Knowledges in Psychology
Choose your interests from a vast range of topics
- Clinical Psychology
- Consumer Psychology
- Counseling Psychology
- Developmental Psychology
- Educational Psychology
- Environmental Psychology
- Experimental Psychology
- Family Psychology
- Forensic & Psychology of Law
- Health Psychology
- Industrial Organizational Psychology
- Neuropsychology/Psychobiology
- Physiological Psychology
- Psychometrics & Quantitative Psychology
- Rehabilitation Psychology
- Social Psychology
- Sport Psychology
- Other
Flop of the Blockbuster
This is about how a big company, through poor managerial decisions, can lead it it's end. It has been observed through different psychological theories.
Senthamizh Kumaran S
Sakshi Agarwal
Healthier the Better
The title for the most famous phrase would definitely go to the phrase “Health is Wealth”. Health is the most important sphere of any person’s life. Undoubtedly, there is nothing in our life that is more valuable than good health. Without health, there is no happiness, no peace, and no success. If everyone knows and realizes the importance of good health early in their lives then they’ll get one step closer to their goals. Health is a type of a pre-requisite for human life, there lies no meaning in one’s life if they are unfit. It’s a famous saying that “a healthy mind resides in a healthy soul”. Being true to its core, this phrase holds true for everyone on the face of this earth. Even a rich person can’t enjoy the pleasure of being rich if he is unfit. A healthy person is completely free from any illness or injury. Our health depends upon several factors, such as food, exercises we do, sleeping habits, mental stress, the air which we breathe, water and sunlight. Food is certainly the primary cause of a person being in a poor state of health, but as time is passing by the newer generation is getting more induced towards having fast food which is not good for their health. An improper diet can cause, obesity, cholesterol problems, depression, lower stamina, etc. Apart from intake habits, the amount of stress which we lay on our mind also plays a vital role in our health conditions too. Also, for staying healthy one should do ample amount of exercises, exercises could be in any form such as running, outdoor sports or going to a gym. It’s high time and we all should start doing something towards our better health so that we could enjoy all the successes which are going to come our way in the future. As health is more valuable than money. Money cannot buy health and happiness. But a healthy person remains in a state of bliss and satisfaction.
Mihir Tanwar
Premature brains develop differently in B&G
Brains of baby boys born prematurely are affected differently and more severely than premature infant girls' brains. This is according to a study published in the Springer Nature-branded journal Pediatric Research. Lead authors Amanda Benavides and Peg Nopoulos of the University of Iowa in the US used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans as part of an ongoing study on premature babies to examine how the brains of baby boys and girls changed and developed. The researchers took high-quality MRI scans of the brains of 33 infants whose ages were corrected to that of one year. The sample included babies who were carried to full term (at least 38 weeks) and preterm (less than 37 weeks). The scans were analyzed in conjunction with information gathered from questionnaires completed by the infants' mothers and other data collected when they were born. "The window between birth and one year of age is the most important time in terms of brain development. Therefore studying the brain during this period is important to better understand how the premature brain develops," explains Benavides. Brain measurements taken from the MRIs showed that even at this very young age, there are major sex differences in the structure of the brain, and these are independent of the effects of prematurity. Brain tissue is divided into cerebral gray matter which includes regions of the brain that influence muscle control, the senses, memory, speech and emotion, and cerebral white matter which helps to link different parts of grey matter to each other. While boys' brains were overall larger in terms of volume, girls had proportionately larger volumes of gray matter and boys had proportionately larger volumes of white matter. These same sex differences are seen in children and adults, and therefore document how early in life these differences are seen. In regard to the effects of prematurity, the researchers found that the earlier a baby was born, the smaller the overall cerebral volume. However, the effect of prematurity on the specific tissues was different depending on a baby's gestation age in conjunction with its sex. The earlier a baby boy was born, the lower the researchers found his cortex volume (gray matter) to be. The earlier a baby girl was born, the lower was the volume of white matter in her brain. Overall, although the effects of prematurity were seen in both boys and girls, these effects were more severe for boys. According to the research team, it is well known that male fetuses are more vulnerable to developmental aberration, and that this could lead to other unfavorable outcomes. Findings from the current study now add to this by showing how the brains of baby boys born too early are affected differently to that of baby girls. "Given this background, it seems likely and even expected that the effects of prematurity on brain development would be more severe in males. The insults to the premature brain incurred within the first few weeks and months of life set the stage for an altered developmental trajectory that plays out throughout the remainder of development and maturation," says Nopoulos.
