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In markets, medicine, justice, politics, psychology, and economics, "Rational Man" is dead. As the science of human behavior enters the post-rational era, we no longer think of ourselves as cool calculators in pursuit of our objective self-interest. "Mind Matters" is about this change and its effects on how we live. It's about the reasons people perceive, feel, think, and act as they do, and the gaps between what we think we're doing and what research says we're doing. And it's about how this change affects the institutions we live by: courts, hospitals, governments, stock markets and other entities that rest on the presumption that people act rationally.

David Berreby
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August 26, 2010
10:55 AM
953 views

Why A Good Friend Has the Same Effect As a Warm Fire

by David Berreby in Mind Matters

"Vision," Stanford's Bill Newsome likes to say, "does not happen in the eye. It happens in the brain." As I mentioned in my last post, this is a general theme in our understanding of the mind and brain: We don't passively record "reality" and then process our perceptions. Rather, we actively create what we see, hear, taste, smell and feel. A nice new example is this experiment, which found that people feel warmer when standing near a loved one, and colder when they're reminded that someone nearby doesn't share their interests.
A growing body of research suggests that physical and psychological perceptions share common pathways. Experiments have already shown, for example, that physically warming up a room causes people in it to feel their relationships are closer. The question Hans Ijzerman and his colleagues took up in this paper was: Would this effect work in reverse? Instead of warming up social perceptions by heating the room, could you make people feel the room was toasty just by putting a loved one nearby?
Answer: Yes. Their paper, recently published in The Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, compared the temperature perceptions of people who stood within two feet of an intimate, compared to people who did not. On average, the people who stood close to a loved one guessed that the temperature in the lab was 2 degrees warmer than did those who weren't experiencing that social and emotional connection. (Unfortunately, the work is behind an outrageously expensive paywall and the abstract is incomplete on ScienceDirect's greedy website. So I've had to deduce some details from the abstract and Daily Mail article.)
Photo: Sophie Lair-Berreby
Ijzerman, H., & Semin, G. (2010). Temperature perceptions as a ground for social proximity Journal of Experimental Social Psychology DOI: 10.1016/j.jesp.2010.07.015
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IJzerman, H., & Semin, G. (2010) Temperature perceptions as a ground for social proximity. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. DOI: 10.1016/j.jesp.2010.07.015

August 6, 2010
05:12 PM
901 views

Will, Baby, Will: Why Energy Problems Need New Thinking, Not New Oil Wells

by David Berreby in Mind Matters

Providing adequate and sustainable sources of energy isn't a geophysical problem of finding supplies or a technological challenge of using sun, wind or gas more efficiently. It's a psychological problem: How to get people to think differently and behave differently. That, I think, is the lesson of this paper, published last month in the journal Environmental Science and Technology: Some 2 percent of American energy use in a year goes to make food that no one eats, it reports. Eliminating that waste would yield more energy than the country gets from all its offshore oil and gas wells, current and projected.
Given that about a quarter of food produced in the United States goes to waste, write Amanda D. Cuéllar and Michael E. Webber of the University of Texas at Austin, they were able to estimate how much energy annually is "embedded in wasted food." It's a lot: More than 2000 trillion BTUs every year.
Addressing food waste would have other benefits, as Rachel Cernansky points out: The average American family loses $600 a year on food it doesn't consume. Then, too, the Natural Resources Defense Council has reported that cutting food waste would also help lower greenhouse gas emissions without in any way reducing anyone's quality of life.
Recapturing that lost power, Cuéllar and Webber note, won't be a matter of getting everyone to order fewer fries and clean their plates. It will require a "retooling of the food supply chain to ensure that the energy consumed during food production does in fact decrease with a decrease in food waste." That will take a lot of work. But the first step, obviously, is to stop focussing on supply and think seriously about all we have to gain by reducing demand.

Cuéllar, A., & Webber, M. (2010). Wasted Food, Wasted Energy: The Embedded Energy in Food Waste in the United States Environmental Science & Technology DOI: 10.1021/es100310d
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Cuéllar, A., & Webber, M. (2010) Wasted Food, Wasted Energy: The Embedded Energy in Food Waste in the United States. Environmental Science , 2147483647. DOI: 10.1021/es100310d

February 15, 2011
09:23 AM
872 views

Why You Can't Cure a Plague of Olbermanns With An Infusion of O'Reillys

by David Berreby in Mind Matters

Do left-leaning social sciences need an influx of conservatives to open their collective minds? So argues Jon Haidt, but I wonder. As I read this study in this month's Journal of Risk Research, adding another ideology to social psychology would more likely lead to a lot of pointless yelling and a ...Read More
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Kahan, D., Jenkins-Smith, H., & Braman, D. (2011) Cultural cognition of scientific consensus. Journal of Risk Research, 14(2), 147-174. DOI: 10.1080/13669877.2010.511246

April 21, 2010
11:37 AM
842 views

New Study: Some Sciences Really Are Better Than Others

by David Berreby in Mind Matters

If you want to rile up a biologist and have no pointed stick handy, try this: Tell her that chemistry or physics are "harder," more fundamentally "sciencey" sciences than hers. "You can't use the standards of one science to judge another," she might say. "Physics is different from biology, not better." Not so, you answer: There must be standards common to all the sciences, which some meet better than others do. You're now set up for a seemingly unresolvable philosophical debate. Most working scientists I know would rather face the pointiest of sticks.

In this paper, published earlier this month, Daniele Fanelli tries to take the issue out of the realm of philosophy. He argues that there is indeed a "hierarchy of sciences" from hard and rigorous down to soft and fuzzy. And that this is not a philosophical position, but an objective fact, quantified by scientific methods.

Irritating as it is to unphilosophical scientists, the issue is unavoidably important. Science is supposed to describe reality, after all. And a reality in which all sciences are equal is different from a reality in which some are better than others.

To see why, consider not what scientists know, but what they don't know. What's the nature of these gaps in their knowledge? To put it roughly, answers fall into two camps.

