What do you pick when you see a sequence of options?

Some choices are made when all of the options are right there in front of you.  For example, if you go to the supermarket, you see the wall of tomato sauce, and you can stand in front of it and compare all of the different brands and the different flavors of sauce for each brand.

For other choices, though, you get information about the options one at a time, and then you have to make a decision.  For example, if you are buying a new car, you have to go from one dealership to the next, test driving cars and talking to salespeople.  Students who apply for graduate schools may visit the schools to which they have been accepted in a sequence until they have to make a decision about where to go.

What happens in those cases?

A paper by Antonia Mantonakis, Pauline Rodero, Isabelle Lesschaeve, and Reid Hastie in the November, 2009 issue of Psychological Science looks at this question.  They had people sample a number of wines in a sequence.  After sampling the wines, they had to decide which one they preferred.  Participants were assigned to try 2, 3, 4, or 5 wines, and the sequence was determined randomly.

The choices people made depended both on the number of wines they sampled and their expertise about wines.  For people who did not have much expertise, they were most likely to choose the first wine they sampled.  For example, when there were two wines, people selected the first wine they tried 70% of the time.  For a sequence of five wines, they still picked the first one 50% of the time (but if they had chosen a wine at random, they would only have chosen this wine 20% of the time). 

For people who had more expertise, there was a combination of two effects on choice.  There was still a tendency for experts to select the first wine they tried.  When sampling only 2 wines, they picked the first one 80% of the time.  When sampling 3 wines, they picked the first one about 65% of the time.  But, when they sampled 5 wines, they picked the first one only about 25% of the time.  In this case, they picked the last wine they tasted about 40% of the time. 

Why is there a difference between experts and non-experts?  The wine experts have a more sophisticated ability to taste differences among wines.  So, they keep comparing each new wine they sample to their favorite.  There is a tendency for the first wine to be a favorite, because it sets the standard for comparison.  However, each new wine that is sampled will have some new flavors, and so they provide a reason to pick the last wine tasted.  The experts taste these new flavors and so they tend to stick with the most recently tasted wines, particularly when they taste a long sequence of wines.  The non-experts can’t taste much difference among the wines, so they often stick with the first one they sample.

One thing that is interesting about these results is that the wines in the middle of the sequence are not chosen very often.  There is an overwhelming tendency for people to pick either the first or the last of the items in the sequence.  For example, for experts choosing from among 5 wines, the first and last items accounted for about 65% of their choices, while the remaining 3 items accounted for only about 35% of the choices.

What does this mean for you?

If you are in a situation in which you have to sample the items in a sequence, and if the choice is important to you (say a car or a graduate school), you should try to write down your criteria for making a choice in advance.  Try to evaluate each option after seeing it by using these criteria.  If you discover a new dimension for evaluating options after seeing the third or fourth item, go back and evaluate the earlier items along that dimension as well.  Do what you can to give each of the options (even the ones in the middle of the sequence) the best chance to be the one that gets chosen.   

Doing good requires hard work. So does feeling good about it.

There is a lot of psychology research suggesting that people prefer objects that are easy to think about than those that are hard to think about.  For example, the classic “mere exposure” effect shows that people generally prefer objects they have seen before to those that they have never seen before.  This preference arises, because it is easier for people to think about an object they have encountered before than an object that is new to them.

One explanation for the mere exposure effect is that ease of thinking causes high preference directly.  That is, there may be a biologically hard-wired connection between liking and ease of thinking. 

An article by Aparna Labroo and Sara Kim in the January, 2009 issue of Psychological Science suggests a different explanation.  Their work suggests that the ease of thinking about something is a piece of information that becomes part of the way an object is evaluated.  Under some circumstances, greater ease of thinking about an object may actually decrease people’s preference for that object.

In particular, when people are trying to satisfy an important goal, they have what Labroo and Kim call an instrumentality heuristic. People believe that a goal worth carrying out is worth working hard at.  Good things require effort.  In these situations, people actually seem to prefer objects that are hard to process.

In one clever experiment, participants were asked to evaluate whether they wanted to give a real donation to the charity Kids in Danger.  This charity promotes safety in children’s products, and was created by psychologist Boaz Keysar and his wife Linda Ginzel after one of their children was killed in a tragic accident involving a portable crib that had a design flaw.  People giving to this charity often feel that they are doing a good deed.

In this study, information about the charity was presented on a computer screen either in a font that was presented clearly on the screen or with a font that was hard to read.  In typical experiments on ease of thinking, products whose descriptions are easy to read are preferred to products whose descriptions are hard to read.  In this experiment, though, because the goal of doing good is associated with effort, people were actually more likely to give to the charity when the description was hard to read than when it was easy to read.  The difficulty of reading the description matched with people’s believes that pursuing an important goal requires effort.

More generally, this finding demonstrates that factors like the ease of thinking about an object can affect preferences for that object, but they do so by providing an additional piece of information about that object.  Whether ease of thinking increases or decreases people’s preferences depends on their goal in making a decision.

Categories, essentialism, race, and culture.

Placing something in a category and describing its properties have very different effects on the way we think about things.  In various blog entries, I have pointed out that calling someone a musician makes playing music seem much more central to their being—more essential—than just saying that they play music.  What about categorizing people by their race?

Throughout the world, racial, cultural, and ethnic differences are used to place people into different categories.  Once we categorize people in this way, we automatically assume that they have the essence of this category.  For example, in 1994, Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray wrote a book called The Bell Curve in which  they documented racial differences in IQ test scores.  An implicit assumption of this book was that it was meaningful to classify people by race and that these racial categories reflected something essential about the people who were categorized. 

