Boost your memory for names by making a game of it

People often apologise for being useless at remembering names, as if it's some idiosyncratic quirk of theirs. In fact, with the exception of memory champs and their fancy mnemonics, plenty of research shows that most of the rest of us are especially hopeless at remembering people's names, as compared with other items of information, such as professions.

Names are arbitrary tags, and so we struggle to embed them in a web of meaningful connections. Research has even shown that people are poorer at remembering names than occupations when the same word is used (e.g. "Mr Carpenter" vs. "a carpenter"), presumably because treating the word as a name robs it of its wider semantic associations.

But that's not to say we can't do a better job of remembering names if we make more effort. And a new study suggests a way to untap this potential - turn the task of memorising names into a game.

Say you're off to a business lunch. You and a colleague could allocate points for any names you remember successfully afterwards. For example, you get 10 points for the boss, 5 points for her assistant, and a point a piece for the remainder of her team. The new research suggests that incentivising the memory challenge in this way will give you a far better chance of recalling the most important names. This could prove handy, helping you make a good impression in future meetings.

Sara Festini and her colleagues put this idea to the test in a study with 32 undergrads. Participants were presented with pictures of 28 male faces, each paired either with a name (e.g. "Mr Fisher") or an occupation ("fisher"). Each face-word pair had a designated point value - either 10 points or 1 point and participants had two chances to study the series of faces and their attached information. A 3-minute filler task came next before the memory test began. The participants were shown the faces and had to recall the relevant name or occupation.

Overall, participants were much better at recalling occupations than names (47 per cent correct vs. 27 per cent), consistent with past research. But crucially, participants did a superior job at remembering high value (10-point) names, than low value names (33 per cent vs. 21 per cent). It's as if the extra incentive prompted participants to go to greater lengths to process the names and encode them more deeply. In contrast, point values made no difference to success with recalling occupations, perhaps because they had already been embedded automatically into a web of semantic connections.

When the experiment was repeated with nonsense words used for names and occupations (e.g. "monid" for occupation and "Mr Monid" for a name), performance was equivalent for names and occupations because the occupations had now been stripped of their automatic meaningful connotations. This time, higher point values improved people's memory for both names and occupations, presumably because both were now able to benefit from the effort of extra processing and encoding.

For a third and final experiment, faces were again paired with standard names and occupations (carpenter / Mr Carpenter) but this time participants were required to rehearse the information for each face out loud, eight times. This was intended to interfere with any attempts at deeper processing, to see if that was the mechanism by which higher points led to better memory. And that's exactly what happened, with high-value names now recalled no more effectively than low-value names.

The researchers said their study revealed "a method to improve proper name learning", although they were cautious about how it might be applied in real life. "Future experiments are needed to determine if deliberately assigning high value to important names in everyday situations similarly boosts name recall as it did in a controlled lab setting."

But their main message remains upbeat: "Although names are difficult to remember," the researchers concluded, "actions can be taken to facilitate their recall."
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Festini, S., Hartley, A., Tauber, S., and Rhodes, M. (2012). Assigned value improves memory of proper names. Memory, 1-11 DOI: 10.1080/09658211.2012.747613

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

Self-esteem is catching

You've probably heard about the negative research showing how people take their work stress home, upsetting their partner's mood. Well, the good news is there's a positive equivalent. Angela Neff and her colleagues monitored the self-esteem of 102 working couples over five days (mostly German academics), getting them to answer questions about their work-related self-esteem when they got home, and then again at bed-time (e.g. they rated their agreement with statements like "I feel as smart as others"). They also completed a measure of their general self-esteem levels and their empathy.

The key finding was that a person's after-work self-esteem was positively related to their partner's self-esteem at bed-time that same day. In other words, when one person came home with a spring in their step, feeling confident about their ability at work, this seemed to infect their partner, so that by bed-time, the partner too was feeling more confident about their own work-related abilities. This transfer of positive self-esteem was more pronounced when the receiving partner tended to be of lower self-esteem more generally and was more empathic.

"This finding supports the notion that work and family do not necessarily have to be conflicting domains," the researchers said, "but can also be mutually enriching." That said, there's a negative interpretation of these results. If one person comes to depend on their partner's after-work positivity, this can backfire on those occasions that the partner has a bad day.

