What you can do affects what you see.

I like to run.  It is very peaceful to go for a nice long run on a beautiful sunny day.  There are days when I feel like I can run forever.  My legs just keep moving.  On those days, I fix my eyes on a point in the distance and before I know it I am passing what I was looking at.  Other days, of course, I feel like I’m running in Jell-O.  On those days, the end of the block looks like it is a million miles away.

Of course, that must just be a metaphor, right?

Actually, there is growing evidence that what you are able to do with your body at any given time affects what you see.  A nice example of this work comes from a paper by Sally Linkenauger, Jessica Witt, Jeanine Stefanucci, Jonathan Bakdash, and Dennis Proffitt in the December, 2009 issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology:  Human Perception and Performance. 

They had people sit at a table and judge the distance between them and a tool that was placed somewhere on the table.  For example, in one study, right-handed people sat at a table and a hammer was placed on the table.  They were to imagine picking up the hammer from the table.  On each trial of the experiment, the hammer was placed some distance away from them.  Then, they had to judge the distance between them and the hammer.  To make this judgment, the experiment who was sitting across from them opened up a tape measure (with the numbers facing away from the participant).  The participant directed the experimenter to lengthen or shorten the exposed ruler until they thought it was the same length as the distance from them to the hammer.

Now here’s the interesting part.  On some trials, the hammer was placed with the handle facing to the right, so that it would be easy to pick up the hammer by just reaching straight out for it.  On other trials, the hammer was placed with the handle facing to the left.  In order to pick up the hammer on these trials, people had to imagine reaching and turning their hand over to grasp the hammer normally.  This movement is awkward.  So, the hammer would be easier to pick up when it was on the right than when it was on the left.

When the hammer was placed so that it would be easy to grasp, people systematically judged the distances to be shorter than when the hammer was oriented so that it would be hard to grasp.  That is, the ease of picking up the hammer affected people’s judgments of how far away the hammer was in space.

Interestingly, left-handed people did not show the same pattern of data.  The left-handers judged the tool to be the same distance away regardless of whether it was oriented in a way that would make it easy to grasp or hard to grasp.  The authors point out that left-handers are usually more ambidextrous than right-handers, and so even though they were asked to imagine picking up the hammer with their left hand only, they may still perceive objects as if they will be grasped in a natural way regardless of how they are oriented.

Finally, I should point out that Dennis Proffitt and his colleagues have done a number of studies of the effects of actions on perception.  For example, they also find that people judge hills to be steeper when they are tired or weighed down by carrying a heavy backpack than when they are not.

These findings make clear that our visual system does not just give us a true picture of what is out there in the world.  Instead, the human visual system provides information that is useful for acting on the world.  It might take us a long time to reason through how likely we are to succeed at climbing a hill or running a distance or picking up a heavy tool.  By biasing our judgments of distance and steepness, though, our visual systems provide us with information that is available quickly and gives us a way of estimating whether we will succeed at a course of action.   

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.

You again! The role of significant others in our social interactions

Some patterns in our lives tend to repeat.  You may meet a new person, and suddenly find that you talk as though you were back in college with them.  Or, you may meet a new romantic interest, and you speak to them as if they were an old significant other.  Or you my have a boss and you find yourself talking to him as if he was your father.

What is going on?

It is hard to have to treat each new person in your life fresh.  After all, there must be some value to all of the experience you have had with other people you have met.

Research by Susan Andersen, Serena Chen, and their colleagues suggests that we do use our experience with important people in our lives to help us figure out how to act with new people that we meet. 

The basic idea is simple.  If you meet a new person, and he has some of the characteristics of your father, then you will engage in behaviors with that person that are similar to the kinds of interactions you have had with your father.  You will also assume (unconsciously) that this person will have other characteristics that your father has.  So, your interactions with this new person are being shaped unwittingly by your own relationship with your father.

This use of your knowledge of significant others in social settings is a double-edged sword.  On the positive side, recycling your social knowledge allows you to decide quickly how to interact with new people.  Furthermore, when a person reminds you of a significant other from your past, it allows you to develop a close relationship with him or her fairly quickly.

On the negative side, you are reminded of these significant others unconsciously.  You are not deliberately saying, “This man reminds me of my father, so I am going to treat him that way.”  It happens without your awareness.  That can lead to a few potential problems.

First, not every relationship with a significant other from our lives is a healthy and positive relationship.  If you had an uncomfortable relationship with a parent, then you may find yourself having uncomfortable dealings with new people who remind you of that parent.  You may experience this discomfort without knowing why you feel negatively toward that person.

Second, while a new person in your life may remind you of someone from your past, that person is still unique.  The research by Andersen and Chen suggests that once you make a link between some new person and a significant other from your past, you begin to assume that this new person shares other characteristics with this significant other.  As a result, you may fail to pick up on subtle differences between this new person and people from your past. 