I'll call one Camp Give-Us-Time. Here, science is a bit like a commuter waiting for a bus: He does not know when the bus will arrive, but that's only because of where he happens to be standing at the moment. The bus's arrival time is certainly knowable, just not known today. All ignorance is temporary. Just Give Us Time, we'll make scientific knowledge complete. "There is intrinsically only one class of explanation," E.O. Wilson wrote in the Bible of Camp Give-Us-Time, Consilience. "It traverses the scales of space, time and complexity to unite the disparate facts of the disciplines by consilience, the perception of a seamless web of cause and effect."

I'll call the other side Camp Incommensurate. Over here, science is like a IT worker trying to understand behavior on a computer network, where millions of users, machines, lines of code and pieces of hardware all interact. Knowing the code doesn't tell you anything about what's happening with the hardware or that clumsy user's coffee cup that tilted onto his keyboard. So, faced with a question like "Why did we crash that one time on Tuesday?" she uses programming skills to look at the code and hardware tools to examine the machines and social skills to look at the users. It may not work, though, because when software, hardware and people interact, things happen that could not be predicted by knowing each part separately. That means some questions cannot be answered, ever. Rather than a consequence of lack of money or brains or time, ignorance is a fact about reality itself.

I call this side Camp Incommensurate because of what follows from acceptance that knowledge is fragmented: These campers don't expect different parts of science to fit together. Different fields are incommensurate, in that they don't line up into a coherent whole. Why should psychology's concepts, theories and methods be expressed as biology? And why imagine that you can break biology down into chemistry? We have psychology precisely because biology can't account for the soul; we have biology because there are aspects of life that chemistry cannot grasp. The philosopher Jerry Fodor didn't think much of the consilience idea for this reason: "In fact, there are very few examples so far in which it has turned out that the explanatory apparatus of a higher-level science can be paraphrased in the vocabulary of some science further down," he wrote. Instead, as he put it, our heterogeneous fragments of knowledge might arise from "the heterogeneity of levels at which the world is organized, and both might well prove irreducible."

Things are different back at Camp Give-Us-Time. There, they hold that psychology is too a subset of biology, which is a subset of biology, which is a subset of chemistry, which is a piece of physics. That means there is (to put it roughly) a single "right" way to do science—or, at least, a single standard against which to judge all research. The "hierarchy of sciences" follows from this assumption that knowledge is a coherent, reflecting a completely intelligible universe.

So I see Fanelli's paper, published this month in the journal PLoS One, a bold raid by Camp Give-Us-Time on their opponents.

Here is his argument: If there is indeed a hierarchy of sciences from "hard," rigorous disciplines down to "soft" ones, he says, then "researchers in 'softer' sciences should have fewer constraints to their conscious and unconscious biases, and therefore report more positive outcomes." According to his analysis of 2,434 papers from the Essential Science Indicators database, that hypothesis was confirmed: "the odds of reporting a positive result were around 5 times higher among papers in the disciplines of Psychology and Psychiatry and Economics and Business compared to Space Science, 2.3 times higher in the domain of social sciences compared to the physical sciences, and 3.4 times higher in studies applying behavioral and social methodologies on people compared to physical and chemical studies on non-biological material." (Yet there were more positive results in chemistry and physics than in papers published under the rubric of Social Science, so maybe the hierarchy needs some surprising revisions.)

At least the softer sciences can console themselves with the thought that they're doing it right, according to Fanelli's analysis: "On the other hand, these results support the scientific status of the social sciences against claims that they are completely subjective, by showing that, when they adopt a scientific approach to discovery, they differ from the natural sciences only by a matter of degree." Perhaps he means it benignly, but I suspect that over in Camp Incommensurate, them's fightin' words.

Fanelli, D. (2010). “Positive” Results Increase Down the Hierarchy of the Sciences PLoS ONE, 5 (4) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0010068

Topics:... Read more »

Fanelli, D. (2010) “Positive” Results Increase Down the Hierarchy of the Sciences. PLoS ONE, 5(4). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0010068

March 12, 2011
10:19 AM
795 views

The Longer You Live, the Worse You Drive

by David Berreby in Mind Matters

Research on life extension is all about aging and death within a human body. Perhaps it should expand to encompass the effects of being run over by a car: According to this study, elderly drivers are half as likely to notice hazards and pedestrians as are younger drivers. So if we ever attain a ...Read More
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Bromberg, S., Oron-Gilad, T., Ronen, A., Borowsky, A., & Parmet, Y. (2011) The perception of pedestrians from the perspective of elderly experienced and experienced drivers. Accident Analysis . DOI: 10.1016/j.aap.2010.12.028

March 14, 2011
01:05 PM
767 views

Is an Atlantic Tsunami Possible?

by David Berreby in Mind Matters

A lot of people know that New York City sits on fault lines (and that the Indian Point Nuclear Power plant is above the intersection of two active seismic zones), all of which makes it entirely possible that the city could suffer a catastrophic earthquake. But I thought at least I and my fellow ...Read More
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Ward, S., & Day, S. (2001) Cumbre Vieja Volcano—Potential collapse and tsunami at La Palma, Canary Islands. Geophysical Research Letters, 28(17), 3397. DOI: 10.1029/2001GL013110

January 4, 2011
11:09 PM
755 views

Study: To Improve Your Score, Try a Little Pre-Test Ancestor Worship

by David Berreby in Mind Matters

I admit I was creeped out by this new paper, from the European Journal of Social Psychology, which reports that people primed to think about their ancestors performed better on intelligence tests than did people who didn't. I'm just a little squicked that a study performed in Austria commends pride ...Read More
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Fischer, P., Sauer, A., Vogrincic, C., & Weisweiler, S. (2010) The ancestor effect: Thinking about our genetic origin enhances intellectual performance. European Journal of Social Psychology. DOI: 10.1002/ejsp.778

MCGLONE, M., & ARONSON, J. (2006) Stereotype threat, identity salience, and spatial reasoning. Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, 27(5), 486-493. DOI: 10.1016/j.appdev.2006.06.003

Cohen, G. (2006) Reducing the Racial Achievement Gap: A Social-Psychological Intervention. Science, 313(5791), 1307-1310. DOI: 10.1126/science.1128317

Miyake, A., Kost-Smith, L., Finkelstein, N., Pollock, S., Cohen, G., & Ito, T. (2010) Reducing the Gender Achievement Gap in College Science: A Classroom Study of Values Affirmation. Science, 330(6008), 1234-1237. DOI: 10.1126/science.1195996

