Psychology: It isn't rocket science

When you sign on to be a Psychologist, you have taken on the study of a topic that is both extraordinarily complex and underappreciated.  Many people have an interesting attitude toward Psychology.  On the one hand, they  are interested enough to want to read news stories and blog entries, but on the other hand they often get the sense that Psychology isn’t doing the heavy lifting of “hard” sciences like chemistry and physics.  Even within the scientific community, Psychology is often the Rodney Dangerfield of sciences.  There are plenty of Nobel laureates like Roger Penrose and Francis Crick who decide that after winning their prize, they will turn their attention to a simpler science and clean it up--only to discover that Psychology is harder than it looks.

There is some evidence that this attitude toward Psychology starts early.

A paper in the February, 2010 issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General by Frank Keil, Kristi Lockhart and Esther Schlegel studied attitudes toward a variety of sciences from Kindergarten through adulthood.  They found that as early as second grade, kids see Psychology as explaining things that are easier to understand than the natural sciences (Biology, Chemistry, and Physics) or even Economics.  (In their sample, these differences went away in the group of adults, but their adult sample consisted largely of college students, many of whom were getting course credit in psychology classes for their participation.)

Why does this happen?

There are a few things that seem to be related to people’s attitude that Psychology is easier than other sciences.  For one, children think it would be easier to learn about aspects of Psychology than to learn about the natural sciences.  They are also more sure that adults would know how things work in Psychology than in the natural sciences. 

The authors did rule out one explanation.  They found that children and adults were no better at distinguishing between facts that are true and false in psychology and in other sciences.  That is, people don’t believe that Psychology is easier because they actually know more about it.  They believe that Psychology is an easier science than the natural sciences because it feels easier.

A key aspect of thinking about Psychology is that we all have minds.  We all have conscious experiences of what it is like to think.  Those experiences give us intuitions about the way our thought processes work.  Even though those intuitions are often misleading, it feels like a good scientific explanation for those thought processes are just beyond our grasp. 

The authors point out that this facet of Psychology has some important practical consequences.  For example, judges in legal trials are often much less likely to allow Psychologists to give expert testimony on the workings of the mind than they are to allow other scientists to give expert testimony.  The judges see the relevant Psychology as part of a juror’s common sense.

I realize that a blog entry like this may be preaching to the choir, but it is important that we find ways to get beyond this sense that Psychology is just studying things that are already obvious.  People struggle with addictions.  They go into counseling to seek help with navigating their daily lives.  Companies seek help making employees happier, more productive, and better innovators.  The answers to these questions come from the science of Psychology.  It really is time for Psychology to sit proudly and unapologetically at the scientific table.

The positive effect of action video games: Speed of visual processing

Periodically, I like to look at the effects of video games on thinking.  A few months ago, I posted a blog entry on the influence of video games on kids’ grades.  In the months after getting a video game system, kids show a drop in their grades.

I like to be even-handed, though, and so I want to talk about a positive influence of playing action video games on thinking.  There is growing evidence that playing action video games increases people’s ability to process visual information quickly and to make decisions based on that information.

Action video games are the ones in which there is a lot of activity on the screen, and the player has to take quick action in these situations.  Many of these action video games are Halo, Grand Theft Auto, and Call of Duty are violent.  The action has to be taken so that the player can avoid being killed in the game.

A paper in the December, 2009 issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science by Matthew Dye, Shawn Green, and Daphne Bavelier looked at differences between people who play video games extensively (at least 5 hours a week) and those who play rarely if ever.  They first analyzed 89 studies from a range of experimental tasks that required people to do things like search for a target shape on a computer screen or to quickly identify shapes on a screen in different conditions. 

They found that video game players were much faster to perform these tasks than non video game players.  One way you could be faster in any task, of course, is just to sacrifice accuracy for speed.  You could respond quickly, but be willing to get some number of answers wrong.  That is not what is happening here.  Video game players are just as accurate as non-video game players in these tasks, they are just faster.

Maybe this is a bias in the sample of people tested.  Perhaps those people who play video games a lot are the ones who happen to be able to do things quickly.  After all, if you tend to be slow in making decisions, you probably won’t have much fun being blown up regularly in games like Halo. 

