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.

I like you, because I always feel good around you and I don’t know why

How do you know that you like someone or something?  Often, seeing a person you like gives you a good feeling inside or makes you smile.  You have that reaction far before you could say exactly why you like that person.  Indeed, you might find it hard to put into words exactly why you like them, but you know you do. 

There is a lot of work in Psychology showing that you can come to like someone (or some thing for that matter) not because of anything they have done, but just because you tend to feel good when you are around them.  There is a procedure called evaluative conditioning that shows how this can happen.

As one example, Michael Olson and Russell Fazio presented studies in the journal Psychological Science in 2001.  They had people stare at a computer screen while images were presented to them very rapidly (at a rate of 1.5 seconds per image).  They told people that they were studying people’s ability to do surveillance in a complex environment.  The images consisted both of pictures (of different Pokemon characters) as well as words.  Sometimes, more than one word or picture appeared on the same screen.  In fact, one Pokemon character was repeatedly paired with positive words and images (like the word excellent or a picture of a sundae).   A second character was repeatedly paired with negative words and images (like the word terrible or a picture of a cockroach).  Later, people were asked to rate how much they liked the character.  People consistently gave higher ratings to the character that was paired with positive words and pictures than to the character that was paired with negative words and pictures.  This difference occurred, though the participants in the study were not aware of which words and images had appeared with the characters. 

So, what is going on here?  In a May, 2009 paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Christopher Jones, along with Russell Fazio and Michael Olson argue that this change in evaluation of the objects occurs because of a mis-attribution of the good feeling to the object.  That is, in these kinds of experiments, the positive words and pictures make the person feel good.  They are not sure why they feel good, so the good feeling is attached to the Pokemon character that is consistently associated with feeling good.  Likewise, the negative words and pictures make them feel bad.  They are not sure why they feel bad, so they attach the negative feeling to the Pokemon character that is consistently associated with feeling bad. 

Often, of course, this strategy is a pretty good one.  If there is a person in the world, and you usually feel good around that person, chances are that person is making you feel good.  If there is a person and you usually feel bad around them, chances are that person is making you feel bad.  However, this strategy can lead to the wrong outcome too.  You may end up liking people and things you encounter in positive situations more than perhaps you should.  Similarly, you may end up disliking people and things you encounter in negative situations more than you should.

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.

Dream Global, Act Local

When you want to motivate someone to do something, you tell them to Dream Big, and to Reach for the Stars.  That is, of course, important advice.  It is hard to achieve greatness without ever dreaming of greatness.  An important question, though, is how you should go about achieving that greatness after you have dreamed it?

An interesting study in the November, 2008 issue of Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin by Linda Houser-Marko and Kennon Sheldon sheds some light on that question.  They point out that there is lots of previous research (much of it by Dan Wegner and Robin Vallacher) that points out that people are able to identify the actions they are carrying out at a variety of different levels of generality. For example, imagine that you are talking on the phone in order to ask your friend whether you can borrow her car.  If someone stopped you in the middle of the conversation and asked you what you were doing, you could say “begging for a car,” or perhaps “asking a question” or even “speaking into the phone.”  The first of these is a very general statement of what you are doing.  The last of these is a very specific action that is part of the more general action of begging for a car. 

When you dream big, you are usually thinking about a grand and general action.  You might want to become a great musician, get a good grade in a class, or perhaps get a rewarding job, or even make the world a safer place.  To carry out any of these big goals, you also need to carry out a series of smaller steps.  For example, getting an A in a class might require studying a certain number of hours each week, or practicing skills from the class, or spending an amount of time writing.

When you are in the process of trying to achieve a big goal, how should you think about your actions?

Houser-Marko and Sheldon’s data suggest that you should focus on the specific actions that are part of the broader goal.  The reason why you should focus on actions, is that you may sometimes fail along the way toward trying to achieve the broader goal.  For example, if you want to get an A in the class, you might set the goal of studying at least 10 hours a week for the class.  Imagine you have a difficult week, or perhaps a strong temptation comes up.  You might study only 6 hours for the class in one week.  If you focus on the general goal of getting an A, then you will feel worse about this failure than if you focus just on the local goal of studying for 10 hours.  The idea is that small failures along the way are more likely to be seen as chipping away at the possibility that you will achieve the broader goal when you focus only on that general goal than if you focus on the specific actions.  If you start to feel bad about your prospects for success at the larger goal, you may give up altogether. 

So, these findings suggest that when you dream, you should dream globally.  Set your sights on high achievement.  But when it comes time to actually achieve your goal, act locally.  Find specific actions that will bring you toward your goal. Even if you stumble on the way to the goal, if you focus on the specific actions, you will not see your failure as a sign that you will not succeed at your dreams.

What is your pain and suffering worth?

The civil courts are one of the most humane systems society has invented.  We take property damage, pain, suffering, and lost wages that have been caused by the negligence or even the willful actions of others and translate them into a dollar amount.  This system allows people to settle their disputes peacefully.  But it does rely on our ability to translate things like pain and suffering into a monetary value.

What factors influence the way we judge the value of intangible elements like pain and suffering?

There was an  interesting paper exploring this issue in the August, 2008 issue of Psychological Science by Eugene Caruso, Dan Gilbert, and Tim Wilson.  They looked at the value that people give to things in the past and in the future.  Consider, for example, an auto accident.  A woman in her car is struck head-on by another car driven by a man who didn’t pay attention to a stop-sign.  The man is clearly at fault.  The woman is injured and it will take 6 months for her to heal.  How much should she be awarded by the insurance company for her pain and suffering?  The researchers asked this question in two ways.  In one situation, the accident was 6 months ago, and the woman is now completely healed.  In the other, the accident just happened, and she is beginning her recovery period.  They found that people were willing to award the woman twice as much when the pain and suffering was yet to happen than when it was now over.  So, future pain and suffering was more valuable than past pain and suffering. 

One interesting side-note, people do not believe that they ought to value the present and future differently.  The researchers did some studies in which they asked both the past and future questions to the same people.  In this case, people gave the same value to past and future events.  However, if they saw the past question first, then the values they gave to both events was lower than if they saw the future question first. 

It is also worth pointing out that this effect was not limited to negative events.  In another study, people were asked how much they would want to be paid for 10 days worth of boring work.  People asked for more money if they were asking for work they had yet to do than if they were being asked for payment for work they had already completed.

So, what does this mean?  I guess that depends on whether you are the insurance company or the person who has suffered damage…Insurance companies ought to wait to place any value on pain and suffering until they are over.  They will seem less valuable when they are finished than while they are ongoing.  On the other hand, if you have suffered damage, your pain and suffering will have the most value while you are going through it.   

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.