Labs worldwide report converging evidence that undermines the low-sugar theory of depleted willpower

One of the main findings in willpower research is that it's a limited resource. Use self-control up in one situation and you have less left over afterwards - an effect known as "ego-depletion". This discovery led to a search for the underlying physiological mechanism. In 2007, Roy Baumeister, a pioneer in the field, and his colleagues reported that the physiological correlate of ego-depletion is low glucose. Self-control leads the brain to metabolise more glucose, so the theory goes, and when glucose gets too low, we're left with less willpower.

The breakthrough 2007 study showed that ego-depleted participants had low blood glucose levels, but those who subsequently consumed a glucose drink were able to sustain their self-control on a second task. In the intervening years the finding has been replicated and the glucose-willpower link has come to be stated as fact.

"No glucose, no willpower," wrote Baumeister and his journalist co-author John Tierney in their best-selling popular psychology book Willpower: Rediscovering Our Greatest Strength (Allen Lane, 2012). The claim was also endorsed in a guide to willpower published by the American Psychological Association earlier this year. "Maintaining steady blood-glucose levels, such as by eating regular healthy meals and snacks, may help prevent the effects of willpower depletion," the report claims.

But now two studies have come along at once (following another published earlier in the year) that together cast doubt on the idea that depleted willpower is caused by a lack of glucose availability in the brain. In the first, Matthew Sanders and his colleagues in the US report what they call the "Gargle effect". They had dozens of students look through a stats book and cross out just the Es, a tiresome task designed to tax their self-control levels. Next, they completed the famous Stroop task - naming the ink colour of words while ignoring their meaning. Crucially, half the participants completed the Stroop challenge while gargling sugary lemonade, the others while gargling lemonade sweetened artificially with Splenda. The participants who gargled, but did not swallow, the sugary (i.e. glucose-containing) lemonade performed much better on the Stroop task.

The participants in the glucose condition didn't consume the glucose and even if they had, there was no time for it to be metabolised. So this effect can't be about restoring low glucose levels. Rather, Sanders' team think glucose binds to receptors in the mouth, which has the effect of activating brain regions involved in reward and self-control - the anterior cingulate cortex and striatum.

The other study that's just come out was conducted by Martin Hagger and Nikos Chatzisarantis based in Australia and the UK. Their approach was similar to Sanders' except that participants gargled and spat out a glucose or artificially sweetened solution prior to performing a second taxing task, rather than during. Also, this research involved a series of 5 experiments involving many different ways of testing people's self-control, including: resisting delicious cookies; reading boring text in an expressive style; unsolvable puzzles; and squeezing hand-grips. But the take-home finding was the same - participants who gargled, but did not swallow, a glucose drink performed better on a subsequent test of their willpower; participants who gargled an artificially sweetened drink did not. So again, willpower was restored without topping up glucose levels. Moreover, the benefit of gargling glucose was displayed only by participants who'd had their self-control taxed in an initial task. It made no difference to participants who were already in an untaxed state.

Hagger and Chatzisarantis agree with the interpretation of the Sanders' group, except they make a distinction. The effect of glucose binding to receptors in the mouth could either stimulate activity in brain regions like the anterior cingulate that tend to show fatigue after a taxing task. Or they say that glucose in the mouth could trigger reward-related activity that prompts participants to interpret a task as more rewarding, thus boosting their motivation. The explanations are complementary and need not be mutually exclusive.

The key point is the new results suggest depleted willpower is about motivation and the allocation of glucose resources, not about a lack of glucose. These findings don't prove that consuming glucose has no benefit for restoring willpower, but they suggest strongly that it's not the principle mechanism. It's notable that the new findings complement previous research in the sports science literature showing that gargling (without ingesting) glucose can boost cycling performance.

"While our findings are consistent with the predictions of the resource-depletion account, they also contribute to an increasing literature that glucose may not be a candidate physiological analog for self-control resources," write Hagger and Chatzisarantis. "Instead ego-depletion may be due to problems of self-control resource allocation rather than availability." An important next step is to conduct brain-imaging and related studies to observe the physiological effects of gargling glucose on the brain, and on motivational beliefs. There are also tantalising applications from the new research - for example, could the gargle effect (perhaps in the form of glucose-infused chewing gum) be used as a willpower aid for dieters and people trying to give up smoking?

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Hagger, M., and Chatzisarantis, N. (2012). The Sweet Taste of Success: The Presence of Glucose in the Oral Cavity Moderates the Depletion of Self-Control Resources. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin DOI: 10.1177/0146167212459912

Sanders, M., Shirk, S., Burgin, C., and Martin, L. (2012). The Gargle Effect: Rinsing the Mouth With Glucose Enhances Self-Control. Psychological Science DOI: 10.1177/0956797612450034

--Further reading--
From The Psychologist: Roy F. Baumeister outlines intriguing and important research into willpower and ego depletion.

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

You think your first name is rarer than other people do

You think you're so special, you probably think this post is about you. And maybe it is, if you too succumb to what US researcher John Kulig calls the "name uniqueness effect" - believing that your first name is more unusual than other people do.

