Inception
Mind-Body Dissonance: Conflict Between the Senses Expands the Mind's Horizons
Li Huang & Adam Galinsky
Social Psychological and Personality Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
The ability of humans to display bodily expressions that contradict mental states is an important developmental adaptation. The authors propose that mind-body dissonance, which occurs when bodily displayed expressions contradict mentally experienced states, signals that the environment is unusual and that boundaries of cognitive categories should be expanded to embrace atypical exemplars. Four experiments found that mind-body dissonance increases a sense of incoherence and leads to category expansion. Recalling a happy memory while frowning or a sad event while smiling, listening to sad music while smiling or happy music while frowning, and assuming an expansive posture while being in a low-power role or a constricted posture while being in a high-power role all led to higher category inclusiveness compared to when the body and mind were coherent. The ability to display bodily expressions that contradict mental states may be an important foundation for the capacity of humans to embrace atypical ideas.
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Jennifer Mueller, Jack Goncalo & Dishan Kamdar
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Drawing on and extending prototype theories of creativity and leadership, we theorize that the expression of creative ideas may diminish judgments of leadership potential unless the charismatic leadership prototype is activated in the minds of social perceivers. Study 1 shows creative idea expression is negatively related to perceptions of leadership potential in a sample of employees working in jobs that required creative problem solving. Study 2 shows that participants randomly instructed to express creative solutions during an interaction are viewed as having lower leadership potential. A third scenario study replicated this finding showing that participants attributed less leadership potential to targets expressing creative ideas, except when the "charismatic" leader prototype was activated. In sum, we show that the negative association between expressing creative ideas and leadership potential is robust and underscores an important but previously unidentified bias against selecting effective leaders.
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Nobuyuki Hanaki, Alan Kirman & Matteo Marsili
Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper suggests that people can learn to behave in a way which makes them persistently unlucky or lucky. Learning from one's own experience, as it reinforces a few lucky or unlucky outcomes in early periods, will lead them to repeatedly make choices that lead to lucky or unlucky outcomes. In this situation, people have reasonably learned to behave as they do and their behavior is consistent with their experience. The lucky ones were not "born under a lucky star"; they learned to be lucky.
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Making Products Feel Special: When Metacognitive Difficulty Enhances Evaluation
Anastasiya Pocheptsova, Aparna Labroo & Ravi Dhar
Journal of Marketing Research, December 2010, Pages 1059-1069
Abstract:
More than 200 studies suggest that metacognitive difficulty reduces the liking of an object. In contrast to those findings, the authors demonstrate that the effects of metacognitive experiences on evaluation are sensitive to the consumption domain. In the domain of everyday goods, metacognitive difficulty reduces the attractiveness of a product by making it appear unfamiliar. However, in the context of special-occasion products, for which consumers value exclusivity, metacognitive difficulty increases the attractiveness of a product by making it appear unique or uncommon. The authors reconcile their findings with prior research by positing that the effect of metacognitive experiences on evaluation depends on the naive theory people associate with product consumption. Four studies demonstrate the proposed effect and test for the role of lay theories in the interpretation of metacognitive experiences. The authors conclude with a discussion of theoretical and marketing implications.
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Bruno Verschuere, Adriaan Spruyt, Ewout Meijer & Henry Otgaar
Consciousness and Cognition, forthcoming
Abstract:
Brain imaging studies suggest that truth telling constitutes the default of the human brain and that lying involves intentional suppression of the predominant truth response. By manipulating the truth proportion in the Sheffield lie test, we investigated whether the dominance of the truth response is malleable. Results showed that frequent truth telling made lying more difficult, and that frequent lying made lying easier. These results implicate that (1) the accuracy of lie detection tests may be improved by increasing the dominance of the truth response and that (2) habitual lying makes the lie response more dominant.
