Psychology » The Thinking Meat Project

Do we really feel more friendly if we hold a warm drink?

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Feb 062013

Like most thinking primates, I am sometimes baffled by my own behavior and reactions. As a result, I generally take an interest in research that explains otherwise puzzling behavior, particularly research involving subconscious influences. One type of study examines the effect of small, perhaps seemingly inconsequential, external events that prime people to behave in a certain way. The technical term for this is behavioral priming, and all sorts of fascinating results have been offered in recent decades. People who have been exposed to words associated with old age walk more slowly when leaving the psychology lab than those who have not, for example, and people who were asked to hold a warm drink as part of a lab experiment judged others more favorably than people who were handed a cold drink.

However, this work has been encountering problems lately, chiefly because it is hard to replicate, as described in this article by Tom Bartlett in the Chronicle of Higher Education. (You might also find an earlier article by Bartlett about the reproducibility of psychological research interesting.) Thus, the answer to the question in the title is that the jury is still out. Stay tuned.

How will I know?

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Aug 032010

Pop singers have asked how you can tell if someone loves you or if his or her love is lasting and true. Countless books and a long-running magazine column have helped dubious lovers explore the long-term potential of their marriages and other relationships. Now a psychological tool, the Implicit Association Test (IAT), has been put to use to answer this type of question.

The IAT is believed to reveal unconscious preferences or feelings by measuring how quickly you associate ideas. For example, do you categorize words or faces more quickly when young faces are paired with positive words and old faces with negative words, or vice versa? It can be used to look for unconscious bias or racism; I think there was a version early in 2008 that evaluated which of the candidates in the US presidential primaries was truly your favorite.

Anthony Greenwald, the developer of the IAT, has written an article for Scientific American about a new use for the IAT. Three psychologists have looked at whether the IAT can be used to predict whether romantic relationships will continue; basically they were looking for how quickly people associated their partners with either positive or negative words (both generic and relationship-specific words). It turns out that it does have some predictive power, more than questionnaires that were also used to evaluate the relationships. It’s an intriguing result, but it’s nowhere near ready for people to be able to sit down at a computer and take an IAT that will tell them whether to buy a house with their sweetie or pack their bags. However, if you want to learn more about how the IAT works and take some tests yourself, check out the Project Implicit web site. I’ve taken several IATs myself (on topics like fat/thin bias or old/young bias), and sometimes I feel a little dubious about whether the test is measuring my own unconscious attitudes or the beliefs I’m surrounded by, but of course it’s possible that I unconsciously subscribe to those beliefs myself without realizing it.

The article about the research is:

Assessing the Seeds of Relationship Decay Using Implicit Evaluations to Detect the Early Stages of Disillusionment, Soonhee Lee, Ronald D. Rogge, and Harry T. Reis, Psychological Science, published online before print May 11, 2010, doi: 10.1177/0956797610371342.

Happine$$ (or not) around the world

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Jul 052010

I’m really enjoying Eric Weiner’s book The Geography of Bliss: One Grump’s Search for the Happiest Places in the World, in which he describes his travels in 10 different countries in search of the meaning of happiness. (Oddly enough, of all the places I’ve read about so far, the one I can see myself being happiest in is Iceland. Yes, the winters are dark and long, but he describes a creative atmosphere and a freedom to reinvent yourself that I think I might enjoy.) Anyway, along the same lines, a Gallup poll of more than 136,000 people in 132 countries that ran from 2005 to 2006 has come up with some new insights into the link between income and happiness.

The survey, which its authors report as the first representative sample of the entire planet, asked respondents about their income levels, standard of living, overall evaluations of their lives on a scale of 1 to 10, and numerous quality-of-life indicators such as the degree to which they feel respected or autonomous or find their jobs fulfilling.

The results seemed to identify two different aspects of happiness: an overall feeling that your life is satisfactory and the experience of positive emotions. Life satisfaction does correlate fairly well with income, but evidently the link between enjoying life (or not) on a day-to-day basis is much less well correlated with income. Basically, the study seems to have identified two different types of resources: the possession of economic resources affects life satisfaction, and the possession of psychological/social capital affects day-to-day reports of positive or negative feelings. The study shows that these two flavors of happiness are separate, but I wonder about how they are related.