Neff and her colleagues said their finding was important because research shows that high work-related self-esteem tends to go hand in hand with better job performance and satisfaction. In this sense, the psychological effect of one person's success at work can filter its way through to their partner, in turn boosting his or her work performance the next day. From a practical perspective, this shows managers how important and far-reaching the effects can be of providing their employees with positive (self-esteem enhancing) feedback.

On a more sober note, the study has several limitations, as the authors realise. This includes the fact that they have no idea of the mechanism by which self-esteem passes from one person to the other. And the sample was narrow, made up of highly-educated people who nearly all came from one field of work. It remains to be seen if the same result will be found with more diverse participants.

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Neff, A., Sonnentag, S., Niessen, C., and Unger, D. (2012). What's mine is yours: The crossover of day-specific self-esteem Journal of Vocational Behavior, 81 (3), 385-394 DOI: 10.1016/j.jvb.2012.10.002

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

The psychology of online reviews

We used to rely on word-of-mouth or expert critics to help us choose our purchases, be that a planned holiday or a movie rental. Today that's all changed. A few mouse clicks and sites like Trip Advisor and Amazon offer us an abundance of reviews written by strangers. Yet, how they affect our judgements has been little researched.

Now Brent Coker has conducted a pair of studies and his main finding suggests that we remain impressed after reading early positive reviews, even if negative reviews come later. It's a finding that could help us be more objective when reading review pages, and it will surely also be of interest to marketeers and PR professionals hoping to give their products an advantage.

Seventy-six undergrads were told all positive facts about one fictional coffee brand and all negative facts about another, along the lines of: "the company has put green policies in place" and "the company has tried to cover up exploitation of its workers". Pictures illustrated the facts.

Next a research assistant told the participants that a mistake had been made - the fact sheets had been wrongly labelled, so that the positive statements actually applied to other coffee brand and vice versa. They were asked to imagine the sheets had been labelled correctly and then say how they felt about the two companies. Their responses were compared against the ratings of a control group for whom the reversal wasn't made.

The key finding here was that the impact of the early positive facts lingered, leading to enhanced ratings for the brand that was originally misdescribed in glowing terms. In contrast, the stain of negative facts wore off. The brand originally misdescribed in negative terms was given fair ratings by the participants, as if they were able to forget the mistaken negative associations.

A second study tested this principle with online reviews for an LA hotel. Two hundred and eighty undergrads read five Trip Advisor reviews for the hotel, either ordered so that they went from positive to negative, or from negative to positive. The participants showed more favour for the hotel when they read the more positive reviews first, again showing how the impact of early positive reviews appears to linger. This remained the case even when the reviews were labelled such that they appeared to have been written over the course of a year (so giving the impression that the hotel had deteriorated during that time).

"This research documented evidence of asymmetrical affective perseverance when consumers form attitudes towards brands," Coker concluded. "... Consumers may overshoot their judgments towards brands when positive information is replaced with negative information."

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Coker, B. (2012). Seeking the opinions of others online: Evidence of evaluation overshoot. Journal of Economic Psychology, 33 (6), 1033-1042 DOI: 10.1016/j.joep.2012.06.005

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

Benevolent sexism puts women off asking for help

Benevolent sexism describes insidious behaviours and beliefs that reinforce the idea that women are less capable than men and need their help. It's a controversial idea. It's not always clear if an act, such as a man opening a door for a woman, is simply polite or an example of benevolent sexism. Another issue is whether or not benevolent sexism is harmful. A new study led by Juliet Wakefield claims to show that exposure to benevolent sexism can put women off asking for help. If true, it's a finding that has obvious implications for the workplace, especially in contexts where health and safety could be compromised.

Eighty-six female undergrads arrived one at a time at a psychology lab for what they thought was an investigation into sex differences in reasoning and problem-solving. A female research assistant welcomed them and explained that they'd be interacting with a remote research team via computer. She then went and sat behind a partition in the same room. The three-person remote team were either all male or all female (this was clear from their names), and they proceeded to ask some basic questions of the participant via the computer.

Next, the research assistant's mobile phone rang. It was obvious from her end of the conversation that it was her male plumber "Joe". He'd moved some items in her house without asking - an act that the research assistant blamed either on his impatience or his sexist beliefs. After her call, the research assistant apologised to the participant, either saying "Sorry about that, my plumber is so impatient" or "Sorry about that - my plumber is such a typical man - he thinks that women are incapable of doing anything on their own!".

