaires and told they were going to give a brief talk in a nearby room.

Some were asked to give a short talk about the types of jobs that seminary graduates would be suited for, while the others were asked to talk about the parable of the ‘Good Samaritan’.

Unknown to the study’s participants, they were to experience their very own ‘Good Samaritan’ test.

For, after filling out their questionnaires and while making their way to the other office to give their talk, they would encounter an experimental confederate lying in a doorway, doubled over, eyes closed and coughing.

Participants would have to pass the apparently highly distressed man, but would they stop to help?

The situation affects behaviour

The experimenters thought it would depend on how much participants were hurried, so they manipulated this by giving them a map and one of the following three instructions:

1. “Oh, you’re late. They were expecting you a few minutes ago. We’d better get moving…”
2. “The assistant is ready for you, so please go right over.”
3. “…It’ll be a few minutes before they’re ready for you, but you might as well head on over…”

This created three conditions: high, medium and low hurry.

So some students left the office thinking they needed to go quickly, others less so, while some were relaxed.

Each of these conditions was also split into two: half about to deliver a talk on the Good Samaritan, the other half on job prospects for seminary graduates.

This meant that the experimenters could assess both the effect of hurry as well as the talk they were giving on the students’ helping behaviours.

Would having a relevant parable uppermost in their minds nudge participants into helping?

Before I give you the results try to predict them for yourself.

How many future priests do you think would stop to see if the man was OK?

Would you stop?

What will be the effects of the situation compared with the individual personalities of the seminarians?

Situation beats personality in explaining behaviour

Here’s what happened.

On average just 40 percent of the seminary students offered help (with a few stepping over the apparently injured man) but crucially the amount of hurry they were in had a large influence on behaviour.

Here is the percentage of participants who offered help by condition:

• Low hurry: 63 percent
• Medium hurry: 45 percent
• High hurry: 10 percent

The type of talk they were giving also had an effect on whether they offered help.

Of those asked to talk about careers for seminarians, just 29 percent offered help, while of those asked to talk about the parable of the Good Samaritan, fully 53 percent gave assistance.

What these figures show is the large effect that subtle aspects of the situation have on the way people behave.

Recall that the experimenters also measured personality variables, specifically the ‘religiosity’ of the seminarians.

When the effect of personality was compared with situation, i.e. how much of a hurry they happened to be in or whether they were thinking about a relevant parable, the effect of religiosity was almost insignificant.

In this context, then, situation is easily trumping personality.

Fundamental attribution error

Before I asked you to imagine what the results might be, were you close?

Perhaps you were surprised by how little effect personality had on whether the seminarians stopped?

That is what catches most people out because of what psychologists call the ‘fundamental attribution error’.

This is the tendency to assume that other people’s behaviour reflects on their personality rather than on the situation they are in.

Contrary to our instincts, however, studies such as this one demonstrate that it is frequently the situation that controls our actions more strongly than personality.

If you saw the trainee priest stepping over the moaning man, what would you think?

Perhaps time for them to switch to a career in investment banking?

Maybe, but in the light of the fundamental attribution error it’s probably unfair on the priest (and the investment bankers) because we all of us have situational pressures on us that can easily drown out the influence of our personalities (see also the bystander effect).

‘Bad’ actions don’t necessarily mean ‘bad’ people just as ‘good’ actions don’t issue forth solely from ‘good’ people, or so the fundamental attribution error suggests.

The old adage that a person can be judged on their actions isn’t the whole truth.

Often people’s behaviour, and our own, may say very little about our personalities and much more about the complexities of the situation in which we find ourselves.

Avoid the fundamental attribution error

One way to avoid the fundamental attribution error is to actively think about a similar situation than you have been in yourself.

For example, when judging someone who was in a hurry for not stopping to help, think about how you behave when you are in a hurry.

Is it possible you have acted in a similar way in similar circumstances.

Another way to avoid the fundamental attribution error is to generate alternate explanations for someone’s behaviour.

For example, if someone is rude to you, could it possibly be that they are not a nasty person, but rather are in a bad mood because something that has happened to them.

Alternatively, they may be preoccupied in a busy environment and have simply not seen you.

Finally, simply understanding the fundamental attribution error can help to combat it.

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Ten of the most influential social psychology experiments explain why we sometimes do dumb or irrational things.

“I have been primarily interested in how and why ordinary people do unusual things, things that seem alien to their natures.

Why do good people sometimes act evil?

Why do smart people sometimes do dumb or irrational things?” –Philip Zimbardo

Like famous social psychologist Professor Philip Zimbardo (author of The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil), I’m also obsessed with why we do dumb or irrational things.

The answer quite often is because of other people — something social psychologists have comprehensively shown.

Each of the 10 brilliant social psychology experiments below tells a unique, insightful story relevant to all our lives, every day.

Click the link in each social psychology experiment to get the full description and explanation of each phenomenon.

1. Social Psychology Experiments: The Halo Effect

The halo effect is a finding from a famous social psychology experiment.

It is the idea that global evaluations about a person (e.g. she is likeable) bleed over into judgements about their specific traits (e.g. she is intelligent).