How do racial categories develop?  This issue was addressed in a paper by Marjorie Rhodes and Susan Gelman in a 2009 paper in Cognitive Psychology.  They looked at two factors:  age and cultural background.  The participants in their study were primarily White.  They came either from a mid-sized city that was politically liberal or from a rural area that was politically conservative.  The participants ranged in age from 5-18. 

The younger children played a game with a puppet.  They were told that the puppet came from another place where they do some things wrong, but they do other things differently from the way we do them, but they are not wrong.  After some practice with the game, children were shown an object or person and then were shown a second object or person and were told that the puppet thinks they are the same kind of thing and were asked whether they were right.  For example, they might be shown a wolf and a lion and were told that the puppet thought that they were the same kind of thing.  Over the course of the study, the puppet classified animals, and artifacts (like cars, forks, and dresses).  The puppet also classified people based on gender and race. 

The older kids did a similar task, but without the puppet.  The oldest kids in this task (who were about 17) were asked these questions in a pencil-and-paper test.

So, what happened?

For simplicity, I’ll just focus on the animal and racial categories.  For the animals, kids of all ages tended to say that the puppet was wrong when it put together animals of different categories.  That is, starting at age 5 and upward to age 17, children felt that it was not correct to put different animals in the same category.

The data for race were much more complex.

As an example, the participant might see a White girl and then an Asian girl and be told that the puppet thought that they were both the same kind of person. 

The youngest children (5- and 7-year-olds) showed no strong preference for saying that the puppet was right or wrong when putting together people of different races.  About half the time they said the puppet was right and half the time they said the puppet was wrong. 

For the older children (10-year-olds and 17-year-olds), their answer depended on where they grew up.  The older children who grew up in the politically liberal area said that it was correct to classify people from different races.  Those who grew up in the politically conservative area said that it was incorrect to classify people from different races.

The first thing to notice about these data is that the belief that race is a possible basis for classifying people emerges late.  This observation is similar to what anthropologist Lawrence Hirschfeld has observed in his research. 

The second thing to see is that beliefs about whether it is necessary to classify people based on their race depend on what other members of your culture suggest.  You are much more likely to think it is necessary to classify people based on race if you grow up in a politically conservative environment than if you grow up in a politically liberal environment.

The reason that this type of classification matters is that classifying people into a group brings along the belief that the members of that group share some essential characteristics.  Consistent with that, Rhodes and Gelman asked the 17-year-olds to fill out scales about how strongly they believe that members of the same race share deep underlying characteristics not shared by other races.  Those kids who were most likely to think that it was necessary to classify people based on race were also the ones most likely to think that racial categories reflect something deeply similar about the members of that race.

For each of us, I think, it is worth reflecting on how likely we are to treat people differently because of the way we categorize them.

Take two Tylenol for heartache too

Last summer, I was playing badminton with my kids, and I tore a calf muscle.  It hurt.  A lot.  Language has lots of ways to express pain.  In the case of my calf, the pain was intense.  The pain shot through my entire leg.  And when the muscle would spasm, I would feel a burning pain.

It is interesting that people also use the language of pain to talk about social pain.  We talk about the pain of a breakup.  Musicians sing about their heart aching for someone they miss.  When people recall being teased as a child, they invariably talk about how much it hurt. 

Is this just a metaphor?

This question was examined in a clever paper by Nathan Dewall, Dianne Tice, Roy Baumeister, and their colleagues in a paper in the July, 2010 issue of Psychological Science.

They reasoned that if we really feel pain from social difficulties, then the strength of that pain might be relieved by taking a pain relieving drug that works on the way the brain processes pain.  One such drug is acetaminophen (the active ingredient in Tylenol). 

In one study, participants in an experimental group took two acetaminophen pills each day, while the control group took a placebo.  Each day, people rated themselves on a scale designed to measure hurt feelings.  At the start of the study, the two groups had similar levels of hurt feelings.  By the end of the study 3 weeks later, people rated themselves as having a lower level of social pain than people who took the placebo.  There was no placebo effect in this study at all, in fact.  People taking a placebo experienced about the same level of hurt feelings throughout the study.

A second study used functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to look at the brain’s response to pain.  Participants either took acetaminophen or a placebo for 3 weeks before the imaging study.  Then, while in the MRI scanner, people played a game in which they thought they were passing a virtual ball with a group of two other participants.  In one round of the game, the participant had the ball thrown to them frequently.  In another round, the participant was excluded, and the other two players (who were actually computer opponents) threw the ball only to each other. 

Functional Magnetic Resonanace Imaging gives a measure of the amount of blood flowing to different areas of the brain.  Because the brain needs a lot of glucose to act, regions of the brain that are very active when people do some task experience an increase in blood flow.  So, blood flow is a rough marker of the activity of the brain.

In this study, the authors looked at two regions of the brain that are involved in the perception of pain (the dorsal Anterior Cingulate Cortex and the Anterior Insula for those of you who like your brain areas…).  People who took a placebo showed higher levels of activity in these brain regions when being excluded from the game than when being included.  In contrast, the people who took acetaminophen actually showed about the same level of activity in the brain regions associated with pain in both when being excluded and included in the game, suggesting that they did not experience an increase in physical pain when being socially excluded.

These findings suggest that the words to the old song, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me” are not quite right.  We really do experience social pain as physical pain.

It is not surprising that the brain would use the mechanisms of pain for social exclusion and other social difficulties.  As humans, we are social creatures.  We rely on our social relationships to survive.  Pain is used as a signal of damage to our bodies, because that helps us to protect ourselves.  It should be no surprise that potential damage to our social relationships is also marked by pain.