Social
May 8, 2008
Category: Memory • Research • Social
Anton races home at speeds well in excess of the speed limit. He's rushing to beat his parents home so that he can hide their anniversary present so it will be a surprise. Suddenly, he hits a slick patch and runs his car off the road an into a tree. He's okay, but the car is totaled and his parent's surprise anniversary party is ruined.
How much is Anton to blame for the accident? If you had to rate it on a scale of 1 to 10, maybe you'd give him a 7. After all, he was just trying to do something special for his parents.
But what if instead of hiding an anniversary present, Anton was rushing home to hide his cocaine stash? Would you now say he's more to blame for the accident? You might not when the two alternatives are placed side-by-side, but when Mark Alicke told the two versions of this story to different groups, the cocaine group rated Anton as more blameworthy than the anniversary present group.
Alicke's study provided the foundation for an array of studies on the effects of social evaluations of individuals on apparently unrelated events, and even factual recollections about episodes.
But when a team led by David Pizarro addressed this question, no study had yet shown that unrelated details about a person could literally affect witnesses' accuracy in recalling that person's actions. The researchers presented a simple story to 283 college students. The story described a person named Frank entering a restaurant, paying with cash for a drink, then ordering a three-course meal, receiving a cell phone call, and leaving without paying the $56.43 bill.
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Posted by Dave Munger at 3:47 PM • Comments (14)
May 7, 2008
Category: Development / Aging • Reasoning • Research • Social
Ask almost anyone whether willfully deceiving another person -- lying -- is wrong, and they'll say it is. But probe a little deeper and most people will say there are some instances where lying is okay: lying to prevent a crime or an injustice is acceptable, just not lying for personal gain. Parents teach their kids that lying is wrong, and punish them for telling lies.
I can still remember the shock when my parents "lied" about my sixth birthday (which was a day away) at an ice-cream parlor so I could get a free sundae. But eventually, at some point, most American kids end up telling lies to their parents, as did I -- I just can't remember any of them at the moment (honest!).
Clearly children's conceptions of "acceptable" lies change over time. There must be a time in early childhood where they don't understand what a lie is. Then they learn what a lie is, followed shortly by learning that a lying is wrong. But how do they move from this stage to the more nuanced moral assessment of lying held by most adults?
Serena Perkins and Elliot Turiel came up with six situations in which lying might be justified, then asked 64 teens aged 12 to 17 which ones were acceptable and which were not. The situations are below:
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Posted by Dave Munger at 3:05 PM • Comments (9)
April 29, 2008
Category: Face perception • Memory • Research • Social
Humans are exceptionally good at recognizing faces they've seen before. It doesn't take much study to accurately recall whether or not you've seen a particular face. However, this pattern breaks down when faces come from unfamiliar races. A white person who lives primarily among other whites will have more difficulty recognizing Asian faces, and vice versa.
But how engrained is this difference? How much experience with other-race faces do we need to have before we can recognize them as well as same-race faces? Is learning to recognize other races as difficult as recognizing any new category of objects -- cars, say, or birds? When we do learn to recognize other-race faces, do we really know them as well as more familiar races?
While it has been known for some time that we can learn to recognize other race faces as well as our own, this last question hasn't been studied as thoroughly. Maybe in more difficult tests of recognition, we wouldn't do as well with different-race faces.
To explore this question, a team led by Elinor McKone developed a clever set of three experiments. In the first experiment, white Australian students were exposed to 32 different faces -- some white, and some Asian -- for three seconds each. After a brief break where they were distracted with multiplication problems, they were tested on a set of 64 pictures -- 32 they had seen before, and 32 new pictures. Their job was to say which were old and which were new. As expected, the students were significantly more accurate with same-race faces compared to different-race faces. This showed that with brief exposure, different-race faces aren't recognized as well as same-race faces.
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Posted by Dave Munger at 3:17 PM • Comments (15)
April 24, 2008
Category: Research • Social • Video Games / Technology
Although not all games are equal, there's plenty of evidence that playing some violent video games can cause aggressive real-world behavior. Sites like addictinggames.com offer popular games whose sole point is to play the role of a hit-man or even to torture animals. Over 85 percent of video games include violence.