This article from Science Daily has more information. The paper reporting the research is:

Ed Diener, Weiting Ng, James Harter, Raksha Arora. Wealth and happiness across the world: Material prosperity predicts life evaluation, whereas psychosocial prosperity predicts positive feeling. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2010; 99 (1): 52 DOI: 10.1037/a0018066

Psychology of religious belief, expanded

Psychology 2 Responses »

Jul 022010

To understand the full spectrum of the human religious experience, it makes sense to study unbelievers, who have almost certainly been exposed to religious beliefs but chosen not to accept them, as well as believers. Researchers in the psychology department at the University of Waterloo are surveying atheists, agnostics, freethinkers, skeptics, humanists, etc., to try to get a handle on how they view and experience life. If you fall into any of those categories, consider contributing your data points. You can find the survey and more at the Atheism Rising web site. Yes, you probably live in a country that is WEIRD (or maybe WIRED or even WIDER, as a friend pointed out), but they’ve got to start someplace. (Although actually I’d be very interested in learning about the areligious in non-WEIRD cultures. On a somewhat-related tangent, I’ve long wondered what freethinking types did during the Middle Ages in Europe, for example, or in other times and places where everyone was assumed to belong to the prevailing religion.)

I live in a WEIRD country

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Jul 012010

That’s a western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) country. Odds are most of you live in one too. So it’s unfortunate, according to a recent study, that people who live in such countries—and typically a particular subset of those people, to boot—provide much of our data on human psychology and behavior.

Researchers at the University of British Columbia examined a comparative database of information from various behavioral sciences and found that it would be hard to find a population less suited for broad generalizations about humans than the inhabitants of WEIRD countries, who provide far and away the majority of data for behavioral studies. The areas they looked at included “visual perception, fairness, cooperation, spatial reasoning, categorization and inferential induction, moral reasoning, reasoning styles, self-concepts and related motivations, and the heritability of IQ.” College students in the US are a subgroup that has its own quirks that differentiate it even from the general run of WEIRD people, and I’m guessing that they are one of the more heavily used groups for psychology research.

So whatever other reservations you may have about things like how well surveys or lab experiments capture people’s real-life behavior and attitudes, add to that the possibility that what we’re learning about is really an atypical batch of humans. A few years back I read David Buller’s book on evolutionary psychology, Adapting Minds: Evolutionary Psychology and the Persistent Quest for Human Nature (Bradford Books), in which he made a fairly persuasive case for the idea that there is no single human nature that describes every human population. Even if there were one, it sounds like we wouldn’t necessarily learn what it is by looking only at people in WEIRD societies. It will be interesting to see what the psychological community makes of this and whether it has any effect on how future studies are done, or at least reported.

There’s more information in this story from Science Daily. The paper is:
Joseph Henrich, Steven J. Heine and Ara Norenzayan The weirdest people in the world? Behavioral and Brain Sciences 33: 2-3, June 2010, pp 61-83.
doi:10.1017/S0140525X0999152X

Altruism/aggression: Two sides of the coin?

Human origins and evolution, Psychology 1 Response »

Jun 162010

In the early 1970s, a Doonesbury comic strip showed a classic moment in which a rebellious crowd of protesters that couldn’t agree on anything found a rallying point: they agreed that they wanted to kill the moderator who was urging them to find common ground in order to effectively fight the system. This captures very nicely the Jekyll and Hyde nature of in-group cohesion. It can be heartwarming, but it often comes with animosity against an out-group.

Some recent research into the workings of the hormone oxytocin revealed that emphasizing its role in fostering trust and interpersonal connections doesn’t tell the whole story. While oxytocin is sometimes called the cuddle hormone because of its importance in pair bonding and maternal behavior, it’s also important in two facets of in-group cohesion: altruism toward those on your side, and defensive aggression against the other side. Male volunteers participated in three experiments where they self-administered either oxytocin or a placebo and then were presented with choices that had various financial consequences for themselves, their in-group, or an out-group. Oxytocin spurred generous, even self-sacrificing, behavior toward one’s own group; if the out-group appeared threatening, oxytocin also spurred defensive aggression to counter the threat.

This article from Science Daily has more information, including a bit about the possible evolutionary implications. The last paragraph seems to be saying that the existence of a neurobiological mechanism that promotes in-group altruism and out-group aggression would support the idea of group selection—selection for behaviors that benefitted an individual’s social group rather than the individual—which is an interesting twist in the discussion on group selection.

It’s interesting that when the out-group didn’t appear to be threatening, only the altruistic behavior appeared. It’s also interesting that one way people have encouraged aggression against others (and, in a roundabout way, social cohesion) has been by emphasizing (or in some cases perhaps even fabricating) evidence that the others are somehow a threat. I’m thinking of the portrayals of enemies during wartime, for one, but also social battles like the one over gay marriage. It’s hard for me to see how widening the definition of marriage to include loving, long-term commitments between same-sex adults poses a threat to heterosexual couples, but plenty of people do feel threatened. Maybe those who encourage such fears are pushing an old (and evidently effective) emotional/neurochemical button.

