Plucking Up Courage
How to Seem Telepathic: Enabling Mind Reading by Matching Construal
Tal Eyal & Nicholas Epley
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
People can have difficulty intuiting what others think about them at least partly because people evaluate themselves in more fine-grained detail than observers do. This mismatch in the level of detail at which people construe themselves versus others diminishes accuracy in social judgment. Being a more accurate mind reader requires thinking of oneself at a higher level of construal that matches the observer's construal (Experiments 1 and 2), and this strategy is more effective in this context than perspective taking (Experiments 3a and 3b). Accurately intuiting how others evaluate themselves requires the opposite strategy-thinking about others in a lower level of construal that matches the way people evaluate themselves (Experiment 4). Accurately reading other minds to know how one is evaluated by others-or how others evaluate themselves-requires focusing one's evaluative lens at the right level of detail.
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Eye position predicts what number you have in mind
Tobias Loetscher, Christopher Bockisch, Michael Nicholls & Peter Brugger
Current Biology, 23 March 2010, Pages R264-R265
Abstract:
Despite the apparent simplicity of picking numbers at random, it is virtually impossible to produce a sequence of truly random numbers. Although numbers seem to pop-up spontaneously in one's mind, their choice is invariably influenced by previously generated numbers. Here, we demonstrate how the eyes and their position give an insight into the nature of the systematic choices made by the brain's ‘random number generator'. By measuring a person's vertical and horizontal eye position, we were able to predict with reliable confidence the size of the next number - before it was spoken. Specifically, a leftward and downward change in eye position announced that the next number would be smaller than the last. Correspondingly, if the eyes changed position to the right and upward, it forecast that the next number would be larger. Apart from supporting the old wisdom that it is often the eyes that betray the mind, the findings highlight the intricate links between supposedly abstract thought processes, the body's actions and the world around us.
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Believing Is Seeing: Using Mindlessness (Mindfully) to Improve Visual Acuity
Ellen Langer, Maja Djikic, Michael Pirson, Arin Madenci & Rebecca Donohue
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
These experiments show that vision can be improved by manipulating mind-sets. In Study 1, participants were primed with the mind-set that pilots have excellent vision. Vision improved for participants who experientially became pilots (by flying a realistic flight simulator) compared with control participants (who performed the same task in an ostensibly broken flight simulator). Participants in an eye-exercise condition (primed with the mind-set that improvement occurs with practice) and a motivation condition (primed with the mind-set "try and you will succeed") demonstrated visual improvement relative to the control group. In Study 2, participants were primed with the mind-set that athletes have better vision than nonathletes. Controlling for arousal, doing jumping jacks resulted in greater visual acuity than skipping (perceived to be a less athletic activity than jumping jacks). Study 3 took advantage of the mind-set primed by the traditional eye chart: Because letters get progressively smaller on successive lines, people expect that they will be able to read the first few lines only. When participants viewed a reversed chart and a shifted chart, they were able to see letters they could not see before. Thus, mind-set manipulation can counteract physiological limits imposed on vision.
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The Presence of an Attractive Woman Elevates Testosterone and Physical Risk Taking in Young Men
Richard Ronay & William von Hippel
Social Psychological and Personality Science, January 2010, Pages 57-64
Abstract:
The authors report a field experiment with skateboarders that demonstrates that physical risk taking by young men increases in the presence of an attractive female. This increased risk taking leads to more successes but also more crash landings in front of a female observer. Mediational analyses suggest that this increase in risk taking is caused in part by elevated testosterone levels of men who performed in front of the attractive female. In addition, skateboarders' risk taking was predicted by their performance on a reversal-learning task, reversal-learning performance was disrupted by the presence of the attractive female, and the female's presence moderated the observed relationship between risk taking and reversal learning. These results suggest that men use physical risk taking as a sexual display strategy, and they provide suggestive evidence regarding possible hormonal and neural mechanisms.
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Male physical risk taking in a virtual environment
Willem Frankenhuis, Ron Dotsch, Johan Karremans & Daniël Wigboldus
Journal of Evolutionary Psychology, March 2010, Pages 75-86
Abstract:
Research has shown that male risk taking is enhanced by the presence of observers. However, naturalistic observations and laboratory experiments have provided mixed evidence as to whether male physical risk taking is primarily directed at females, at other males, or both. We present a behavioral experiment in virtual reality in which males ( N = 72) crossed an ominous bridge over a steep valley - either in the presence of a male virtual observer, a female virtual observer, or alone. A male or female experimenter was present while the participants crossed the bridge. Our results show that males crossed the bridge faster in the presence of a female experimenter than in the presence of a male experimenter. Follow up tests revealed that the experimenter effect was driven by the condition in which the virtual observer was female. This finding is consistent with previous work suggesting that male physical risk taking is primarily directed at females.