Aman Kumar Singh
People can handle the truth (more than you think)
Most people value the moral principle of honesty. At the same time, they frequently avoid being honest with people in their everyday lives. Who hasn't told a fib or half-truth to get through an awkward social situation or to keep the peace? New research from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business explores the consequences of honesty in everyday life and determines that people can often afford to be more honest than they think. In the paper, "You Can Handle the Truth: Mispredicting the Consequences of Honest Communication," Chicago Booth Assistant Professor Emma Levine and Carnegie Mellon University's Taya Cohen find that people significantly overestimate the costs of honest conversations. "We're often reluctant to have completely honest conversations with others," says Levine. "We think offering critical feedback or opening up about our secrets will be uncomfortable for both us and the people with whom we are talking." The researchers conclude that such fears are often misguided. Honest conversations are far more enjoyable for communicators than they expect them to be, and the listeners of honest conversations react less negatively than expected, according to the paper, published in the Journal of Experiment Psychology: General. For purposes of the study, the researchers define honesty as "speaking in accordance with one's own beliefs, thoughts and feelings." In a series of experiments, the researchers explore the actual and predicted consequences of honesty in everyday life. In one field experiment, participants were instructed to be completely honest with everyone in their lives for three days. In a laboratory experiment, participants had to be honest with a close relational partner while answering personal and potentially difficult discussion questions A third experiment instructed participants to honestly share negative feedback to a close relational partner. Across all the experiments, individuals expect honesty to be less pleasant and less social connecting than it actually is. "Taken together, these findings suggest that individuals' avoidance of honesty may be a mistake," the researchers write. "By avoiding honesty, individuals miss out on opportunities that they appreciate in the long-run, and that they would want to repeat."
Teen dating violence is down. But Boys?
When it comes to teen dating violence, boys are more likely to report being the victim of violence -- being hit, slapped, or pushed -- than girls. That's the surprising finding of new research from the University of British Columbia and Simon Fraser University. Overall, fewer teens are experiencing physical abuse from their dating partners, with five per cent of teens reporting dating violence in 2013, down from six per cent in 2003. However, the researchers found 5.8 per cent of boys and 4.2 per cent of girls said they had experienced dating violence in the past year. First author Catherine Shaffer, a PhD student from SFU who was involved in the study, says more research is needed to understand why boys are reporting more dating violence. "It could be that it's still socially acceptable for girls to hit or slap boys in dating relationships," she said. "This has been found in studies of adolescents in other countries as well." She added that the overall decline in dating violence, while small, is encouraging. "Young people who experience dating violence are more likely to act out and take unnecessary risks, and they're also more likely to experience depression or think about or attempt suicide," Shaffer said. "That's why it's good to see that decline in dating violence over a 10-year span. It suggests that healthy relationship programs are making an impact among youth." The study is the first in Canada to look at dating violence trends among adolescents over time, and the first in North America to compare trends for boys and girls. Researchers analyzed data from three B.C. Adolescent Health Surveys involving 35,900 youth in grade 7 to 12 who were in dating relationships. Elizabeth Saewyc, senior study author and UBC nursing professor, said the findings highlight the need for more support programs for both boys and girls in dating relationships. "A lot of our interventions assume that the girl is always the victim, but these findings tell us that it isn't always so," said Saewyc. "And relationship violence, be it physical, sexual or other forms, and regardless who the perpetrator is, is never OK. Health-care providers, parents and caregivers, schools and others can protect teens from dating violence by helping them define what healthy relationships looks like, even before their first date." The study analyzed surveys conducted by the McCreary Centre Society, a community-based organization dedicated to adolescent health research in B.C. Results were published recently in the Journal of Interpersonal Violence.
