For once, social scientists have discovered a flaw in the human psyche that will not be tedious to correct. You may not even need a support group. You could try on your own by starting with this simple New Year’s resolution: Have fun … now!
Then you just need the strength to cash in your gift certificates, drink that special bottle of wine, redeem your frequent flier miles and take that vacation you always promised yourself. If your resolve weakens, do not succumb to guilt or shame. Acknowledge what you are: a recovering procrastinator of pleasure.
It sounds odd, but this is actually a widespread form of procrastination — just ask the airlines and other marketers who save billions of dollars annually from gift certificates that expire unredeemed. (…)
But it has taken awhile for psychologists and behavioral economists to analyze this condition. Now they have begun to explore the strange impulse to put off until tomorrow what could be enjoyed today.
Why are people so blissfully ignorant of certain aspects of their personalities?
Take an everyday example: 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, they are aware of it and presumably not worried about appearing unconscientious. For the unaware it’s almost as if they don’t realise they’re always late. How is that possible?
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.
However schema theory also suggests that these maps have uncharted areas, leaving people with certain blind spots in their self-knowledge.
A fundamental mistake we often make when judging other people is assuming that their behaviour mainly reflects their personality. 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. (…)
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.
What does gift-wrapping do for the recipient? Is all this effort worth it for the recipient? For example, do recipients actually like gift-wrapped presents more than unwrapped gifts?
According to a study that was published 15 years ago by Daniel Howard, professor of marketing at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, it appears so.
The success of many attacks on computer systems can be traced back to the security engineers not understanding the psychology of the system users they meant to protect. We examine a variety of scams and “short cons” that were investigated, documented and recreated for the BBC TV programme The Real Hustle and we extract from them some general principles about the recurring behavioural patterns of victims that hustlers have learnt to exploit.
We argue that an understanding of these inherent “human factors” vulnerabilities, and the necessity to take them into account during design rather than naïvely shifting the blame onto the “gullible users”, is a fundamental paradigm shift for the security engineer which, if adopted, will lead to stronger and more resilient systems security.
I had been mistaken in thinking that I could see clearly into my own heart. But this knowledge which had not been given me by the finest mental perceptions had now been brought to me, hard, glittering, strange, like a crystallised salt, by the abrupt reaction of grief.
Je m’étais trompé en croyant voir clair dans mon cœur. Mais cette connaissance que ne m’avaient pas donnée les plus fines perceptions de l’esprit venait de m’être apportée, dure, éclatante, étrange, comme un sel cristallisé par la brusque réaction de la douleur.
A good exercise for learning about yourself is to think about how other people might view you in different ways. Consider how your family, your work colleagues or your partner think of you.
Now here’s an interesting question: to what extent do you play up to these expectations about how they view you?
This idea that other people’s expectations about us directly affect how we behave was examined in a classic social psychology study carried out by Dr Mark Snyder from the University of Minnesota and colleagues (Snyder et al., 1977). (…)
Understanding that other people’s expectations about us directly and immediately affect our behaviour is a vital component in understanding how we can come to be quite different people across various social situations.
“People make optimistic predictions about themselves,” he says. “They expect relationships to last longer, tasks to take less time and things to turn out generally better than they will.” And when they ask for a waffle-maker for Christmas, they think, “I’ll use this all the time!”
“But sometimes the reality of owning an object doesn’t quite measure up to our expectations,” says Vietri. “The cappuccino machine is a hassle to clean, the fancy navigation system is not necessary for most driving, and no one has time to play the new piano.”
Posing as patients, three undercover observers got themselves admitted as patients to a locked psychiatric ward to investigate conditions on the inside.
Each undercover patient had rehearsed an extensive back story, and the supposed family members who visited them were professional actors. A remote team monitored the project via hidden cameras and microphones from a command center in a nearby hotel.
The project, which took place this spring in De Gelderse Roos, a psychiatric complex about 40 miles from Amsterdam, was not a sting operation. The staff was told there would be mystery shoppers, of a sort, in the facility over a couple of months.
Le fou est le joueur déréglé du Même et de l’Autre. Il prend les choses pour ce qu’elles ne sont pas, et les gens les uns pour les autres; il ignore ses amis, reconnaît les étrangers; il croit démasquer, et il impose un masque.
When Thomas Mann was a child his father contrived an experiment to teach him and his siblings a lesson about appetite. “Our father assured us,” Mann writes, “that once in our lives we could eat as many cream puffs … and cream rolls at the pastry shop as we wanted. He led us into a sweet smelling Paradise, and let the dream become reality - and we were amazed how quickly we reached the limit of our desire, which we believed to be infinite.” Here the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. We need only to experiment with our greed to discover that it is only in our fantasies that we are excessive; in reality our appetite is sensible; is, as we like to say, self-regulating - we know when we have had enough. (…)
When we are greedy, the psychoanalyst Harold Boris writes, we are in a state of mind in which we “wish and hope to have everything all the time”; greed “wants everything, nothing less will do”, and so “it cannot be satisfied”. Appetite, he writes in a useful distinction, is inherently satisfiable. So the excess of appetite we call greed is actually a form of despair. Greed turns up when we lose faith in our appetites, when what we need is not available. In this view it is not that appetite is excessive; it is that our fear of frustration is excessive. Excess is a sign of frustration; we are only excessive wherever there is a frustration we are unaware of, and a fear we cannot bear.
