I want what is best for you, but what is most possible for me.

At the end of a long week, we often order takeout food from a local restaurant rather than cooking.  There are a lot of restaurants in Austin, and many of them serve really excellent food.  Yet, we tend to order from the same small list of places.  There are better restaurants, but by the time we get down to ordering, we are most interested in doing what is easiest.  The places we normally pick are within a few minutes’ drive of the house.

This example rests on two factors that influence a lot of our choices:  desirability and feasibility.  Desirability is how much we want a particular option.  Feasibility reflects how easy it is to get that option or how likely we are to succeed if we make a particular choice. 

An interesting paper by Jingyi Lu, Xiaofei Xie, and Jingzhe Xu in the February, 2013 issue of Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin explored how we trade off between these concerns.  They suggest that people pay more attention to feasibility information when making a choice for themselves than when making a choice for someone else.

In previous blog entries, I have talked about an observation that came from research by Yaacov Trope and Nira Liberman that we tend to think about things more specifically when they are psychologically nearer to us than when they are psychologically distant.  In the case of decisions, making a choice for yourself puts you psychologically closer to that choice than making a choice for someone else.  When you think specifically about a choice, you generally focus on the specific circumstance you are in.  So, you are concerned about whether the option is feasible. When you think generally abstractly about a choice, you focus on more general concerns like whether the option is going to be enjoyable.

To test this proposal, the researchers did several studies. In one experiment, college students could choose to purchase coupons for restaurants.  Some participants selected restaurants for themselves, while others were asked how much a typical student would be willing to pay for these coupons.  One restaurant was described as having excellent food and being very popular, but also being far away and often crowded so that there is a wait to get a table.  The other was described as having decent food, but being close by without long waits to get a table.  When choosing for themselves, people were willing to pay more for the nearby restaurant than for the restaurant with good food.  When choosing for a typical other person, people were willing to pay more for the restaurant with good food than for the restaurant that was close by.

A second study examined the kind of information people seek when making choices.  In this experiment, the materials were descriptions of classes.  People were asked to choose a course either for themselves or for a typical student.   Each option was described by 10 features.  Five of those were related to how desirable a class was likely to be (like how interesting it is or how much depth it covers).  Five were related to how easy it would be to complete the class successfully (like passing rate and difficulty of the assignments).  People had to select which five features they wanted to see.  Participants choosing for themselves were more likely to select information about how easy the class would be to complete than people who were choosing for a typical student.

A third set of studies had people make choices and then later asked them what they remembered about the options.  In this study, people making choices for someone else remembered more about how desirable the options were than those who were making choices for themselves. 

Putting all of this together, we treat choices differently depending on whether we are making a decision for ourselves or for someone else.  When we choose for ourselves, we are mentally nearer to the decision than when we are choosing for someone else.   As a result, when choosing for ourselves, we focus on information that is related to the ease of the options, but when choosing for someone else we focus on the desirability of the options.

If you find yourself opting for the easy choice, then, you can get yourself out of that rut by imagining what someone else would do in the same situation.  That can get you to think more about picking will be most enjoyable for you.

Oxytocin and conformity

Oxytocin has been the focus of a lot of research lately.  Oxytocin is a hormone that is released when people touch or kiss.  It is also released during orgasm, during childbirth, and during breastfeeding.  In the body, oxytocin creates muscle contractions and it also plays a role in the reflex that causes milk to be let down in nursing mothers.  Oxytocin also acts on the brain, and that has been the source of a lot of research.  Various popular accounts have called oxytocin a trust chemical or a love chemical.

The reality is more complex.  A nice demonstration of this complexity comes from a study in the December, 2012 issue of Psychological Science by Mirre Stallen, Carsten De Dreu, Shaul Shalvi, Ale Smidts, and Alan Sanfey.  These researchers focused on the influence of oxytocin on people’s preferences for new objects.

Groups of six participants were brought to the lab where they were administered oxytocin or a placebo using a nasal spray.  Participants were each seated in front of a computer, and they did about 40 minutes of filler tasks to allow the oxytocin to have its effect.  Then, participants were informed that the group was divided into two teams.  Each participant saw a series of novel icons and were asked to rate how much they liked them.  At the bottom of the screen, they could see ratings that they believed were given by other participants.  (In fact, the ratings were generated by the experimenters.)  They could see whether the ratings came from members of their team or members of the other team.