September 1, 2010
03:17 PM
752 views

Self-Righteousness and Kink: Perfect Together?

by David Berreby in Mind Matters

Props to my colleague Lindsay Beyerstein for this great catch yesterday: Tea Party favorite Sharron Angle's campaign received a donation from someone who listed her employer as "husband" and her occupation as "slave." Maybe it's just a joke (boring). Or maybe this couple is in one of those Christian "submitted wife" relationships (unlikely, given that "slave" isn't the sort of rhetoric that culture promotes). But maybe this is an "out" dominant/submissive couple. That shouldn't be a surprise, if so. Contrary to stereotypes, there's good evidence that conservatives worldwide are more likely than liberals to have non-vanilla sex lives.
Obviously I'm not talking about high-profile Republican kink, like the $2000 the party spent at a bondage-themed strip club or the curious habits of some of its senators. We're looking at the rank and file. In this online survey, for instance, 81 percent of Republican respondents reported that they'd used blindfolds, handcuffs or other restraints during sex. Democrats came in at 77 percent on that one. Almost half the Republicans said they had filmed themselves during sex, compared to 38 percent of the Democrats.
Of course, the sample here was biased (it consisted of visitors to the website of Good Vibrations, the sex-toy store). A statistically sounder indicator is Benjamin Edelman's finding that in the United States, "red" states have the highest rates of subscription to online porn. You can read the paper, "Red Light States," in pdf form, here. Similarly, as P.Z. Myers showed last month, for Google searches of kinky pornographic terms ("horse sex," "rape video" and the like), the leading nations are officially cultural conservatives: Pakistan, India, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
Are these data signs of the allure of the forbidden? Maybe. Perhaps, though, they reflect what Chen-Bo Zhong and Katie Liljenquist call the "Macbeth effect," after Lady Macbeth's attempt to wash away her sins by scrubbing her hands. Some years ago, Zhong and Liljenquist found that people who'd been prompted to think about a past ethical lapse were more eager to wash their hands then were people who had been reminded of some virtuous act they'd done. The washing ritual had an effect on their behavior: Asked to give time for no pay to a desperate grad student's project, three-quarters of those who had not washed did volunteer. Of those who did wash, only 41 percent stepped forward to help.
Similarly, Simone Schnall and her colleagues have found that letting people wash has an effect on how they feel about using a kitten to get off sexually, taking money from a lost wallet, or other ethically dubious acts. Cleaning up, which makes people feel purer physically as well as morally, left them more accepting of the kitten-sex idea than were people who, not having washed, felt themselves to be a little dirtier.
We tend to think that a self-righteous sense of your own virtue makes you less accepting of "sin," however it's defined by your community. (Important caveat there: I'm not passing judgment on dom/sub couples or Pakistani "donkey sex" searches; rather, I'm focussing on the gap between ideology in the public square and whatever is whimpering, meowing or purring contentedly in one's private life). But maybe our expectations get it exactly backwards. Perhaps believing yourself to be the holiest, purest, most righteous and civic-minded paragon in the neighborhood is just the sort of mindset that makes a search for "camel sex," or "sub lifestyle," feel like no big deal.
Benjamin Edelman (2009). Red Light States: Who Buys Online Adult Entertainment? Journal of Economic Perspectives, 23 (1) DOI: 10.1257/jep.23.1.209
Zhong CB, & Liljenquist K (2006). Washing away your sins: threatened morality and physical cleansing. Science (New York, N.Y.), 313 (5792), 1451-2 PMID: 16960010
Schnall S, Benton J, & Harvey S (2008). With a clean conscience: cleanliness reduces the severity of moral judgments. Psychological science : a journal of the American Psychological Society / APS, 19 (12), 1219-22 PMID: 19121126
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Benjamin Edelman. (2009) Red Light States: Who Buys Online Adult Entertainment?. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 23(1). DOI: 10.1257/jep.23.1.209

Zhong CB, & Liljenquist K. (2006) Washing away your sins: threatened morality and physical cleansing. Science (New York, N.Y.), 313(5792), 1451-2. PMID: 16960010

Schnall S, Benton J, & Harvey S. (2008) With a clean conscience: cleanliness reduces the severity of moral judgments. Psychological science : a journal of the American Psychological Society / APS, 19(12), 1219-22. PMID: 19121126

September 10, 2010
02:50 PM
751 views

Study: Just Thinking About Alcohol Makes People More Aggressive

by David Berreby in Mind Matters

Why exactly do fights break out when people are drinking? You might think it's simple biochemistry—alcohol molecules wreaking changes on brain cells, leading to behavior change, leading to a broken nose and community service. But simple biochemistry isn't enough to explain much about mental life—not even such supposedly straightforward experiences as tasting wine, enjoying a steak or feeling better after taking an aspirin. People find wine more complex if they think it's expensive; they find meat tastes better if it came from a rare animal; and pain pills work better on those who think they cost more. So there must be more than organic chemistry to the link between drink and aggression. This study, for instance, found that people who'd merely seen words like "vodka" or "whiskey" were nastier afterwards than people who hadn't.
In fact, the words were flashed on computer screens for only 17 milliseconds each, so the people watching (78 French university students) weren't even aware that they had seen them. In their experiment, Baptiste Subra, Dominique Muller, Laurent Bègue, Brad J. Bushman and Florian Delmas divided the volunteers into three groups, some of whom saw the alcohol-related words, while others saw "assault" and other words related to aggression. The third group saw neutral words like "water."
After "priming" them with the flashed words, the experimenters annoyed the hell out of all three groups, by giving them a "boring and difficult" computer task to do, then faking a computer malfunction that threatened to make everyone repeat the whole exercise. Then the experimenter running the operation asked his victims to rate him. On the form they filled out, it was clear that their rating would help decide the psychologist's future.
Given this opportunity for revenge, the three groups might have given similar ratings. Instead the group primed with "aggression" words wanted to do more damage than the "neutral" word cohort—they were significantly more negative. In fact, they were just as aggressive as the third group, which had been primed with fighting words.
Subra et al. say their result discredits two common ideas about drinking and aggression: One is the biochemical model (obviously, no actual alcohol was involved here). The other is what I think of as the "Las Vegas" model: It holds that drinking acts as a psychic permission slip, loosening people's self-control even if they aren't physiologically drunk. that "expectancy" theory, this paper argues, isn't enough to explain the links between alcohol and violence. You don't need a bar or frat party to nudge people toward a fighting stance, it suggests. The sight of a beer bottle might be more than enough.
Subra, B., Muller, D., Begue, L., Bushman, B., & Delmas, F. (2010). Automatic Effects of Alcohol and Aggressive Cues on Aggressive Thoughts and Behaviors Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 36 (8), 1052-1057 DOI: 10.1177/0146167210374725
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Subra, B., Muller, D., Begue, L., Bushman, B., & Delmas, F. (2010) Automatic Effects of Alcohol and Aggressive Cues on Aggressive Thoughts and Behaviors. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 36(8), 1052-1057. DOI: 10.1177/0146167210374725

