Wednesday, 25 November 2015

Are extraverts or introverts more cooperative? It depends on the situation

Our achievements as a species owe a debt to our willingness to cooperate. But we all vary in how we solve the social dilemma – whether in any given situation we choose to favour self-interest or cooperation. This issue has long fascinated researchers, who delight in testing people’s choices in hypothetical setups involving prisoners’ loyalty to each other or the sharing of community resources. But these setups have struggled to give us a clear picture of how personality tips people one way or another: for example, are extraverts more cooperative by instinct than introverts?

A new paper published in Philosophical Transactions B suggests that we need to use the right frame: the context surrounding a dilemma affects how it’s tackled by different personality types. Extraverts act more exploitatively in social dilemmas than introverts, the research shows, but only when they think they can get away with it.

The 177 undergraduate participants tackled a setup called the Public Goods Game, where they had to decide whether to hang onto their tokens or put them into a public pot, where they would swell in value before being shared between the game’s four players, collaborating over a computer network. If everyone invests, each player is better off, but such collaboration is not guaranteed so a token in the hand is still arguably worth more to a player than his or her share of the future public pot. Extra realism came from the fact that each player’s end-of-game tally of tokens was converted into real money once the study was over.

Kari Britt Schroeder and her colleagues found that over ten rounds of this game, extraverts were more likely to hold back tokens for themselves. But then the researchers shifted the rules so that now following each of the next ten rounds participants got to see how everyone else had invested during that round, and they also had the chance to assign other players negative tokens, which cost the giver one token but taxed the recipient three. In this punishment stage, extraverts were more generous than introverts, tending to put more of their tokens into the public pot.

The researchers expected to find these effects of personality on cooperation. Extraversion is known to make gaining rewards more appealing, creating a temptation to free-ride even though it may not be morally "right". But when the possibility of punishments kicks in, free-riding loses its appeal, and extraverts see more reward in banding together. Or perhaps the disincentive is the loss of social standing implied by being fined by others, as extraverts are particularly keen on positive attention. Regardless of the cause, the experiment shows that the larger context totally reconfigures the effect personality has on cooperation.

Clearly the same goes for real life. Most social dilemmas don’t take place in a vacuum; they require a context, often an institution armed with more or less power to discipline anti-social behaviour. You can’t be punished for selfish behaviour in the park, but you can be at work – unless, maybe, your father is the boss. So researching social dilemmas with more consideration of this institutional weight will hopefully be the key to a better understanding of who in a given context is likely to be more prone to selfish temptation ... and perhaps help us figure out a way forward through the social dilemmas that the 21st century poses to us.


Schroeder, K., Nettle, D., & McElreath, R. (2015). Interactions between personality and institutions in cooperative behaviour in humans Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 370 (1683) DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2015.0011

--further reading--
How can we increase altruism towards future generations?
How the threat of violence can make us nice to each other



Tuesday, 24 November 2015

Embrace your bad moods and they may not take such a toll on you

"Being upset is a warmer, close-up feeling, not a chilly distant feeling like laughing at people" from Margaret Atwood's The Heart Goes Last
Generally speaking, being in a bad mood isn't just no fun, it also isn't good for you – people who feel negative emotions like anger, anxiety and sadness a lot of the time tend to have poorer social lives and suffer worse physical health in the long run, suggesting that dark moods take a toll. But a new study published in Emotion shows how this isn't a uniform truth. Bad moods don't have an adverse effect on everyone to the same degree. The crucial difference seems to be how much people see that there can be value, meaning and even satisfaction in bad moods – those who appreciate this tend to suffer fewer ill effects from the supposedly darker sides of their psyche.

Gloria Luong and her colleagues interviewed 365 German participants (aged 14 to 88) about their attitudes to negative and positive emotions, and about their mental and physical health (physical health was measured subjectively by self-report and also objectively by a grip strength test). The researchers also monitored the participants' mood states over a three-week period using smart phones. Six times a day during nine days in a 3-week period, the participants were prompted by the phones to indicate how good or bad they were feeling at that time (the participants gave ratings of how much they were feeling various positive and negative mood states, such as their joy and enthusiasm and their anger and disappointment, among others, and the researchers took averages of these to calculate their overall amount of positive or negative mood).