You’re mugged by a man with a patch over one eye. You describe him and his distinctive appearance to the police. They locate a one-eyed suspect and present him to you in a video line-up with five innocent “foils”. If this suspect is the only person in the line-up with one eye, prior research shows you’re highly likely to pick him out even if, in all other respects, he actually bears little resemblance to your mugger. So the challenge is: How to make police line-ups fairer for suspects who have an unusual distinguishing feature?
Police in the USA and UK currently use two strategies - one is to conceal the suspect’s distinguishing feature (and tell the witness they’ve done so); the other is to use make-up, theatrical props or Photoshop to adorn the other members of the line-up with the same distinctive feature. Now Theodora Zarkadi and her colleagues have compared both approaches and found the fairer method is to replicate the unusual feature.
Whenever a new corporate or governmental scandal erupts, onlookers ask “Where were the lawyers?” Why would attorneys not have advised their clients of the risks posed by conduct that, from an outsider’s perspective, appears indefensible? When numerous red flags have gone unheeded, people often conclude that the lawyers’ failure to sound the alarm must be caused by greed, incompetence, or both.
A few scholars have suggested that unconscious cognitive bias may better explain such lapses in judgment, but they have not explained why particular situations are more likely than others to encourage such bias. This article seeks to fill that gap. Drawing on research from behavioral and social psychology, it suggests that lawyers’ apparent lapses in judgment may be caused by cognitive biases arising from partisan kinship between lawyer and client.
The article uses identity theory to distinguish particular situations in which attorney judgment is likely to be compromised, and it recommends strategies to enhance attorney independence and minimize judgment errors.
If someone tells you something that isn’t true, they may not be lying. At least not in the conventional sense. Confabulation, a rare disorder resulting from severe brain damage, causes its sufferers to relentlessly invent and believe fictions—both mundane and fantastical—about their lives. If asked where she has just been, a patient might say that she was in the laundry room (when she wasn’t) or that she’s been visiting Scotland with her sister (who’s been dead for 20 years), or even that she isn’t in the room where you’re talking to her, but in one exactly like it, further down the corridor. And could you fetch her hand cream please? These stories aren’t maintained for long periods, but are sincerely believed.
While it only affects a tiny minority of those with brain damage, confabulation tells us something important: that spontaneous, fluid, even riotous creativity is a natural part of the design of the mind. The damage associated with confabulation—usually to the frontal lobes—adds nothing to the brain’s makeup. Instead it releases a capacity for fiction that lies dormant inside all of us. Anyone who has seen children at play knows that the desire to make up stories is deeply embedded in human nature. And it can be cultivated too, most clearly by anarchic improvisers like Paul Merton.
Suppose a genie appears and gives you two choices. The first option is that he will [thanks] give you $10 million dollars, but everyone else you know will get $20 million apiece.
Choice two: You get $5 million, but no one else gets anything.
As a bonus, the genie offers to erase your memory of having made the choice, so guilt will never be a factor. You will simply wake up the next day in the new situation.
Which option do you choose to maximize your personal happiness?
A common line of argument in evolutionary psychology suggests that sexual preferences for certain body types exist because we’ve evolved these desires to maximise our chances of mating with the most fertile or healthiest partner.
For example, studies have interpreted the fact that taller men are more likely to attract mates and reproduce in terms of evolutionary pressures on sexual desire. But most of these and similar studies have been completed on Western samples, while the authors draw conclusions about the ‘universal’ nature of these ‘evolutionary’ pressures.
To test how universal these body preferences really are, anthropologists Rebecca Sear and Frank Marlowe looked at whether similar preferences existed in the Hadza people, a hunter-gather tribe from Tanzania.
It turns out, these supposedly ‘universal preferences’ don’t exist in the Hadza.
Attempts at lie-detection have been around ever since we first deceived - pretty much as soon as humans walked upright. Most countries outside the US have moved on from the polygraph - although prosecutors in India are now using electroencephalograms to “prove” guilt, despite the science being bitterly disputed.
So are there any reliable indicators of mendacity? Tics - fidgeting, stuttering - are mistakenly attributed to cheats across many societies (psychologist Charles Bond has noted this belief in 63 countries) without recourse to scientific proof.
Ditto the avoidance of eye contact - dropping your inquisitor’s gaze is often given anecdotally as confirmation of guilt.
“Eye contact has been proven the least accurate thing to watch for,” says Stan Walters, author of The Truth About Lying. “Most reliable cues typically come from the voice, in specific, the words.”