After this, the participants began a 90-second anagram challenge on the computer. When the time was up, they had the chance to request help from the remote research team for any items they hadn't solved. They also answered questions about their mood.

The key finding is that participants exposed to the story about the sexist plumber asked for less help on average, compared with participants who were told the plumber was merely impatient (they sought help with 48 per cent vs. 56 per cent of unsolved items). This held regardless of the sex of the remote research team (the source of the help). Another finding was that for participants exposed to the sexist plumber story, the more help they sought, the worst their mood. Conforming to the stereotype of the needy female appeared to make them feel rubbish about themselves.

"All in all," the researchers concluded, "our findings underline the point that the benevolent sexism in everyday banal interactions can be consequential for women's emotions and behaviour, and is therefore anything but banal."

Critics may feel that the explicit view to which some of the participants were exposed - that "women are incapable of doing anything on their own" (emphasis added) - was not particularly subtle; that the results therefore say more about out and out sexism rather than benevolent sexism. It would also have been preferable to include a third condition in which the participants were not exposed to any overheard phone conversation.
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Wakefield, J., Hopkins, N., and Greenwood, R. (2012). Thanks, But No Thanks: Women's Avoidance of Help-Seeking in the Context of a Dependency-Related Stereotype Psychology of Women Quarterly, 36 (4), 423-431 DOI: 10.1177/0361684312457659

-Further resources-
Podcast featuring the lead author of this study discussing the findings.
"Let me help you with that" - how women suffer from benevolent sexism. 

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

The advantage of having an anxiously attached person on your team

Psychologists talk about different attachment styles, such as secure, anxious and avoidant. The secure style is usually the one we're supposed to aspire to. They're the calm people who find it easy to get close to others, but not in a clingy way. By contrast, those with an anxious or avoidant attachment style are often seen in a pathological light - being either too needy or too aloof, respectively. They might sound like the kind of people you want to steer clear of, but now Tsachi Ein-Dor and Orgad Tal have published new research showing the upside to having an anxiously attached person on your team.

Eighty undergrads (28 women) completed attachment style and personality questionnaires. High scorers in anxious attachment agreed with statements like "My desire to be very close sometimes scares people away". Two weeks later they returned for what they thought was a study into artistic preferences. Each participant sat down at a computer and was left to rate a series of paintings that appeared on-screen. After the third piece of art, an error message popped up and the next thing, after the participant clicked OK, the computer started running a virus that wiped the whole hard-drive. The experimenter - a trained actress - came back in the room, feigned horror, and asked the participant to take the flash-drive out of the computer and head to the Dean's assistant manager for help.

Over the next few minutes, four obstacles were thrown in the way of the participants, potentially diverting them from the aim of seeking help. Outside in the corridor a person asked them to complete a short survey; the Dean's assistant manager, when they got there, directed them to the lab manager, but asked them to do some photocopying first; the lab manager's door had a sign on it asking visitors to wait; and finally, after being directed to the lab technicians' room, the participants passed a student who dropped a load of papers on the floor.

The higher that participants scored on anxious attachment, the more likely they were to seek help about the virus with single-minded focus. They more often than others refused to do the survey, shrugged off the photo-copying request, sought help rather than waiting outside the lab manager's office, and left the student to pick up their own papers from the floor. In contrast, the personality variables of extraversion and neuroticism were not related to this single-mindedness.

Ein-Dor and Tal have nicknamed anxiously attached people "sentinels". In past research they've shown that they, like people of a generally anxious disposition, are quicker to detect threats (e.g. smoke in the room). This new result confirms the researchers' further prediction that anxiously attached people are also particularly motivated to seek help from others, to raise the alarm - a tendency that "in many real world situations, might save others from a serious threat". Concluding, Ein-Dor and Tal said their study offered "a new perspective on the strengths of individuals who have long been viewed as deficient and poorly adapted."

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Ein-Dor, T., and Tal, O. (2012). Scared saviors: Evidence that people high in attachment anxiety are more effective in alerting others to threat. European Journal of Social Psychology, 42 (6), 667-671 DOI: 10.1002/ejsp.1895

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

When not to pat someone on the shoulder

Physical touch can be surprisingly persuasive. From diners giving larger tips to waiters who touch them, to people being more helpful to strangers who pat them lightly on the arm, the literature has tended to paint a positive picture of the emotional influence of social touch. But now a study out of Belgium has documented what you might call the dark side of social touching. This isn't about unwanted groping, which is always inappropriate. It's about the fact that context is everything for light social touches, with the new research showing that even a friendly pat on the shoulder can have an adverse effect if it's performed in the wrong situation.

