Saturday, July 30, 2011

Moral righteousness in trying times











Tuesday, July 26, 2011

Categories, essentialism, race, and culture.






So, what happened?


The data for race were much more complex.








Friday, July 22, 2011

Seek and ye shall find







Tuesday, July 19, 2011

Unpredictability is in our nature.






What will you do in this game?









Friday, July 15, 2011

Take two Tylenol for heartache too

Last summer, I was playing badminton with my kids, and I tore a calf muscle.  It hurt.  A lot.  Language has lots of ways to express pain.  In the case of my calf, the pain was intense.  The pain shot through my entire leg.  And when the muscle would spasm, I would feel a burning pain.

It is interesting that people also use the language of pain to talk about social pain.  We talk about the pain of a breakup.  Musicians sing about their heart aching for someone they miss.  When people recall being teased as a child, they invariably talk about how much it hurt. 

Is this just a metaphor?

This question was examined in a clever paper by Nathan Dewall, Dianne Tice, Roy Baumeister, and their colleagues in a paper in the July, 2010 issue of Psychological Science.

They reasoned that if we really feel pain from social difficulties, then the strength of that pain might be relieved by taking a pain relieving drug that works on the way the brain processes pain.  One such drug is acetaminophen (the active ingredient in Tylenol). 

In one study, participants in an experimental group took two acetaminophen pills each day, while the control group took a placebo.  Each day, people rated themselves on a scale designed to measure hurt feelings.  At the start of the study, the two groups had similar levels of hurt feelings.  By the end of the study 3 weeks later, people rated themselves as having a lower level of social pain than people who took the placebo.  There was no placebo effect in this study at all, in fact.  People taking a placebo experienced about the same level of hurt feelings throughout the study.

A second study used functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to look at the brain’s response to pain.  Participants either took acetaminophen or a placebo for 3 weeks before the imaging study.  Then, while in the MRI scanner, people played a game in which they thought they were passing a virtual ball with a group of two other participants.  In one round of the game, the participant had the ball thrown to them frequently.  In another round, the participant was excluded, and the other two players (who were actually computer opponents) threw the ball only to each other. 

Functional Magnetic Resonanace Imaging gives a measure of the amount of blood flowing to different areas of the brain.  Because the brain needs a lot of glucose to act, regions of the brain that are very active when people do some task experience an increase in blood flow.  So, blood flow is a rough marker of the activity of the brain.

In this study, the authors looked at two regions of the brain that are involved in the perception of pain (the dorsal Anterior Cingulate Cortex and the Anterior Insula for those of you who like your brain areas…).  People who took a placebo showed higher levels of activity in these brain regions when being excluded from the game than when being included.  In contrast, the people who took acetaminophen actually showed about the same level of activity in the brain regions associated with pain in both when being excluded and included in the game, suggesting that they did not experience an increase in physical pain when being socially excluded.

These findings suggest that the words to the old song, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me” are not quite right.  We really do experience social pain as physical pain.

It is not surprising that the brain would use the mechanisms of pain for social exclusion and other social difficulties.  As humans, we are social creatures.  We rely on our social relationships to survive.  Pain is used as a signal of damage to our bodies, because that helps us to protect ourselves.  It should be no surprise that potential damage to our social relationships is also marked by pain.

Tuesday, July 12, 2011

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

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

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

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

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

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

Friday, July 8, 2011

Conspiracy theories are easier to maintain from a distance

I have always scratched my head over conspiracy theories.  It is hard enough to get a group of reasonably intelligent people organized to run their own fantasy football league.  It would require true organizational geniuses to have carried out truly big conspiracies like the alleged conspiracy to kill JFK without somebody finding out about it at some point.  But many of the characters who are supposed to be deeply involved in these conspiracy theories hardly seem like organizational geniuses.  Yet, conspiracy theories abound.

Some research by Marlone Henderson in the October, 2009 issue of Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin helps to explain why. 

He capitalizes on an observation I have talked about before in this blog that people think about things more abstractly when they are far away in space or time than when they are close in space or time.  In order for a group to be united to a common purpose, they all have to have the same goal.  If you think about a group close up, then you can start to think about all of the different people involved, and it is easy to realize that lots of the group members are going to have somewhat different motivations.  But if you think of the group from a distance, then these individual differences in motivation get fuzzy.  Instead, you tend to focus abstractly on the group’s mission. 

To test this prospect, Henderson asked participants to think about a group consisting of a variety of different types of people.  They had come together to work on a project.  Some of the participants in the study were told that the group was meeting in New York (where the study was conducted).  Other participants were told that the group was meeting in San Francisco.  The participants were asked to judge how united the group was toward their common project.  The group that was far away was judged consistently to be more united in their efforts than was the group that was meeting close by.  That is, people really did consider groups that are far away to be more coherent than groups that are close by.

And that is one psychological mechanism that can support conspiracy theories.  You would be hard-pressed to believe that you or your friends, or people you have met could carry out a diabolical plan without someone messing it up or letting a key piece of information slip out.  But at the same time, it seems easier to swallow that a shadowy group operating far away can somehow keep focused on a common goal and then vanish without a trace.