Kulig asked 153 female students and 94 male students to rate how common their first name was on a scale from 0 to 100. The scale featured nine "anchor" names placed at the appropriate places as a guide, based on actual name frequencies obtained from the university's registrar.

For comparison, a control group of the same number of men and women each provided an estimate of the popularity of one of the names from the first group (women rated a female name, and men rated one of the male names).

Participants consistently rated their own first name as rarer than the estimates provided by participants in the control group (and as rarer than they really were, although this wasn't tested statistically). This was the case for names that were common and rare, according to university records, although slightly exaggerated for rare names. "People are motivated to be different from others," Kulig said. The phenomenon wasn't explained by the fact that some people spell their names in unusual ways.

A follow-up study was similar with 86 women and 57 men rating the frequency of their own first names, and a control group of men and women rating the names that belonged to that first group. As before, the participants estimated their names to be rarer than members of the control group did.

A clue as to the cause of the effect came from the fact that participants with (genuinely) rarer names tended to be happier with their names, consistent with Kulig's idea that we have a subconscious motivation to feel special. Also, of those who'd contemplated changing their names, the most popular reason was to obtain a rarer name. Finally, participants seemed completely unaware of "the name uniqueness effect". When participants were asked to estimate how rare other people would rate their (i.e. the participant's) name, they guessed that other people would come up with just the same rating as they had.

The new results complement a study from 2004, in which Danny Oppenheimer found that people underestimate the frequency of their own and famous people's last names. He put this down to a "discounting heuristic". Usually we overestimate the frequency of phenomena that we're familiar with (known as the availability heuristic), but Oppenheimer thinks we cancel out this bias when we're aware of a single, obvious cause of the familiarity, as we are with our own names or famous names. It's over-compensation by this process that he suggested leads us to an underestimation of the frequency of our last names.

The way we overestimate the prevalence of our names actually represents an anomaly when considered against findings showing that we tend to assume other people indulge in behaviours with a similar frequency as we do - known as "the false consensus effect." Kulig said more research is needed to find out if the "name uniqueness effect is itself a unique finding."

More generally, these new findings add to a growing literature on the psychology of our names. For example, past research has shown that we have a bias towards liking our own name and initials, and related to that, there's evidence for "nominative determinism", whereby our names influence our life opportunities and choices. A study published earlier this year, for example, claimed that people with unpopular names suffer life-long prejudice.

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Kulig, J. (2012). What's in a name? Our false uniqueness! British Journal of Social Psychology DOI: 10.1111/bjso.12001

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

People make more moral decisions when they think their heart is racing

Why did the proverbial Good Samaritan cross the road to help the injured stranger? Perhaps he listened to his heart. Not in the poetic sense, but literally. A new study by Jun Gu and his colleagues has highlighted the way cardiac feedback influences people's moral decisions. When students were fed false feedback, leading them to think their heart was racing, they were more likely to volunteer for a good cause and less likely to lie to gain more money.

Eighty-six undergrads arrived at a psychology lab and were asked if they could quickly test out some heart-recording equipment that was needed for a separate study. A wrist monitor was attached to a headset though which false normal (60 beats per minute) or fast (96 beats per minute) heartbeat sounds were played. While the students test-drove the equipment, they were asked to read a recruitment letter, seeking their time for another study into the negative consequences of homophobic discrimination. Forty per cent of students who heard their heart beating fast agreed to volunteer their time, as compared with 17 per cent of students who heard their heart beating at a normal speed.

A second study with 65 more students was similar, but this time as the students tested the heart-monitoring equipment, they played a quick money-sharing game. They simply had to decide whether to instruct their partner, located in another room, to pick option A (which was actually more lucrative for the participant him or herself) or option B (more lucrative for the partner). Participants who heard their heart beating fast were less likely to lie and tell their partner that he or she would be better off choosing option A (31 per cent of them did so, compared with 58 per cent of participants who heard their heart beat at normal speed). A handful of participants were suspicious about the false heart feedback so they were excluded from the analysis, though the general pattern of results was the same with their data included or omitted.

Gu and his colleagues think that a fast heart beat is interpreted by people as a sign they are stressed and that they should adhere to moral conventions as a way to escape that stress. The new finding is consistent with Antonio Damasio's influential Somatic Marker hypothesis, which is based on the idea that bodily feedback guides our decisions, often at a non-conscious level. For example, people playing a card game sweat more when picking from the wrong, costly pile, even before they've realised at a conscious level that it's the wrong choice. The new research also complements recent research showing how bodily perceptions can influence the moral conscience. In one study, participants were less likely to volunteer their time after being given the chance to wash their hands - as if the process of physical cleansing left them feeling less need to compensate for past transgressions.

Cardiac feedback doesn't affect everyone in the same way. In further experiments, Gu and his colleagues demonstrated that the moral decision-making of people who are more mindful (for example, they agreed with statements like: "I perceive my feelings and emotions without having to react to them") was unaffected by the false cardiac feedback. The researchers also found that telling participants that the financial game was a "decision-making" task led to immunity from the false heart feedback, relative to being told the game was an "intuitive task".

