Disgust, morality, and attention

Our sense of morality helps us to do the right thing even in situations where there is a temptation to do something wrong.  For example, when you engage in an action that you know is morally wrong, you experience guilt.  When you see others engaging in an act that is morally wrong, you often judge them.  Those judgments may also serve to keep you from engaging in those acts yourself. 

An interesting observation from this research is that people’s moral judgments are also related to disgust.  When people witness (or hear about) a moral transgression, they often get a disgust reaction.  In addition, feelings of disgust increase people’s sense of moral outrage.  A fascinating element of this work is that the sense of moral outrage may increase even when the feeling of disgust comes from another source.

The idea is simple.  As with most feelings, we look around the world trying to find the source of those feelings.  Most of the time, those sources are obvious.  Imagine you are walking down the street, and suddenly you see a car speeding toward you.  You jump back onto the sidewalk, and feel a combination of fear (that you were almost hit) and relief (that you were not).  It is pretty clear that the reason for these feelings is that you were almost hit by a car.

In some cases, the source is less obvious.  You might wake up in the morning feeling some stress because you have an exam coming up or a big presentation at work.  That underlying stress may make you anxious about making a big purchase, even though the stress came from another source.

The same thing can happen with disgust.  Encountering a disgusting situation can influence other judgments about morality.  A fascinating set of experiments by Lotte Van Dillen, Reine van der Wal, and Kees van den Bos in the September, 2012 issue of Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin explored individual differences in this tendency to misattribute disgust in moral judgments.

They pointed out that people differ in their level of attentional control.  Consider the classic Stroop task.  In the Stroop task, color words are written in fonts of different colors.  People are asked to name the color of the font.  The task is easy when the font is the same color named by the word.  That is, people are fast to say that the font is red when the word is RED.  The task is hard when the font is a different color than the one named by the word.  So, people are slow to say that the font is red when the word is GREEN.

There are individual differences in how hard people find this task.  Some people find it very hard to name the font when the word is different, while others are able to guide their attention toward the font color more exclusively and so they find the task easier.

In one experiment, the researchers told participants that they were going to do a series of unrelated experiments.  First, they gave participants a Stroop task and measured the difference in speed for naming the font when the word named the same color or a different color.  That speed was a measure of the ability to control attention.  Next, participants read sentences that either described mildly disgusting events (“Ann bit into an apple and found a worm inside.”) or neutral events (“Ann bit into an apple that she brought for lunch.”). 

Finally, participants read a story about someone who found a wallet and decided to keep it.  They were asked to rate how strongly they disapproved of that action.  Participants who read neutral sentences tended to rate this action as moderately severe.  Participants who found it easy to identify the font color when the word named a different color (so they had a high degree of attentional control) also rated the action as moderately severe.  However, those who found it hard to identify the font color when the word named a different color (so they had a low degree of attentional control) rated that they strongly disapproved of the action.

Another study in this series manipulated the instructions given to people viewing disgusting events.  Some were told to feel as strongly as possible, while others were told to distract themselves while viewing the disgusting events. Later in the session, participants read a story about someone who leaves his/her family after having an affair and were asked how strongly they disapproved. 

In this case, people who were asked to feel when viewing the disgusting events rated themselves as more disapproving of the person in the story than people who were asked to distract themselves.

Putting all of this together, then, you can use your sense of disgust to help you determine whether an action is morally right.  You are prone to use any feeling of disgust you are experiencing to make this judgment.  However, the higher the level of your ability to focus attention, the more likely you are to restrict your use of disgust to those feelings that are actually related to the event you are judging.

Those pesky unconscious goals.

Have you ever had one of those days where you just find it hard to get anything done?  You sit at your desk trying to work, and your mind keeps wandering off.  Eventually, you may just give up and do something else for a while.

There are many reasons why this might happen, of course.  If you don’t get enough sleep, it can be hard to concentrate.  Stress can make it hard to keep yourself focused.  Some new research by Hans Marien, Ruud Custers, Ran Hassin, and Henk Aarts published in the September, 2012 issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology suggests that another reason why you might be having trouble getting work done is that you might have another goal that you subconsciously want to achieve.

Psychologists have known for a long time that it is possible to get you interested in pursuing a goal without being aware that the goal is influencing you.  For example, research on goal contagion (originally done by some of the authors of this paper) shows that people will unconsciously adopt the goals that people around them are pursuing.  In experiments, people can be nudged to pursue a goal by flashing words at them that are related to a goal they have.