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Peter Fischer, Julia Fischer, Silke Weisweiler & Dieter Frey
British Journal of Social Psychology, December 2010, Pages 871-881
Abstract:
We investigated whether different modes of decision making (deliberate, intuitive, distracted) affect subsequent confirmatory processing of decision-consistent and inconsistent information. Participants showed higher levels of confirmatory information processing when they made a deliberate or an intuitive decision versus a decision under distraction (Studies 1 and 2). As soon as participants have a cognitive (i.e., deliberate cognitive analysis) or affective (i.e., intuitive and gut feeling) reason for their decision, the subjective confidence in the validity of their decision increases, which results in increased levels of confirmatory information processing (Study 2). In contrast, when participants are distracted during decision making, they are less certain about the validity of their decision and thus are subsequently more balanced in the processing of decision-relevant information.
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Listening to Your Heart: How Interoception Shapes Emotion Experience and Intuitive Decision Making
Barnaby Dunn et al.
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Theories proposing that how one thinks and feels is influenced by feedback from the body remain controversial. A central but untested prediction of many of these proposals is that how well individuals can perceive subtle bodily changes (interoception) determines the strength of the relationship between bodily reactions and cognitive-affective processing. In Study 1, we demonstrated that the more accurately participants could track their heartbeat, the stronger the observed link between their heart rate reactions and their subjective arousal (but not valence) ratings of emotional images. In Study 2, we found that increasing interoception ability either helped or hindered adaptive intuitive decision making, depending on whether the anticipatory bodily signals generated favored advantageous or disadvantageous choices. These findings identify both the generation and the perception of bodily responses as pivotal sources of variability in emotion experience and intuition, and offer strong supporting evidence for bodily feedback theories, suggesting that cognitive-affective processing does in significant part relate to "following the heart."
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Warning readers to avoid irrelevant information: When being vague might be valuable
Annie Peshkam, Michael Mensink, Adam Putnam & David Rapp
Contemporary Educational Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Students are often provided with instructions that are intended to influence their attention to particular sections or elements of their reading materials. To date, the bulk of the work on such prereading instructions has focused on drawing reader attention to relevant text information. In the current project, we examined whether instructions might also be useful in helping readers ignore irrelevant (albeit inherently interesting) information in text. In two experiments, prereading instructions asked readers to (a) focus on specific relevant text segments, (b) ignore specific irrelevant text segments, (c) maintain an awareness that the text contained irrelevant segments without specifically identifying them, or (d) read without warnings. Participants generally exhibited longer reading times and enhanced recall for irrelevant segments compared to base content, except in cases for which general instructions warned about but did not specifically identify those irrelevant elements. The implications of these findings for research on seductive details and text processing, as well practical applications for the design of reading instruction, are discussed.
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Causality orientations moderate the undermining effect of rewards on intrinsic motivation
Martin Hagger & Nikos Chatzisarantisb
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
The present study tested the hypothesis that individual differences in autonomy or control causality orientation would moderate the undermining effect of rewards on intrinsic motivation. Equal numbers of autonomy- and control-orientated participants provided solutions to an interesting puzzle under reward or no reward conditions. Participants were then required to provide further solutions to the puzzle in a free-choice period. Time spent solving the puzzle during the free-choice period constituted the dependent measure of intrinsic motivation. Results revealed a significant interaction effect of causality orientations and reward condition on intrinsic motivation. Control-oriented participants' assigned to the reward condition exhibited significantly lower levels of intrinsic motivation compared to those assigned to the no reward condition. In contrast, there was no significant difference in intrinsic motivation levels across the reward conditions for autonomy-oriented individuals. Findings indicate that an autonomy-oriented causality orientation offered a degree of 'protection' from the undermining effect of rewards on intrinsic motivation. This is in keeping with self-determination theory in terms of the interactive effects of environmental events and interpersonal factors on intrinsic motivation.