When these statistics are combined with the results of studies showing that aggressive attitudes and even actions can be increased after playing violent games for as little as 20 minutes, it's possible that we have a major problem on our hands.
Another potential problem of video game violence is widespread activation of a phenomenon that has been observed in many other domains: desensitization. Some desensitization is undoubtedly good: for example, a surgeon who exhibited the natural disgust and revulsion at seeing human entrails probably would have a hard time doing her job. Desensitization means that after seeing the gore of an operating room many times throughout her training process, she can overcome that natural revulsion to human innards and is prepared to do her job when it counts.
But other types of desensitization are not so good. Desensitization to racism allowed slavery to persist for centuries across much of the world. Desensitization to violence might mean that individuals are less likely to assist someone who's being attacked, or more likely to actively cooperate in a violent act. Aside from some reports of military uses for preparing troops for battle, there has been little study of whether playing violent video games desensitizes people to violence. So does the cartoon violence in games affect our reaction to real-world violence?
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Posted by Dave Munger at 2:44 PM • Comments (31)
April 22, 2008
Category: Reasoning • Research • Social
Do we have free will? While some may see the question as trivial, it's a challenging topic that has been actively debated for centuries. Whether or not you believe a god is involved, a case can be made that free will is simply an illusion, and that every "decision" we make is completely controlled by factors outside of an individual's control.
Yet others have argued that a belief in free will is essential to morality. If we don't actually have any control over the decisions we make, how can we be held accountable for them? Several studies have suggested that when kids believe their achievements are due to innate ability rather than their own effort, they are less likely to persist at similar tasks in the future. But until recently, no study has attempted to directly study belief in free will and how it affects behavior.
Kathleen Vohs and Johnathan Schooler have found a way to study this question (though they can't tell you whether they were predestined to do it or they came up with the idea through their own independent efforts!). They had 30 students read one of two passages by Francis Crick. The first passage argued that most scientists now recognize free will as an artifact of the way the brain works, that free will is simply an illusion and our actions are determined solely by genetics and the environment. The second passage discussed consciousness and did not bring up free will at all. Then the students were given a test to measure their belief in free will versus determinism.
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Posted by Dave Munger at 3:31 PM • Comments (28)
April 17, 2008
Category: Emotion • Research • Social
If you saw a headline like this one in your local newspaper, you might first think it's some type of info-tisement sponsored by the floral industry. You'd probably be right, too. So what is this headline doing in Cognitive Daily? We've found a study to support the notion that flowers actually induce real positive emotions.
Was it paid for by the floral industry? Yes, it was. Does that mean it's bad research? Not necessarily. A team led by Jeannette Haviliand-Jones has conducted an impressive set of three experiments, each of which contributes to the idea that giving someone flowers improves their mood, not just at the moment of delivery, but long afterwards.
In the first experiment, 147 women were recruited using ads in supermarkets to participate in a study about "normal daily moods." In exchange, they would be given one of 10 possible gifts, but they weren't told which gift they'd receive. The women were all called on the phone and given a questionnaire to assess their mood and overall life satisfaction. Then, 10 days later, two experimenters showed up at their door at a scheduled time to deliver the gift.
One third of the women received flowers, one third got a fruit basket, and one third got a candle. These gifts had been pre-selected by a group of volunteers to have equivalent appeal, and they all had equivalent monetary value. Chocolate wasn't chosen as a gift because some raters found it unappealing because of the danger of gaining weight.
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Posted by Dave Munger at 2:33 PM • Comments (21)
April 14, 2008
Category: Emotion • Research • Social
How often do you take time to reflect on the things you're grateful for? Once a month? Once a week, at church, perhaps? Maybe you say "grace" at mealtime every day. But even prayers that do express gratefulness, such as a traditional mealtime prayer, are often expressed by rote. Growing up, my family wasn't very religious, but when we had dinner with family or friends, we'd usually say grace. I was probably well into my teens before I understood what "blessusolordforthesethygiftswhichweareabouttoreceivefromthybounty" actually meant.
While many would agree that "counting your blessings" is a worthwhile practice, there hasn't been much experimental research on whether gratitude really has a positive impact on our lives. Several studies have found that gratitude correlates with positive emotions such as happiness, pride, and hope, but experimental work -- showing that gratitude causes these things -- is scarcer.