In these studies, the researchers were interested in whether activating a goal without conscious awareness would interfere with tasks that people were consciously trying to pursue. 

In one experiment, participants were shown a string of letters (like aaaaAaaaa) and were asked to identify whether any of the letters were capital letters.  For a brief period while participants looked at the letters, they were replaced with words.  The flash was too brief for people to be consciously aware of what they saw.  For some participants, the words were related to the goal of socializing.  For the rest of the participants, the words were not related to any particular goal. 

After this priming task, participants did an interesting memory test.  They were shown a string of four different letters (say XRBQ) and then a probe letter (T) and were asked whether the probe letter was in the string of letters they had just seen.  (In this example, the answer would be ‘no.’)  People did a long sequence of these trials.

Now, consider the following sequence of trials.

XRBQ           Target—B  (Answer: Yes)

VRMS           Target—T  (Answer:  No)

TBLX            Target—R  (Answer:  No)

For this last trial, the letter R that is part of the probe is not part of the most recent string of letters, so the answer is no.  Notice, though, that the letter R was part of the previous two strings.  So, in order to answer this question correctly, the participant has make sure that they base their response just on the last set of letters they saw.  That is a somewhat difficult task to do.

The researchers measured the amount of time it took people to make responses like this (relative to easier trials where the target letter had not been seen for a while).  People who were primed to pursue the goal of being social took much longer to respond to these difficult memory trials than people who were not primed to pursue a goal.  This finding suggests that when you are unconsciously focused on achieving a goal, it interferes with your ability to do difficult tasks.

Several other studies in this series clarified the results.  One study demonstrated that the effect of unconsciously priming a goal was similar to the effect of consciously asking people to think about a goal that they have.  Another study found that this effect was obtained, even when people were told that if they performed well on the memory test that they would be eligible for a large payment.  So, it was not the case that the unconscious goal was just making the memory task uninteresting.

There are many things in your world that can serve to activate goals.  In the modern world, for example, people are often drawn to check their email and text messages frequently.  These goals can be made stronger by the badges on email programs that alert you that new messages have arrived.  These unconsciously activated goals can sap your performance. 

So, what can you do?

Goals often require some trigger in the environment to be activated.  If you find that you get distracted at work often, try to minimize the sources of distraction in your work space.  Keep your email program closed except when you are checking your email.  Don’t open up social networking sites when you are trying to get work done.  Keep your smart phone off.  In this way, you can protect the main goals you are trying to achieve from the goals that may get activated unconsciously.

Becoming bi-cultural makes you more creative

Innovation provides a key path to business success.  In the 1970s, it may have seemed inconceivable that computers would some day become just another commodity.  Just 40 years later, most manufacturers of computers are competing to produce the fastest cheapest machines, and so they operate on small profit margins.

The exception to this trend comes from innovative companies like Apple.  Companies that bring out new and exciting projects capture people’s imaginations and ultimately people are willing to pay a premium for their new products. 

Because of the key role of innovation in generating new business, companies are on the lookout for people who are likely to bring a creative spirit to their work. A paper by Carmit Tadmor, Adam Galinsky, and William Maddux in the September, 2012 issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology explores how living abroad can influence people’s creativity.  This research expands on a previous paper involving some of these researchers. 

When people live abroad for an extended period of time, there are three possibilities for their relationship to their host culture.  One possibility is that they will retain their original cultural identity and keep themselves separate from their host culture.  A second possibility is that they will assimilate to the host culture and lose their original cultural identity.  A third possibility is that they will become bicultural, and will retain a strong tie both to their original culture and to the host culture.

The researchers suggest that when people become bicultural, it helps them to see many sides to an issue.  This integrative complexity allows them to be more creative.  After all, being creative often involves seeing things in more than one way.

They tested this prospect in a series of studies using people who had lived abroad.  In each study, the researchers measured whether people were separate from their host culture, assimilated to it, or bicultural.  They also assessed a variety of personality characteristics to ensure that the findings were based on the degree to which people became bicultural and not because of a basic personality variable that leads people to be more accepting of a new culture.  They also measured people’s tendency toward integrative complexity by having them write essays about a dilemma.  Essays displaying integrative complexity were ones that acknowledge both sides of the dilemma and talked about the relationship between the opposing sides.