If oxytocin just increases overall trust, then we would expect that people who are given oxytocin would give preference ratings that are more similar to the other ratings of all of the participants.  However, the researchers suggested that oxytocin may have a more specific effect.  It might increase people’s tendency to conform to the ideals of other members of their own social group.  In that case, we would expect that people’s ratings would track those of other members of the same team.

To provide a critical test of this possibility, on a certain number of trials, the icons got divergent ratings from the participant’s team members and the other team.  Sometimes the team members gave the icon a high preference rating while the other team gave it low ratings and sometimes the opposite occurred. 

On these trials, participants who got the placebo were relatively uninfluenced by ratings of their team members.  However, the participants who got oxytocin gave significantly higher ratings when their team members also gave the icon a high rating than when they gave it a low rating. 

This result suggests that oxytocin increases people’s sense of closeness to their social group (even when that social group is arbitrarily created in the lab).  This closeness leads people to generate attitudes that conform to those of their group members.  However, it does not increase general trust of all people.  The attitudes of people from other groups do not influence their behavior.

Language changes distance and mood

We all know that thinking about happy memories can make you happy, while thinking about sad events from the past can make you sad.  This relationship is so well-established that it is often used as a manipulation of people’s mood in experiments.

Presumably, this happens, because thinking about a positive event brings you mentally closer to that happy time in your past, and being close to something happy makes you happy.  Likewise, thinking about negative events brings you mentally closer to sad events.

An interesting paper in the January, 2013 issue of Psychological Science by William Hart examined this question of mental closeness using language.

The complex grammar of language allows us to take all kinds of vantage points on events.  We are all familiar with basic components of grammar like tense.  We can talk about events that happened in the past as well as events that will happen in the future.  

Another (and less obvious) element of grammar is aspect.  Aspect allows us to describe an action as if it is extended in time or as an action that has a clear endpoint.  The imperfective aspect describes events that extend over time (I was shopping for a shirt).  The perfective aspect marks that the event has ended (I shopped for a shirt).  

Hart suggests that when people talk about an event as if it is extended in time (using the imperfective aspect), then they will feel mentally nearer to that event than if they describe it as completed (using the perfective aspect).  That mental nearness can influence mood.  So, when thinking about a positive past event, people should be happier when they describe it using the imperfective aspect (which brings them mentally closer to it) than when using the perfective aspect.  When thinking about a negative past event, people should be sadder when they describe it using the imperfective aspect (which brings them mentally nearer to it) than when using the perfective aspect.

In one study, people were asked to describe a past event that was either negative or neutral (neither positive or negative).  They were cued to talk about the event either in the imperfective aspect (What was happening?) or in the perfective aspect (What happened?). After describing the event, people also rated their mood.  

People who described a neutral event were not affected by the aspect they used to describe the event, meaning that particular grammatical forms do not influence mood on their own.  However, those who described a negative event were sadder when they used the imperfective aspect than when they used the perfective aspect.  That is, when the language made people feel close to the event, they were sadder than when it made them feel further away.

In a second study, people did either an easy or frustrating task.  The easy task involved solving simple anagrams (unscramble the letters LGRAE into LARGE).  The difficult task involved some difficult anagrams and some that were actually impossible.

After doing this task, people were asked to describe it.  As before, they were prompted to use either the imperfective or perfective aspect when describing what they did.  Finally, people rated how happy they were feeling.  

Those who did the easy task felt positively about it. When they described the task using the imperfective aspect (which made them feel close to the event), they rated themselves as happier than when they described it using the perfective aspect.  Those who did the hard task felt negatively about it.  When they described the task, using the imperfective aspect, they rated themselves as sadder than when they described it using the perfective aspect.

This research is fascinating, because it demonstrates how the language we use affects our sense of closeness to the past.  Simply by describing events as extended in time we can bring ourselves closer to the past.  This effect happens, even though most of us are not explicitly aware of these elements of our grammar. 