Robert Emmons and Michael McCullough figured it would be worthwhile to explore this notion. Their method of study was both ingenious and simple: they would ask 201 students in a health psychology class to respond to a weekly questionnaire. Everyone rated their well-being, was tested on a measure of gratefulness, and reported on their physical health and level of exercise. The key to the study was a division into three groups. The first group listed five things they were grateful for each week. The second group listed five hassles or irritants from the past week. The final group simply wrote down five "events or circumstances" from the past week. This continued for ten weeks.
What sort of things did they write?
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Posted by Dave Munger at 10:34 AM • Comments (16)
April 8, 2008
Category: Movement and exercise • Research • Social
In our little college town, one of the most popular fitness trends over the past few years has been yoga. Friends and acquaintances often suggest we join them in their favorite class, claiming not only that we'll get stronger and more flexible, but that we'll feel better about ourselves.
But Greta and I both have fitness routines that work well for us. I like to go for a morning run, I bike, and I play soccer, and Greta not only walks for 30 minutes on the treadmill every day, she also walks to and from work, 1.3 miles each way. Despite our assurances that we enjoy these things, devout yoga fans seem convinced that we're missing out on something: a chance to improve our self-esteem.
Despite all the hype about yoga and self esteem, there hasn't been a lot of research demonstrating a connection, especially in comparison to other forms of exercise. But Steriani Elavsky and Edward McAuley have conducted a new study comparing yoga to walking. They recruited 164 women age 42 to 56, with offers of a free fitness program. At the study outset, all the women were paid $20 to undergo both psychological testing for measures such as their body image, physical self-esteem, and global-self esteem, as well as physical measures like weight and body fat percentage. Then they were randomly divided into three groups: yoga, walking, and control (no exercise).
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Posted by Dave Munger at 2:34 PM • Comments (37)
April 3, 2008
Category: Reasoning • Research • Social
"Outing" gays and lesbians has always been a controversial practice, especially when done without the outed person's consent. But even when an individual outs him or herself, some people argue that outing is inappropriate because of the negative stereotypes that are evoked. But there's a subtler sort of outing as well: even if a person is publicly out, not everyone is immediately aware of it. While most Americans know that Ellen DeGeneres is a lesbian, fewer people might be aware that Alice Walker is too. While they might know Freddy Mercury was gay, they might not know about Cole Porter.
It might seem rather pointless for every news report about Alice Walker to mention her sexual preferences, but those in favor of this subtler sort of outing suggest that it can improve the public impression of gays and lesbians. Up until now, there hasn't been much science to back that claim. What we do know is that people who have gay and lesbian friends and family members tend to show less bias against them, both overtly and in implicit bias tests. Does simply seeing or learning about famous people who are gay or lesbian also decrease bias?
Nilanjana Dasgupta and Luis Rivera recruited 127 heterosexual people via newspaper ads to participate in a paid study. The participants were divided into two groups: one group viewed pictures and descriptions of 15 flowers, while the other saw photos and short biographies of famous gays and lesbians. They were then given an Implicit Attitude Test.
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Posted by Dave Munger at 3:05 PM • Comments (12)
March 10, 2008
Category: Development / Aging • Face perception • Research • Social
What makes children so cute? Is it their adorably soft skin? Their innocently mischievous smiles? Their oversized eyes and tiny little mouths? Why is it that some kids are singled out for TV commercials and child beauty pageants, while others don't seem to be noteworthy in any way?
Attractiveness in children isn't trivial -- teachers believe more attractive students are more intelligent, and are less likely to punish them for misbehavior. There are also gender differences: Teachers give better grades to attractive girls, but worse grades to attractive boys.
Most studies about cuteness have focused on photographs of children. For example, in the grading study I mentioned above, photos of attractive and unattractive kids were included with essays to be graded by teachers. But when a Japanese team led by Reiko Koyama asked 38 volunteers to tell them what made a child cute, many of the responses were focused on actions: When a child shares with a friend, or imitates adult behavior, or hides in shame, all these things are seen as cute. Out of 148 different examples of cuteness, the researchers selected the 29 most reliable factors, which they divided into four categories: Childlike behavior, physical cuteness, imitating adults, or invoking protective feeling in others.