This last result is particularly intriguing since we usually assume that thinking more deliberatively helps rein in the wild horses of our emotions, allowing us to behave more morally. The finding of Gu's team suggests that in some circumstances at least, thinking more deliberately can undermine the influence of the heart, actually making it less likely that we'll make a more moral decision.

"The current research reveals that perceived physiological experiences play an important role in influencing moral behaviours," the researchers said. "Listening to your heart may indeed shape ethical behaviours."

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Gu J, Zhong CB, and Page-Gould E (2012). Listen to Your Heart: When False Somatic Feedback Shapes Moral Behavior. Journal of experimental psychology. General PMID: 22889162

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

How the presence of an uninformative photo makes a statement more believable

When we're making a snap judgement about a fact, the mere presence of an accompanying photograph makes us more likely to think it's true, even when the photo doesn't provide any evidence one way or the other. In the words of Eryn Newman and her colleagues, uninformative photographs "inflate truthiness".

Ninety-two students in New Zealand and a further 48 in Canada looked at dozens of "true or alive statements" about celebrities, some of whom they'd heard of and some they hadn't, such as "John Key is alive". As fast as they could, without compromising their accuracy, the students had to say whether each statement was true or not. Crucially, half the statements were accompanied by a photo of the relevant celebrity and half weren't. The take-home finding: the participants were more likely to say a statement was true if it was accompanied by a photo. This was the case for claims about celebrities being alive or dead, but the effect was stronger for unfamiliar celebrities.

Another study with 70 New Zealand undergrads was similar but this time uninformative photos accompanied obscure general knowledge facts. For example, "Macademia nuts are in the same evolutionary family as peaches" was presented alongside a photo of macadamia nuts that provided no clues as to the veracity of the statement. The same effect was found - the students were more likely to wager that a fact was true when it was accompanied by an uninformative photo.

Why do photos have this truthiness effect? One possibility is that it's something specifically to do with pictures. To check this, another, similar study was conducted but sometimes celebrity "dead or alive" statements were accompanied by simple verbal descriptions of the celebrities that weren't helpful for judging the dead-or-alive claim. These verbal descriptions also had a "truthiness" effect, which suggests the truthy effect of photos isn't unique to them, but must instead have to do with some kind of non-specific process that makes it easier for the mind to seek out confirmatory evidence for the claim that's being judged. Or, perhaps some feature of the verbal descriptions or photos is being taken as evidence for the attached claim. The researchers can't be sure: "We speculate that nonprobative photos and verbal information help people generate pseudo evidence," they said.

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Newman EJ, Garry M, Bernstein DM, Kantner J, and Lindsay DS (2012). Nonprobative photographs (or words) inflate truthiness. Psychonomic bulletin and review PMID: 22869334

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

If your plane gets lost you'd better hope there's an orienteer on board

If you're planning on flying any time soon, you may want to look away now. A new study reports that trainee air pilots, including those with considerable experience, fell prey to an elementary mistake in a basic navigation task. Were they to commit this error whilst flying, it would endanger the plane. Indeed, such a scenario has unfolded in real-life incidents.

The task that Andrew Gilbey and Stephen Hill presented to dozens of pilots (some of whom had 160 hours flight experience) required that they choose which of three geographical features to focus on (e.g. a picnic area, bush covered hills, or an unmade road) as a way of determining their location. They were to imagine that they were lost either on a motorbike, in a plane, or on a yacht and, with time short, they needed to use one of these three geographical features to check whether they really were where they thought they were (marked as a "best guess" circle on a map), or if they were in fact located elsewhere nearby.

Over 82 per cent of the time, the pilots chose to focus on one of the three available geographical features that was present both in the best-guess location and elsewhere nearby. In other words, they sought confirmatory evidence to support where they thought they were located. They almost entirely failed to focus on the one geographical feature that was not present in the best-guess location (but was located elsewhere). That is, by failing to seek disconfirmatory evidence, they fell victim to the confirmation bias and missed the best strategy in this situation.

"It appears that having extensive experience with map reading and flight navigation does not help in and of itself [to prevent confirmation bias in lost procedures]," the researchers said.

In other experiments, a group of psychology undergrads consistently made the same error as the pilots, even though they'd just had a lecture on the confirmation bias. A short presentation on confirmation bias also failed to improve the navigation performance of another group of trainee pilots (average flight experience 55 hours). Gilbey and Hill speculated that maybe the presentation failed because it was passive and didn't require the pilots to practice seeking disconfirmatory evidence.

Intriguingly, a group of 21 orienteers performed much better at the task, choosing the disconfirmatory evidence 67 per cent of the time. Gilbey and Hill said this result could help inform future training programmes for pilots - "Although confirmation bias has been the focus of a great deal of research, the current findings suggest that further applied research, particularly in the area of applied aviation, may further improve understanding of this pervasive phenomenon."

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A Gilbey, & S Hill (2012). Confirmation bias in general aviation lost procedures Applied Cognitive Psychology DOI: 10.1002/acp.2860

-Further reading- People don't follow their own directions when walking from A to B.