May 28, 2010
04:06 PM
739 views

Study: People Think Less of Working Moms (And of Their Children)

by David Berreby in Mind Matters

Americans may talk a good game about "work-life balance," but according to this study, they're biased against working mothers. More surprisingly, those who liked working moms less also liked the children of those mothers less.
For her Master's degree, Jennifer Livengood, who graduated this month from Kansas State University, asked 96 students to rate mothers and children after hearing them interact with their kids on an audiotape and watching a brief video. The raters knew in advance which mothers worked only in the home, which ones had full-time jobs, and which ones worked part-time. As Livengood told this interviewer, she thought she'd find differences in how people reacted to each type of parent. She didn't. Instead, though, she found one consistent pattern: her volunteers rated the fully employed mothers as less competent; their relationships with their kids as more troubled; and the kids themselves as less likable.
It has long been known that "irrelevant" facts have an impact on teachers' expectations for kids. This study, for example, showed that the same academic file would get different ratings from teachers if the accompanying photo showed a nice-looking kid than it would if the child was unattractive: The teachers had higher expectations for the intelligence, popularity, and educational prospects of the good-looking pupils. And this one found that kindergarten teachers expect short boys to be less academically capable than typically-sized ones. Moreover, there's a huge body of research showing that teachers' expectations have a big impact on kids—the "Pygmalion effect" that suggests a kid expected to do well will do better than a kid expected to be dull.
All of which makes me wonder what would happen if someone were to test the effect on teachers of knowing that a pupil's mother is a "working mom" or a "stay-at-home." Livengood's study would suggest that there'd be an effect. And that, despite the lip service we all pay to hardworking mothers, that effect wouldn't be pretty.
For more on teacher-bias studies, here are the two I mentioned (one among the earliest, the other recent):
Clifford, M., & Walster, E. (1973). The Effect of Physical Attractiveness on Teacher Expectations Sociology of Education, 46 (2) DOI: 10.2307/2112099
Smith, J., & Niemi, N. (2007). Exploring Teacher Perceptions of Small Boys in Kindergarten The Journal of Educational Research, 100 (6), 331-335 DOI: 10.3200/JOER.100.6.331-335
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Clifford, M., & Walster, E. (1973) The Effect of Physical Attractiveness on Teacher Expectations. Sociology of Education, 46(2), 248. DOI: 10.2307/2112099

Smith, J., & Niemi, N. (2007) Exploring Teacher Perceptions of Small Boys in Kindergarten. The Journal of Educational Research, 100(6), 331-335. DOI: 10.3200/JOER.100.6.331-335

December 29, 2010
04:03 PM
732 views

Using Google to Tell Real Science from Fads

by David Berreby in Mind Matters

Most hot ideas and discoveries fade with time. But some scientific papers are genuine breakthroughs, whose importance only increases as the decades pass. This one, published in Science last week, which describes a database of words from millions of books digitized by Google—4 percent of all books ...Read More
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Michel, J., Shen, Y., Aiden, A., Veres, A., Gray, M., , ., Pickett, J., Hoiberg, D., Clancy, D., Norvig, P.... (2010) Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books. Science. DOI: 10.1126/science.1199644

Fanelli, D. (2010) “Positive” Results Increase Down the Hierarchy of the Sciences. PLoS ONE, 5(4). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0010068

December 23, 2010
09:08 PM
712 views

Three Cheers for Failure!

by David Berreby in Mind Matters

Last week I vowed to pay more attention to replication in psychology experiments. Repeated experiments are an important test of whether a finding is "really out there" or an accident, so, as a number of psychologists have been saying lately to the public, it is kind of a problem that many ...Read More
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Jennifer V. Fayard, Amandeep K. Bassi, Daniel M. Bernstein, & Brent W. Roberts. (2009) Is cleanliness next to godliness? Dispelling old wives’ tales: Failure to replicate Zhong and Liljenquist (2006). Journal of Articles in Support of the Null Hypothesis, 6(2), 21-29. info:other/1539-8714

Zhong CB, & Liljenquist K. (2006) Washing away your sins: threatened morality and physical cleansing. Science (New York, N.Y.), 313(5792), 1451-2. PMID: 16960010

June 25, 2010
11:09 AM
711 views

More Insight Into Why 'The Tears of Strangers Are Only Water'