Jeroen Camps and his colleagues had 74 student participants perform a maze challenge in a race against a partner. The outcome was fixed so the participant won by a tiny margin, and then, as the pair left the room, the partner (actually a male or female stooge planted by the researchers) patted the participant on the shoulder lightly three times, smiled gently and wished them good luck for the next task. For participants in the control condition, all this was the same but without the shoulder patting. Next, the participants and their partner went to another room and completed "the dictator game", a simple economic game that involved the participant choosing how many movie-prize credits to share with their partner.

The revealing finding was that participants who'd been patted on the shoulder shared fewer credits with their partner, suggesting that touch can backfire when it's performed in a competitive context, perhaps because it's interpreted as a gesture of dominance. Interestingly, there was no link between participants' awareness of whether they'd been touched and their sharing behaviour; participants who remembered the touch rated it as neutral; and the partner wasn't rated as more unpleasant in the touch condition. All of which suggests the adverse effect of touch on later cooperation was probably non-conscious.

A second study was similar but this time participants and their partner (another stooge, always female) either competed against each other on a puzzle or they cooperated. Again, afterwards, the partner wished them luck, smiled, and either did or didn't pat them on the shoulder at the end, before they both moved to another room to play the dictator game. The results were clear - in a competitive context, touched participants subsequently shared fewer movie-prize credits with their partner, compared with those participants who weren't touched. By contrast, in the cooperative context, touched participants went on to be more generous with their partner, as compared with participants who weren't touched.

"Despite what some people might think, touching someone else may thus not always have desirable social consequences," the researchers said. "A simple tap on the shoulder, even with the best intent, will do nothing but harm when used in the wrong place at the wrong time."

A limitation of the research is the use of a shoulder pat. It could be argued that this is a form of touch with specific connotations, depending on the context. For instance, maybe it is construed as condescending in a competitive situation. By contrast, a lot of the earlier research on the benefits of touch have tended to use a simple, light touch on the arm, which is perhaps a more neutral gesture.

What do you think? Are there any instances when you've been touched lightly (in a non-sexual way) and it's irritated you? Or times that it's endeared you to the toucher? Was it the context that made the difference?

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Camps, J., Tuteleers, C., Stouten, J., and Nelissen, J. (2012). A situational touch: How touch affects people's decision behaviour. Social Influence, 1-14 DOI: 10.1080/15534510.2012.719479

--Further reading--
The power of a light touch on the arm
Why is a touch on the arm so persuasive?

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Tendency to 'move against' others predicts managerial derailment

This post is taken from our sister blog, The Occupational Research Digest, written by Dr Alex Fradera. It's like this Research Digest but with a focus on psychology in the workplace - please go pay a visit. 

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Derailment is when a manager with a great track record hits the skids, often spectacularly. It's highly undesirable, for the disruption and human harm it can involve, and its costs, which after tallying up lost productivity, transition, and costs of a new hire, can exceed twice an annual salary in the case of executive departures.

As a result, organisational researchers have developed measures of 'derailment potential' that consider key suspect behaviours such as betraying trust, deferring decisions, or avoiding change. Work to date has confirmed that managers fired from organisations are judged to be higher in these derailers, but these were post-hoc judgments that could have reflected biased hindsight rather than honest evaluations. 

To avoid this, a new study led by Marisa Carson utilises database information on 1,796 managers from a large organisation to examine behaviours rated during employment tenure instead of on departure. Each behaviour was rated by between eight and ten sources - from subordinates to supervisors – with ratings combined into single potential scores. Drawing on staff turnover data, the study confirmed that individuals exhibiting more derailment potential behaviours were more likely to later be ejected from the organisation. In addition, they were more likely to leave early of their own volition, suggesting they jumped before they were pushed.

The study also looked beyond the behaviours exhibited to the traits that might be behind them, through a personality inventory, the Hogan Development Survey (HDS), that all managers had completed. The researchers were exploring the philosophy that derailment isn't caused by a deficit in positive traits such as conscientiousness, but the presence of additional, unhelpful qualities, measured in the HDS, that resemble features of clinical disorders. These traits come in three areas: 'moving away from people' such as a cynical, doubtful disposition, 'moving against people' including manipulation and a tendency to drama, and a third area of 'moving towards people' involving an abiding eagerness to please and defer to others.