To address this possibility, the authors also reviewed a number of studies in which people who were not video game players were either assigned to play action video games for 50 hours over 9 weeks or to play entertaining non-action games for 50 hours.  Later, all of these experiment participants performed visual experiments like searching for patterns on a screen.  In this training study, the non-video game players who played action games ended up being able to perform these tasks faster than the ones who played other games.  These studies suggest that there is something about action video games that speeds people’s ability to process and use visual information.

Finally, you might think that these action video games just make you more impulsive.  That is, perhaps people who play video games just respond very fast to all information on a screen.  That doesn’t seem to be true either.  The authors also reviewed a study in which there were some trials where items on the screen signaled that you were not supposed to respond.  Video game players were also quite good at keeping themselves from responding when that was appropriate. 

So, video games don’t make people trigger-happy, they just make people faster at processing and using visual information.  There are some tangible benefits to playing action video games after all.

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.

Conspiracy theories are easier to maintain from a distance

I have always scratched my head over conspiracy theories.  It is hard enough to get a group of reasonably intelligent people organized to run their own fantasy football league.  It would require true organizational geniuses to have carried out truly big conspiracies like the alleged conspiracy to kill JFK without somebody finding out about it at some point.  But many of the characters who are supposed to be deeply involved in these conspiracy theories hardly seem like organizational geniuses.  Yet, conspiracy theories abound.

Some research by Marlone Henderson in the October, 2009 issue of Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin helps to explain why. 

He capitalizes on an observation I have talked about before in this blog that people think about things more abstractly when they are far away in space or time than when they are close in space or time.  In order for a group to be united to a common purpose, they all have to have the same goal.  If you think about a group close up, then you can start to think about all of the different people involved, and it is easy to realize that lots of the group members are going to have somewhat different motivations.  But if you think of the group from a distance, then these individual differences in motivation get fuzzy.  Instead, you tend to focus abstractly on the group’s mission. 

To test this prospect, Henderson asked participants to think about a group consisting of a variety of different types of people.  They had come together to work on a project.  Some of the participants in the study were told that the group was meeting in New York (where the study was conducted).  Other participants were told that the group was meeting in San Francisco.  The participants were asked to judge how united the group was toward their common project.  The group that was far away was judged consistently to be more united in their efforts than was the group that was meeting close by.  That is, people really did consider groups that are far away to be more coherent than groups that are close by.

And that is one psychological mechanism that can support conspiracy theories.  You would be hard-pressed to believe that you or your friends, or people you have met could carry out a diabolical plan without someone messing it up or letting a key piece of information slip out.  But at the same time, it seems easier to swallow that a shadowy group operating far away can somehow keep focused on a common goal and then vanish without a trace.

A dollar is a dollar is a dollar…Right?

The purpose of money is to provide a uniform method for valuing things.  It doesn’t matter whether I have a crisp new $1 bill in my pocket, an old dollar bill, four quarters, or even a check made out to me for a $1.  They all have the same value.  This currency system allows us great freedom to buy and sell things and services.

Despite the great flexibility that money permits us, people have trouble treating every dollar the same as every other dollar.  Here are two examples.

First, sociologist Viviana Zelizer in her fantastic book The Social Meaning of Money has done an extensive analysis of the way that people use money.  One thing that becomes clear quickly is that people really do create different types of money to help them organize their lives.  As a simple example, people treat birthday money differently than other money.  For example, if a relative gives you $25 for your birthday, you are likely to spend it on something nice for yourself rather than on bills, even though the gift money is part of your total pile of money once it has been given to you.  That is, we keep the money psychologically separate. 

One way to see this idea of different types of money is in gambling behavior.  There is a phenomenon that arises in research on gambling called the “house money effect.”  Basically, people get more risky in their bets when gambling after they have won a bit.  The idea is that the money that they have won isn’t really theirs.  They are gambling with the house’s money.  Somehow, that money is less valuable, and so people are more willing to risk it. 

The second example ties the value of money to our motivational system as well.  A study by Adam Alter and Danny Oppenheimer in the October, 2008 issue of Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, looked at how the ease of thinking about money influences the value of money.  This ease of thinking is usually called fluency.  Alter and Oppenheimer suggested that being more fluent with a type of money would make that money seem more valuable.