If you find yourself in a new relationship with someone (whether it is a friendship, a work relationship or a romantic relationship) and you find that you are starting to repeat old patterns of behavior, then ask yourself whether there is someone from your life that is like this person.  If you do a little digging, you may discover that you are actually treating this new person as if they were someone else.  Once you know why you are treating a new person using old patterns of behavior, you can try to be more aware and mindful of creating unique patterns of interaction   

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.   

When cigarette warnings backfire

Cigarettes are a clear public health problem.  A significant number of people who smoke regularly throughout their lives will develop serious health problems including lung cancer, heart disease and emphysema.  And for 30 years now, governments around the world have worked to change people’s attitudes toward smoking.  Indeed, the US government wants to institute a number of graphic new warning labels on cigarette packages to deter smokers.

There are two classes of measures that have been taken to fight smoking (and related public health problems like alcohol and unhealthy eating).  One is to make smoking less attractive in the short-term to counteract the positives of smoking.  The other is to provide warnings about the dangers of smoking.

As I have written before in previous entries, one reason why smoking is so difficult to quit is that it provides some pleasure in the short term (and for the addicted smoker also the absence of painful cravings).  The health risks are in the long-term and so they have a weaker pull over current behavior.  Thus, measures like making it illegal to smoke indoors in public places and raising the price of cigarettes through taxes are aimed at decreasing the pleasure of smoking in the short term.

The other major public health initiative is to influence the information that is available about smoking.  For example, in the US, there are very few venues in which cigarette manufacturers are allowed to advertise, and so there are few positive messages about smoking in mainstream media.  In addition, by law, cigarette packs have to come with a warning about the dangers of smoking.

A paper by Jochim Hansen, Susanne Winzeler, and Sascha Topolinski in the January 2010 issue of the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology examined the effectiveness of these warnings on the attitudes of smokers toward smoking. 

The authors reasoned that there are two kinds of smokers.  Some smokers find that smoking is an important part of their self concept.  They are truly smokers.  Other people smoke cigarettes, but that is not an important part of their self-concept.  They do not identify strongly as smokers. 

There are also two kinds of warnings that are often given about smoking.  Some of those messages are about the negative social consequences of smoking.  For example, a warning might point out that “Smoking makes you unattractive.”  Most of the warnings that actually appear on cigarette packs tend to focus on the danger of death associated with cigarettes, issuing warnings like “Cigarettes are dangerous for your health” or “Cigarettes cause lung cancer.”   

In other posts, I have discussed the idea of mortality salience:  that being reminded of your own mortality can affect your self-esteem.  Hansen and colleagues reasoned that a cigarette warning that highlights that cigarettes may cause death could actually backfire.  When someone identifies strongly as a smoker, then a warning that focuses on mortality can threaten that person’s self-esteem.  Because they identify strongly as a smoker, the easiest way to boost their self-esteem is to increase their favorable attitude toward cigarettes.

To test this hypothesis, a number of cigarette smokers were tested.  Some of these people were ones for whom smoking was an important part of their self-concept, while others were ones for whom smoking was not that important to their self-concept.  The smokers read either a warning that talked about how smoking decreases a person’s attractiveness or a warning that talked about how smoking causes death.  Later, these people rated their attitude toward smoking. 

As these researchers predicted, if people thought smoking was an important part of their self-concept, they rated smoking as much more attractive if they read a warning that focused on death than if they read a warning focused on attractiveness.  That is, for the group of smokers whose identity is bound up with smoking, the kinds of warnings that are typically shown on cigarette packs actually backfire.

This research suggests the importance of gathering evidence about programs that relate to the behavioral aspects of public health problems.  On the surface, nobody could oppose big warnings on cigarettes that trumpet their health risks.  However, we must be careful, because these warnings could actually do more harm than good.

Your perception of your future self affects how you value future outcomes

Many choices in life reflect a tradeoff between the value of things in the present and in the future.  For example, if I buy a new computer today, I get to use that new computer now, but undoubtedly a better one will come out a year from now that will be nicer than the one I just bought.  Similarly, if I invest money in the stock market, I am trading the value of that money to me now for the hope that it will be worth a larger amount in the future. 

Clearly, some option in the future has to be more valuable than the option available in the present in order for us to wait for it.  But how much better does the future have to be in order for us to wait?

You can think of your willingness to wait until some time in the future to get something (an object or money) that is similar to what you could get now as your degree of patience.  An interesting paper in the February, 2010 issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General by Dan Bartels and Lance Rips suggests that the people are more patient when they view their future self as being similar to their current self.

Let me break this down.  Being patient means that you are willing to wait to get something that you could get more without requiring a huge increase in value to pay for the wait.  For example, imagine you had the chance to get $100 right now.  I might give you the chance to wait a year to get more money.  How much more would you need to get to wait the year?  If you said that you needed $110, that would be more patient than if you said $150. 