Believing the mind and body are the same promotes healthy behavior

Minds are strange things.  Our conscious experience of the world feels separate from the body that we inhabit.  That is why it is so easy to believe both in ghosts (minds with no physical body) and zombies (bodies with no conscious mind).  Discussions about the relationship between mind and body happen both in college dorms and in the philosophical literature. 

But does this discussion really matter?  That is, are there aspects of the way people live their life that are influenced by their beliefs about the relationship between mind and body?

This issue was explored in an interesting paper in the October, 2012 issue of Psychological Science by Matthias Forstmann, Pascal Burgmer, and Thomas Mussweiler.  They were interested in the relationship between people’s beliefs about mind and body and their health-related behaviors. 

The authors reasoned that people who believe that the mind and body are separate may be less prone to do healthy things to protect the body than people who believe that the mind and body are one and the same. 

In one set of studies, participants read one of two essays.  One essay promoted the idea that the mind and body are separate (a philosophical position called dualism).  The other essay promoted the idea that the mind and body are one (a position called physicalism).  After reading the essay, people rated their own belief about the relationship between mind and body by looking at a series of seven pairs of circles that overlapped to different degrees.  They were asked to select the degree of overlap between the circles that reflected their belief about the relationship between mind and body.  Finally, participants answered a series of questions about health-related behaviors (like going to the gym and washing hands after using the bathroom). 

As you might expect, people who read an essay promoting dualism rated the mind and body as more separate than those who read an essay promoting physicalism.  Participants who read about dualism also stated that they engage in fewer health-related behaviors than those who read about physicalism. 

Of course, studies about attitudes may not reflect people’s behavior in the world.  In another study, participants were approached before eating lunch at a cafeteria.  They read an essay about either dualism or physicalism and to do the start of a memory task.  People were asked to eat lunch and then to return to complete the memory task.  After they returned, participants were asked about what they ate and also rated how healthy their lunch had been.  Participants who read about dualism ate a less healthy meal than those who read about physicalism. 

Another study in this series had people select from among a set of cookbooks after reading about either dualism or physicalism.  Some cookbooks gave recipes for unhealthy food (barbecue or desserts) others gave recipes for healthy food (vegetarian or organic food).  People were more likely to select a cookbook with recipes for healthy food after reading about physicalism than after reading about dualism.

Putting this all together, then, your belief about the relationship between mind and body affects your behavior.  The more that you see the mind and body as a unit, the more respect you show your body. 

So, the next time you are faced with an opportunity to do something unhealthy, just remember that your body is deeply connected to your mind.

Creating attitude change by influencing values

A lot of political discussion in the US examines policies as well as the values related to those policies.  Discussions about increasing the minimum wage, for example, explore both the logistics of wage increases as well as the values that are signaled by these policies (such as reducing poverty or promoting the health of businesses). 

Suppose you were trying to influence people’s opinion about particular policies.  Would it be better to talk about the specific policy, or is it more effective to focus on the values related to that policy?

This question was addressed by Kevin Blankenship, Duane Wegener, and Renee Murray in a paper in the October, 2012 issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.  They argued that people have a lot of experience defending their views on particular behaviors or policies.  So, if you try to argue someone out of their belief on a policy, they will resist the argument and generate counterarguments.  Those counterarguments protect their belief about the policy.

People have less experience arguing about values, though.  When someone argues against a value, it does not trigger as many counterarguments.  The arguments that they hear about their values undermine their belief on those values, which can then influence their opinion about policies related to the value.

To test this possibility, the researchers focused on undermining students’ belief in fair pay laws.  Most college students are in favor of laws that mandate fair pay, and so it provides an opportunity to influence the students’ beliefs.  Participants were asked about their attitudes toward fair pay laws prior to the study.

Some students read an essay that they were told was written by a professor who aimed to attack fair pay laws, arguing that they reduce productivity and can bankrupt companies.  Other students read the identical essay, but were told that it was written by a professor who aimed to attack the idea of equality in society.  So, the arguments that people read were identical, only the target (a particular policy versus a value) was different.  After reading these essays, participants once again rated their support of fair pay laws.