It is sometimes called the “what is beautiful is good” principle, or the “physical attractiveness stereotype”.

It is called the halo effect because a halo was often used in religious art to show that a person is good.

2. Cognitive Dissonance

Cognitive dissonance is the mental discomfort people feel when trying to hold two conflicting beliefs in their mind.

People resolve this discomfort by changing their thoughts to align with one of conflicting beliefs and rejecting the other.

The study provides a central insight into the stories we tell ourselves about why we think and behave the way we do.

3. Robbers Cave Experiment: How Group Conflicts Develop

The Robbers Cave experiment was a famous social psychology experiment on how prejudice and conflict emerged between two group of boys.

It shows how groups naturally develop their own cultures, status structures and boundaries — and then come into conflict with each other.

For example, each country has its own culture, its government, legal system and it draws boundaries to differentiate itself from neighbouring countries.

One of the reasons the became so famous is that it appeared to show how groups could be reconciled, how peace could flourish.

The key was the focus on superordinate goals, those stretching beyond the boundaries of the group itself.

4. Social Psychology Experiments: The Stanford Prison Experiment

The Stanford prison experiment was run to find out how people would react to being made a prisoner or prison guard.

The psychologist Philip Zimbardo, who led the Stanford prison experiment, thought ordinary, healthy people would come to behave cruelly, like prison guards, if they were put in that situation, even if it was against their personality.

It has since become a classic social psychology experiment, studied by generations of students and recently coming under a lot of criticism.

5. The Milgram Social Psychology Experiment

The Milgram experiment, led by the well-known psychologist Stanley Milgram in the 1960s, aimed to test people’s obedience to authority.

The results of Milgram’s social psychology experiment, sometimes known as the Milgram obedience study, continue to be both thought-provoking and controversial.

The Milgram experiment discovered people are much more obedient than you might imagine.

Fully 63 percent of the participants continued administering what appeared like electric shocks to another person while they screamed in agony, begged to stop and eventually fell silent — just because they were told to.

6. The False Consensus Effect

The false consensus effect is a famous social psychological finding that people tend to assume that others agree with them.

It could apply to opinions, values, beliefs or behaviours, but people assume others think and act in the same way as they do.

It is hard for many people to believe the false consensus effect exists because they quite naturally believe they are good ‘intuitive psychologists’, thinking it is relatively easy to predict other people’s attitudes and behaviours.

In reality, people show a number of predictable biases, such as the false consensus effect, when estimating other people’s behaviour and its causes.

7. Social Psychology Experiments: Social Identity Theory

Social identity theory helps to explain why people’s behaviour in groups is fascinating and sometimes disturbing.

People gain part of their self from the groups they belong to and that is at the heart of social identity theory.

The famous theory explains why as soon as humans are bunched together in groups we start to do odd things: copy other members of our group, favour members of own group over others, look for a leader to worship and fight other groups.

8. Negotiation: 2 Psychological Strategies That Matter Most

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.

In a classic, award-winning series of social psychology experiments, Morgan Deutsch and Robert Krauss investigated two central factors in negotiation: how we communicate with each other and how we use threats.

9. Bystander Effect And The Diffusion Of Responsibility

The bystander effect in social psychology is the surprising finding that the mere presence of other people inhibits our own helping behaviours in an emergency.

The bystander effect social psychology experiments are mentioned in every psychology textbook and often dubbed ‘seminal’.

This famous social psychology experiment on the bystander effect was inspired by the highly publicised murder of Kitty Genovese in 1964.

It found that in some circumstances, the presence of others inhibits people’s helping behaviours — partly because of a phenomenon called diffusion of responsibility.

10. Asch Conformity Experiment: The Power Of Social Pressure

The Asch conformity experiments — some of the most famous every done — were a series of social psychology experiments carried out by noted psychologist Solomon Asch.

The Asch conformity experiment reveals how strongly a person’s opinions are affected by people around them.

In fact, the Asch conformity experiment shows that many of us will deny our own senses just to conform with others.

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Critical thinking skills are difficult to acquire because the mind is a believing machine, as this classic psychology study demonstrates.

What is the mind’s default position to critical thinking: are we naturally critical or naturally gullible?

As a species do we have a tendency to behave like Agent Mulder from the X-Files who always wanted to believe in mythical monsters and alien abductions?

Or are we like his partner Agent Scully who applied critical thinking, generating alternative explanations, trying to understand and evaluate the strange occurrences they encountered rationally?

Do we believe what the TV, the newspapers, blogs even, tell us at first blush or do we use critical thinking processes?

Can we ignore the claims of adverts, do we lap up what politicians tell us, do we believe our lover’s promises?

It’s not just that some people do think critically and some people don’t think critically; in fact all our minds are built with the same first instinct, the same first reaction to new information.

But what is it: do we believe first or do we first understand, so that belief (or disbelief) comes later?

Critical thinking skills: Descartes vs. Spinoza

This argument about whether belief is automatic when we are first exposed to an idea or whether belief is a separate process that follows understanding has been going on for at least 400 years.