Just as the researchers predicted, the links between people's frequency of bad moods and negative outcomes (in terms of mental and physical health) varied depending on the attitudes they held toward negative emotion. Those participants who had negative attitudes toward bad moods tended to pay a price: the more negative moods they experienced, the poorer their mental and physical health, both in the moment and longer term (for example, based on their number of health complaints). However, among the participants who had a more positive attitude toward bad moods, these links were mostly reduced, or in some cases even absent completely.

There are different ways to interpret these results: for example, perhaps not suffering from the ill effects of bad moods helps people not to have such a negative view of bad moods. But Luong and her team favour a different account. They think recognising the value and meaning of negative moods and emotions probably helps prevent those dark mood states from taking such an adverse toll, possibly by "dampening the magnitude and/or duration of the concomitant physiological arousal and psychological distress associated with negative affect [affect is another word for emotion]." Future research will need to test this and other explanations.

It's worth noting, there were some exceptions to the protective effect of valuing negative moods. For example, even among participants who held negative moods in a positive light, the more negative moods they felt, the lower their life satisfaction tended to be. The researchers speculate this may be because when making such a sweeping judgment about their lives, people use an internal gauge of their mood levels as one way to reach an answer, even if, on reflection, they recognise the value and meaning of those negative moods.

Another caveat is that this research was conducted exclusively in Germany. Past research has already revealed cultural differences that are relevant to this topic – for example, German people are less motivated to avoid negative emotions than Americans, and some cultures are actually fearful of too much happiness – so we need more research to see if the current findings apply in other cultural contexts.

These notes of caution aside, the research raises the empowering possibility that negative feelings needn't always take such a toll, not if we can learn to see the value and meaning they may have (for example, recognising that anger can sometimes be empowering, that sadness can be poignant and bring us closer to one another, and so on). If this effect can be replicated in future research, it may pave the way for mental health interventions based on this principle of seeing the positive side of bad moods.


Luong, G., Wrzus, C., Wagner, G., & Riediger, M. (2015). When Bad Moods May Not Be So Bad: Valuing Negative Affect Is Associated With Weakened Affect–Health Links. Emotion DOI: 10.1037/emo0000132

--further reading--
Other people may experience more misery than you realise
What's the difference between a happy life and a meaningful one?
How happiness campaigns could end up making us sadder
Why do we sometimes like getting sad together?
The unexpected benefits of anxiety



Monday, 23 November 2015

On some issues, liberals are more dogmatic than conservatives

In the liberal worldview, conservatives are notoriously narrow-minded – and for years we’ve had the science to prove it. Meta-analyses published in 2003 and 2010 of dozens of studies using different measures revealed a consensus on "the rigidity of the right" – that is, people who hold more right-wing views tend to be more close-minded. Case closed? Or should we be open to other perspectives, such as the one offered in a new article published recently in Political Psychology. Produced by a research team lead by Lucian Conway of the University of Montana, it shows how classic measures of close-mindedness may be bedevilled by topic bias. When the subject matter is switched out, it’s the left who’re locked-in.









--further reading--
Think less and become more conservative
Why conservatives are happier than liberals
Comparing Obama's and Romney's speech styles and the way their audiences react
Feeling like you're an expert can make you closed-minded



Saturday, 21 November 2015

Link feast


The Five-point Plan to Help Paris Survivors Recover From Attacks
New Scientist speaks to UCL psychologist Chris Brewin.


Bad Thoughts Can’t Make You Sick, That’s Just Magical Thinking


Championing Responsible Antibiotic Use

The Virtue of Contradicting Ourselves

Brain Scans Can Help Explain Why Self-Affirmation Works

Can You Think Yourself Into A Different Person?

The Observer Corps

Why Are Conspiracy Theories So Attractive? (audio)


Friday, 20 November 2015

In search of the optimum level of trust between human and machine

A computer screen at the NASA flight control room is used to
remotely pilot a Proteus aircraft during flight demonstrations of
(Photo by David McNew/Getty Images)
By guest blogger Craig Aaen-Stockdale














Thursday, 19 November 2015


Calm down, it's not that funny! 