Carson's team predicted each of these areas would predict derailment behaviours, but in the analysis only one mattered: moving against people. This factor also predicted turnover of both kinds, and its effect on turnover was brokered by higher derailment behaviours. Conversely the 'away' area turned out to relate negatively, but non-significantly, to the derailment scores, and the 'toward' area didn't emerge as a coherent factor during preliminary analysis so wasn't pursued further. The story here, then, is that qualities that rub up badly against others, such as attention-seeking, idiosyncracy, over-confidence and rule-bending translate into red-flag behaviours that predict early exit from the organisation.

What to be done? This research provides some support for screening for these types of tendencies early in a manager's career, in order to inform decisions about future role as well as identifying priority areas for training and development. These efforts, should they avert derailment, are likely to pay off in the long run.

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Marisa Adelman Carson, Linda Rhoades Shanock, Eric D. Heggestad, Ashley M. Andrew, S. Douglas Pugh, & Matthew Walter (2012). The Relationship Between Dysfunctional Interpersonal Tendencies, Derailment Potential Behavior, and Turnover Journal of Business and Psychology , 27 (3), 291-304 DOI: 10.1007/s10869-011-9239-0

When sales staff smile everyone wins

Serving customers with a smile must be tough if you're not in the mood. In the end, though, sales employees who are more smiley may end up reaping the benefit. A new study has looked at the way an employee's positive emotion infects their customers, and how this in turn feeds back to the employee, boosting their own mood.

Eugene Kim and David Yoon observed 117 interactions between staff and customers at clothing and accessory stores at a large shopping mall in Seoul, South Korea. The emotional behaviour of the employees was observed, then the way their customers responded, and finally, right afterwards, both employee and customer were quizzed about their mood and personality.

The more positive the employee, the more positive the customer tended to be. Moreover, employees who were more positive tended to be in a better mood afterwards, an association that was fully explained by the positive emotions displayed by the customer. In other words, smiley and polite staff initiated a virtuous interactive circle in which customers tended to respond in kind, thus benefiting the worker's own mood.

Of course not all customers are made equal. Kim and Young found that customers who scored lower in agreeableness and lower in emotional stability were more influenced by the positive emotion of the staff. More agreeable customers would be friendly anyway and highly stable customers are less prone to outside influences on their emotions.

A weakness of the study is that the researchers didn't assess staff mood at the outset, prior to each customer interaction. Though unlikely, they admitted this means that they couldn't completely rule out the possibility that interaction had nothing to do with the results - that an employee's mood at the outset had simply affected both their own emotional display, the customer's response and their own mood at the end.

Notwithstanding the need for more longitudinal research, Kim and Yoon said a key message for managers was to see customers as "coproducers of a positive service interaction". As well as "recruiting and hiring employees who are adept at displaying positive emotions," they said that managers should also consider reminding customers of the part they have to play by saying thank you and being civil.

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Kim E, and Yoon DJ (2012). Why Does Service With a Smile Make Employees Happy? A Social Interaction Model. The Journal of applied psychology PMID: 22800188

-Further reading- Switching, empathising and staying neutral: the emotional labour of GP receptionists (from our sister blog, The Occupational Digest).

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.

How to turn time spent living abroad into creative success

Spending time living abroad can set the creative juices flowing. But it doesn't work for everyone and a new study helps explain why. To extract maximum benefit from time in a foreign land, what's needed is a "bicultural" perspective - the ability to identity with your new home, but all the while continuing to connect with your native country too.

This form of dual acculturation breeds creative and professional success, the new findings suggest, because it encourages a sophisticated style of thought. Juggling the conflicts and complexities of a dual-identity fosters an ability to register multiple perspectives and to understand the conceptual relations between them ("a habitual tool for making sense of the world", in the researchers' words).

Carmit Tadmor and her colleagues began by studying 78 MBA students of 26 different nationalities at a European Business School. All had spent time living in one of 31 different foreign countries. Factors such as personality and age were taken into account through all the study analyses.