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Proactive People Are Morning People
Christoph Randler
Journal of Applied Social Psychology, December 2009, Pages 2787-2797
Abstract:
Proactivity is the willingness and ability to take action to change a situation to one's advantage and has been studied in a wide range of contexts. The role of chronotype on proactivity has not been assessed. Individual differences in circadian rhythms have been widely acknowledged and are accepted as an interesting facet of human personality. Morning people were more proactive than evening types, and people with small differences in rise time between weekdays and free days were also more proactive persons. Sleep length (on weekdays and on free days) and total time spent in weekend oversleep did not show any relationship with proactivity. These results suggest that morning people are more proactive than are evening types.
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Social Power and the Advent of Action
Jon Maner, Michael Kaschak & John Jones
Social Cognition, February 2010, Pages 122-132
Abstract:
Power - the ability to influence the outcomes of other people - is a key variable that regulates a wide range of human social interactions. Although previous research has demonstrated that power leads people to become approach-oriented, most studies have focused on how this orientation manifests itself in conscious, higher-order aspects of social behavior. The current study presents evidence that priming the concept of power has a direct influence on low level processes within the motor system. Participants performed a task in which they responded to auditory cues by moving their hand either toward the immediate environment (approach) or away from the environment (avoidance). Priming the concept of power facilitated the initiation of approach responses and, to a lesser degree, interfered with initiation of avoidance responses. This study supplements theories of power and approach, and fits with recent work suggesting fundamental links between cognitive processes and motor behavior.
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Schizotypy and mental time travel
Hannah Winfield & Sunjeev Kamboj
Consciousness and Cognition, March 2010, Pages 321-327
Abstract:
Mental time travel is the capacity to imagine the autobiographical past and future. Schizotypy is a dimensional measure of psychosis-like traits found to be associated with creativity and imagination. Here, we examine the phenomenological qualities of mental time travel in highly schizotypal individuals. After recollecting past episodes (autobiographical memory) and imagining future events (episodic future thinking), those scoring highly on positive schizotypy reported a greater sense of ‘autonoetic awareness,' defined as a greater feeling of mental time travel and re-living/‘pre-living' imagined events. Furthermore, in contrast to other sensory domains, imagery of the past and future episodes contained more olfactory detail in these high scorers. The results are discussed in relation to previous reports of anomalous olfactory experiences in schizotypy and heightened vividness of olfactory imagery in post-traumatic stress disorder, for which schizotypy is a risk factor.
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Lane Beckes, Jeffry Simpson & Alyssa Erickson
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Integrating ideas from Mikulincer and Shaver's (2003) process model of attachment and Nelson and Panksepp's (1998) neurobiological theory of an integrated social emotion system, we predicted novel attachment-related learning effects. In two experiments, we tested for a unique form of conditioning based on the social regulation of emotion. Consistent with this theoretical integration, the results indicated that people develop more positive and less negative associations with faces of people who display genuine smiles if those faces have been implicitly paired with a distressing stimulus (e.g., a striking snake). These findings could have broad implications and should be of interest to researchers who study attachment, social and affective neuroscience, emotion, learning and memory, attitudes, and interpersonal relationships.
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Predicting Pilots' Risk-Taking Behavior Through an Implicit Association Test
Brett Molesworth & Betty Chang
Human Factors: The Journal of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, December 2009, Pages 845-857
Objective: The Implicit Association Test (IAT), in combination with a battery of additional psychometric tests, was employed to examine the accuracy with which it predicts pilots' risk-taking behavior.
Background: Risk management is an integral part of piloting. Many factors affect pilots' risk management, including individual differences. Therefore, employing a unique methodology from social cognition, the present study examined the influence of attitude, as measured implicitly through the IAT, personality, and flight experience variables on pilots' risk-taking behavior.
Method: In addition to a simulated flight on a computer-based flight simulator, 35 pilots completed a battery of psychometric tests.
Results: Among the 6 risk perception variables, 10 risk attitude variables, and 2 experience variables, only 2 variables were found to be significantly related with in-flight risk-taking behavior: everyday risk (risk perception) and the IAT effect (attitude). Of these, the IAT effect was the strongest predictor of flight behavior.
Conclusion: The results indicate that implicit attitudinal measures, such as the IAT, provide a more accurate forecast of pilot behavior than do the more traditional explicit attitudinal or personality measures.
Application: An implicit attitudinal measure can be proactively employed to identify pilots who are potentially more likely to engage in high-risk activities, hence permitting a more strategic approach to pilot training.
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Does Combat Exposure Make You a More Violent or Criminal Person? Evidence from the Vietnam Draft
Chris Rohlfs
Journal of Human Resources, March 2010, Pages 271-300
Abstract:
This study exploits the differential effects of the Vietnam War across birth cohorts to measure the effects of combat exposure on later violence and crime. Combat exposure and violent acts are measured using self-reports from the National Vietnam Veterans Readjustment Study. I find large positive effects on violence for blacks, suggestive evidence of positive effects on violence for whites and on arrests for certain offense types, and negative "incapacitation" effects on arrests during the men's years abroad. The estimates, while imprecise, suggest that the social cost of the violence and crimes caused by Vietnam-era combat exposure was roughly $65 billion.