The theory states that, fundamentally, we are most often amused when we are surprised by, and then resolve, an apparent incongruity: a word that didn't mean what we originally thought, say, or a person not being who we first expected and so on (also known as expectancy violation). It can be difficult to test this theory because in real life jokes and funny situations so many other factors come into play (such as cultural knowledge or people's reputations), layered atop this fundamental mechanism. To test the theory in its purest terms, Chris Westbury and his colleagues have explored the possibility that some nonsense words are inherently funnier than others at least in part because they are simply just less expected.


The first key finding was that there was a significant amount of consistency in the students' ratings – that is, some nonsense words were consistently rated as funny (such as blablesoc), while others were consistently rated as unfunny (such as exthe). This was true even after all the rude-sounding nonsense words were removed, an important step since the researchers didn't want implied meanings to contaminate the results. Among the rude-sounding words were whong, dongl, focky, and clunt, which consistently attracted the highest humour ratings before being removed.

Next, to specifically test the theory that humour is often based on resolved incongruities, the researchers created a new list of nonsense words and calculated the entropy of each – this essentially means quantifying how unlikely each word was; that is, how far removed it is from being a real word. The researchers predicted that the less entropy in a nonsense word (i.e. the less "wordy" it was), the funnier it would be, because it would more strongly challenge people's expectation for what counts as a real word. Among the lowest entropy words used in the study included subvick, quingel, and probble, while among the highest entropy words were tatinse, retsits and tessina (rude-sounding words were again removed).

Two experiments supported the researchers' predictions: when comparing the humorousness of pairs of nonsense words, 56 participants consistently gave higher funniness ratings to the lower entropy word, and also when simply rating the nonsense words for their humour value, lower entropy words tended to receive higher ratings. The researchers said these results are entirely in line with the expectation violation theory: "Nonwords [are sometimes] funny because they violate our expectations of what a word is," they said. As to why we find unexpected events, including nonsense words, funny, perhaps even chuckling a little out loud, Westbury and his team said their findings can be interpreted in line with a recent evolutionary account of humour:


The researchers added that as well as supporting the resolved incongruity theory of humour, their results also have some potential applied uses. For example, testing patients reactions to nonsense words could provided a very sensitive and subtle measure of their sense of humour, which can be impaired by brain damage or illness. "The effect may also have practical effects in product naming," they said. "If it can be shown that the computable funniness of a name is a relevant factor in consumer behaviour. We predict that consumers will strongly prefer (funny nonsense words) 'whook' or 'mamessa' to (unfunny nonsense words) 'turth' or 'suppect' for a new product name."



--further reading--
Why it's apt - psycho-acoustically speaking - that Darth Vader wasn't called Barth Vaber



Wednesday, 18 November 2015

What happens when you fall in love with someone who's aggressive?

Does experiencing aggression in a relationship make us more vigilant against it – or more forgiving? New research published recently in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology suggests that when we want to keep our partner badly enough, we redefine the levels of aggression that we believe it is justifiable to endure.

Aggression can manifest in obvious violations such as controlling behaviours or physical violence, but also includes more common behaviours – denigrating a partner, or threatening to leave them. Drawing the line with these isn’t guided by societal absolute, but depends on individual discretion. Could that discretion be influenced by exposure to aggression?

Ximena Arriaga and her colleagues investigated this through research with students currently in a relationship. The students reported their experience of aggression in their own relationships, then responded to a list of specific aggressive behaviours, revealing in each case whether or not they would tolerate such behaviours. Examples on the list included a partner who “refused to talk about an issue with you” or “belittled you in front of others.”

Three separate studies involving more than a thousand participants showed that participants were more tolerant of aggressive behaviours if their current partner had already committed an act of aggression toward them. This can be explained in terms of the need to feel consistent and avoid dissonance between our actions and our beliefs about what is appropriate: if you’ve stayed in spite of what they’ve done, you'll find it harder to see similar acts as a basis for leaving in the future.