Those students who'd assumed a bicultural perspective (as opposed to those identifying steadfastly with their original culture only, or those who'd gone entirely native and rejected their home identity) performed better on a lab test of creativity - coming up with new uses for a brick. Moreover, this advantage was mediated by their scores on "integrative complexity" - the thinking style mentioned earlier, in which multiple perspectives are appreciated and linked.

A second study involved 54 MBA students at a business school in the USA, all of whom had spent time living abroad. This time the biculturals were found to have been more innovative in real life (in terms of setting up new businesses; inventing new products and services). Again, this creative advantage was mediated by the "integrative complexity" of their thinking.

Finally, the researchers surveyed 100 Israeli professionals, most of them working in Silicon Valley. Their average time in the States was 9 years. The biculturals in this sample had enjoyed more promotions and had superior professional reputations (based on the judgment of one of their peers), compared with the participants who identified only with their Israeli heritage or only with their adopted American culture. Again, this professional advantage was mediated by the biculturals' "integrative complexity" in their thinking.

Tadmor and her team acknowledge that their results are limited by being cross-sectional - it's possible that professional success encourages a complex thinking style; that a complex thinking style provokes a bicultural approach to life, and so on. But they pointed to past longitudinal research that showed biculturals' thinking became more integratively complex over time, as compared with the thinking of mono-cultural individuals - so it's certainly plausible that acquiring a bicultural perspective plays a causal role. The researchers also admitted that a bicultural perspective could have other positive benefits besides encouraging complex thought - for example, by catalysing better relations with colleagues. There could be downsides too. The process of becoming bicultural is likely a stressful demanding experience.

If you're planning to live abroad for creative benefit, there are clear lessons to take away from this research, but we still don't know how much it's possible to choose to adopt a bicultural perspective. More research will be needed to look into this. Another detail worth noting is that participants in this study who rejected both their original home identity and their new adopted identity (known as "marginals"), also showed greater integrative complexity and more creative success, though not to the same extent as biculturals. Perhaps, the researchers surmised, being culturally independent also fosters a complex style that aids creative thought.

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Tadmor CT, Galinsky AD, & Maddux WW (2012). Getting the Most Out of Living Abroad: Biculturalism and Integrative Complexity as Key Drivers of Creative and Professional Success. Journal of personality and social psychology PMID: 22823287

--Further reading--

Living abroad linked with enhanced creativity
The Cure for Creative Blocks? Leave Your Desk.

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Music we like can be more distracting than music we don't

Music by Infernal: enjoyable but distracting 

Many of us like to listen to music while we work. It's become a ritual, alongside the coffee in our favourite mug. Previous research suggests this is probably no bad thing. In lab studies, people who listen to music they like, generally perform better at mental tasks afterwards, an effect that's been attributed to boosts in mood and arousal.

But what about the effect of background music that plays on during a task - more akin what we do in real life? This is actually less studied. The traditional mood-arousal literature would predict it to be beneficial too, especially if the music is to the listener's taste.

However, there's another line of research, known as the "Irrelevant Sound Effect", that's all about the way background sounds can interfere with our short-term memory for ordered lists, which would be a bad thing for many work-related tasks. These studies show that the distraction is greater when the sound is more acoustically varied - just like your typical pop song. Based on this, Nick Perham and Martinne Sykora made a counter-intuitive prediction - background music that you like will be more detrimental to working memory than unappealing music, so long as the liked music has more acoustical variation than the disliked music.

Twenty-five undergrads completed several serial recall tasks. They were presented with strings of eight consonants and had to repeat them back from memory in the correct order. Performance was best in the quiet condition, but the key finding was that particiants' performance was worse when they completed the memory task with a song they liked playing over headphones (Infernal's "From Paris to Berlin"), compared with a song they disliked (songs such as "Acid Bath" from the grind core metal band Repulsion). In case you're wondering, participants who liked Repulsion were excluded from the study.

The fast-tempo "extreme guitar-based" music of Repulsion, the researchers explained, is like "a cacophony of sound, in which the segmentation of each individual sound from the next is difficult to identify". This means it has less acoustic variation from one moment to the next, which helps explain why, even though disliked, it had a less detrimental effect on serial recall than Infernal's pop song.

Perham and Sykora said their findings were "seemingly incompatible with the mood and arousal literature, but are consistent with the changing-state explanation of the Irrelevant Sound Effect."