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Neural basis of the undermining effect of monetary reward on intrinsic motivation
Kou Murayama, Madoka Matsumoto, Keise Izuma & Kenji Matsumoto
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 7 December 2010, Pages 20911-20916
Abstract:
Contrary to the widespread belief that people are positively motivated by reward incentives, some studies have shown that performance-based extrinsic reward can actually undermine a person's intrinsic motivation to engage in a task. This "undermining effect" has timely practical implications, given the burgeoning of performance-based incentive systems in contemporary society. It also presents a theoretical challenge for economic and reinforcement learning theories, which tend to assume that monetary incentives monotonically increase motivation. Despite the practical and theoretical importance of this provocative phenomenon, however, little is known about its neural basis. Herein we induced the behavioral undermining effect using a newly developed task, and we tracked its neural correlates using functional MRI. Our results show that performance-based monetary reward indeed undermines intrinsic motivation, as assessed by the number of voluntary engagements in the task. We found that activity in the anterior striatum and the prefrontal areas decreased along with this behavioral undermining effect. These findings suggest that the corticobasal ganglia valuation system underlies the undermining effect through the integration of extrinsic reward value and intrinsic task value.
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Anger as Seeing Red: Perceptual Sources of Evidence
Adam Fetterman, Michael Robinson, Robert Gordon & Andrew Elliot
Social Psychological and Personality Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
A class of metaphors links the experience of anger to perceptions of redness. Whether such metaphors have significant implications for understanding perception is not known. In Experiment 1, anger (versus sadness) concepts were primed and it was found that priming anger concepts led individuals to be more likely to perceive the color red. In Experiment 2, anger states were directly manipulated, and it was found that evoking anger led individuals to be more likely to perceive red. Both experiments showed that the observed effects were independent of the actual color presented. These findings extend the New Look, perceptual, metaphoric, and social cognitive literatures. Most important, the results suggest that emotion representation processes of a metaphoric type can be extended to the perceptual realm.
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The Power of Proverbs: Dissonance Reduction through Common Sayings
Daniel Stalder
Current Research in Social Psychology, 2010
Abstract:
After reading a detailed account of a serious mistake in which a similar-age other went against personal values or a prior commitment, undergraduates rated their feelings of dissonance (regret, hypocrisy, and stupidity) had they been in the actor's place. Relative to a control condition, reading relevant proverbs such as "everybody makes mistakes" or "live and learn" significantly reduced feelings of dissonance in men but not women. For men but not women, perceived applicability of the proverbs also predicted trivialization of the mistake.
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Distracting the Mind Improves Performance: An ERP Study
Stefan Wierda, Hedderik van Rijn, Niels Taatgen & Sander Martens
PLoS ONE, November 2010, e15024
Background: When a second target (T2) is presented in close succession of a first target (T1), people often fail to identify T2, a phenomenon known as the attentional blink (AB). However, the AB can be reduced substantially when participants are distracted during the task, for instance by a concurrent task, without a cost for T1 performance. The goal of the current study was to investigate the electrophysiological correlates of this paradoxical effect.
Methodology/Principal Findings: Participants successively performed three tasks, while EEG was recorded. The first task (standard AB) consisted of identifying two target letters in a sequential stream of distractor digits. The second task (grey dots task) was similar to the first task with the addition of an irrelevant grey dot moving in the periphery, concurrent with the central stimulus stream. The third task (red dot task) was similar to the second task, except that detection of an occasional brief color change in the moving grey dot was required. AB magnitude in the latter task was significantly smaller, whereas behavioral performance in the standard and grey dots tasks did not differ. Using mixed effects models, electrophysiological activity was compared during trials in the grey dots and red dot tasks that differed in task instruction but not in perceptual input. In the red dot task, both target-related parietal brain activity associated with working memory updating (P3) as well as distractor-related occipital activity was significantly reduced.
Conclusions/Significance: The results support the idea that the AB might (at least partly) arise from an overinvestment of attentional resources or an overexertion of attentional control, which is reduced when a distracting secondary task is carried out. The present findings bring us a step closer in understanding why and how an AB occurs, and how these temporal restrictions in selective attention can be overcome.