A further longitudinal study (that surveyed participants repeatedly over several weeks) showed that initial levels of commitment to one’s current partner was also an important factor that was associated with people being more tolerant of later acts of aggression. At the start of the study, many participants had yet to experience aggression from their partner, but some had a different story to tell by the time of the final data collection eight or ten weeks later. Did these twenty individuals who had newly experienced aggression become more accepting of aggressive behaviours? Only some did: those who were strongly committed to their relationship. If you want it to succeed badly enough, you justify. And a further study showed this tendency to be very focused on making this relationship work: highly committed people were no more likely to tolerate (hypothetical) aggression when it was described as being directed towards a stranger, but became forgiving when they had to imagine it directed at them from their current partner.

These findings suggest that, at least in this sample, tolerance of aggressive partners is driven more by the present relationship than past history. Another intriguing detail from the longitudinal study was that it found that the participants’ stated tolerance to aggression at the start of the study was no predictor of who experienced aggression by its end, meaning that it gives no evidence of tolerant people gravitating to (or attracting) aggressors. And across the studies, aggression history prior to the current relationship wasn’t associated with current tolerance levels, once other factors were taken into account. Rather, the main driver seems to be the motivation to make the current relationship work, and seem workable, even if that means redrawing the lines that a loved one is not supposed to cross.



Arriaga, X., Capezza, N., & Daly, C. (2015). Personal Standards for Judging Aggression by a Relationship Partner: How Much Aggression Is Too Much? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology DOI: 10.1037/pspi0000035

--further reading--
Why do some men insult their partners?



Tuesday, 17 November 2015

Sports psychologists understand surprisingly little about "the yips"

Two-time Masters Champion Bernhard Langer
has battled the yips throughout his career. He told
the Telegraph
they are: "an involuntary and uncontrollable
movement of the muscles, resulting in a fast,
jerky, uncontrolled putting stroke. It is like a muscle
 spasm; you hold the putter this way or that way
 - it doesn't matter - and sometimes you can't take it back.
You freeze, you totally freeze - or you just jerk."
Image: Wikipedia
A golf champion prepares for the easiest of putts on the final green, only for his wrist to jerk suddenly, sending the ball wide of the mark. A darts player pulls back his arm for a winning throw, takes aim, but finds he can't let go. Incidences like this – in which highly skilled sports players find their fine motor control has gone awry – are incredibly common (some surveys find over 50 per cent of skilled golfers have experienced it). And yet a new review published in the International Review of Sports and Exercise Psychology makes it clear that psychologists really know surprisingly little about what causes "the yips" (also known as "dartitis" in darts) or how best to intervene to help.

Philip Clarke and his colleagues trawled the sports psychology literature for relevant English language articles published between 1989 and 2013. They identified 25 papers that involved study of the yips, which the authors define as "a psycho-neuromuscular impediment affecting the execution of fine motor skills during sporting performance." Together, these studies involved 876 sports people who experienced the yips and 1003 competitors without the condition. Most of the research is on golf players, but a minority of studies have involved other sports including running, cricket, tennis and shooting.


Regarding physiological research, most studies have used electromyography to record athletes' muscular activity and there's some evidence here that people who experience the yips have higher than normal muscle activity in some situations, and in turn that this extra activation can affect technique and performance. Neurological research, nearly all of it based on case studies, has failed to find evidence of dystonia (pathological muscle spasms) or other neurological illness in yips sufferers.

Crossing these research categories are other studies that have looked at interventions, including but not limited to, the use of drugs that are usually used in the treatment of Parkinson's Disease, which proved effective; a form of alternative therapy known as the "emotional freedom technique", which also supposedly helped; and acupuncture (also apparently helpful). But crucially, this intervention research has all been based on case studies (that is the stories of one or two people, rather than properly controlled trials) – in other words, this is the kind of evidence that would carry little weight were it used to support treatments for more serious medical conditions.