Anyway, enough idle speculation. The paper is:

C. K. W. De Dreu, L. L. Greer, M. J. J. Handgraaf, S. Shalvi, G. A. Van Kleef, M. Baas, F. S. Ten Velden, E. Van Dijk, S. W. W. Feith. The Neuropeptide Oxytocin Regulates Parochial Altruism in Intergroup Conflict Among Humans. Science, 2010; 328 (5984): 1408 DOI: 10.1126/science.1189047

Personality and political views

Psychology 2 Responses »

Jun 132010

You may remember hearing about some work that looked at different aspects of morality and found that people who are politically liberal emphasize certain of these aspects, and those who are politically conservative tend to consider them all. (Liberals emphasize caring for others/avoiding harm and fairness/reciprocity, whereas conservatives also consider in-group loyalty, purity, and authority/respect.) A new study expands our knowledge of the relationship between personality traits and political views.

The new work looks at several of the Big Five personality traits: Openness/Intellect, two different aspects of Agreeableness (Compassion and Politeness), and the Orderliness aspect of Conscientiousness. Previous work had indicated that a conservative political outlook was negatively correlated with Openness/Intellect and positively correlated with Conscientiousness. The current work adds a little nuance: the negative correlation between conservatism and Openness/Intellect still holds, and a positive correlation between Orderliness (rather than overall Conscientiousness) was found. Furthermore, a liberal/egalitarian outlook was linked to higher levels of Compassion and a conservative/traditional outlook with higher levels of Politeness.

“Level” is a key word here, it seems to me. With personality traits, everyone falls somewhere on a continuum, so even those who are, say, profoundly introverted still enjoy spending time with others—just not nearly as much as those who are highly extroverted. So these differences are not apples and oranges, exactly; we should in theory be able to find some common ground and at least understand the other side’s point of view, even if we disagree with the degree to which they emphasize one thing or another. This article from Science Daily closes with a quote from one of the new study’s authors to the effect that we appear to need both the liberal and the conservative mindset in any society.

So why are these differences in mindset so sharply and painfully divisive in US politics at the moment? I think part of what is going on is that because political views are linked to personality traits, they often feel like self-obvious views of how the world is and how things work. They’re taken for granted like the water a fish swims in. It can be very difficult to examine them rationally and be prepared to compromise to accommodate the fact that the world and how it works look very different from behind another set of genetic and environmental influences. This leaves aside nasty tactics such as dishonesty or pandering to prejudice, ignorance, or selfishness, the need for an educated citizenry to make a democracy work, and things like the confirmation bias, which tends to make us notice the evidence that confirms our views and discount the evidence against them. I think all these other things come into play partly because our beliefs about the relative importance of fairness, order, or compassion are so inherent to us that we have a hard time taking other rankings of them seriously. I don’t know if it’s a failure of the melting pot, a failure of education, or some more fundamental human flaw, but somehow we haven’t really developed the capacity to use both mindsets productively rather than set them at each other’s throats. Maybe they can’t be consciously accommodated in a single society but must battle it out, back and forth, over and over again?

Oh, yeah. The paper itself is:
J. B. Hirsh, C. G. DeYoung, Xiaowen Xu, J. B. Peterson. Compassionate Liberals and Polite Conservatives: Associations of Agreeableness With Political Ideology and Moral Values. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 2010; 36(5): 655. DOI: 10.1177/0146167210366854

Nature and humans

Humans and Earth, Psychology Comments Off

Jun 062010

I’ve been watching the Ken Burns series on the history of America’s national parks (highly recommended). I’ve noticed how many of the people he interviews or quotes talk about how they love being surrounded by natural settings because of the way it makes them feel. The repeated message seems to be that there is something about nature that resonates in the human psyche. Some recent research indicates that this may be more than a subjective judgement. Spending time outside in nature makes people feel more energetic, according to researchers who completed five separate studies that looked at both actual time spent in natural settings and imagined time in such settings. The researchers took into account the effect of physical activity and the socializing that tends to go on when people are hiking or camping together, and found that the increased energy could not be attributed entirely to these mood boosters. It’s evidently due to something about nature itself.

This is an interesting finding, especially the part about how as little as 20 minutes of time outside in nature during the day can be enough to trigger the energy boost. Indiana University’s master plan for the Bloomington campus involves planting lots of trees, restoring an urban waterway (the Jordan river), and creating more pleasant walking paths. There are a lot of reasons that all of this is a good idea, but maybe part of the benefit to campus inhabitants will be that it makes them feel good to spend time outside among the trees or walking along the river.
This article from Science Daily has more information, and the full article is:
Richard M. Ryan, Netta Weinstein, Jessey Bernstein, Kirk Warren Brown, Louis Mistretta, Marylène Gagné. Vitalizing effects of being outdoors and in nature. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 2010; 30 (2): 159 DOI: 10.1016/j.jenvp.2009.10.009.

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