by David Berreby in Mind Matters

If I want you to give time or money to my cause, I'll say your sacrifice is for "people just like you, just like me," for "communities like yours, all across America," or, as Mary Tyler Moore once wrote, for "fascinating beings with complex social interactions, long childhoods and awkward adolescences" (her subject was lobsters—so human-like, she said, they even walk "claw-in-claw" on the seafloor). Feelings of kinship promote feelings of kindness, as marketers know. Last week, this paper in Science suggested one possible reason.
Dosed with the "cuddle chemical" oxytocin, men in the experiments became more generous to total strangers who were members of the same team. Other men, who got a placebo up their noses instead of the oxytocin spritz, were far less likely to help a fellow "Triangle" or "Circle." (Importantly, the teams were what social psychologists call "minimal groups," created right before the experiment began. It is incredibly easy to get human beings to share an identity. That's why those appeals to help "people like you" are so effective.)
Oxytocin has gotten a lot of "cuddle chemical" press lately, because it's associated with warm, touchy-feely emotions in one-on-one situations. Levels of oxytocin rise after orgasm and during childbirth and breast-feeding, for instance, and go up in children when they are comforted by their mothers. In one recent experiment, men given oxytocin became more sensitive to social cues and more empathetic—almost as empathetic, in fact, as women, said the experimenters. The "bonding hormone" has even been tried as a means of getting autistic people to be more alert to other people's feelings.
The new Science paper, though, is the first I've seen to look at how oxytocin might interact with perceptions of groups instead of just individuals. Among the things I liked about it was its pushback against psychology's individualist orientation.
After all, in the course of a typical day you encounter a lot of people whom you never perceive as individuals. Rather you'll see them as "a cop," "a mother," "a guy driving a Mercedes," "a New Yorker," and so on. And your response to each will vary depending on the identity you perceive. Yet many theories describe the male brain or the child's development or the use of stereotypes, as if all people mean the same thing to one another, and always have the same interaction with each new person they engage.
Well, as your mother the New York cop who drives a Benz might say, Forget about that. Individualist psychology would predict that oxytocin, the "bonding hormone," requires sex, hugs, intimate conversation or some other one-on-one interaction. But these new experiments, performed by Carsten De Dreu and his colleagues at the University of Amsterdam, show that the mere idea of shared membership in a group is enough. And unlike individualist accounts of oxytocin, which imply that it will have the same effect on any two people, De Dreu's work found that oxytocin's cuddly influence stops at the border between "Us" and "Them."
In their first experiment, the researchers gave a task to 49 male students at their university, each of whom was seated in a cubicle, alone. Each man used a computer to distribute ten virtual euros. One choice was to keep the thing for himself, in which case the volunteer would be receive one euro later, when the experimenters paid up. Another choice was to give to a common fund shared by the subject and his teammates. That was worth only 50 cents to the individual, but it also gave 50 cents to every one of his fellow Triangles. The third choice was to spend the money on an attack on the other group: One euro here would result in 50 cents being taken away from the other side. Half the volunteers did the job in their normal hormonal state; the others received oxytocin beforehand.
In both groups, about a quarter of the men went out of their way to hurt the team they weren't on. The big difference was in the way the rest behaved. A majority of the men without oxytocin preferred the selfish course, keeping the whole euro for themselves. With oxytocin, though, nearly sixty percent chose to give money to their group's pool. Oxytocin seems to have triggered classic altruism: Less for me, more for us.
In a later experiment, another bunch of undergraduate men distributed the money using Prisoner's Dilemma choices about whether to cooperate, both with teammates and with "out-group" members. Men working under oxytocin's supposedly cuddly influence were significantly less likely to cooperate with "Them" than with "Us."
De Dreu and co. say all this means they have found "a biological cause of intergroup competition and conflict." But if one cause of their their results was a hormone, another, equal cause was the product of conscious symbolic thought: Before oxytocin could wield its influence, the men had to learn that they were either "Triangles" or "Circles." Maybe we're hormonally pre-wired to prefer "us" over "them"; but, as marketers know, we're also wired to change our minds about exactly what "us" means.
Last week's Science paper:
De Dreu, C., Greer, L., Handgraaf, M., Shalvi, S., Van Kleef, G., Baas, M., Ten Velden, F., Van Dijk, E., & Feith, S. (2010). The Neuropeptide Oxytocin Regulates Parochial Altruism in Intergroup Conflict Among Humans Science, 328 (5984), 1408-1411 DOI: 10.1126/science.1189047
Recent papers on oxytocin's role as "the bonding hormone":
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De Dreu, C., Greer, L., Handgraaf, M., Shalvi, S., Van Kleef, G., Baas, M., Ten Velden, F., Van Dijk, E., & Feith, S. (2010) The Neuropeptide Oxytocin Regulates Parochial Altruism in Intergroup Conflict Among Humans. Science, 328(5984), 1408-1411. DOI: 10.1126/science.1189047

Feldman, R., Weller, A., Zagoory-Sharon, O., & Levine, A. (2007) Evidence for a Neuroendocrinological Foundation of Human Affiliation: Plasma Oxytocin Levels Across Pregnancy and the Postpartum Period Predict Mother-Infant Bonding. Psychological Science, 18(11), 965-970. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.02010.x

Hurlemann, R., Patin, A., Onur, O., Cohen, M., Baumgartner, T., Metzler, S., Dziobek, I., Gallinat, J., Wagner, M., Maier, W.... (2010) Oxytocin Enhances Amygdala-Dependent, Socially Reinforced Learning and Emotional Empathy in Humans. Journal of Neuroscience, 30(14), 4999-5007. DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.5538-09.2010

March 29, 2011
08:01 AM
695 views

When Reason Falters, It's Age-Morphing Apps and Virtual Reality to the Rescue

by David Berreby in Mind Matters

The other day I asked for examples of practical post-rationality—changes in law or policy that happened because institutions have stopped assuming that people behave rationally. A number of people wrote in about instances of what Jon Elster calls "precommitment" or "self-binding": Giving up some ...Read More
... Read more »

Yee, N., Bailenson, J., & Ducheneaut, N. (2009) The Proteus Effect: Implications of Transformed Digital Self-Representation on Online and Offline Behavior. Communication Research, 36(2), 285-312. DOI: 10.1177/0093650208330254

April 30, 2010
03:55 PM
693 views

"The Tears of Strangers Are Only Water"

by David Berreby in Mind Matters

Empathy is a complicated emotion, even for mice. On seeing another in pain, a mouse will act as if it itself is also hurting—much more, though, if it knows the first mouse. Capuchin monkeys will help out another monkey, without any reward, but only if they're on friendly terms. People also feel less for those they dislike. But our species adds another layer of complication: We empathize more with people who are "like us" than with "them." This study, published this month, suggests that this Us-Them divide is more general—that the brain responds differently to any action performed by "one of us," not just to signs of trouble.