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Posted by Dave Munger at 3:25 PM • Comments (4)
March 3, 2008
Category: Language • Reasoning • Research • Social
You might expect someone's cultural background to influence their speech, their appearance, their musical tastes, and the foods they like. You'd probably also expect culture to have an impact on values and beliefs, on stories and traditions. But what about their bodies -- not just physical features like skin color or hair texture, but attitude towards the self? If culture touches on so many aspects of an individual, perhaps it can also impact the subtle ways people think about of their own bodies.
Consider this fairly well-established difference between Euro-Americans and Asian Americans: Euro-Americans tend to believe that they should be concerned primarily with their own self-interest: they should consider their own needs before those of others. Asian Americans tend to believe that they should adapt their actions to the needs of others: they should "harmonize" with those around them. While in some ways this distinction is a stereotype, it has been supported by research -- even if it doesn't apply to every member of each culture.
It's not hard to see how this difference between two cultures might be expressed in Euro-Americans' and Asian Americans' attitudes about their bodies: Euro-Americans might take their own perspective, while Asian Americans might be more likely to take the perspective of others. In English (and many other languages), different language is used depending whose perspective you're taking: From my perspective, you come to my house, but from your perspective, you go to my house.
Angela Leung and Dov Cohen had 131 Euro- and Asian Americans read eight stories sentence by sentence on a computer screen. Half the stories took the perspective of the reader, and half took the perspective of a friend chosen by the reader. Each story had two key sentences involving the "coming/going" (or a similar "taking/bringing") distinction -- an object or person was either depicted as "coming" or "going" towards the protagonist in the story. The researchers measured how long it took readers to read these sentences, and here's what they found:
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Posted by Dave Munger at 3:06 PM • Comments (9)
February 26, 2008
Category: Face perception • Research • Social
It's hard to resist flirting with babies. Even if a baby has been screaming her head off for hours on end in the seat behind you on a transatlantic flight, if she giggles and smiles when you're deplaning, you'll probably smile back. What is it about babies that makes our hearts melt almost instantaneously when we see them? Is it their cuteness, their happiness, or just their babyness?
A team led by Morten Kringelbach showed photos of babies and adults to twelve volunteers while their brains were being scanned with a MEG (magnetoencephalography) scanner. The key to the study was the control of the photos. Ninety-five judges had previously rated these pictures for the emotion they displayed and the attractiveness of the faces. Both the adult photos and the baby photos were rejected if they were rated as too attractive or unattractive: only middling pictures were chosen for use in the study. Each of the individuals -- 13 adults and 13 babies -- was depicted with a happy, sad, and neutral expression, and again all these photos were selected to have equivalent levels of emotional expression, so the viewers each saw 78 different pictures.
The MEG scanner, unlike fMRI, measures actual neuronal activity, and it responds extremely rapidly, allowing precise measurements within milliseconds after the cells in brain are activated. Viewers were told to look at a small red cross on the screen and press a button when it changed from red to green. They were told to ignore the pictures, which were flashed for about a third of a second between appearances of red/green cross. Of course the researchers were actually interested in the brain activity while the pictures were seen, and they ignored the data from when the cross actually changed color, which happened about 15 percent of the time. Here's what they were really interested in:
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Posted by Dave Munger at 8:00 PM • Comments (11)
February 20, 2008
Category: Music • Research • Social
One of the most common "icebreaker" conversation topics is music preferences. We ask friends what they're listening to on their iPods, bloggers post playlists on their sidebars, and one of the most popular websites on the planet (MySpace) is built around sharing music. The assumption is that musical preferences can tell us something beyond what someone likes to listen to -- we believe we can judge a person's personality, fashion preferences, and more based just on the style of music they prefer.
For me, it's difficult not to form a mental picture of a person when I hear what music they listen to. A heavy metal fan evokes an entirely different mental image for me compared to a classical music buff or someone who likes religious music. But are these mental pictures accurate? Can we really make reliable judgments based just on music preferences? Until recently, very little research had been conducted on the subject.
We've discussed one such study here on Cognitive Daily, by Peter Rentfrow and Samuel Gosling, which suggested that music preferences do correlate with some personality traits. Now Rentfrow and Gosling have conducted a new study which explores a wider range of musical styles, and focuses more on stereotypes than individual preferences.