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Prepared to wait? New research challenges the idea that we favour small rewards now over bigger later

The old idea that we make decisions like rational agents has given way over the last few decades to a more realistic, psychologically informed picture that recognises the biases and mental short-cuts that sway our thinking. Supposedly one of these is hyperbolic discounting - our tendency to place disproportionate value on immediate rewards, whilst progressively undervaluing distant rewards the further in the future they stand. But not so fast, say Daniel Read at Warwick Business School and his colleagues with a new paper that fails to find any evidence for the phenomenon.

Studies of hyperbolic discounting have often involved participants choosing between a smaller sooner reward and a later larger reward at two time points. When both rewards are in the distant future, people will pick the larger reward, but when the smaller reward is imminent then it's the one that's favoured.

Read's team criticise these kinds of studies on several counts, including the fact that participants often know that the first decision is hypothetical (thus increasing the chance they'll give the socially desirable answer), and the fact that participants often get to interact between the two decision points, which can lead to social influences.

For the new research, Read and his colleagues tested 128 participants from the LSE and Leeds Business School, sending them four weekly emails each containing several choices. The first Tuesday, the participants indicated in an email whether they'd prefer £20 immediately or £21 in one week; £21 in one week or £22 in two weeks; £22 in three weeks or £23 in four weeks; £23 in five weeks or £24 in six weeks. The following Tuesday they made the same choices, but updated for the progress of time, beginning with £21 immediately or £22 in one week, and ditto for the next two Tuesdays. The participants were told that a random selection of them would receive one of their choices, with the reward coming at the appropriate time, thus lending some reality to the task.

If hyperbolic discounting is real, there should have been evidence of the participants showing a greater preference for smaller sooner rewards the more imminent they became. No such effect was found. The researchers also looked at the ratio of choice switches - when participants favoured one option at one time point, but changed their mind later on - in terms of whether they changed to being more patient or to being more impatient. Contrary to hyperbolic discounting, switches to greater patience (favouring larger rewards later) were just as common as the other way around.

A second study built on these findings with 201 US citizens first making a choice between $20 three weeks from today vs. $21 five weeks from today; and then making the choice again three weeks later, so that the smaller reward was imminent and the slightly larger reward was two weeks hence. Some of the participants were told they were making the choice for real (and they were - the researchers even took turns sleeping so that they could fire back vouchers in timely fashion); others were told there was a chance of their choices being acted on for real.

Once again, no evidence was found for hyperbolic discounting. Just as many participants switched to greater patience at the second choice. And the smaller sooner reward was actually chosen slightly less often at the second choice, when it was immediate.

Read's team recognise that there is widespread evidence for myopic decision making - just think of the times you've vowed that your future self will eat healthy food, but when the choice is imminent you go for short-term flavour over long-term health. But they think there's a big question mark over hyperbolic discounting per se as the explanation for these effects. More promising theories, Read and his colleagues believe, are "visceral arousal theory", in which we're motivated to prioritise our primary needs over longer term aims; and "temporal construal theory", in which we represent distant events more abstractly in terms of superordinate (lofty) goals, whilst seeing the short-term more concretely, in terms of our more basic needs.

If hyperbolic discounting is such a fundamental feature of human thinking, Read and his team conclude, then how come research on regret finds that most people rue, not their overindulgence, but their past failures to indulge?

How do these debates fit with your own experiences? Do you find that you favour immediate rewards, even if you could get a bigger reward by waiting?

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Read D, Frederick S, and Airoldi M (2012). Four days later in Cincinnati: Longitudinal tests of hyperbolic discounting. Acta Psychologica, 140 (2), 177-85 PMID: 22634266

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Self-licensing: when you indulge through reason, not lack of willpower

We usually think of over-indulgence in terms of a lack of willpower. I scoff the doughnut because I can't marshal the necessary self-control to resist it. A great deal of psychology research has pursued this particular line, demonstrating, for example, that willpower seems to be a finite resource. Expend it in one situation and you'll have less left over for another.

A new study by Jessie de Witt Huberts and her colleagues at Utrecht University takes a different perspective. They point out that we often over-indulge, not because we can't help it, but because we reason that it's okay to do so. After that half-hour run, we tell ourselves, we deserve the doughnut! de Witt Huberts' team call this self-licensing and they say it's surprisingly under-researched.

Previous studies have shown how self-licensing affects our choices. For example, after working harder, people are more likely to choose a cake over a fruit-salad. But before now, no-one's looked to see how self-licensing might affect actual indulgent consumption.

Before they got started, de Witt Huberts and her team had to confront a complication with researching this topic - the need to separate out the effects of low energy from self-licensing. If someone's been working hard, not only might this encourage them to think they deserve a naughty snack, their lack of energy might also deplete their willpower (indeed, studies have suggested that low sugar levels reduce willpower).

To get around this problem, de Witt Huberts and her colleagues needed a way to trick people into thinking they'd worked hard (inviting self licensing) without actually diminishing their willpower levels. They did this by having participants test-out what they were told was a new screening tool for dyslexia. It involved looking at 200 words on a computer screen, one at a time, and pressing the key on the keyboard that corresponded to the first letter of each word. Crucially, one group of participants did this for five minutes, and were then told they had to do it all over again for another five minutes to check the reliability of the screening tool. The other participants simply had a one-minute break between two 5-minute sessions.