In one simple study, participants were asked to list as many functions as possible for a brick.  Previous research suggests that creative people are more likely to find many uses for a brick than those who are not that creative.  Participants who were bicultural typically found more uses for a brick than either those who were separate or assimilated to the host culture.  Statistical analyses suggested that the best explanation for this difference was that the bicultural participants also displayed more integrative complexity in their essays.

Two other studies explored the workplace.  One study found that bicultural individuals were more likely than separated and assimilated individuals to start new companies based on new ideas and to generate new ideas that were successfully implemented in their companies.  A second study found that bicultural individuals were also more likely than separated and assimilated individuals to be promoted and to achieve high levels of status in their company.  In both cases, the degree of integrative complexity supported by being bicultural was the best statistical explanation for these findings.

Putting all of this together, the value of living abroad comes from putting in effort to understand the new culture while at the same time retaining an original cultural identity.  Truly understanding and identifying with two cultures allows people to see the same issue from multiple perspectives.  In real world settings, this ability to consider different sides of a situation allows people to generate new ideas and to innovate.  These findings suggest that companies would do well to find employees with experience in more than one culture.

How can we get kids interested in math and science?

High school is interesting, because it is the first time that students have the chance to start picking their own classes.  They have the change to determine the difficulty of the classes they want to take and they have some flexibility in the number of classes that they take in different subject areas.

This flexibility is particularly important when it comes to math and science classes.  It is generally agreed that the STEM disciplines (Science, Technology, Education, and Math) are important for the economy.  Students trained in these subjects go on to earn high salaries and to contribute to the growth of new businesses.

Yet, many students decide not to pursue difficult science and math classes in high school.  These early choices have a lasting influence, because when these students go to college, they continue to stay away from science and math.

What can be done to get students to take more science and math?

One possibility would be to try to convince students that science and math are fun.  Certainly, there are many people who find a lot of intrinsic enjoyment in solving math problems and in pursuing new knowledge through science.  And according to psychologist Jacquelynne Eccles, students will gravitate toward classes that they enjoy.

The problem is that it can be difficult to convince a student who has not enjoyed math and science classes in the past that math and science are actually fun.  And anyone who has tried to push a teenager to do something that he or she does not want to do knows how difficult that can be.

However, Eccles also suggests that students will take classes that they consider valuable, even if they do not think that the classes will be enjoyable at the time.  That is, students realize that there are some classes that are just no fun, but that they need to take because of the importance of those classes for their future.

If we helped students to see the value in math and science classes, would that lead them to take more math and science?

That question was addressed in a study by Judith Harackiewicz, Christopher Rozek, Chris Hulleman, and Janet Hyde published in the August, 2012 issue of Psychological Science.  They conducted their experiment as part of a longitudinal study of children in Wisconsin. 

Starting when these students were in the 10^th grade, parents were sent brochures that described the value of math and science classes.  The brochures also directed parents to websites that had more information on the value of math and science.  Parents were encouraged to talk to their children about math and science classes. 

The researchers then analyzed the high school transcripts of these students for their last two years of high school.  The classes taken by these students were compared to the classes taken by a control group whose parents did not receive any information about math and science.  The researchers also gathered information from parents and children about the number of conversations they had about math and science during high school.  Finally, the researchers had access to lots of demographic information about the families, because they were part of this long-term study.

So what happened?

One important predictor of the number of math and science classes that students took was their parents’ level of education.  The more education the parents had, the more math and science classes the students took.

On average, though, students whose parents received information about the value of math and science took one more semester of math and science in high school than those whose parents did not receive this information.  In particular, these students tended to take more elective and advanced classes.

Finally, the students whose parents received information about the value of math and science reported having more conversations about math and science classes with their parents than the students whose parents did not receive this information.

Putting this all together, then, high school students may not love math and science.  But, they can see the value in these classes.  When parents talk to their children about the importance of math and science, it really does have an impact on the classes they take.  And presumably, a student who is well-prepared in math and science in high school will continue that education in college.

Treating yourself with compassion helps you change for the better.

I read a book that compared the entrepreneurial communities in Silicon Valley and the Boston area.  In the early 1970s, both regions had a large number of high-tech companies.  By the late 1980s, though, there was a thriving community of startup companies in Silicon Valley, while the Boston area had a smaller number of large companies, many of which were struggling to survive.

One of the striking differences between the regions was their tolerance of failure.  In the Boston area, people in the high tech community were reluctant to go out on their own and start a new company, because if they failed, they felt it would count strongly against them when they looked for another job.  In contrast, in Silicon Valley, new companies failed all the time, and it was expected that an entrepreneur might fail several times before having some success.