To test this idea, they did a number of studies in which they contrasted the value of a familiar form of money with an unfamiliar form of money.  For example, in one study, the familiar form of money was a one-dollar bill.  The unfamiliar form of money was a Sacagawea dollar.  They gave people a list of inexpensive items (like paper clips and Hershey’s kisses) and asked how many of them they thought they could buy for a dollar.  People suggested that they would be able to buy far more of the items with the familiar one-dollar bill than with the unfamiliar Sacagawea dollar.  This result suggests that people found the familiar form of money more valuable than the unfamiliar form of money.

Findings like these suggest that the psychology of money is far more complex than the economics of money.  For economists, every dollar is the same as every other dollar.  For people, though, some dollars have different uses than others.  Perhaps more importantly, some dollars have more value than others.  

There are important implications for research like this.  Politicians tend to assume that the free-hand of the market will work to ensure that businesses run efficiently.  However, this belief makes many assumptions.  Among these assumptions are that there are no systematic biases in people’s economic behavior that will distort the way markets operate.  These results suggest that there are systematic biases in the way people treat money all the way down to the level of the value of a single dollar.

If you’re not in a group, you better have a plan.

Much of your life is spent doing routine things.  On weekdays, you have a set of actions you take out of habit to wake up, get ready to leave your house, go to work or school and so on through the day.  You also have some strategies for helping you to remember things that vary from day to day.  You may have a to-do list or an agenda.  You might place little post-it notes around your home or office to remind you to do things.

But how do you make sure that you do things that are really rare?  By definition, you have no routines for those.

A study by David Nickerson and Todd Rogers in the February, 2010 issue of Psychological Science examined this question by looking at voting behavior.

There is research by Peter Gollwitzer and his colleagues that it can often be helpful to envision a specific plan (which he calls an implementation intention) when you need to perform an action that is out of the ordinary.  Voting can be a pain, for example.  If election day is during the week (as it often is), you have to arrange your day to get to a polling station at a time when you can afford to wait if there is a line.  That requires thinking carefully about your schedule for that day and choosing a time of day that makes sense to go. 

Do these plans actually help you?

Nickerson and Rogers built a study into calls made to nearly 300,000 voters in the Democratic Presidential Primary election in Pennsylvania 2008.  They selected only registered voters who rarely vote in the primary elections.  Some voters were just called and reminded to vote.  A standard “Get out the vote” call.  Some were called and asked to predict whether they thought they would vote in the upcoming primary.  A third group was asked to think specifically about how they would get to the polls on election day in order to vote.  That is, they had to form an implementation intention.  Later, the voting records were checked to determine the proportion of people receiving each type of call who actually voted.

The results were interesting.

People who lived in a family with 2 or more registered voters in the house were completely unaffected by the type of call they received.  They were just as likely to vote whether they got a call or not and the type of call they received did not matter.

The results were quite different for people who were the only registered voter in their home.  These people were much more likely to vote if they were asked to form a specific plan than if they were just reminded to vote or asked to predict whether they would vote. 

What does this mean?  Obviously, performing actions that go beyond the ordinary is difficult.  In this primary election, only about 45% of registered Democrats actually voted, so most people either were not interested or could not find a way to get to the polls. 

If you live with a group, then it is easier for everyone in the group to talk about their plans.  It is also easier get support from others to help you satisfy your goals.  For example, all of you might go to the polls together.

When you are the only one responsible for an action, though, you don’t have other people to discuss your plans with.  You also don’t have social support for carrying out an action.  So, being forced to think through the details of a plan is particularly important when you are acting alone.

There are two important conclusions to draw from this research.

First, if you know you are going to have to do something out of the ordinary (like voting or perhaps starting a new exercise program), you should try to enlist a few others to help you out.  It is easier to generate intentions and stick to them when you are in a group.

Second, if you can’t enlist a group, then make sure you really think through the details of a plan to carry out an action.  That detailed plan will help you to overcome the variety of obstacles that often keep you from succeeding when you have to go beyond the ordinary actions of the day.