Participant who read an essay attacking fair pay laws were relatively unaffected by what they read.  Their attitude toward these laws was roughly the same before and after reading the essay.  Those who read an essay attacking the idea of equality, however, were more strongly influenced.  Their attitude toward fair pay laws went down substantially after reading the essay.

Other studies in this series expanded on the results in two ways.  First, studies demonstrated that attacking a value undermined people’s confidence in that value, which ultimately led them to feel worse about policies related to that value.  Second, two studies found that attacking a value influenced beliefs about policies related to that value, but not policies related to other values.  So, attacking the value of equality made people feel worse about policies like affirmative action and civil rights, but not policies like letting the CIA read emails of private citizens (which is related to the value of freedom) or nuclear power as a source of energy (which is related to the value of the environment). 

This effect of arguing about values rather than policies reflects that people find it easier to construct arguments around policies than to construct arguments around values.  If policy makers start to focus their arguments on values, though, people will become more adept at making arguments about values.  So, while the strategy of arguing against values may be effective now, it is not clear whether it will continue to work in the long run.

Thinking about the actions of people and groups

We often make generalizations about the behavior of groups of people. We might say that college students are prone to binge drink or that older people tend to go to sleep early.  Presumably, if you believe that a group acts in a particular way, then you should assume that the members of that group are representative of the group as a whole.  If you believe that 40% of college students binge drink, then if you select a college student at random, you should assume that he or she has a 40% chance of being a binge drinker.

An interesting paper by Clayton Critcher and David Dunning in the January, 2013 issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology suggests that we actually think about specific members of groups differently than we think about the group as a whole.

In a series of studies, these researchers demonstrated that people assume specific group members act more morally and more based on their individual will than the group as a whole.

In one study, for example, participants were told that researchers would be taking a poll of college students on a campus about whether they had engaged in a variety of behaviors.   Some of these behaviors had a strong moral or selfless component (like giving up a seat on a bus for an old person), while others were immoral or selfish (like not doing one’s share on a group project).  Participants making group predictions were asked what percentage of college students would respond that they had engaged in the behavior.  People making individual predictions were asked to think about a randomly selected student and were asked how likely it was that person engaged in these behaviors. 

For the moral/selfless behaviors, participants thinking about individuals rated that the person would be more likely to perform the behavior than those thinking about the group as a whole.  For the immoral/selfish behaviors there was no difference between those rating the individuals and those rating the group.

The researchers replicated this finding several times.  In one study, they took out the moral dimension and focused on individual will.  Some of the behaviors were ones that an individual would have to choose to do (like travel a long distance to see a favorite band perform), while others reflected a person acting along with social forces (like voting for the same political candidate as one’s parents).  Again, participants rated the likelihood of the behavior either for the individual or the group.

In this case, participants rated individuals as more likely than the group to perform a behavior when the behavior required individual will, but not when it reflected other social forces.

It seems that when we reason about individuals, we focus on elements that make individuals unique like their ability to initiate their own actions.  When we reason about groups, we focus on more general characteristics that drive many different people’s behavior.

This finding has interesting implications for our judgments of people’s guilt.  For example, if you think that individual people should be more moral than groups, then you might hold an individual highly responsible for his or her actions, even if their social group as a whole tends to perform the same behavior. 

Is willpower energy or motivation?

Anyone who has tried to break a bad habit has experienced the trouble with willpower.  You want to stick to your diet, but you find yourself standing at a buffet filled with tempting desserts.  You want to avoid the desserts, but before you know it, there is a beautiful piece of cake on your plate.  And at least for that night, the diet is blown.

Psychologists have been quite interested in understanding why willpower works so poorly.  Essentially, your action system has two components:  a Go System and a Stop System.  The Go System is the one that supports action.  It helps you engage in lots of activities that allow you to achieve your goals.  It also supports the many habits that allow you to get through your day effectively without having to think about the many actions you take on a daily basis. 