In a pilot study with 106 women, the group who thought they'd had to test the screening tool twice, felt like they'd worked harder than the other group, who thought they'd done it just once (even though both groups had worked for the same length of time). Next, both groups completed the Stroop test, a classic measure of self control that requires people to read colour words (e.g. blue), whilst ignoring the ink colour they're written in. This test confirmed that both groups had the same levels of self control even though one group felt like they'd worked harder than the other.

When it came to the study proper, 39 women were split into two groups - one did the dyslexia screening tool in two phases, to make them feel like they'd worked harder, and the other group did it in one bash. Next, ostensibly as part of a separate consumer research study, all the women taste-tested some crisps, M&Ms, Wine gums and Chocolate chip cookies.

The take-home finding? Both groups said their willpower levels felt the same, but the women who thought they'd worked harder tended to eat more of the naughty food. In the ten minutes available, they consumed an average of 26 grammes of more snack-food, which equated to 130 more calories. As well as feeling like they'd worked harder, they also said they felt more hungry, but this wasn't correlated with the amount they ate. The researchers speculated that the feelings of hunger could have been a further form of self-licensing - "I've worked hard and I'm hungry".

This study is one of the first steps towards uncovering the part that self-licensing plays in giving in to temptation. It's limited in that the sample only included women and the self-licensing was implicit. The women who thought they'd worked harder were more indulgent, but we don't know anything about the way they reasoned with themselves, or if the effect was conscious at all. "Nevertheless," the researchers concluded, "although many questions about self-licensing require further investigation, the current studies demonstrate that sometimes people strategically choose to indulge and that gratification of our desires is not inevitably governed by our impulses."
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ESSIE C. DE WITT HUBERTS, CATHARINE EVERS, and DENISE T. D. DE RIDDER (2012). License to sin: Self-licensing as a mechanism underlying hedonic consumption. European Journal of Social Psychology DOI: 10.1002/ejsp.861

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Threaten a man's masculinity and he becomes a short-sighted risk taker

With Britain embroiled in yet another banking scandal, commentators are once again pointing their fingers at the macho culture of the City. "Put a bunch of confident, aggressive men in the same room and reward them for taking risks," Ian Leslie wrote, "and you create a pressure cooker, from which probity and prudence evaporate like steam."

Now a study has cast new light on the role that masculinity may have played in past and present financial crises. Jonathan Weaver and his colleagues at the University of South Florida report that threatening a man's sense of manhood makes him myopic and more prone to take risks, particularly in a public situation. The findings suggest that being surrounded by their sweaty, swaggering alpha-male peers may have provided just the kind of threatening environment to encourage bankers to become short-sighted risk-takers.  

For an initial study, the masculinity of 19 heterosexual male university students was threatened by having them product test a pink bottle of "Sweet Pea" fruit-scented hand lotion; 19 others acted as a comparison group and tested a power drill. Ostensibly as part of a separate study, all the men were then filmed playing a gambling game. They started with $5 and had five chances to bet between $0 and $1 on whether a die roll would turn up odds or evens, with the potential to win or lose the amount they gambled. Over the course of the first four bets, the men who'd had their masculinity challenged tended to bet larger amounts; they also bet the maximum possible amount more often.

A second study was similar but this time the masculinity of half of 73 more men was threatened by having them recall 10 examples of times they'd behaved like a "real man". Chuck Norris aside, because it's difficult for most men to think of 10 examples off the cuff, this challenge has an undermining effect on their sense of masculinity. By contrast, thinking of 2 examples (as the remainder of the participants did) is easy for most men, and has the opposite, manhood enhancing effect. Next, all the men made a series of choices between smaller financial rewards now or larger rewards later. Half of the men in both groups thought they'd have to justify their choices publicly. The take-home finding here was that men who'd had their masculinity challenged, and thought their decisions would be public, tended to make more short-term choices, forfeiting about three times the amount of money available, as compared with men in the other conditions. Presumably acting impetuously in front of a crowd helped the men feel more manly.  

Weaver and his colleagues acknowledged that the way they threatened the manhood of their participants was not a close simulation of the way that masculinity is threatened in a macho banking environment. However, they said that both their interventions had "the psychological consequence of reminding men that manhood is a precarious social status."

"Whether manhood threats were directly implicated in the recent financial crises that continue to plague the US [and UK] economy, the current findings are at least consistent with such an interpretation," they said. "Certainly, they are suggestive enough to warrant further investigation into this critically important question."

A weakness of the studies was the lack of a genuine control group, in which masculinity was neither threatened nor strengthened. As mentioned by the researchers, it would also be useful for further investigations to observe the effect of gender threats on women's risk-taking behaviour.

This new paper builds on several related findings that are pertinent to the role of a macho culture in the recent banking crises; for example: it's been shown that men, but not women, take higher-risk financial bets when surrounded by same-sex peers of similar status; men make more myopic decisions in competitive all-male situations; and male stock traders in London made higher gains on days that their testosterone levels were higher (probably because they took more risks).