At the surface, it is tempting to say that the cultures of Silicon Valley and Boston promoted a different level of fear of failure.  An interesting paper in the September, 2012 issue of Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin by Juliana Breines and Serena Chen suggests that the difference might actually lie in the self-compassion promoted by each region.

Self-compassion is the degree to which people treat themselves with warmth and understanding.  People are not hard on themselves are treating themselves with self-compassion.  At one level, this might feel similar to self-esteem, which is the degree to which people think of themselves positively.  But, you can treat yourself with compassion without necessarily feeling positively toward yourself.

In one study, the researchers manipulated people’s level of self-compassion by having them think about a personal weakness or shortcoming.  The self-compassion group wrote a paragraph about how they would talk to themselves about this weakness from a perspective of compassion and understanding.  A second group was given self-esteem instructions. They were asked to write about talking to themselves about how to validate their positive qualities.

After writing, participants were asked to rate the degree to which they thought that the weakness they described was a permanent quality of themselves or something that could be changed.  The self-compassion group rated the weakness as more changeable than the self-esteem group.

In another study in this series, participants took a difficult vocabulary test.  Before taking the test, the self-compassion group was told not to be too hard on themselves if they did poorly, while the control group was not.  The test was hard enough that on average, participants only got about 40% of the answers correct.  After taking the test, participants were told that they were going to take a second test later and were given time to study before taking the test.  The self-compassion group studied 30% longer than the control group. 

What does this mean?

There are two ways to interpret failure.  One is to see failure as a reflection of who you are.  If you fail, then you yourself are a failure.  A second possibility is that you see failure as a challenge to be overcome. 

Self-compassion helps people to view failure as a challenge.  The way to overcome failure is to try again and to work harder the next time.  The studies suggest that self-compassion is more likely than self-esteem to lead people to treat failures as challenges. 

This work also suggests that the culture of Silicon Valley promoted self-compassion.  Entrepreneurs were taught to think of failure as a natural part of the business process and not a reflection on their capabilities.  In the long-run, this attitude may have played an important role in making Silicon Valley the thriving hub of high-tech business that it is today.

Social drinking helps people get along

On Sunday nights, I play saxophone in the backing band for a blues jam that is held at a local club.  Most of the people who come are musicians or other folks from the neighborhood who wandered in for a drink.  As I look around the room, most people have a drink in front of them.  They are talking and laughing.  Everybody seems to be having a good time. 

Of course, there is a lot going on there.  The music adds to the atmosphere.  Many of the people who are there know each other, and so they are continuing conversations that have been going on for weeks (if not years). 

What role does alcohol play in this?

This question was addressed in a paper by Michael Sayette and 8 of his colleagues in paper in the August, 2012 issue of Psychological Science.  They did a fascinating and well-designed study of the influence of alcohol on social interactions. 

A total of 720 people participated in this research.  One set of participants drank about 3 drinks over a 30 minute period.  The drinks were a mixture of vodka and cranberry juice.  The second set drank 3 placebo drinks.  The placebo was a mixture of flat soda and cranberry juice.  Before participants entered the lab, though, the glasses were wiped with vodka to give them an alcohol taste.  The third set drank cranberry juice and was told that they were given no alcohol. The reasoning behind these three groups is that it helps to distinguish between the effects of alcohol and the effects about the belief that you are drinking. 

Participants came to the lab in groups of three.  The experimenters ensured that the group members had never met before.  Participants sat around a table to consumer their drinks.  They thought that the purpose of the study was to test the effects of alcohol on other tasks that they would do later, but the experimenters were really interested in the interactions among people as they drank and how that affected how much the group members got along with each other.

After finishing their drinks, the group members filled out evaluations of how much they liked the other members of their group.

What happened?

First, the manipulations of the drinks worked as expected.  Participants in the alcohol condition had the highest blood alcohol levels (about .06 by the end of the study).  The other two sets of participants had very low blood alcohol levels.  Second, both the alcohol and placebo participants rated themselves as feeling somewhat intoxicated, though the participants who drank alcohol rated themselves as much more intoxicated than those in the placebo group.  Consistent with that, the alcohol participants estimated that they drank about 7 ounces of alcohol, while the placebo participants estimated that they drank about 4.5 ounces of alcohol.