The Stop System (what we call willpower) applies the brakes to actions that are begun by the Go System, but conflict with some other newer goal.  Dieting is a great example.  You have built up lots of eating habits over the years.  When you decide to go on a diet, you are adding a new goal that conflicts with many of those eating habits.  You need your Stop System to prevent you from eating foots that would get in the way of your diet.

Unfortunately, the Stop System is not as efficient as the Go System.  Lots of things can interfere with it.  When you are stressed, the Stop System does not work so well.  Drugs and alcohol can prevent the Stop System from working.  In addition, lots of research on ego depletion suggests that when you use the Stop System a lot, it begins to work less effectively.  So, a long day of having to control yourself at work can get in the way of your diet is likely to be in peril.

There is an ongoing debate in the research community about why these ego depletion effects happen.  An intriguing set of studies by Matthew Gailliot and Roy Baumeister in a 2007 issue of Personality and Social Psychology Review suggested that ego depletion may reflect actual energy levels within your body.  There were two kinds of data that led them to this conclusion.  First, they found that having to use the Stop System repeatedly led to decreases in blood glucose (sugar) levels (as measured with the kinds of glucometers that diabetics use regularly).  Second, they found that after making people use their Stop System, a high-glucose drink kicked the Stop System back into gear.

A number of other researchers questioned these findings, however.  A new set of studies by Daniel Molden, Chin Ming-Hui, Abigail Scholer, Brian Meier, Eric Noreen, Paul D’Agostino, and Valerie Martin in the October, 2012 issue of Psychological Science strongly suggests that failures of willpower reflect aspects of the motivational system, and not low levels of energy.

First, they repeated the physiological studies of blood glucose levels with more sensitive measuring equipment.  They taxed the Stop System using a task that has been used in previous studies.  They asked participants to look at a passage of text and cross out every letter e.  This is not hard to do.  Some participants then did the same task with a second passage.  Another group had to cross out every e that was not next to another vowel.  This latter task is harder and requires a lot of use of the Stop System.  They measured people’s blood glucose before and after doing this task.  Finally, they gave people a seven-letter word and asked them to generate as many smaller words as they could from the letters. 

Consistent with lots of previous work, people who just did the more difficult letter-crossing task spent less time generating words than people who did the easier task.  That is the typical ego depletion effect.  However, the measure of blood glucose levels showed no difference between the groups in their glucose levels.  That is, the more difficult self-control task did not consume more glucose than the easier task.

Next, the researchers explored the effect of drinking a high-sugar drink.  They pointed out that drinking a sugary drink could have many effects on a person.  Obviously, one is that it raises the level of glucose in the blood.  However, the taste of the glucose is pleasant, and that might make people happy.  Most importantly, the presence of glucose in the mouth might activate reward centers in the brain that could influence people’s motivation to perform a task. 

They explored this possibility in several other studies.  In one study, they had people do the same letter-crossing task I just described.  Then, people swished a sweet drink in their mouth and spit it out.  For some people, that sweet drink had an artificial sweetener in it (which does not activate reward centers in the brain), while for others the drink had glucose in it.  After that, people were asked to squeeze a hand grip for as long as they could.  Squeezing a hand grip has been used as a measure of persistence in other studies. 

The group that swished the drink with artificial sweetener showed the usual ego depletion effect.  Those who did the hard letter-crossing task held the grip for less time than those who did the easy letter-crossing task.  The group that swished the glucose drink in their mouth showed no ego-depletion effect.  They were able to hold the hand grip for about the same amount of time regardless of which letter-crossing task they did.  The researchers did a few other studies showing similar effects of glucose on more cognitive tasks. 

So, what does all this mean? 

Failures of willpower reflect the operation of the motivational system and not just a lack of energy.  How will this help you engage your Stop System?  If you find yourself in a difficult spot, try to find a way to give yourself a little reward.  When you stand in front of that buffet table filled with desserts, seek out a friend and have a fun conversation.  That rewarding conversation will help revive the Stop System and keep you on your diet.

This set of studies also shows how the scientific process works.  The initial studies had some intriguing results.  Whenever scientists find something new, others come along to explore the topic more fully.  Even though the initial explanation (that the Stop System requires energy) does not seem to be right, we have learned a lot about motivation from this initial set of studies.