Size of food orders is affected by the need for status

The amount of food you eat is affected by the size of the portion you get.  At restaurants, for example, people generally eat what is on their plate.  So, the more food they are given, the more that they will eat.   This is a particular problem, because obesity rates are rising worldwide.  We need to find ways to help people eat less food. Portion size seems like a great place to start.

There are lots of ways to influence portion size.  At home and at buffet lines, it is helpful to use small plates.  You tend to put enough food on a plate to fill it, so using a smaller plate leads to smaller portions. 

In addition, restaurants often offer portions of different sizes.  At high-end restaurants, for example, steak-eaters may choose the size of the steak they order.  At fast-food restaurants, there are often specific sizes of drinks and fries that are available.

An interesting study by David Dubois, Derek Rucker, and Adam Galinsky in the April 2012 issue of the Journal of Consumer Research suggests that the size of a portion that someone orders can be influenced by their need to enhance their status.  The idea is that in many situations, bigger portions are seen as reflecting higher status than smaller portions.  When people are feeling powerless, they often want to make themselves feel better by enhancing their status.  Ordering a larger portion is one way to do that.

The researchers started by confirming that people generally viewed people who were eating larger portions as having higher status than those eating smaller portions.  Next, they looked at the relationship between feeling powerless and portion size. 

In one study, participants were residents of an apartment building.  The researchers set up tables in three different lobbies of the building.  Each table was set up to look like it was advertising a new bagel restaurant in town that was giving out free samples.  One table had a sign saying, “We all feel powerless in the morning, treat yourself to free bagels.”  One table had a sign saying, “We all feel powerful in the morning, treat yourself to free bagels.”  A third (control) table said “It’s morning, treat yourself to free bagels.” 

On the tables were two bowls with bagel pieces.  In one bowl, the bagel pieces were cut in small cubes, and in the other, the bagel pieces were cut into large cubes.  People coming to the table were told to take as many bagel pieces as they wanted, but they had to eat them at the table.  The people who were at the ‘powerless’ table were more likely to take large bagel pieces than those at the other tables.  As a result, they ate more.  On average, people at the ‘powerless’ table consumed about 100 calories worth of bagels, while those at the other two tables consumed about 70 calories worth of bagels.

Two other experiments in this series extended the results.  One study showed that people were most likely to order large portions when they felt powerless and were eating in a social situation.  If they felt powerless and were eating alone, then they did not order large portions.  This finding suggests that people are selecting portions in part based on the status that those portions may give them.

Finally, the researchers created a situation in which smaller portions signal higher status.  In this case, they had participants in the lab read an article suggesting that thinner people are more likely to be successful in business than fatter people.  The experimenters manipulated the feeling of powerlessness by having people imagine either that they were an employee who had to do what their boss wanted them to do (a powerless position) or that they were a boss who could tell their employees what to do (a powerful position).  At the end of the study, participants were able to select from among different sizes of Toblerone candy bars.  In this study, participants who thought that being thinner conveyed higher status selected smaller candy bars when they felt powerless than when they felt powerful. 

Putting these findings together, then, it seems that in general people think that larger portions convey more status than smaller portions.  As a result, people may overeat in order to increase their status compared to other people.

If we ant to help people to eat less food, then there are a few things we can do.  First, these studies suggest that we can help people to see that being thin can also convey status.  In that case, the need to show status can actually get people to select smaller portions.  Second, people who are concerned about their portion sizes should focus on the aspects of their life in which they have control in order to minimize the need to show status through food.

Guilt and leadership

Are good leaders born or made?  To some degree, of course, that is a false dichotomy.  A person’s characteristics may predispose them to want to be a leader and even to have some potential to lead effectively, but there is still a lot of learning that has to be done to become a good leader.

That said, quite a bit of research has begun to explore the personality characteristics that give someone a head start toward being a good leader.

Personality psychologists have identified what they call the “Big Five” dimensions of personality.  Essentially, if you throw a large number of questions about behavior into a survey, there are five broad characteristics that emerge from people’s responses:  Openness, Conscientiousness, Emotional Stability, Agreeableness, and Extraversion. 

All of them are associated with leadership to some degree.  People who are open to experience, for example, tend to be better leaders than those who are not.  Perhaps obviously, people who are conscientious are also better leaders than those who are not so conscientious.  People who are emotionally stable are also more effective leaders than those who are not emotionally stable.  The other two traits have a more complex relationship with leadership.