The French philosopher, mathematician and physicist René Descartes (below, right) argued that understanding and believing are two separate processes.

First, people take in some information by paying attention to it, then they decide what to do with that information, which includes believing or disbelieving it.

Descartes’ view is intuitively attractive and seems to accord with the way our minds work, or at least the way we would like our minds to work.

The Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza, a contemporary of Descartes, took a quite different view.

He thought that the very act of understanding information was believing it.

We may, he thought, be able to change our minds afterwards, say when we come across evidence to the contrary, but until that time we believe everything.

Spinoza’s approach is unappealing because it suggests we have to waste our energy using critical thinking to root out falsities that other people have randomly sprayed in our direction, whether by word of mouth, TV, the internet or any other medium of communication.

So who was right, Spinoza or Descartes?

Research on critical thinking skills

Daniel Gilbert and colleagues put these two theories head-to-head in a series of experiments to test whether understanding and belief operate together or whether belief (or disbelief) comes later (Gilbert et al., 1993).

In their classic social psychology experiment on critical thinking, seventy-one participants read statements about two robberies then gave the robber a jail sentence.

Some of the statements were designed to make the crime seem worse, for example the robber had a gun, and others to make it look less serious, for example the robber had starving children to feed.

The twist was that only some of the statements were true, while others were false.

Participants were told that all the statements that were true would be displayed in green type, while the false statement would be in red.

Here’s the clever bit: half the participants where purposefully distracted while they were reading the false statements while the other half weren’t.

In theory, if Spinoza was correct, then those who were distracted while reading the false statements wouldn’t have time to process the additional fact that the statement was written in red and therefore not true, and consequently would be influenced by it in the jail term they gave to the criminal.

On the other hand, if Descartes was right then the distraction would make no difference as participants wouldn’t have time to believe or not believe the false statements so it wouldn’t make any difference to the jail term.

The reason critical thinking is difficult

The results showed that when the false statements made the crime seem much worse rather than less serious, the participants who were interrupted gave the criminals almost twice as long in jail, up from about 6 years to around 11 years.

In contrast, the group in which participants hadn’t been interrupted managed to ignore the false statements.

Consequently, there was no significant difference between jail terms depending on whether false statements made the crime seem worse or less serious.

This meant that only when given time to think about it did people behave as though the false statements were actually false.

On the other hand, without time for reflection, people simply believed what they read.

Gilbert and colleagues carried out further experiments to successfully counter some alternative explanations of their results.

These confirmed their previous findings and led them to the rather disquieting conclusion that Descartes was in error and Spinoza was right.

Believing is not a two-stage process involving first understanding then believing.

Instead understanding is believing, a fraction of a second after reading it, you believe it until some other critical faculty kicks in to change your mind.

We really do want to believe, just like Agent Mulder and naturally lack the critical thinking skills of Agent Scully.

Believe first, ask questions later

Not only that, but their conclusions, and those of Spinoza, also explain other behaviours that people regularly display:

• The fundamental attribution error: this is people’s assumption that others’ behaviour reflects their personality, when really it reflects the situation.
• Truthfulness bias: people tend to assume that others are telling the truth, even when they are lying.
• The persuasion effect: when people are distracted it increases the persuasiveness of a message.
• Denial-innuendo effect: people tend to positively believe in things that are being categorically denied.
• Hypothesis testing bias: when testing a theory, instead of trying to prove it wrong people tend to look for information that confirms it. This, of course, isn’t very effective hypothesis testing!

When looked at in light of Spinoza’s claim that understanding is believing, these biases and effects could result from our tendency to believe first and ask questions later.

Take the fundamental attribution error: when meeting someone who is nervous we may assume they are a nervous person because this is the most obvious inference to make.

It only occurs to us later, when applying critical thinking skills, that they might have been worried because they were waiting for important test results.

If all this is making your feel rather uncomfortable then you’re not alone.

Gilbert and colleagues concede that our credulous mentality seems like bad news.

It may even be an argument for limiting freedom of speech.

After all, if people automatically believe everything they see and hear, we have to be very careful about what people see and hear.

Disadvantages of too much critical thinking

Gilbert and colleagues counter this by arguing that too much critical thinking or even cynicism is not a good thing.

Minds working on a Descartian model would only believe things for which they had hard evidence.

Everything else would be neither believed or not believed, but in a state of limbo.

The problem is that a lot of the information we are exposed to is actually true, and some of it is vital for our survival.

If we had to go around applying critical thinking to our beliefs all the time, we’d never get anything done and miss out on some great opportunities.

Minds that work on a Spinozan model, however, can happily believe as a general rule of thumb, then check out anything that seems dodgy later.

Yes, they will often believe things that aren’t true, but it’s better to believe too much and be caught out once in a while than be too cynical and fail to capitalise on the useful and beneficial information that is actually true.

Or maybe by going along with this argument I’m being gullible and the harsh truth is that it’s a basic human failing that we are all too quick to take things at face value and too slow to engage our critical thinking.

I’ll leave you to ponder that one.

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