Admittedly, I could be a smart alec when I was a kid. I distinctly remember the disdain I felt at 15 of having to wait another three years to be able to vote. I felt it was ridiculous to discriminate who got to vote and who didn't based on an arbitrary age when it would make more sense to subject all potential voters to a test and eliminate voters based on some qualification that I felt I probably had.
Turns out I may have been right that children should have the right to vote but for the wrong reasons. Although I thought many teens and even some children had sufficient mental faculties to vote, it may be that adults tend to use the same methods to pick their candidates that children do.
John Antonakis and Olaf Dalgas report, in the February 27, 2009 issue of Science that all it takes to be successful in politics in an appealing face, a quality which children and adults appreciate in the same way.
Swiss participants were shown sets of two photos of candidates from past French elections (with which the participants were not familiar) and were asked to pick the photo with the most competent candidate in each set. Basing their notion of competence on a photo alone, the participants managed to pick the winning candidate most of the time suggesting appearances can play a big role in what we think of a politician.
The same sets of photos were shown to children who had just played a game recreating a Mediterranean sea voyage. When asked to pick which of the two photos they would prefer as their captain, not only did the children pick the winner most of the time, their choices were statistically the same as the adults' choices. This leads the researchers to speculate that children and adults use the same criteria to assess leadership ability in facial appearances.
Of course, it would be foolish to think that appearances are all that matter. Everyone old enough to have weathered a couple of elections can no doubt recall a time when a particularly savvy remark or gruesome gaffe either won or lost an election. Even beyond that, there are party affiliations that don't seem to vary even when the candidates representing different parties change from election to election.
What this research does suggest is that first impressions based on appearances can be difficult to change even when we have information more relevant to making our decision. Since I can't foresee elections where voters are deprived of photos of the candidates, we should all just try to be sure whomever we support politically is more than just a pretty face.
Showing posts with label psychology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label psychology. Show all posts
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Monday, February 16, 2009
I think I can't...
It is known as Parkinson's law: Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. Basically, if you think a task will take a week, you'll find a way, maybe not consciously, to make it take a week. If you think it will take three days, you'll do it in three days.
Michael DeDonno, a PhD student at Case Western Reserve University, has shown that Parkinson's law might need to be expanded: It's not only the time you have but how you perceive that time - whether you feel like you have enough time or not.
163 participants were asked to perform the Iowa Gambling task. In the IGT, they are presented with four decks of cards on a computer screen. When they flip cards over they can either win or lose money based on the card. They are told that two of the decks are "good decks" (i.e. decks that are more likely to win them money) and the other two decks are "bad decks". The task is to decided which decks are the good ones and which are the bad ones while only flipping over one card at a time. Over the course of 100 trials, it was determined how much time the participants needed to complete the task.
The participants are then broken up into two groups: one that is told they have enough time to complete the task and another that is told they won't have enough time. Then each of these groups is split in two again with one half being given less time to decide between each card selection than the other half.
Surprisingly, the groups that were told they would have enough time performed better than the group that was told they wouldn't have enough time regardless of whether they actually had more or less time. This means that participants will less actual time (less time between choosing cards) but more perceived time (told they would have enough time) performed better than those with more actual time and less perceived time. Another example of the brain trumping reality! Maybe trumping is too strong a word but it certainly has the upper hand!
DeDonno says that his research could have impacts on fields like standardized testing (SATs, MCATs and GREs) as well as in the medical fields. He wonders if doctors who feel they don't have enough time to spend with patients make poorer decisions simply because of the pressure.
This whole situation adds a whole level to the argument that worrying about a deadline you can't change is not only useless, it may hinder your ability to make it! I suggest we all take a lesson from Scotty, the engineer in the original Star Trek. Figure out how much time it will take to fix something then tell the captain it will take twice that time.
Information on research drawn, in part, from: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/02/090210162035.htm
Michael DeDonno, a PhD student at Case Western Reserve University, has shown that Parkinson's law might need to be expanded: It's not only the time you have but how you perceive that time - whether you feel like you have enough time or not.