Agreeableness is the degree to which a person gets along with others.  A moderate degree of agreeableness is good for leaders, because they have to have some talent at getting along with others.  However, leaders who are too agreeable will not tell others things that they do not want to hear.  So, high levels of agreeableness are not good for leadership.

Extraversion is the degree to which someone seeks out others and likes to have the spotlight shown on them.  Clearly leaders need to be comfortable interacting with others and bringing ideas from a work group to a broader audience.  At the same time, a leader who wants the spotlight too much can keep other group members from getting enough credit for their efforts.

Of course, there are lots of other characteristics that define people’s personality beyond these Big Five.  A paper in the August 2012 issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology by Rebecca Schaumberg and Francis Flynn explored the influence of people’s proneness to feel guilty on their leadership ability.

These researchers distinguish between two related emotions—guilt and shame.  People experience guilt when they have a responsibility that they have failed to live up to.  The emotion is focused on the failure.  Shame also arises from a failure to live up to a responsibility, but it is self-focused.  People experience shame when they feel like they are a bad person because of their failure.

In one study, guilt and shame were measured using questionnaires in which people were asked to imagine that they had failed at some important task or responsibility.  They rated both the degree to which they would feel bad about what happened (guilt) as well as the degree to which they would feel bad about themselves (shame).  Participants also filled out a survey to assess the Big Five dimensions.

Several days later, participants came to the lab in groups and performed a series of group activities.  In one activity, for example, the group had to imagine that they were developing advertisements for new products.  After performing these group activities, participants rated the other group members for their leadership in the activities.

The best predictor of whether people would take a leadership role in this study was the degree to which people tend to feel guilt as a result of failures.  The tendency to experience guilt was a more powerful predictor than any of Big Five personality characteristics.  

Why does the tendency to feel guilt play such a significant role in leadership?  In another study, participants rated their tendency to experience guilt and shame as in the study just described.  In addition, they rated their sense of responsibility for other people.  The participants in this study were students in an MBA program.  The measure of leadership in this case came from evaluations done by the leadership center run by the business school where the participants were students. 

As in the study I just described, people’s tendency to feel guilt (rather than shame) predicted the independent ratings of how good a leader they were.  The tendency to feel guilt also predicted people’s sense of responsibility for others.  Statistical analyses suggest that guilt influenced the sense of responsibility for others, which in turn affected people’s success as leaders.

Of course, this research does not address the factors that make some people (and not others) feel guilty in the first place.  When these factors are better understood, it might be possible to teach other people these skills in order to increase their effectiveness in leadership roles.

Credit cards make you pay attention to benefits

Most people have had the experience that paying for something with a credit card seems less painful than paying for it with cash.  In addition to this common experience, a number of studies have demonstrated that people are generally more willing to part with their money when paying with credit cards than with cash.  They are also willing to pay more for a product when paying with a credit card than when paying with cash. 

There are many reasons for this difference.  For example, it is just harder to keep track of how much you are spending when you are just dealing with numbers on a credit card than when you have actual cash. 

A paper by Promothesh Chatterjee and Randall Rose in the April 2012 issue of the Journal of Consumer Research suggests another reason.  People pay more attention to the benefits of a product when paying with credit cards than with cash, but they pay more attention to the costs associated with the product when paying with cash than with credit cards.

In one study, participants were first primed to think about credit cards or cash.  This priming was done by having people use a set of words to form sentences.  Some of those words were related either to credit cards (Visa) or to cash (ATM). 

Next, participants read about a digital camera.  They were given information about benefits of the camera (“It has a 12x optical zoom”) and costs (“Has a 2-year warranty that costs an additional $69.99.”).  They were asked how much they would be interested in paying to buy this camera.  Later, they saw descriptions of possible features of a camera and were asked to remember whether those were actually properties they saw in the description. 

Consistent with the previous research, people who were primed to think about credit cards were willing to pay more for the camera than people who were primed to think about cash.  In addition, the people who were primed to think about credit cards were more accurate at recognizing the benefits of a product than its costs.  In contrast, the people primed to think about cash were (somewhat) more accurate recognizing the costs than the benefits.  A second study found a similar pattern using a slightly different methodology. 