Professor Richard Wiseman (…) says that common sense is the lie-buster’s best weapon, and affirms that it is aural rather than visual clues that are key. (…)
“Lying taxes the mind,” Wiseman explains. “It involves thinking about what is plausible. People tend to repeat phrases, give shorter answers, and hesitate more. They will try to distance themselves from the lie, so use far more impersonal language. Liars often reduce the number of times that they say words like ‘I’, ‘me’, and ‘mine’. To detect deception, look for aural signs associated with having to think hard.”
According to the Canadian Journal of Police and Security Services, another side-effect of lying that forensic interrogators will look for is the avoidance of verbal contractions - using “I am” instead of “I’m” and so on.
Nature reported another study by Ioannis Pavlidis of Honeywell Laboratories in Minnesota. He established that many people blush when they are telling a lie - a subtle, but detectable, phenomenon.
Like the flu, a person’s emotional state can be contagious. Watch someone cry, and you’ll likely feel sad; think about the elderly, and you’ll tend to walk slower. Now a study suggests that we can also catch someone else’s irrational thought processes.
Anyone who’s lost money on a fixer-upper may have succumbed to a classic economic fallacy known as “sunk costs.” You make a bad investment in a home that’s never going to sell for more than you put in to it, yet you want to justify your investment by continuing to throw money into renovations. One way to avoid this hole is to get advice from someone who has no self-interest in the project. But is the outsider still somehow susceptible to your mindset?
To find out, social psychologist Adam Galinsky of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, and colleagues asked college students to take over decision-making for a person they had never met–and who they didn’t know was fictitious. The volunteers were split into two groups: one that felt some connection with the decision-maker and another that didn’t. (…)
The results suggest that companies trying to reverse results of bad decisions should find true outsiders. He points to troubled automaker Ford as an example. Instead of hiring from within–as General Motors (GM) recently did–Ford made Alan Mulally from Boeing, an aerospace company, their chief executive officer. Many experts believe that Ford is now recovering quicker than GM.
One of the most incredible things about the human mind is its resilience. Let’s face it, life can be pretty depressing at times, and yet people generally push on much the same as they always have, sometimes even with a spring in their step and a smile on their face.
How come one day it seems like the world is going to end and the next there’s hope? And how come our bad moods lift so unexpectedly, like a brick sprouting wings and disappearing into the clear blue sky?
The reason is that we all have a secret weapon against bad moods: a psychological immune system. When we experience events that send us into an emotional tailspin it kicks in to try and protect us from the worst of it.
So let’s look at Twitter in the context of Abraham Maslow’s concept of a hierarchy of needs, first presented in his 1943 paper “A Theory of Human Motivation.”
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is most often displayed as a pyramid, with lowest levels of the pyramid made up of the most basic needs and more complex needs are at the top of the pyramid. Needs at the bottom of the pyramid are basic physical requirements including the need for food, water, sleep and warmth. Once these lower-level needs have been met, people can move on to higher levels of needs, which become increasingly psychological and social. Soon, the need for love, friendship and intimacy become important. Further up the pyramid, the need for personal esteem and feelings of accomplishment become important. Finally, Maslow emphasized the importance of self-actualization, which is a process of growing and developing as a person to achieve individual potential.
Twitter aims primarily at social needs, like those for belonging, love, and affection. Relationships such as friendships, romantic attachments and families help fulfill this need for companionship and acceptance, as does involvement in social, community or religious groups. Clearly, feeling connected to people via Twitter helps to fulfill some of this need to belong and feel cared about.
An even higher level of need, related to self-esteem and social recognition, is also leveraged by Twitter.
The pride expression is a fairly specific signal of high status. (…) The pride display may be best viewed as a gestalt signal in which the sum of various parts (expanded body posture, small smile, head tilt back, arms extended) transmits an automatically interpreted message. (…)
Pride expression sends a message that is distinct from that of happiness, consistent with a growing body of research suggesting that distinct positive emotions, such as pride and happiness, may have evolved to serve distinct functions. (…)
The high-status signal sent by pride expression also appears to be distinct from any message sent by anger. Previous research has shown that displays of anger lead observers to judge individuals as more professionally qualified than individuals displaying sadness. Thus, anger seems to convey a sense of power or competence, at least relative to a low-power (and presumably low-status) emotion such as sadness. Yet, the present findings suggest that the anger expression does not convey high status to the same extent as pride; in fact, when compared with pride, anger was relatively more associated with low status. (…)
The current results demonstrate that high-status perceptions of the pride expression are unelaborated and automatic. Indeed, this is the first research to suggest that our ability to rapidly and involuntarily assess social status may be due, in part, to our ability to automatically recognize and interpret displays of pride.
{ Azim F. Shariff and Jessica L. Tracy, Knowing Who’s Boss: Implicit Perceptions of Status From the Nonverbal Expression of Pride, 2009 | PDF | Continue reading | via OvercomingBias }