A further intriguing detail from the study is the participants' lack of insight into the degree of distraction associated with each type of music. Asked to judge their own performance, they determined correctly that their memory was more accurate in the quiet condition, but they didn't realise that their performance was poorest whilst listening to the music they liked.

So, the next time you're bothered by someone else's bad music, console yourself that the noise could be less harmful to your work performance than your own choice would be!

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Nick Perham and Martinne Sykora (2012). Disliked Music can be Better for Performance than Liked Music. Applied Cognitive Psychology DOI: 10.1002/acp.2826

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.

Who are you protecting when you praise a dud performance?

Most of us have done it - told someone their performance was great when it was in fact woeful. But whose ego were we protecting? Theirs or our own? A new study has teased these possibilities apart by inviting 263 undergrad participants to read and provide feedback on an essay by another student on media violence and aggression.

Some participants were told they'd be providing the feedback face-to-face, others were told their feedback would be provided anonymously, and a third group were told their ratings of the essay would not be fed back to the writer. Additionally, the participants answered questions about their own self-esteem and they were given information about the writer's self-esteem, which was presented as either low, medium or high.

The findings provided strong evidence that we mostly withhold negative feedback to protect ourselves, not to protect the person we're judging. If people's motives were selfless then arguably the feedback provided should have been just as positive regardless of how it was delivered. In fact, students in the face-to-face condition provided the most positive feedback, but only if they had low self-esteem (specifically low self-liking, as opposed to low feelings of self competence). "If one accepts that people with relatively low self-esteem are expected to place greater emphasis on wanting to be perceived as likeable or attractive to others, then this lends support for the self-protection motive," said the researchers, led by Carla Jeffries. By contrast, undergrad participants with high self-esteem gave the same kind of feedback regardless of whether it was delivered anonymously, face-to-face, or not at all.

There was further evidence of a self-serving motive. Students with low self-esteem who were told their ratings would not be fed back to the writer tended to give particularly critical ratings - it's as if judging the essay harshly made them feel better about themselves. "A particularly harsh assessment creates a downward social comparison and, in turn, a gain for one's self-esteem," the researchers said.

The results did throw up some modest evidence of altruistic motives. Ratings by low self-esteem students were more generous in the anonymous condition versus the undelivered feedback condition. Seeing as their identity would be concealed in both cases, this suggests they gave inflated feedback in the anonymous condition purely to protect the feelings of the writer. However, this empathy only went so far - none of the participants moderated the tone of their feedback in line with the writer's self-esteem scores.

Jeffries and her team said their findings could have implications for organisations. For example, bolstering people's self-esteem prior to their rating another person's performance could help them to be more honest. "The data ... speak to the importance of developing cultures that encourage frank and fearless feedback giving and non-defensive feedback receiving," the researchers said. "Strong and positive feedback cultures might help overcome some of the fears of feedback-givers, and reduce the tendency for feedback to be adjusted as a function of who is watching."

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Jeffries, C., and Hornsey, M. (2012). Withholding negative feedback: Is it about protecting the self or protecting others? British Journal of Social Psychology DOI: 10.1111/j.2044-8309.2012.02098.x

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Thinking about our hourly wage stops us from smelling the roses

Thinking about the monetary value of our time prevents us from being able to enjoy those moments when we're not working. That's the implication of new research by Sanford DeVoe and Julian House. Once we think about our time in monetary terms, they say, any time not working becomes lost revenue. This makes us impatient to get back to work and stops us from savouring the moment.

In an initial study, fifty-three students at a Canadian University answered questions about how much they expected to work and earn in their first year after graduating. Crucially, half of them answered a further question about how that would translate into an hourly wage. Next, the students were given ten minutes free time to browse the web. The key finding is that the students who hadn't thought about their hourly wage were happier after the web browsing than they were before - they'd obviously made the most of the chance to surf the internet. By contrast, the students who'd thought about their post-graduation hourly wage were no happier after the web browsing than they were before. "Their experience of this leisure period lost some of its hedonic value and failed to bring about any improvement in their happiness," the researchers said.

A second study tested if thinking about the monetary value of time has this adverse effect because it makes us impatient. This time hundreds of participants were recruited via Amazon's Mechanical Turk (a site for recruiting people to work on problems at their computers). The participants listened to 86 seconds of "the Flower Duet" from the opera Lakmé after answering some work-related questions, which either did or didn't involve thinking about their hourly pay. After the music, the participants who'd previously worked out their hourly rate for the past year were less happy than other participants. What's more, this difference in happiness was entirely mediated by their impatience. The participants who'd worked out their hourly rate tended to agree with statements like "I was impatient for the music to end" and to disagree with statements like "I felt the music was a relaxing break".