The study is part of a boom in research around the idea that people literally share feelings, at the physiological level: When I see you in pain, for example, neurons fire in my brain just as they would if I myself were in pain. It's an intriguing notion, not least because it offers a way to integrate aspects of human behavior that are usually looked at separately. Empathy is a social fact, arising out of people's relationships to each other; and it's a psychological experience for each of us; and it's a physiological phenomena in each empathizer's body. A model that connects those different levels would offer a more complete explanation. It would also, of course, offer ways to corroborate theories: It's great to be able to ask people if they feel empathy, but it's even better if you can measure it as well.
In a study published last year, for instance, Xiaojing Xu of Peking University and his colleagues used an MRI scanner to measure activity in the anterior cingulate cortex region of 33 college students as they watched films of other people getting poked in the cheek with either a Q-tip or a nasty sharp needle. A neural circuit involving the ACC is active when you feel pain in your own body, and when you see others being hurt (and, like a disgruntled monkey's, your circuit will respond less if you have a low opinion of the person being hurt, at least if you're male). In addition, Xu et al. found, their subjects' pain circuit responded much more when the injured party was of the same race. Chinese reacted more to photos of Chinese injury, and whites to white.
The new paper, by Jennifer Gutsell and Michael Inzlicht of the University of Toronto, didn't address empathy directly. They showed 30 white students a video of a college-age person drinking a glass of water, and then asked each volunteer to do the same. The students were hooked up to an electroencephalograph, which measured activity in the motor cortex area of their brains. Unsurprisingly, the motor cortex was most active when each volunteer performed his or her own act. It was also active, though, when each watched another white person drink. But if the drinker was black, South Asian or East Asian, the motor area didn't activate much at all.
Interestingly, all the students, as part of an intro psychology class, had completed something called the Symbolic Racism Scale, which is supposed to measure degrees of prejudice. When the researchers compared scores on that test with the EEG measures, they found a correlation: The more prejudiced a student appeared on the Racism Scale, the less motor activity was recorded when s/he watched non-whites.
Gutsell and Inzlicht theorize that there is indeed an Us-Them empathy gap, but that it's part of a more general phenomenon. People, they write, "mentally simulate" each other all the time, not just in pain and grief. But we only simulate people like us. We don't, they believe, "mentally simulate the actions of outgroups."
Does this mean racial preferences are somehow hardwired into the brain? Highly unlikely, for two reasons. First, there's that earlier research I mentioned, in which men empathized less with others if they believed those others had been unfair. That suggests that empathy is shaped by experience—that we learn who to "mentally simulate" and who not to.
Secondly, race figured in these studies because the investigators chose it, not because it's the only possible Us-Them division. Race is convenient for these experiments because everyone can see it, and most everyone can name his place on a racial map. It's not 100 percent reliable (two students Gutsall and Inzlicht considered "white" had to be dropped from their experiment because they self-identified as non-white) but it poses fewer pitfalls than religion, class, nationality or other groupings (an experiment based on religion, for instance, could raise questions about how the experimenters knew that students could tell Christians from Muslims).
In other words, race is used in "neuroscience of prejudice" experiments because it's handy, not because it's special. The real news here is the big impact of Us-Them divides on feelings we often assume are universal.
More on empathy research:
Frans de Waal's The Age of Empathy is a great introduction to the field (de Waal is one of the founders of the shared-neural-patterns model for empathy). Papers discussed in this post are here:
Gutsell, J., & Inzlicht, M. (2010). Empathy constrained: Prejudice predicts reduced mental simulation of actions during observation of outgroups Journal of Experimental Social Psychology DOI: 10.1016/j.jesp.2010.03.011
Xu, X., Zuo, X., Wang, X., & Han, S. (2009). Do You Feel My Pain? Racial Group Membership Modulates Empathic Neural Responses Journal of Neuroscience, 29 (26), 8525-8529 DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2418-09.2009
Singer, T., Seymour, B., O'Doherty, J., Stephan, K., Dolan, R., & Frith, C. (2006). Empathic neural responses are modulated by the perceived fairness of others Nature, 439 (7075), 466-469 DOI: 10.1038/nature04271 Topics: ... Read more »

Gutsell, J., & Inzlicht, M. (2010) Empathy constrained: Prejudice predicts reduced mental simulation of actions during observation of outgroups. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. DOI: 10.1016/j.jesp.2010.03.011

Xu, X., Zuo, X., Wang, X., & Han, S. (2009) Do You Feel My Pain? Racial Group Membership Modulates Empathic Neural Responses. Journal of Neuroscience, 29(26), 8525-8529. DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2418-09.2009

Singer, T., Seymour, B., O'Doherty, J., Stephan, K., Dolan, R., & Frith, C. (2006) Empathic neural responses are modulated by the perceived fairness of others. Nature, 439(7075), 466-469. DOI: 10.1038/nature04271

July 22, 2010
01:55 PM
686 views

Want to Play It Safe? Have a Cheeseburger

by David Berreby in Mind Matters

Sometimes it seems that everyone has abandoned the notion that rational self-interest drives people's decisions. It's high time for some answers to the next obvious question: If Reason doesn't rule the mental roost, then what does govern people's approach to buying, selling, voting, marrying, hiring and other choices? Last month, this study suggested that part of the answer is, simply, food. People who are hungry, it found, make different financial decisions than people who've recently eaten.
Mkael Symmonds, Julian J. Emmanuel and their colleagues had 19 men play a virtual lottery 200 times, each time picking between two choices on a computer screen. As in real life, their chances of winning, say, £20 were much better than their chances of winning £100. Each man played the game once a week for three weeks. Once, he had a nice meal first, and then played right away; another time, he ate and then waited an hour before hitting the computer; and, in the third time, he had to fast for 14 hours before playing.
If they were purely rational economic men, the volunteers invariably would have chosen the low-paying bets with the best odds of winning. And if they were ruled by their innate personality differences, they would have divided into risk-takers who consistently go for long shots and risk-avoiders who played it safe.
That's not what happened.
When hungry, the men went for long-shots more often. This is consistent with work on animals. Hunger drives any creature to take risks it wouldn't if it felt comfortable. And folk wisdom knows this too, of course: The personnel philosophy of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, for instance—"let me have men about me that are fat"—prompts him to mistrust "lean and hungry" Cassius(good call, as Cassius is engaged in the high-risk venture of plotting to kill him).
On the other hand, when they played one hour after eating, the men preferred lower-risk bets. In fact, their attitude toward risk rose and fell with their levels of the hormone acyl-ghrelin, a hunger signal that rises when the body wants food and falls after eating.
Even more interesting were the games played right after the meal, before acyl-ghrelin levels had time to change. In that situation, men with lower Body Mass Index scores (roughly, those whose look tends toward the "lean and hungry") didn't change their attitude toward risk, the authors write. But chubbier men took more risks right after they'd eaten. Symmonds et al. think this might have implications for the fight against obesity: Once a certain level of body fat is reached, they suggest, that act of eating itself might enable impulsive, high-risk choices. Like having another Twinkie. Or buying that lottery ticket.
Symmonds, M., Emmanuel, J., Drew, M., Batterham, R., & Dolan, R. (2010). Metabolic State Alters Economic Decision Making under Risk in Humans PLoS ONE, 5 (6) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0011090
... Read more »