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Jonathan R. Weaver, Joseph A. Vandello, & Jennifer K. Bosson (2012). Intrepid, Imprudent, or Impetuous?: The Effects of Gender Threats on Men's Financial Decisions. Psychology of Men &; Masculinity DOI: 10.1037/a0027087

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

We think more rationally in a foreign language

One of psychology's major contributions has been to document the myriad ways our thinking is sent haywire by a series of biases. Investigations into the ways and means to combat these biases have lagged behind, but that's starting to change. Now a team of researchers at the University of Chicago has reported that people are immune to two key biases when they think in their second, less familiar language.

The first half of the investigation involved well-established framing effects. Participants were told that 600,000 people were at risk from a deadly disease. They were then presented with the same decision framed differently. In one condition, they chose between a medicine (A) that would definitely save 200,000 lives versus another (B) that had a 33.3 per cent chance of saving 600,000 people and a 66.6 per cent chance of saving no one. In another condition, the participants chose between a medicine (A) that meant 400,000 people will die versus another (B) that had a 33.3 per cent chance that no one will die and 66.6 per cent that 600,000 will die.

The gamble in each condition is effectively the same, but numerous studies have shown that people are systematically influenced by the way the choice is framed. In the first condition, the gains of A are made salient, and people tend to prefer the certainty of that option. In the second condition, A's losses are made more salient and people prefer to take the risk of medicine B.

Boaz Keysar and his team showed that dozens of native English speakers showed the typical framing effect when they completed the task in English, but not when they completed the task in their second, classroom-learned language of Japanese. It was a similar story with native Korean speakers - they showed no framing effect when they completed the task in English. And it was the same again with native French speakers when they completed the task in their second language of English. A follow-up study added a third inferior option to the decision task and confirmed that participants weren't just choosing at random when taking part in their second language.

The second half of the investigation focused on loss aversion. We're typically affected emotionally twice as much by losses as we are affected positively by gains of equivalent size. So, presented with a series of bets on the toss of a coin, with the chance to win $1.50 or lose $1, people will tend to shy away from the bet even though the cold logic of probability theory suggests they'll win out in the long run. Keysar and his colleagues gave native English speakers $15 in cash to play 15 rounds of this game, with the chance to keep the balance of their wins and losses at the end. The key finding was that the players were far more willing to gamble when they played the game in their second language of Spanish.

The researchers aren't entirely sure why speaking in a less familiar tongue makes people more "rational", in the sense of not being affected by framing effects or loss aversion. But they think it may have to do with creating psychological distance, encouraging systematic rather than automatic thinking, and with reducing the emotional impact of decisions. This would certainly fit with past research that's shown the emotional impact of swear words, expressions of love and adverts is diminished when they're presented in a less familiar language.

The findings have important implications for international internet research - psychological measures could vary according to whether participants are answering in their mother tongue or in a second language learned later in life. More generally, the researchers said the findings could have ramifications for real life. "People who routinely make decisions in a foreign language rather than their native tongue might be less biased in their savings, investment, and retirement decisions, as a result of reduced myopic loss aversion," they concluded. "Over a long time horizon, this might very well be beneficial."
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Boaz Keysar,, Sayuri L. Hayakawa, and Sun Gyu An (2012). The Foreign-Language Effect, Thinking in a Foreign Tongue Reduces Decision Biases. Psychological Science DOI: 1177/0956797611432178

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

When are two heads better than one?

The Challenger disaster, the Bay of Pigs fiasco, the botched invasion of Iraq ... all these historical calamities have in common that they've been blamed on dud group decision making. Bang heads together, it seems, and you dull people's minds. And yet there's the almost-magic "Wisdom of Crowds" effect - average people's verdicts together and you'll arrive at a more accurate answer than any one person would have achieved on their own. How to solve this paradox? A new series of intriguing studies by Asher Koriat provides part of the answer, highlighting the roles played by people's confidence and the type of problem they're tackling.

Across five studies Koriat tasked dozens of participants with answering a mix of forced-choice questions - some were to do with visual attention (e.g. which of two displays of patterns includes an odd-one-out?); others were general knowledge (e.g. which of two European cities has the larger population?); and there were visual judgement questions (e.g. which of two squiggly lines is longer?). The participants were asked to say how how confident they were in each of their answers.

For each round of questions, Koriat paired up the participants "virtually". That is, the partners in a pair didn't have anything to do with each other. But for each pair, Koriat followed the same rule, always taking the answer from the partner who was more confident.

Over a series of questions, Koriat found that always taking the answer from the most confident partner in a pair led to superior performance for that series (69.88 per cent correct on average in one study) compared with always taking the answer from whichever individual had the most impressive overall performance (67.82 per cent correct). In other words, the more confident of two heads working together nearly always outperformed the most proficient individual working on their own. In the first study using visual patterns, this was true for 18 of the 19 dyads. In further analysis, taking the most confident answer from a virtual group of three led to even more impressive performance.