If thinking about the monetary value of our time prevents us from savouring the moment, what if we're compensated for that time? A final study tested this idea. Again, some participants worked out their hourly wage before listening to a short piece of music. However, this time some of them were given a small additional participation fee for the time spent listening to the music. With this payment, the participants who'd thought about their hourly wage were able to appreciate the music just as much as the other participants who hadn't thought about their hourly pay.

The researchers said these new results show how modern working practices could affect the way we choose to spend our free time and how much we're able to enjoy it. In particular, with more people in part-time, flexi-time and freelance roles, time more than ever is likely to be perceived as having a monetary value. "Thinking about time in terms of money is poised to affect our ability to smell the proverbial roses," the researchers concluded.

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DeVoe, S., and House, J. (2012). Time, money, and happiness: How does putting a price on time affect our ability to smell the roses? Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 48 (2), 466-474 DOI: 10.1016/j.jesp.2011.11.012

Further reading: Being paid by the hour changes the way we think about time.

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

We "cyberloaf" more when we're tired

This post originally appeared on the BPS Occupational Digest and was written by Alex Fradera.

Cyberloafing is when work time is frittered away on an unrelated online activity, whether it be web comics, perusing news sites or watching the 1982 snooker championship final. A new article suggests that we may be more prone to it when we haven't had enough sleep. Its authors, led by David Wagner, began sifting through Google's publicly available data for rates of Entertainment-related searches, judged to be a reasonable proxy of cyberloafing. But how can anonymous data shed light on an issue involving sleeping habits?

The investigators recognised an event that affects everyone's sleep: when the clocks go forward for Daylight Saving Time. Prior evidence suggests we lose on average 40 minutes of sleep per night following the switch, as our body rhythms struggle to adjust. (Exploiting a fixed phenomena is an example of a quasi-experiment; another would be the hurricane that occurred within this study on emotional hangovers.) The researchers used data from 203 metropolitan areas in the USA, weighted by area size, across 2004-2009. They found that Entertainment-related searches on the Monday after DST were 3.1% more prevalent than the previous Monday, and 6.4% than the subsequent Monday . It's worth noting that the data isn't segmented by work and leisure hours, so the effect includes extra surfing that might occur later at night, when people are still feeling awake; however, the bulk of online activity occurs during working hours.

A second study took this to controlled lab conditions. 96 undergraduate students wore a sleep monitoring bracelet overnight before attending a lab session to complete a computer task - assessing a potential new professor for the university by watching a 42 minute video lecture. What the researchers were really interested in was the amount of time they would spend surfing the internet instead. Cyberloafing was higher for participants who experienced more instances of sleep interruption or less sleep overall, as recorded by their monitoring bracelet.

This is another piece of research advancing the ego depletion theory of why we fail to effectively regulate behaviour. This states that willpower is a resource that is used up through effortful acts, leaving us susceptible to temptation or laziness. Researchers have previously argued that sleep is a means of recharging our regulatory resources, and these studies confirm that less sleep does indeed make us prey to counterproductive activities like cyberloafing. However, those who naturally exercise self-discipline may be somewhat resistant: in study two, the effect of sleep interruption on cyberloafing was weaker for participants who scored high on a measure of conscientiousness administered beforehand. (The effect of less overall sleep still remained.) This is consistent with ego depletion, as highly conscientious types are more likely to actively use methods to regulate their effort to overcome counterproductive behaviours, rather than taking the path of least resistance.

The costs of cyberloafing have been estimated at around £300m a year, so it's worth understanding when we're more vulnerable to its temptations; UK employers should remember this when our clocks go forward on the 25th of this month. Aware of its power, I've included only one extraneous, non-work related link in the above text, and it's a niche one at that. But if you're a classic snooker fan with a tricky deadline, I'm so sorry. Just think about all the time I wasted considering the alternatives.
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Wagner, D., Barnes, C., Lim, V., and Ferris, D. (2012). Lost Sleep and Cyberloafing: Evidence From the Laboratory and a Daylight Saving Time Quasi-Experiment. Journal of Applied Psychology DOI: 10.1037/a0027557