Monday, 16 November 2015

Being true to yourself may protect against the harmful effects of loneliness


Jennifer Bryan and her colleagues surveyed 537 undergrads (average age 22; age range 18 to 60), nearly three quarters of whom were female. The students filled out questionnaires about how lonely they felt; their mood; any unpleasant physical symptoms they'd experienced in the last month; how much alcohol they typically drank on a daily basis and whether they had a drink problem; and finally their authenticity.

To get a sense of what the researchers really mean by "authenticity" let's look in more detail at that last questionnaire. It consisted of 45-items in four categories: Awareness, which means how much someone is motivated to understand themselves (points are awarded for agreement with statements like "For better or worse I am aware of who I truly am"); Behaviour, which measures how much the person actually acts in accordance with their values and beliefs; Related Orientations, which is about how open and honest the person is in their relationships; and finally, Unbiased Processing, which speaks to how much someone can accurately evaluate themselves without being misled by what other people say or do. The researchers averaged across these subscales to give their participants an overall authenticity score.



Why might this be? Bryan and her colleagues posit a couple of explanations: First, perhaps highly authentic people don't overanalyse their lonely feelings – they don't see their loneliness as some kind of indictment of their personality, it's just the way things currently are. Second, authentic people are likely less inclined to try to get out of their lonely situation by hanging out with people they don't want to be with, or doing stuff they don't want to do. Yes, this might increase their isolation at first, but it probably helps prevent them from growing more bitter and resorting to counter-productive coping mechanisms like drinking too much.

Of course there's a lot of speculation here. We need a replication of the finding with a more robust longitudinal research methodology (that follows people's changing feelings and traits over time), and to test other demographics. What's exciting though, is that if the effect proves to be real, then it hints at a useful way to help lonely people – simply encourage them to be true to themselves. "Such an intervention would be uniquely beneficial," the researchers said, "as it would not require effort from others (who need to interact with the lonely individual)."



--further reading--
A preliminary psychology of "keeping it real"
Your personality can invite loneliness, and loneliness can shape your personality
Loneliness is a disease that changes the brain's structure and function
Lonely people's brains work differently



Saturday, 14 November 2015

Link feast


Be It Resolved That Humankind's Best Days Lie Ahead (video)
Steve Pinker and Matt Ridley argued in favour of the proposition at the latest Munk Debate in Toronto. Malcolm Gladwell and Alain de Botton argued against.

Can Psychology Help Solve Long-running Conflicts?
This BBC News article (and related radio show) explores new ideas that psychologists are testing which could offer a way of tackling seemingly intractable disputes.

Intelligence In The Flesh
Where we used to say ‘The body has a brain’ it now seems more accurate to say simply ‘The body is a brain’ writes Guy Claxton at The Psychologist.

Neuropolitics, Where Campaigns Try to Read Your Mind
The use of neuromarketing techniques to help political campaigns is on the rise in many parts of the world, reports Kevin Randall for the New York Times.

What's the Best Way To Stay Motivated? (video)
This video from The Atlantic highlights the work of Dan Ariely, as well as Daniel Pink and Teresa Amabile​, to explain how progress and meaning influence our motivation to work.

Implanting and Erasing Memories: Life-Changing, or Taking Science Too Far?
At her Gaines on Brains blog, Jordan Gaines Lewis discusses the ethical implications of research in rats that's shown it's possible to implant false memories by using light to activate small clusters of neurons.

David Halpern on Nudge Theory (video)
In this video excerpt from his recent talk at the RSA, the director of the UK's Behavioural Insights Team provides a primer on the principles behind the idea of nudging people's behaviour.

The Science of Human Hehavior is Reshaping the US Government
Dave Nussbaum at Quartz reports on the work of the White House’s one-year-old Social and Behavioral Sciences Team.

How Being Optimistic in Your Teens Comes Back to Haunt You in Your 30s
"Enjoy your youth, kids, because life is pretty much downhill from your 30th birthday. This is, essentially, the bummer of a finding from a big new study examining happiness across the lifespan," writes Melissa Dahl at New York's Science of Us.

Psychologists' Betting Market Hints at Most Reliable Research Findings
Markets beat opinion polls in predicting which studies will be replicated successfully, reports Erika Check Hayden at Nature.