In a final study, participants had the chance to actually make choices.  Again, they were primed to think about cash or credit cards.  This time, though, they saw descriptions of two mp3 players.  One of them had better benefits than the other.  The second had fewer costs than the first.  People primed to think about credit cards selected the player with the better benefits about 75% of the time.  People primed to think about cash selected the player with the lower costs about 75% of the time.

Putting all of this together, then, the form of payment you use to make a purchase affects how you evaluate the items.  Credit cards lead you to focus on the benefits of a product.  Cash leads you to focus on the costs.

What should you do?

When making any large purchase, you should think about whether you would be just as willing to buy the product if you were paying cash as if you were paying with credit.  This can be particularly important for purchases like cars and electronics where salespeople like to add on expensive warranties.  In the context of spending thousands of dollars on a purchase, a few extra hundred dollars may not feel like very much.  It is worth thinking about all that you could do with those extra hundreds.  Thinking about paying with cash may help you to do that.

It is motivating to belong to a group

There are lots of benefits to being a member of a community.  People feel more secure when they know that they have others around them who share their goals and care about their progress.  That is one reason why it can be so stressful to move or to travel.  Suddenly, you are cut off from your regular group.

But, how much of a connection do you need with others in order to get some benefit from being a member of a group?  This question was explored in a paper by Gregory Walton, Geoffrey Cohen, David Cwir, and Steven Spencer in the March, 2012 issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.  Their research suggests that you don’t need much connection before you start to see some benefit. 

In one study, for example, college student participants read an article that was supposed to have been written by a more advanced student who had a positive experience in math.  The biography of the author of this article included their birthday.  For some participants, the biography was set up so that the author of the article and the participant had the same birthday.  For others, the participant and the author had birthdays several months apart. 

After reading this article, participants were given a geometry problem that is impossible to solve (involving coloring a map with a fixed number of colors).  Participants who shared a birthday with the author of the article worked longer on the impossible problem than participants who did not share a birthday.  In addition, the participants who shared a birthday with the author of the article had more positive thoughts about math and rated the math department at their university as a friendlier and warmer place. 

Another study created an arbitrary relationship between people.  People were given a sticker to wear at the start of the study.  Later, they were told that the people with that color sticker were either part of the “numbers” group or part of the “puzzles” group.  After being placed in these groups, people were given the impossible math problem used before.  People who were part of the “numbers” group worked on the problem longer than those who were part of the “puzzles” group.  Interestingly, this effect only happened for those people who were highly interested in math.  People who were not interested in math were not affected by being put in the “numbers” group. 

Putting these studies together, this work shows that even a simple relationship between people based on arbitrary reasons like sharing a birthday or being randomly assigned to a group) is enough to increase feelings of warmth and motivation. 

Ultimately, people seem wired to adopt the goals of the people around with, particularly when they feel close to those others.  Of course, that can be a good thing or a bad thing depending on what the people around us are doing.  For that reason, we have to be careful to surround ourselves with other people who are engaging in the behaviors that we would like to see in ourselves.

What do you enjoy doing?

Often, I hear people repeat the phrase, “Life is a journey, you have to enjoy the ride.”  I completely agree that it is important to enjoy the things you do each day.  If you want to set up your life so that you can enjoy as many of the moments as possible, though, are there particular experiences you ought to strive for?

This issue was addressed in an interesting paper by Sami Abuhamdeh and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in the March, 2012 issue of Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.

The starting point for this paper is the observation that you perform activities for different reasons.  Extrinsically motivated activities are done because there is some goal that they achieve.  A student might go to a lecture, for example, because she has to go in order to get credit for the class.  Intrinsically motivated activities are done because there is something inherently rewarding about doing them.

The first study in this paper examined an intrinsically motivated activity—playing chess.  Most chess players play the game, because they enjoy it.  The researchers tracked 87 male chess players using a chess website over a 2-week period.  On average, players played about 16 games in that period.  After each game, the players rated their enjoyment of the game. 

Two main factors influenced players’ enjoyment of the games they played.  Games that they felt were challenging were enjoyed more than games that were easy.  Games in which a player felt he played well were enjoyed more than games in which a player felt he did not play well. 

This study suggests that people find activities particularly rewarding when they are challenged and engaged.