The authors looked at this question a few different ways.  First, they just used correlations.  They had people rate how similar the person they are right now would be to the person they think they will become at various points in the future.  Then, they had people do exercises in which they had to say how much money they would want to wait a particular amount of time predict the amount of money that would be required for them to wait to get some amount of money (as in the example in the previous paragraph).  They found that for each individual, time periods with large decreases in self-similarity people also became less patient.

In other studies, they had participants read about other people and their life changes.  Some of those life changes were fairly small (Jill discovered she likes rice dishes), while others were more significant (Bill had a health scare in which doctors thought he had a rare blood disease, but in the end he was found to be perfectly healthy).  The participants in the study rated the similarity of the people in the story before and after the events.  Later, they also did patience tasks like the one described earlier.  In some of these studies, the valuable things were things like vacation days from work rather than money. 

In these experimental studies, participants judged that the people would be more patient in periods in which they had undergone only small life changes than when they had undergone big life changes.  People also felt that the big life changes would make the person more different from their former self than the small life changes.

What does this all mean? 

When we plan for our own future, we are most focused on sharing the things we have with our future self.  The more similar we are to that future self, the more willing we are to share. 

 Often, though, we must make plans to put things off to the distant future when we feel that we will be quite different from what we are now.  For example, many people have difficulty saving enough money for their retirement.  You must begin saving for retirement when you are in your 20s or 30s, even though you may not  retire until you are in your 60s or 70s.  That means that you must agree to share your current money with someone who feels very little like you now.  Because this future self feels so different, people often put away too little money toward their retirement.  That is one reason why government pension funds like Social Security end up being so important to people.

In the end, when trying to plan for the future, it is probably best to use a little more math and a little less intuition.  For example, in the case of retirement savings, work with someone to make an assessment of how much money you will need when you retire.  Then, create a specific savings plan that will lead you to that amount of money in the future. Otherwise, you will be most likely to share that current money with a self that is more like who you are right now.

It is easier and more satisfying to buy experiences than to buy stuff

One of my kids has a tough time making choices.  If he has gift money to spend at the toy store, he’ll find three things he really likes and then agonize over the decision.  Just when we think he’s ready to pick one of the items, he starts to think about not having one of the others and he gets thrown back into the agony of the choice. 

I hadn’t noticed it before, but last year I gave him the choice between going to a local amusement park and a nearby water park.  That choice was free of the real pain that usually goes along with decisions.

Some new research gives some insight into what is going on.

A paper in the January, 2010 issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology by Travis Carter and Tom Gilovich looks at differences in the way people treat choices involving material goods (that is, stuff like toys, electronics, or jewelry) and choices involving experiential goods (like trips or visits to an amusement park). 

Consistent with the story about my conflicted son, they find that people report that choices for material products are harder for them to make than choices for experiential products. 

There is another interesting finding as well.  When people were asked about choices they made for material products, they found themselves less satisfied with the choice they had made over time.  When people were asked about choices of experiences, though, they were more satisfied with their choice over time. 

Why is this?

Part of what is happening is that when we buy a material product, it is often easy for us to compare that product to other similar ones.  So, if you go out and buy a flat-screen TV, the store probably has a wall of TVs just like it.  They differ in lots of ways, and so you can always think about the ones you did not buy and how they may have been better than what you got.

Experiences are different.  It is hard to compare across them.  If you take a trip to the beaches of Florida in the winter, you might spend your time swimming, eating good food, and dancing at night.  You could have chosen a trip to ski in Colorado instead.  Your activities on that trip would have been much different, and so it isn’t so easy to compare the different options.

Consistent with this idea, Carter and Gilovich find that when people are making choices for material products, they spend more time comparing alternatives than when they are making choices for experiences.  People think about choices for experiences, but they aren’t really comparing the different options.

Another difference is that material products are just possessions.  Even really expensive and important purchases are just things that eventually get older or break or are replaced by newer and (usually) better things.  The stuff you have is not psychologically a part of you.

Experiences, though, are a part of you.  The trips you take, the movies you see, and the things you do create your memories which become a central part of who you are.  Even bad experiences can often become stories that you tell, and in that way, they gain value.  You do not shed your experiences as easily as you shed your stuff.

Finally, as Carter and Gilovich point out, it is important to remember that many things that you may buy have both a material and an experiential part.  For example, a new car can be thought of as a material product.  It has features like the styling, handling, and engine power that can be compared to other cars.  It may also be thought of as an experience.  You could choose to focus on the enjoyment of driving the car and the trips you take in it. 

In the end, you are much more likely to be satisfied with your choices if you treat the objects in your life as experiences rather than just as stuff that you have accumulated.  Stuff will come and go, but your experiences will make you who you are.