They quizzed over 200 college students on their stereotypes of fans of one of 14 different musical genres: blues, classical, folk, jazz, alternative, heavy metal, rock, country, pop, religious, soundtracks, electronic, rap, and soul. For most genres, the judges were largely in agreement as to what the typical fan was like.
The graph below shows how the judges rated five personality traits of fans of four of the genres:
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Posted by Dave Munger at 3:49 PM • Comments (16)
January 14, 2008
Category: Movement and exercise • Reasoning • Research • Social
I was a little surprised by an offhand observation Thomas Schubert made in a recent research report. He claimed that while men will commonly make a fist to celebrate a goal in a soccer match or a home run in baseball, it's unusual for women to do so.
I'm sure I've seen both female athletes and fans celebrating with fist pumps. But maybe I only noticed these cases because they were exceptions. Let's see if we can verify Schubert's observation with a little poll.
But there are additional gender dynamics to making fists besides who celebrates that way at a football game. At a minimum, a fist can signal an intent to hit someone (Schubert claims it's an abbreviation for the act of hitting itself). Researchers have found that males usually hit others with the intent to coerce or punish; women, by contrast, are likely expressing distress when they hit others. It's almost the opposite intention: speaking in generalities, men hit to establish their power, while women hit to express their powerlessness.
If hitting has a different meaning for men and women, then it falls to reason that making a fist also has a different meaning -- which might explain Schubert's anecdote about making fists in celebration. But studying body movement and how it affects thoughts and intentions is a tricky business (see, for example, this study on smiling). If you tell someone to make a fist and ask them how it makes them feel, is it the physical fist-making that causes the emotion, or the linguistic term "fist"?
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Posted by Dave Munger at 12:18 PM • Comments (16)
December 27, 2007
Category: Emotion • Research • Social
Earlier this week we discussed the relationship between life satisfaction and other measures of well-being, finding that for measures such as relative income, the happiest people weren't always the best-off. For relationships, however, the happiest individuals also seem to do better.
But these measures were only taken at an instant in time. What about over longer periods? The College and Beyond study questioned incoming college freshmen in 1976, and included a self-rating of "cheerfulness," among many other measures. Then those same individuals were surveyed in 1995. How did cheerfulness affect income nearly two decades later? Here are the results:
As you can see, it depends on the individual. People who came from higher-income families earned significantly more than those who were from low-income families. But the pattern for high-income families looks more like the pattern previously observed only for relationships: the more cheerful respondents were in 1976, the more they made in 1995. For low-income families, being extremely cheerful didn't pay off as well: respondents from the second most cheerful group in 1976 earned more in 1995 than the most cheerful group.
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Posted by Dave Munger at 9:30 AM • Comments (5)
December 24, 2007
Category: Emotion • Research • Social
Happiness is associated with a lot of good things in life. People who are happier tend to get better job ratings, make more money, be more likely to get married, and be more satisfied with their marriages than people who are less happy, even years after the original happiness assessment.
People around the world rate happiness as more important than intelligence, success, and material wealth. But is it possible to be too happy? An extremely happy person might be less motivated to seek a better job, more education, or better health care. Short-term happiness could conceivably be a route to a less satisfying life. Yet many government policies, for example, are justified by a desire to promote more and more happiness. Isn't there a limit?
A team led by Shigehiro Oishi conducted what they claim is the first study of the idea that there may be an optimal happiness level. There is a wealth of data available that includes some measure of happiness along with other possible measures of well-being, so rather than conducting a new survey, the researchers re-analyzed several different data sets with an eye to learning if the optimal level of happiness might be something less than "perfectly content."
The first study they considered was the World Values Survey, which was administered to over 100,000 individuals from 96 different countries between 1981 and 2000. One of the many questions respondents were asked was "all things considered, how satisfied are you with your life these days?" This is a pretty standard measure of happiness: respondents are simply asked to rate their overall happiness level on a numerical scale (in this case, 1 to 10). Another common way to assess happiness is on a moment-to-moment basis: You could be happy overall with your life, but sad momentarily when a favorite pet dies. Oishi's team concerned itself primarily with the more long-term variety -- but many studies have also shown that momentary happiness correlates with life satisfaction.
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Posted by Dave Munger at 9:16 AM • Comments (13)
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