Of course, this result might just reflect something about chess players.  Perhaps the people who gravitate to chess are ones that enjoy a challenge.  So, in a second study over a thousand people were tracked for a week at a time.  Participants wore a watched that beeped at random times of the day.  When it beeped, participants were supposed to fill out a survey about what they were doing, why they were doing it, how much they enjoyed it, and they answered questions about whether the activity was challenging and whether they were performing well. 

There are two nice aspects of this method.  First, the researchers were able to sample a large number of activities.  Second, some of these activities were being done for extrinsic reasons (the participant had to do them) and others were being done for intrinsic reasons (the participant wanted to do them). 

An interesting pattern emerged.  First, people generally enjoyed intrinsically motivated activities more than extrinsically motivated activities.  For all activities, participants enjoyed them more when they thought they were doing them well than when they thought they were doing them poorly.  However, the results for challenging tasks depended on the reason for doing them.  For intrinsically motivated tasks (like playing chess or doing a sport) the activity was more fun when it was challenging than when it was not.  For extrinsically motivated tasks (like housework or an exam) the activity was more fun when it was easy than when it was challenging.

So, what can you do if you want to enjoy life’s journey?

First, try to focus your life on activities you do because there is something about them you enjoy.  Even when there are things you technically ‘have’ to do (like going to school or going to work), you can try to find elements of them that are inherently enjoyable.

Second, find ways to challenge yourself.  The more that you are engaged with your world, the more you will enjoy it.  Don’t take the easy road through life.  Not only will you achieve more, you’ll have a better time doing it.

Developing good study habits really works

Knowledge is the essence of smart thinking.  No matter how much raw intelligence you have, you are not going to succeed at solving complex problems without knowing a lot.  That’s why we spend the first 20 (or more) years of our lives in school. 

Robert Bjork and fellow PT blogger Nate Kornell have explored some of the study habits of college students in a 2007 paper in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review.  Research on memory provides a number of important suggestions about the most effective ways to study. One of the most important tips is that students should study by testing themselves rather than just reading over the material.  It is also important to study over a period of days rather waiting until the last minute to study.  Kornell and Bjork’s studies suggest that only about 2/3 of college students routinely quiz themselves, and a majority of students study only one time for upcoming exams.

Of course, guidelines from memory research come from studies in idealized circumstances.  Researchers bring participants (many of whom are college students) into a lab and ask them to learn material.  Perhaps the recommendations drawn from these studies are not that helpful for real students dealing with real courses.

To address this question, Marissa Hartwig and John Dunlosky related the study habits of college students to their grade point average (GPA) in a 2012 paper in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review.  They asked students about a number of study behaviors.  They also had students report their current GPA.

The students with the highest GPA were more likely to study by testing themselves than the students with lower GPAs.  What is the most effective way to test yourself, though?  It turns out that most students report using flashcards, and the use of flashcards does not predict a student’s grades.  However, flash cards usually allow people to learn basic aspects of a domain like key vocabulary.  Really understanding something new requires practice with explaining it.  So, self-testing needs to involve deeper questions than the ones that are usually written on flash cards.

All college students tend to focus their study on upcoming assignments.  That is no surprise, because college is a busy time.  The most successful students, though, also schedule time to study for classes even before the exam is coming up.  The students who make a schedule and stick with it tend to get better grades than those who just work on whatever is coming up.

Finally, the time of day that students study also matters.  College students are notorious night owls.  Indeed, few students reported studying in the morning, or even in the afternoon.  Most students study in the evening and late at night.  One of the interesting results of this research, though, is that the students who study late at night tend to get worse grades than those who study in the evening. 

It is always nice when studies of real-world behavior mesh with recommendations from basic research.  In the case of studying, though, it seems particularly important to ensure that basic research influences behavior.  People invest several years and thousands of dollars in a college education.  That education has an enormous effect on their future productivity.  Cognitive science can ensure that students maximize the value of that experience.

Even for young kids, explanation guides exploration

It is generally a positive characteristic to be curious.  When you are curious, you spend a lot of time trying to understand the way the world around you works.

If we dig a bit deeper into this idea, there seem to be two related aspects of curiosity.  The first is that it is important to try to explain how the world works.  That is, curious people spend a lot of time asking the question “why?”  But, having asked why? it is also important to try to answer that question.  So, curious people should also explore the world, taking things apart and trying to understand what makes them tick.