163 participants were asked to perform the Iowa Gambling task. In the IGT, they are presented with four decks of cards on a computer screen. When they flip cards over they can either win or lose money based on the card. They are told that two of the decks are "good decks" (i.e. decks that are more likely to win them money) and the other two decks are "bad decks". The task is to decided which decks are the good ones and which are the bad ones while only flipping over one card at a time. Over the course of 100 trials, it was determined how much time the participants needed to complete the task.
The participants are then broken up into two groups: one that is told they have enough time to complete the task and another that is told they won't have enough time. Then each of these groups is split in two again with one half being given less time to decide between each card selection than the other half.
Surprisingly, the groups that were told they would have enough time performed better than the group that was told they wouldn't have enough time regardless of whether they actually had more or less time. This means that participants will less actual time (less time between choosing cards) but more perceived time (told they would have enough time) performed better than those with more actual time and less perceived time. Another example of the brain trumping reality! Maybe trumping is too strong a word but it certainly has the upper hand!
DeDonno says that his research could have impacts on fields like standardized testing (SATs, MCATs and GREs) as well as in the medical fields. He wonders if doctors who feel they don't have enough time to spend with patients make poorer decisions simply because of the pressure.
This whole situation adds a whole level to the argument that worrying about a deadline you can't change is not only useless, it may hinder your ability to make it! I suggest we all take a lesson from Scotty, the engineer in the original Star Trek. Figure out how much time it will take to fix something then tell the captain it will take twice that time.
Information on research drawn, in part, from: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/02/090210162035.htm
Sunday, February 8, 2009
Could it be Christmas everyday?
Christmas is a time for happiness. So much so that it feels like the holiday season is an entirely separate entity from the rest of the year. Families, friends, food and festivities fill our lives and happiness sets in as a consequence. Why do we feel so much happier over the holidays and is there a way to continue that happiness throughout the whole year?
Of course there’s no clear answer to that question, despite what a number of self-help books might want you to think. There is no road easy road to happiness but there may be some signposts along the way.
Dan Gilbert is a professor in the department of psychology at Harvard University and he’s spent a good portion of his time studying happiness and why people are so bad at making choices that will make them happier.
If asked how you’d feel about winning the lottery tomorrow or becoming paraplegic, most people would have the good sense to say that winning the lottery would make you feel really good and that losing the use of your legs wouldn’t feel very good at all and, of course, they’d be right. Where we’re bad at predicting what will make us happy is the degree to which certain events are going to make us feel good and how long those feelings will last.
One tendency that creates these bad decisions is that we focus too much how something will make us feel and forget that other events in our lives will impact our mood. An example of this is an avid sports fan who overestimates how good a win will make him feel because he ignores all of the other sources of stress and unhappiness in his or her life. A win for your sports team may make you feel good in the short term, but if you have looming deadlines that feeling can be rather shortlived.
What helps us deal with this inability to make the best choices, Gilbert argues, is that we have the machinery necessary to produce happiness ourselves – that sometimes we can be just as happy not getting something we want as actually getting it. Though this is initially hard to believe, allow me to persuade you, if only partially, by summarizing an experiment Gilbert did with some colleagues to support his point.
His experiment involved showing six prints of Monet paintings to different participants. Each participant was asked to rank the prints from their favourite to their least favourite at which point they were told that they could have one of the prints to take home but the could only choose from their third and fourth most preferred prints. Most participants choose the one they ranked third and were sent home. At some point in the future, the participants were shown the prints again and asked to rank them in terms of preference once more. The participants tended to rank the one they chose, the third one, higher than they did initially and they ranked the one they rejected lower than they did before.
One of two things could be happening here. The first possibility is that the participants have convinced themselves that they liked the own better simply because they own it. In essence, they don’t necessarily like it better than they did before but they are pretending to. This is similar to what we think people do when they buy something expensive but aren’t quite satisfied. They feign happiness. The second possibility is once the participant has made their choice they have actually changed their preferences and are genuinely happier. They have “synthesized” their own happiness by changing their preferences.
Gilbert, in order to show that the second possibility is actually quite a plausible one, conducted the experiment again but using patients which, for one reason or another, have lost the ability to form short term memories. The experiment was the same as before. They asked the participants to rank the prints, told them they could have one and that they would be getting it in the mail in a couple weeks. They left the room for a half hour, reentered and did the same task again. The participants could not, when asked, pick the one they had chosen in the first task, demonstrating that they had no recollection of the print they had chosen. Amazingly, these participants responded in the same way as the first study. They tended to rank the one they chose higher than before and ranked the one they rejected lower. Because they couldn’t remember which one they chose the first time they couldn’t be simply pretending to be happier. They had synthesized happiness by changing their preferences – and they didn’t even know it!