Overall, the people who drank alcohol rated that they got along better with their group members than either the people who drank the placebo or the non-alcoholic drinks.  The difference between those who drank alcohol and those who drank the placebo was particularly large. 

Why did this happen?

The researchers did a painstaking analysis of the facial expressions of the group members and the speech patterns.  The groups that drank alcohol smiled more and gave fewer signs of negative feeling than the other groups.  So, on a moment-by-moment basis, the groups that drank alcohol seemed to be having a better time than the other groups.

In addition, everyone in the groups that drank alcohol seemed to participate in the conversations to a greater degree than the people in the other groups.  In the groups that drank alcohol, there were more conversations in which each person took a turn speaking. 

Putting all of this together, then, a moderate amount of drinking gets people to participate in social interactions and to enjoy those social interactions.  In that way, alcohol helps people to get along well with others.  This seems to be an effect of the alcohol itself, and not just the belief that you are having alcoholic drinks with other people, because the results of the placebo condition were similar to those of the control condition.

Thinking style and belief in God

There is no doubt that the human mind is prepared to believe in the divine.  All over the world, cultures have created belief in one or many gods.  These beliefs are common in societies regardless of levels of technological advancement and scientific achievement.

Because of the prevalence of religious beliefs in cultures throughout the world, psychologists have explored why a belief in God is so common.  It is clear that there are many different factors that come together to support a belief in God.  For example, people tend to view even random events as having a cause, and God provides a good explanation for these seemingly random events.  The belief in God may also reduce people’s anxiety when faced with events that would be hard to explain otherwise.

An interesting paper by Amitai Shenhav, David Rand, and Joshua Greene in the August, 2012 issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General suggests that people’s thinking style may also influence the strength of people’s belief in God. 

Many different theories propose that there are two inter-related systems of thought.  One is a more intuitive system that helps people to make fast judgments.  The second is a more reflective system that allows people to reason through complex problems. 

A classic example of these systems in action involves a simple math problem:  You go to the store and buy a bat and a ball.  The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball.  Together they cost $1.10.  How much did the ball cost? 

Many people have an immediate intuition that the ball cost ten cents.  After thinking about this problem further, though, you may realize that the ball actually costs five cents with the bat costing one dollar more ($1.05).  Even after you realize the correct answer to the problem, though, you can still see the appeal of the incorrect answer that the ball costs ten cents.  The fact that the wrong answer is still appealing even after you know the correct answer is an indication that there are two distinct systems of reasoning that are giving you different answers to the question.

Shenhav, Rand, and Greene suggest that an intuitive style of reasoning may also increase people’s belief in God.  They explored this question in two ways.

In one study, they gave people a series of problems like the ball and bat question.  They measured how often people gave the intuitively appealing answer to the problem.  They also asked people to rate the strength of their belief in God.  The researchers also had participants’ scores on tests of intelligence.  In this study, measures of intelligence did not predict the strength of people’s belief in God.  Instead, people were more likely to believe in God the more that they gave the intuitive answers to the problem. 

Of course, this study is just correlational.  The authors also provided a more experimental test of the relationship between reasoning style and belief in God.  In this study, participants either wrote a brief essay about a time that they used their instinct to solve a problem or a time that they used their reasoning ability to solve a problem.  The essay either had to describe a situation in which the problem solving had a good outcome for them or a bad outcome.  After writing this essay, participants rated their degree of belief in God as well as whether they felt they had experiences in their life that convinced them that God exists. 

When people wrote an essay about using intuition to solve a problem, their rated belief in God was significantly higher when they wrote about a good outcome for themselves than when they wrote about a bad outcome.  When people wrote an essay about using reasoning to solve a problem, their belief in God was lower when they wrote about a good outcome than when they wrote about a bad outcome.  A similar pattern was observed for people’s agreement that they had experiences that convinced them of the existence of God.

Why would reasoning style influence the strength of people’s belief in God?

One reason why people believe in God is that this belief helps people to deal with situations that have no obvious explanation.  God provides an intuitively appealing explanation.  Often, when you think deeply about a situation, though, you can also generate other explanations for the same situation.  Those other explanations can undermine a belief in God.

Before closing this blog entry, I should say that in my view this research does not (and should not) tell anyone what to believe.  The field of cognitive science is interested in the psychological mechanisms that support people’s belief in God.  The more we understand about these factors, the better we can understand ourselves as humans.  But, these data will not provide definitive answers to any of the difficult theological questions that have been debated for millennia.