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Imitation Improves Language Comprehension
Patti Adank, Peter Hagoort & Harold Bekkering
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Humans imitate each other during social interaction. This imitative behavior streamlines social interaction and aids in learning to replicate actions. However, the effect of imitation on action comprehension is unclear. This study investigated whether vocal imitation of an unfamiliar accent improved spoken-language comprehension. Following a pretraining accent comprehension test, participants were assigned to one of six groups. The baseline group received no training, but participants in the other five groups listened to accented sentences, listened to and repeated accented sentences in their own accent, listened to and transcribed accented sentences, listened to and imitated accented sentences, or listened to and imitated accented sentences without being able to hear their own vocalizations. Posttraining measures showed that accent comprehension was most improved for participants who imitated the speaker's accent. These results show that imitation may aid in streamlining interaction by improving spoken-language comprehension under adverse listening conditions.
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Surprise-induced blindness: A stimulus-driven attentional limit to conscious perception
Christopher Asplund et al.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, December 2010, Pages 1372-1381
Abstract:
The cost of attending to a visual event can be the failure to consciously detect other events. This processing limitation is well illustrated by the attentional blink paradigm, in which searching for and attending to a target presented in a rapid serial visual presentation stream of distractors can impair one's ability to detect a second target presented soon thereafter. The attentional blink critically depends on 'top-down' attentional settings, for it does not occur if participants are asked to ignore the first target. Here we show that 'bottom-up' attention can also lead to a profound but ephemeral deficit in conscious perception: Presentation of a novel, unexpected, and task-irrelevant stimulus virtually abolishes conscious detection of a target presented within half a second after the 'Surprise' stimulus, but only for its earliest occurrences (generally 1 to 2 presentations). This powerful but short-lived deficit contrasts with a milder but more enduring form of attentional capture that accompanies singleton presentations in rapid serial visual presentations. We conclude that the capture of stimulus-driven attention alone can limit explicit perception.
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Goals and everyday problem solving: Manipulating goal preferences in young and older adults
Christiane Hoppmann & Fredda Blanchard-Fields
Developmental Psychology, November 2010, Pages 1433-1443
Abstract:
In the present study, we examined the link between goal and problem-solving strategy preferences in 130 young and older adults using hypothetical family problem vignettes. At baseline, young adults preferred autonomy goals, whereas older adults preferred generative goals. Imagining an expanded future time perspective led older adults to show preferences for autonomy goals similar to those observed in young adults but did not eliminate age differences in generative goals. Autonomy goals were associated with more self-focused instrumental problem solving, whereas generative goals were related to more other-focused instrumental problem solving in the no-instruction and instruction conditions. Older adults were better at matching their strategies to their goals than young adults were. This suggests that older adults may become better at selecting their strategies in accordance with their goals. Our findings speak to a contextual approach to everyday problem solving by showing that goals are associated with the selection of problem-solving strategies.
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My way: How strategic preferences vary by negotiator role and regulatory focus
Kirstin Appelt & Tory Higgins
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, November 2010, Pages 1138-1142
Abstract:
Negotiators may use vigilant, loss-minimizing strategies or eager, gain-maximizing strategies. The present study provides evidence that preferences for these different strategies depend on negotiator role and personal orientation. In a price negotiation, buyers and prevention-focused individuals prefer vigilant strategies whereas sellers and promotion-focused individuals prefer eager strategies. When there is a match between the strategy and the role (role-strategy fit) or between the strategy and the individual's regulatory focus orientation (focus-strategy fit), the negotiator experiences more fit and plans to be more demanding in the negotiation. By manipulating strategy in a real, binding negotiation, we reveal its importance in determining negotiators' subjective experiences and planned demand. Our results show that shared strategic preferences between different motivational orientations - negotiator role and personal regulatory focus - can create self-regulatory compatibility.