The strategy even worked for people working alone if they were given two chances, a week apart, to provide answers to a series of questions, as well as rating their confidence. Always taking the more confident of their answers led to superior performance overall and was more effective than simply averaging their two answers (see earlier Digest item: Unleash the crowd within).

But here's the all-important caveat. This strategy of taking the answer of the most confident partner only worked for questions for which most people, "the crowd", tend to get the answer right. When the questions were tricky and wrong-footed most people, then the rule was reversed. Take the example of "Which city has the larger population - Zurich or Bern?". Most people get this question wrong - they think it's Bern because that's the capital city, but the correct answer is Zurich. For questions like this, the most effective strategy is actually to always take the answer of the dyad partner who is least confident (doing so beats the average score of the individual with the overall best performance).

Reflecting on these new results, Ralph Hertwig at the University of Basel said there were two important, tantalising questions for future research - is it possible to categorise problems somehow into those that tend to wrong-foot the crowd, and those that don't?  Similarly, are there any cues that can be used to recognise in advance whether a problem is of the kind that the crowd gets right (in which case it's best to go with the most confident team member) or wrong (if so, go with the least confident member)?

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Koriat, A. (2012). When Are Two Heads Better than One and Why? Science, 336 (6079), 360-362 DOI: 10.1126/science.1216549

Further reading: The much maligned group brainstorm can aid the combining of ideas.
Three-person groups best for problem-solving.

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

People prefer the middle option

When objects are arranged in an array from left to right, the central item jumps up and down and calls out to you "Pick me, pick me!" Well, not literally, but in a new study psychologists have provided further evidence for what's called the "Centre Stage effect" - our preferential bias towards items located in the middle.

Paul Rodway and his colleagues showed 100 participants (65 women) a questionnaire consisting of 17 questions, wherein each question featured five different pictures of the same item or type of item (e.g. five scenic views or five border terriers). Each set of five pictures was arranged in a horizontal row and the task for participants, depending on the question, was either to pick their most preferred or least preferred item. When picking out their favourite, the participants showed a clear preference for the central items; by contrast, no position bias was found when selecting their least favoured items.

The size of the preferential bias for central items was statistically significant but relatively modest in percentage terms. Central items were selected approximately 23 per cent of the time compared with the 20 per cent you'd expect if choices were random. The selection rate for items in other locations averaged below 20 per cent.  

A second study was similar to the first, but this time each array of five items was arranged vertically - once again there was a bias for the central item. A final study used real objects - five pairs of identical white socks - pinned in a vertical array on a large piece of cardboard. Again, participants were asked to pick out their preferred option and again they showed a bias for the middle choice. Additionally, they showed a bias against picking the lower two options. The fact that the Centre Stage effect occurred for vertical arrays argues against explanations for the effect related to the brain's hemispheres biasing attention either to the left or right. Perhaps the cause has to do with cultural beliefs linking importance or prestige with being centrally located.

Rodway's team pondered the real-world implications of their findings. '"If item location influences preference during the millions of purchasing choices that occur every day, it will be exerting a substantial influence on consumer behaviour," they said. "Moreover, choices from a range of options are made in many other contexts (e.g. legal and occupational), and it remains to be investigated whether the central preference remains with other formats and whether it extends to other types of decision."

The new findings build on previous research showing that observers tended to overestimate the performance of quiz show contestants located in central positions, and tended to favour job candidates located centrally in a photograph.

Complicating matters, other research that's looked at items presented in a sequence or one at a time, has found that people show a bias towards items located in extreme positions in the sequence. For example, Wandi de Bruin in a 2005 study found that ice-skating competitors and Eurovision singers tended to receive higher scores if they performed later. On the other hand, if a choice array is perceived as a continuum - as in a questionnaire rating scale - there's evidence for a left-ward bias, perhaps caused by the dominance of the right hemisphere, which directs attention to the left-hand side of space.
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Rodway, P., Schepman, A., and Lambert, J. (2012). Preferring the One in the Middle: Further Evidence for the Centre-stage Effect. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 26 (2), 215-222 DOI: 10.1002/acp.1812

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Feeling hungry? Better let your subconscious make the decisions

For optimal decision making, some studies have suggested it's best not to think too hard, that it's advantageous to let your subconscious do the creative heavy lifting. However, other studies have failed to find that unconscious thought leads to superior decisions. To begin solving this contradiction, Maarten Bos and his team have investigated one factor that could make a difference to the effectiveness of unconscious thought - a person's sugar levels. Their rationale is that conscious thought may require high levels of sugar, whereas unconscious thought might be able to operate effectively on low energy.

One hundred and fifty-six students (35 men) abstained from food and drink (except water) for three hours prior to the study. On arrival half of them enjoyed a can of the sugary drink 7-up. The others had a sweet tasting, sugar-free drink. To allow the sugar to reach the brains of those who had 7-up, all the students then watched a nine-minute wildlife film.

Next the students were presented with details about either four cars or four jobs. The items differed on 12 key aspects, which made them either more or less appealing. Whether viewing cars or jobs, there was always one optimal choice that ticked 75 per cent of the boxes; two choices that ticked half the boxes; and one choice that ticked just 25 per cent of the choices.