As with any experiment like this, it’s important to not blow the results out of proportion but we can take some solace in our ability to create happiness. We tend to overestimate how we will be affected by things in the future due, at least in part, to the fact that we can synthesize happiness. A number of studies have shown that people think they are going to feel worse after painful medical procedures than they actually do. Even the initial example I presented between a lottery winner and a paraplegic demonstrates this. One year after either winning the lottery or losing the use of their legs, members of both categories report being equally happy with their lives. As Gilbert expressed in a recent interview on the Stephen Colbert show, this insight isn’t meant to be like a self-help book, they’re only meant to help you identify the ways in which people make bad decisions which is likely to help make future decisions.
Nonetheless, we can indulge these results a little and know that we have the ability to make it a little more like Christmas everyday. Maybe the poem “Everyday is Christmas” is referring to synthesized happiness when it says, “Every day is Christmas /with a beauty deeply cast/ When you find it doesn't matter/ if you're first or if you're last”
Of course there’s no clear answer to that question, despite what a number of self-help books might want you to think. There is no road easy road to happiness but there may be some signposts along the way.
Dan Gilbert is a professor in the department of psychology at Harvard University and he’s spent a good portion of his time studying happiness and why people are so bad at making choices that will make them happier.
If asked how you’d feel about winning the lottery tomorrow or becoming paraplegic, most people would have the good sense to say that winning the lottery would make you feel really good and that losing the use of your legs wouldn’t feel very good at all and, of course, they’d be right. Where we’re bad at predicting what will make us happy is the degree to which certain events are going to make us feel good and how long those feelings will last.
One tendency that creates these bad decisions is that we focus too much how something will make us feel and forget that other events in our lives will impact our mood. An example of this is an avid sports fan who overestimates how good a win will make him feel because he ignores all of the other sources of stress and unhappiness in his or her life. A win for your sports team may make you feel good in the short term, but if you have looming deadlines that feeling can be rather shortlived.
What helps us deal with this inability to make the best choices, Gilbert argues, is that we have the machinery necessary to produce happiness ourselves – that sometimes we can be just as happy not getting something we want as actually getting it. Though this is initially hard to believe, allow me to persuade you, if only partially, by summarizing an experiment Gilbert did with some colleagues to support his point.
His experiment involved showing six prints of Monet paintings to different participants. Each participant was asked to rank the prints from their favourite to their least favourite at which point they were told that they could have one of the prints to take home but the could only choose from their third and fourth most preferred prints. Most participants choose the one they ranked third and were sent home. At some point in the future, the participants were shown the prints again and asked to rank them in terms of preference once more. The participants tended to rank the one they chose, the third one, higher than they did initially and they ranked the one they rejected lower than they did before.
One of two things could be happening here. The first possibility is that the participants have convinced themselves that they liked the own better simply because they own it. In essence, they don’t necessarily like it better than they did before but they are pretending to. This is similar to what we think people do when they buy something expensive but aren’t quite satisfied. They feign happiness. The second possibility is once the participant has made their choice they have actually changed their preferences and are genuinely happier. They have “synthesized” their own happiness by changing their preferences.
Gilbert, in order to show that the second possibility is actually quite a plausible one, conducted the experiment again but using patients which, for one reason or another, have lost the ability to form short term memories. The experiment was the same as before. They asked the participants to rank the prints, told them they could have one and that they would be getting it in the mail in a couple weeks. They left the room for a half hour, reentered and did the same task again. The participants could not, when asked, pick the one they had chosen in the first task, demonstrating that they had no recollection of the print they had chosen. Amazingly, these participants responded in the same way as the first study. They tended to rank the one they chose higher than before and ranked the one they rejected lower. Because they couldn’t remember which one they chose the first time they couldn’t be simply pretending to be happier. They had synthesized happiness by changing their preferences – and they didn’t even know it!