Symmonds, M., Emmanuel, J., Drew, M., Batterham, R., & Dolan, R. (2010) Metabolic State Alters Economic Decision Making under Risk in Humans. PLoS ONE, 5(6). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0011090

April 13, 2010
11:57 AM
681 views

Why (and How) People of a Feather Flock Together

by David Berreby in Mind Matters

Seeking the hidden causes of behavior, some scientists work on the scale of brain regions and neurons, searching inside people's heads. Others work on the scale of crowds, neighborhoods and nations, seeking hidden patterns in the way multitudes behave. What's unusual about this paper in PLoS One is that it combines both those perspectives: Mehdi Moussaïd and his co-authors have worked out the physical effects of a psychological motivation. That gave them a new way to predict how people walk on city streets.

There are other physics-style models of crowd behavior, but, as the authors point out, those have assumed that each human "particle" on the street is an isolated individual. Give each "agent" a few simple rules to follow, and a computer can generate a simulation of actual people's movements pretty well. But we're a social species, and such models fail to capture the fact that people don't walk alone.
The paper's authors set up a camera on streets in Toulouse and simply recorded pedestrian traffic on a workday and then again on a weekend—4559 people in all. If people talked, smiled, gestured or laughed together, they counted them as part of a single group. More than half the pedestrians in the workday streetscape were in such groups; on the weekend, 70 percent were.
Physical facts have an important effect on how people walk, of course. As molecules of a gas move more quickly when they're less densely packed, so too people on the street walk faster when they're less crowded. However, Moussaïd and Co. found that walkers in groups put physical imperatives below psychological ones: The bigger the collection of people, the slower all its members walked. Degree of crowding had no effect on this pattern.
Were there any predictable laws in the way these walking groups organized themselves? To find out (this is the part that scientists properly call "heroic" for its superhuman care and patience) the researchers looked at all the pedestrians they'd recorded in groups and measured the angle and distance of an imaginary line between each person and his/her right-hand neighbor. That gave the team a way to define and track patterns in movement over time.
When streets weren't too crowded (or, in physics-speak, when density was low), the social groups walked in a horizontal line, shoulder to shoulder. When streets get more crowded, though, groups reform into a predictable formation: The middle person or persons hang back, and others draw closer. The result is a "V" or "U" of people.
It's much like the "V" you can see in the sky when geese are migrating, except that the human version points away from the direction of travel. As the authors point out, a flexible structure moving against a flow would be most efficient if it did what geese do. (That is, of course, why geese do it.) But people don't. Physical laws push them one way, but a psychological law (people in a group want to communicate with each other) pushes the other way.
Armed with this information, the team devised a new model of pedestrian behavior, adding group motivations to the usual variables that represent the effects of density, physical barriers and so on. This model, which assumes that people will do what makes it easiest to keep each other in sight and in earshot, fits real-life behavior quite well. Groups of walkers are slower than they "should" be, because they aren't organized to walk in the quickest, most "aerodynamic" formation. So, as the groups get bigger, they get slower, regardless of how many strangers are also walking on the street.
This doesn't mean that human V's lack leaders. Conversational groups tend to be made up of a few big talkers and many listeners, so, Moussaïd and Co. expect that the "leaders" of pedestrian groups are usually around the point of the inverted V. Again, like birds, but in reverse, because it's sociodynamic instead of aerodynamic.
Speaking of bird flight, this paper on pigeon flocking in last week's Nature coincidentally touches on the same theme as the Moussaïd paper in PLoS. By tracking pairs of pigeons as they flew, Tamás Vicsek and his co-authors found that pigeons, too, have leaders: Birds in the front (especially if they were on the followers' left) had more influence over the movements of the whole group than did others. In fact, they found a stable hierarchy of influence, with some pigeons definitely more equal than others. Both papers combine the individual and group levels of analysis to find rules in motion that looks random to the naked eye.
Further Reading:

Moussaïd, M., Perozo, N., Garnier, S., Helbing, D., & Theraulaz, G. (2010). The Walking Behaviour of Pedestrian Social Groups and Its Impact on Crowd Dynamics PLoS ONE, 5 (4) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0010047
Nagy, M., Ákos, Z., Biro, D., & Vicsek, T. (2010). Hierarchical group dynamics in pigeon flocks Nature, 464 (7290), 890-893 DOI: 10.1038/nature08891Topics: ... Read more »

Moussaïd, M., Perozo, N., Garnier, S., Helbing, D., & Theraulaz, G. (2010) The Walking Behaviour of Pedestrian Social Groups and Its Impact on Crowd Dynamics. PLoS ONE, 5(4). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0010047

Nagy, M., Ákos, Z., Biro, D., & Vicsek, T. (2010) Hierarchical group dynamics in pigeon flocks. Nature, 464(7290), 890-893. DOI: 10.1038/nature08891