Finally, half the participants in each drink group then spent four minutes thinking about the jobs or cars before rating the four options in terms of preference - this was the conscious thought condition. The other half of the participants watched a second wildlife film for the same duration of time (to prevent conscious thought about the cars or jobs) before rating the various options - this was the unconscious thought condition.

For the participants with low sugar, their ratings were more astute if they were in the unconscious thought condition, distracted by the second nature film. By contrast, the participants who'd had the benefit of the sugar hit showed more astute ratings if they were in the conscious thought condition and had had the chance to think deliberately for four minutes. "We found that when we have enough energy, conscious deliberation enables us to make good decisions," the researchers said. "The unconscious on the other hand seems to operate fine with low energy."

The study has some shortcomings as the researchers acknowledged. For example, the decision-making was artificial - the participants weren't really choosing a car or job; they were merely rating the various choices in a contrived task. Another thing is that it's far from certain that the participants who watched the second nature film weren't thinking about the cars or jobs at the same time. Nonetheless, the researchers concluded: "Our data show that when we are low on energy we can employ another decision strategy than thinking consciously: we can trust our unconscious."

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Bos, M., Dijksterhuis, A., and van Baaren, R. (2012). Food for Thought? Trust Your Unconscious When Energy Is Low. Journal of Neuroscience, Psychology, and Economics DOI: 10.1037/a0027388

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Already struggling to keep New Year resolutions? Here's the first detailed study of daily temptation and resistance

There it is, posing. A small, perfectly formed chocolate. The diminutive trouble-maker causes you angst. You adore chocolate, but you're battling to lose weight. Immediate longing clashes against a longer-term goal. Just how often are we torn in this way? And how often are we able to resist?

To find out, Wilhelm Hofmann and his colleagues equipped 205 participants (66 per cent female, average age 25; mostly students, but also the general public) in Würzburg, Germany with Blackberry smartphones. For seven days, the participants were beeped seven times a day and asked to report whether they were experiencing a desire now or in the preceding 30 minutes. The participants noted what their desire(s) was, how keenly it was felt, whether it caused internal conflict, whether they attempted to resist it, their success, as well as who they were with and where they were. Data was also collected on the participants' personalities.

"To our knowledge," the researchers said, "this study is the first one that has used experience sampling methods to map the course of desire and self-control in everyday life."

Here are some of the basic findings. The participants were experiencing a desire on about half the times they were beeped. Most often (28 per cent) this was hunger. Other common urges were related to: sleep (10 per cent), thirst (9 per cent), media use (8 per cent), social contact (7 per cent), sex (5 per cent), and coffee (3 per cent). About half of these desires were described as causing internal conflict, and an attempt was made to actively resist about 40 per cent of them. Desires that caused conflict were more likely to prompt an attempt at active self-constraint. Such resistance was often effective. In the absence of resistance, 70 per cent of desires were consummated; with resistance this fell to 17 per cent.

"Inner conflict is a frequent feature of daily life," the researchers said. "The findings suggest that self-regulation is needed many times in a typical day, because conflicts are frequent."

Strong desires and weak desires were just as likely to provoke an attempt at self-restaint, but as you'd expect, it was strong desires that were least likely to be constrained. However, even desires rated by participants as "irresistible" were often successfully controlled.

Broadly speaking, personality traits were related to participants' experience of desire and conflict, whereas environmental factors, such as the company of others, had a bearing on whether those desires were enacted and/or resisted.

For example, people who scored highly on a measure of trait self-control had just as many desires, but they were less likely to report experiencing internal conflict; their desires were generally weaker; and they attempted to resist them less often. These findings are revealing. It's not that people with high self-control have saintly willpower, it seems. Rather, they seem to avoid putting themselves in situations in which they are exposed to problematic temptations. "The result is not a desire-free life," the researchers said. "Au contraire, the result appears to be that they mainly have desires that they can satisfy."

Other relevant personality factors included perfectionism (associated with strong desires, high conflict and frequent resistance) and narcissism, which was associated with less conflict - these people felt they were entitled to their desires.

As for environmental factors: being highly inebriated weakened resistance to desires; desires were felt more strongly; and they also led to more internal conflict. The presence of other people, meanwhile, increased people's ability to resist conflict-inducing desires - perhaps because of the fear of disapproval, or maybe other people's help was sought to fight temptation. Company also led to fewer desires being consummated, even ones that weren't resisted. But there was an exception to this - if other people were engaging in the desired behaviour, then this had the effect of weakening resistance and made it more likely that the desire would be fulfilled. Finally, when at work, desire provoked inner conflict more than it did in any other context.

"Our findings suggest that desire is a common, recurrent theme in the daily lives of modern citizens," Hofmann and his team concluded. " ... everyday life may be an ongoing drama in which inner factors set the stage for motivation and conflict, while external factors contribute to how well people manage to resist and enact their current wants and longings."

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Hofmann, W., Baumeister, R., Förster, G., and Vohs, K. (2011). Everyday temptations: An experience sampling study of desire, conflict, and self-control. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology DOI: 10.1037/a0026545

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.