As with any experiment like this, it’s important to not blow the results out of proportion but we can take some solace in our ability to create happiness. We tend to overestimate how we will be affected by things in the future due, at least in part, to the fact that we can synthesize happiness. A number of studies have shown that people think they are going to feel worse after painful medical procedures than they actually do. Even the initial example I presented between a lottery winner and a paraplegic demonstrates this. One year after either winning the lottery or losing the use of their legs, members of both categories report being equally happy with their lives. As Gilbert expressed in a recent interview on the Stephen Colbert show, this insight isn’t meant to be like a self-help book, they’re only meant to help you identify the ways in which people make bad decisions which is likely to help make future decisions.
Nonetheless, we can indulge these results a little and know that we have the ability to make it a little more like Christmas everyday. Maybe the poem “Everyday is Christmas” is referring to synthesized happiness when it says, “Every day is Christmas /with a beauty deeply cast/ When you find it doesn't matter/ if you're first or if you're last”
Wednesday, October 1, 2008
The biology behind voting
On October 14, Townshippers, along with their fellow Canadians will be filing into the voting booths to elect who will represent them in Ottawa. We often think that we are fully in control when we are choosing which little white circle to fill in, but two studies released recently is making the traditional notion of voters carefully choosing sides based on candidate, party performance and values look antiquated.
For some people deciding who to vote for is not a demanding task. Like a die-hard hockey fan, their loyalty to a party is undeniable. But for those not firmly entrenched, adding up all the debates, sound bytes, mistakes and so on, can be demanding. Take the race for MP of Brome-Missisquoi, for instance, where the battle is between Bloq Quebecois incumbent Christian Ouellet and Liberal Denis Paradis. For those voters who wish to express their preferences on environmental issues, it is not a straightforward decision.
Both have a history of service on Parliament’s Environment and Sustainable Development Committee but Ouellet has stronger personal environmental credentials having served as chair of the Solar Energy Society of Canada and also as co-founder of Quebec Solaire. Ouellet’s party, on the other hand, has no legitimate chance of forming a government and, as such, are relegated more to a role of influencing legislation rather than instigating it. Paradis, on the other hand, is a member of a party that is really pushing its green side under leader Stephane Dion who continually emphasizes the importance of his carbon tax, a plan to cut income tax and boost taxes on activities the emit greenhouse gases. If you don’t wish to vote for either of these, a vote for any party will still secure $1.75 of funding for that party assuming they get 2% of the vote. How do you make up your mind with choices like these? A recent study shows that your biology can influence your decision in ways you weren’t aware of.
A group of American scientists from backgrounds in political science and psychology released a study in last week’s edition of the journal Science which shows that physiological traits have a measurable impact on political attitudes. After filling out a form to identify their political beliefs, the participants of the study were exposed to two slide shows. One included three threatening pictures of a large spider on the face of a frightened person, a dazed person with a bloody face, and a maggot-infested wound and the other included three non-threatening pictures of a bunny, a bowl of fruit and a happy child. While both groups reacted similarly to the non-threatening slides, there was an important difference between reactions to the threatening slides. Participants with a high level of support for protective policies (increased military spending, support for the Iraq war, etc.) tended to have stronger reactions to the threatening slides as indicated by skin-conductance which measures levels of stress. This difference has important implications including the fact that politic affiliations may be, in part, genetic shedding new light on an old saying: like father, like son.
While your genetics may play a part in political choices, it is certainly not the be all and end all of decision making. The conscious brain must do the rest of the work right? Not according to Bertram Gawronski from the Western University and two of his colleagues who found that they could predict the future stance on an issue of an undecided individual one week in advance by measuring certain unconscious impulses. Participants in their study, citizens of Vicenza, Italy, were asked to fill out a questionnaire on the enlargement of a U.S. military base in their area and were subsequently submitted to an implicit association test. This test asked the participants to associate, as quickly as possible, pictures of a U.S. army base and either positive or negative words. The speed at which they associate two items can reveal subconscious preferences. The researchers found that, among those undecided about their opinion on the base, reaction times in the implicit association test allowed them to make good predictions of their decision one week in advance. This demonstrates that, although the participants were consciously undecided, a stance on the issue had already been taken in their subconscious. This means that so called swing voters that political parties vie viciously for, may have already decided.