June 26, 2010
12:24 AM
680 views

Why Red Ink and Rain Can Ruin Your Grade

by David Berreby in Mind Matters

One of the eerier themes in psychology papers is the extreme susceptibility of people's thoughts and acts to incidental details in their surroundings. For instance, this paper from a recent European Journal of Social Psychology (I was led to it by this recent news story), in which people rated some paragraphs, supposedly from a student essay. Those who used red ink found more errors, and gave lower grades, than those who'd used blue.
Pretty disturbing -- like this Canadian study published last winter, which examined five years of candidate-interview records at the University of Toronto Medical School. It found that applicants interviewed on rainy days received consistently lower scores, and estimated that rain has the same impact on a would-be doctor's chances of admission as a 10 percent reduction in her score on the Medical College Admission Test.
We'd all like to think these ephemeral effects will cancel each other out—if you're interviewed in a downpour in Toronto, maybe your Chicago appointment will take place under blue skies—but we have no proof this is so.
Aside from the practical questions about tests' fairness and effectiveness, these kinds of results also raise a challenge to our self-understanding. We imagine ourselves to be more or less stable and predictable through rain and shine—but capable of big changes when we're hit with big events, like fighting in a war, losing a child or winning a lottery.
From recent research, though, it's possible to construct an alternate model. In that one, some parts of the self simply never change (Daniel Gilbert has famously found, for instance, that neither losing one's legs nor winning a lottery has much effect on people's long-term sense of how happy they are). And other parts of the mind change every minute: Voting in a school seems to make people more willing to support education spending than voting in a police station, for example, while just thinking about "old people" words like "Florida," "bingo," "traditional" and "helpless" caused undergraduates to walk more slowly than their peers.
Constant spinning on an unchanging foundation: It's an interesting possibility, but it would really screw up our notion of free will. That, after all, assumes I am consistent through minor ups and downs, but altered by big experiences. Thus "I," the conscious part of my mind, know the reasons for my thoughts, perceptions and actions. So I can choose among them. Hence we say, "ever since I had kids myself, I see political issues differently."
But if my take on politics is a mix of rock-solid traits I can't change and passing influences that I can't detect, and which always change, to what extent do "I" have a say in deciding what I do?
Red Ink:
Rutchick, A., Slepian, M., & Ferris, B. (2010). The pen is mightier than the word: Object priming of evaluative standards European Journal of Social Psychology DOI: 10.1002/ejsp.753
Rain:
Redelmeier, D., & Baxter, S. (2009). Rainy weather and medical school admission interviews Canadian Medical Association Journal, 181 (12), 933-933 DOI: 10.1503/cmaj.091546
... Read more »

Rutchick, A., Slepian, M., & Ferris, B. (2010) The pen is mightier than the word: Object priming of evaluative standards. European Journal of Social Psychology. DOI: 10.1002/ejsp.753

Redelmeier, D., & Baxter, S. (2009) Rainy weather and medical school admission interviews. Canadian Medical Association Journal, 181(12), 933-933. DOI: 10.1503/cmaj.091546

May 25, 2010
09:13 AM
677 views

New Study: 'Celebrity Endorsements' Sway Chimps, Too

by David Berreby in Mind Matters

Human beings give their attention readily to people who already have it. It doesn't matter if a guy won fame for his action movies, people will listen to his advice on carbon sequestration, and go out an buy his brand of shoe. That's not logical, but it does follow a predictable rule, which is that being famous, "cool" and/or prestigious gives you ready access to the minds of others. That bias may have evolved a very long time ago, according to this paper in the journal PLoS One last week. Prestige, it reports, sways chimpanzees the same way it does people.
The authors—Victoria Horner, Darby Proctor, Kristin E. Bonnie, Andrew Whiten and Frans de Waal—taught a novel game to members of two chimpanzee troops that live at the Yerkes Primate Research Center near Atlanta. In one troop, Georgia, a high-ranking female, was taught to put plastic tokens into a polka-dotted receptacle to win a treat; the same routine, except with a striped receptacle, was taught to Tara, an ape nobody, who was low on the totem pole of social rank. (Chimp troops, like military units or Condé Nast magazines, operate with a very clear, harshly enforced pecking order.) In the other group, the learners were high-ranking Ericka and low-ranking Julianne.
As each one went through her routine, others watched and soon learned it. Many decided to get in on the action. Practically, there was no difference between imitating Georgia and imitating Tara, as the tasks and reward were identical. But the chimps much preferred to follow the high-ranking Georgia: 70 percent of the tokens they collected went into her bin. The difference between high and low status was even more marked in the second group, where 90 percent of the tokens went where Ericka was putting hers.
In a social animal, the authors conclude, learning depends on prestige. Among chimps in the wild, they write, innovations probably won't spread unless they have the equivalent of a celebrity endorsement—that is, unless they are introduced by someone high in rank.
So perhaps celebrity influence isn't a peculiarity of our times, but rather a trick evolution has played on us. For eons, imitating the "cool" guy was probably a very good bet for a social primate, because "cool" meant he was doing something right (being the best tracker, being the son of the top female) and therefore getting more food, sex and protection than the average schlub.
Civilization makes fine distinctions between kinds of prestige—we don't expect Nobel-winning physicists to be good at basketball, or Tiger Woods to play like Sonny Rollins—but elsewhere in the mind, all prestige is still the same.
That might explain why "cool" isn't a quality the authorities can control (a fact that greatly irritates the sort of people who put themselves in charge of others' morals). In her fascinating book Outcasts, for instance, Ruth Mellinkoff quotes a sermon preached in Germany in 1272: "You are not satisfied that almighty God has given you a choice of colors such as red, blue, white, green, yellow, and black for your clothing. No, in your arrogance you have cut your clothes into pieces—here putting red in the white, there yellow in the green, another is striped; this one motley, that dark brown ... This arrogance never ends, for as soon as someone discovers a new fashion, all of you must try it!"
At the time, it was soldiers who slashed up their sleeves and wore multiple patches—"pied" clothing, like the "Pied Piper" sported. In other words, while respectable burghers talked up examples of responsibility and piety, their children were more impressed by the medieval European equivalent of "gangstas."
Chimps live with a single social hierarchy, but people live with two. One is civilization's official pecking order, which values the mathlete valedictorian more highly than the studly dropout. The other pecking order gives top status to whoever is getting attention, sex and other goodies right now—never mind how. As most of us remember from high school, this intuitive hierarchy is hard to resist. If you had to choose, who would you follow around collecting tokens to win a banana—Angelina Jolie or Carol W. Greider?
Horner, V., Proctor, D., Bonnie, K., Whiten, A., & de Waal, F. (2010). Prestige Affects Cultural Learning in Chimpanzees PLoS ONE, 5 (5) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0010625
... Read more »

Horner, V., Proctor, D., Bonnie, K., Whiten, A., & de Waal, F. (2010) Prestige Affects Cultural Learning in Chimpanzees. PLoS ONE, 5(5). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0010625

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