As I discuss in my book Smart Thinking, it is crucial to develop high quality knowledge about the way the world works if you ultimately want to be able to solve new problems. 

An important question is whether creating explanations for things guides people’s search for new knowledge.  This question was addressed in a clever study published in a 2012 issue of Child Development by my colleague Cristine Legare.  She studied children between the ages of 2 and 6.

In these studies, children were exposed to both surprising and unsurprising events.  First, this study explored the kinds of explanations give to these events.  In particular, kids should be most focused on trying to explain surprising things.  Second, the study examined whether the type of explanations that kids give to surprising events influenced the way that the kids played with the objects later. 

At the beginning of the experiment, children were shown two boxes with lights inside them.  The boxes were designed so that when some objects were placed on top of them, the boxes would light up.  (The boxes were actually set up so that an experimenter watching the study could turn the boxes on and off, but from the child’s perspective, the boxes lit up when certain objects were put on them.)

The objects used in this study were blocks of different shapes and colors.  All of the blocks were actually boxes, so that if you looked carefully at them, you could see that they opened up.

A block of a particular shape and color (say a red triangle) was placed on top of one light box, and then the other.  When the block touched the box, it lit up.  Children were told, “This is a blicket.”  Then, another block of the same shape and color (another red triangle) was placed on each of the boxes.  Once again, when the block touched the box, it lit up, and it was labeled a blicket.  After that, a different block (perhaps a green hexagon) was placed on the box.  This time, the box did not light up.  The child was told “This is not a blicket.”

After being introduced to the box and the blocks, children saw two more demonstrations.  Now, two light boxes were put in front of the child.  The blicket was placed on one box and the not-a-blicket was placed on the other.  The first time this happened, the box with the blicket on it lit up, and the box with the not-a-blicket did not.  The key part of the experiment came when the next pair of blocks was tried.  In the consistent condition, the blicket made the box light up again and the not-a-blicket did not.  In the inconsistent condition, neither block made the box light up.

Children were asked to explain what just happened.  After giving an explanation, the children were allowed to play with the blocks for a while.  After completing this part of the study, the children each participated in the other condition as well.  So, each child did both the consistent and inconsistent conditions.

When children saw a consistent event, they rarely saw the need to explain what happened.  If blickets consistently made the box light up, then the best explanation for why a new block made the box light up was that it was a blicket.

The inconsistent events were the ones that really required an explanation.  In this case, there was a block that once made the box light up, and now a new one failed to make it light up. 

Children at all ages tried to come up with explanations for what went wrong.  At each age group, there were two general types of explanations that children gave.  Some tried to explain why the block did not make the box light up.  They might way that the block ran out of batteries, or that placed on the box the wrong way.  Others explained the unexpected event by focusing on the category the object belonged to.  They would say things like, “I guess that one isn’t really a blicket.”  Overall, about half of the kids gave explanations for why the object didn’t make the box light up, while about a third of the kids focused on the category of the objects.  The explanations given by the rest of the kids were some other type.

The type of explanation kids gave was related to the way the kids played with the objects later.  The kids who tried to explain why the block did not make the box light up spent more of their play time testing the blocks than the kids who gave other types of explanations for what happened.  They would stack a few blocks on the machine, open up the blocks, and tried different combinations of blocks on the boxes. 

The children who gave explanations based on the categories of the objects spent more time than other children sorting the blocks into categories.  They would place a block on the box, and if it lit up, they put it in one pile, but if it didn’t light up they put it in another pile.  This kind of behavior will not let children understand anything about why the blocks make the box light up, it just confirms that some blocks make the box light up, while others don’t.

A fascinating aspect of these findings is that there is a clear relationship between curiosity and exploration.  Starting from the age of 2, when a child asks the question why, this question is followed by an attempt to answer that question.  That means that giving explanations that focus on understanding why things happen drives a better understanding of why the world works as it does.  Merely categorizing objects in the world does not promote this same kind of understanding.

There are two important questions for future research raised by these studies.  First, are there big differences between kids in how likely they are to give why explanations?  Is a kid who asks why today also more likely to ask why tomorrow?

Second, can we teach kids to be better at asking why?  Because the kids who ask why are engaging in behaviors that promote smart thinking, it would be wonderful to help make that a habit even in kids who don’t generally ask why on their own.

And, of course, even as adults, we should spend a lot of time asking why.