Each of these studies, when published in the mainstream media, seemed to elicit negative responses, primarily from angry partisans trying to find some rationale for the choices of their political adversaries. This interpretation seems, to me, quite selective. Research into this kind of psychology isn’t intended to portray voters as robotic automatons filling in ballots as their genetics and subconscious see fit; another, positive, message can be excised. Knowledge of the genetic and sub-conscious components of our decision-making process, can be used to our benefit by weeding out knee-jerk reactions to politicians and policies leaving us to better able to vote for our values, regardless of what those values may be.
As seen in the September 24, 2008 issue of the Brome County News
For some people deciding who to vote for is not a demanding task. Like a die-hard hockey fan, their loyalty to a party is undeniable. But for those not firmly entrenched, adding up all the debates, sound bytes, mistakes and so on, can be demanding. Take the race for MP of Brome-Missisquoi, for instance, where the battle is between Bloq Quebecois incumbent Christian Ouellet and Liberal Denis Paradis. For those voters who wish to express their preferences on environmental issues, it is not a straightforward decision.
Both have a history of service on Parliament’s Environment and Sustainable Development Committee but Ouellet has stronger personal environmental credentials having served as chair of the Solar Energy Society of Canada and also as co-founder of Quebec Solaire. Ouellet’s party, on the other hand, has no legitimate chance of forming a government and, as such, are relegated more to a role of influencing legislation rather than instigating it. Paradis, on the other hand, is a member of a party that is really pushing its green side under leader Stephane Dion who continually emphasizes the importance of his carbon tax, a plan to cut income tax and boost taxes on activities the emit greenhouse gases. If you don’t wish to vote for either of these, a vote for any party will still secure $1.75 of funding for that party assuming they get 2% of the vote. How do you make up your mind with choices like these? A recent study shows that your biology can influence your decision in ways you weren’t aware of.
A group of American scientists from backgrounds in political science and psychology released a study in last week’s edition of the journal Science which shows that physiological traits have a measurable impact on political attitudes. After filling out a form to identify their political beliefs, the participants of the study were exposed to two slide shows. One included three threatening pictures of a large spider on the face of a frightened person, a dazed person with a bloody face, and a maggot-infested wound and the other included three non-threatening pictures of a bunny, a bowl of fruit and a happy child. While both groups reacted similarly to the non-threatening slides, there was an important difference between reactions to the threatening slides. Participants with a high level of support for protective policies (increased military spending, support for the Iraq war, etc.) tended to have stronger reactions to the threatening slides as indicated by skin-conductance which measures levels of stress. This difference has important implications including the fact that politic affiliations may be, in part, genetic shedding new light on an old saying: like father, like son.
While your genetics may play a part in political choices, it is certainly not the be all and end all of decision making. The conscious brain must do the rest of the work right? Not according to Bertram Gawronski from the Western University and two of his colleagues who found that they could predict the future stance on an issue of an undecided individual one week in advance by measuring certain unconscious impulses. Participants in their study, citizens of Vicenza, Italy, were asked to fill out a questionnaire on the enlargement of a U.S. military base in their area and were subsequently submitted to an implicit association test. This test asked the participants to associate, as quickly as possible, pictures of a U.S. army base and either positive or negative words. The speed at which they associate two items can reveal subconscious preferences. The researchers found that, among those undecided about their opinion on the base, reaction times in the implicit association test allowed them to make good predictions of their decision one week in advance. This demonstrates that, although the participants were consciously undecided, a stance on the issue had already been taken in their subconscious. This means that so called swing voters that political parties vie viciously for, may have already decided.
Each of these studies, when published in the mainstream media, seemed to elicit negative responses, primarily from angry partisans trying to find some rationale for the choices of their political adversaries. This interpretation seems, to me, quite selective. Research into this kind of psychology isn’t intended to portray voters as robotic automatons filling in ballots as their genetics and subconscious see fit; another, positive, message can be excised. Knowledge of the genetic and sub-conscious components of our decision-making process, can be used to our benefit by weeding out knee-jerk reactions to politicians and policies leaving us to better able to vote for our values, regardless of what those values may be.
As seen in the September 24, 2008 issue of the Brome County News
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