Toddlers prefer winners, but avoid those who win b
They have only just learnt to walk and talk -- and have only just started to develop social relationships with children of their own age. Yet, these tiny toddlers already use cues of social status to decide which people they prefer or would rather avoid. This has just been established by researchers from Aarhus BSS and the University of California, Irvine, through experiments carried out on toddlers aged 21 to 31 months. Previous research has shown that even nine-month-old infants can grasp a simple conflict of interest. When two individuals block each other's path, the infants will automatically assume that the largest person will defeat the smallest. Lotte Thomsen, professor of psychology at the University of Oslo and associate professor at Aarhus BSS, and her colleagues, established this. Now researchers are taking it one step further by demonstrating how toddlers also themselves prefer to affiliate with the winners of these conflicts and avoid those who they have seen yield to others. The research results have recently been published in Nature Human Behavior in the article "Toddlers prefer those who win, but not when they win by force." "The way you behave in a conflict of interest reveals something about your social status," says Ashley Thomas from UC Irvine, who is the lead author of the article. She continues: "Across all social animal species, those with a lower social status will yield to those above them in the hierarchy. We wanted to explore whether small children also judge high and low status individuals differently." To explore this question, the researchers used the basic paradigm of Lotte Thomsen's previous research where two puppets attempt to cross a stage in opposite directions. When the puppets meet in the middle, they block each other's way. One puppet then yields to the other and moves aside, allowing the other puppet to continue and reach its goal of crossing the stage. Afterwards, the children were presented with the two puppets. 20 out of 23 children reached for the puppet that had "won" the conflict on the stage -- the unyielding puppet. Thus, the children preferred the high-status puppet -- the one that others voluntarily yield to. We do not like people winning by force "Next, we wanted to explore whether toddlers would still prefer the winning puppet if it won by using brute force," says Thomas. The researchers exposed a new group of toddlers to the same puppet show, but this time one puppet would forcefully knock the other puppet over to reach its goal. Now 18 out of 22 children avoided the winning puppet and reached for the victim instead. In line with other social animals, infants thus prefer individuals who appear to have a high status -- but only if their status is acknowledged by others and not if they retort to using raw physical force to get their way. Here toddlers differ from our closest primate relatives -- the bonobo apes -- who still reach for those who use physical force to get their way in similar experimental set-ups. Acquired versus innate The underlying logic of this kind of research is to explore the implicit, given rules and assumptions that humans use for understanding and navigating social relations: What are the shared expectations and basic motives that underpin our social interactions? "Our research shows that it's part of human nature to be aware of social status: Even nine-month-old babies assume that the largest person will win, and even 1 1/2 year-old toddlers seek out those whom other people yield to. However, in contrast to other primates, it's crucial for even the youngest human beings that others also acknowledge someone's social status or priority right. We're generally repulsed by bullies who brutally steamroll others to get their own way," Thomsen explains. This reflects the challenges of living in cultural communities where we depend on learning from and being protected by respected others to whom we defer because they have more competence, know-how, strength or resources to share, but where we must also reach solutions to conflicts of interest that will be acceptable to the majority of people. Long-term socialisation and experience with the ups and downs of social hierarchies and the people at their top -- for instance with good and bad leaders -- might account for such status representations and motives among adults. However, it is harder to see how preverbal infants and toddlers would have already acquired such motives through their own relatively short experience, especially with regards to the minimal experimental situations that the toddlers have not seen before. "Our results indicate that the fundamental social rules and motives that undergird core social relationships may be inherent in human nature, which itself developed during thousands of years of living together in cultural communities," Thomsen concludes.
You probably made a better first impression than y
After we have conversations with new people, our conversation partners like us and enjoy our company more than we think, according to findings published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. In our social lives, we're constantly engaged in what researchers call "meta-perception," or trying to figure out how other people see us. Do people think we're boring or interesting, selfish or altruistic, attractive or not? "Our research suggests that accurately estimating how much a new conversation partner likes us -- even though this a fundamental part of social life and something we have ample practice with -- is a much more difficult task than we imagine," explain first authors Erica Boothby, a postdoctoral researcher at Cornell University, and Gus Cooney, a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard University. "We call this a 'liking gap,' and it can hinder our ability to develop new relationships," study coauthor Margaret S. Clark, the John M. Musser Professor of Psychology at Yale University, told Yale News. Boothby, Cooney, Clark, and Gillian M. Sandstrom, Professor of Psychology at the University of Essex, examined various aspects of the liking gap in a series of five studies. In one study, the researchers paired participants who had not met before and tasked them with having a 5-minute conversation featuring typical icebreaker questions (e.g., Where are you from? What are your hobbies?). At the end of the conversation, the participants answered questions that gauged how much they liked their conversation partner and how much they thought their conversation partner liked them. On average, the ratings showed that participants liked their partner more than they thought their partner liked them. Since it can't logically be the case that both people in a conversation like their partner more than their partner likes them, this disparity in average ratings suggests that participants tended to make an estimation error. Indeed, analyses of video recordings suggested that participants were not accounting for their partner's behavioral signals indicating interest and enjoyment. In a separate study, participants reflected on the conversations they'd just had -- according to their ratings, they believed that the salient moments that shaped their partner's thoughts about them were more negative than the moments that shaped their own thoughts about their partner. "They seem to be too wrapped up in their own worries about what they should say or did say to see signals of others' liking for them, which observers of the conservations see right away," Clark noted. Additional studies showed that the liking gap emerged regardless of whether people had longer conversations or had conversations in real-world settings. And a study of actual college roommates showed that the liking gap was far from fleeting, enduring over several months. The phenomenon is interesting because it stands in contrast with the well-established finding that we generally view ourselves more positively than we do others, whether we're thinking about our driving skills, our intelligence, or our chance of experiencing negative outcomes like illness or divorce. "The liking gap works very differently. When it comes to social interaction and conversation, people are often hesitant, uncertain about the impression they're leaving on others, and overly critical of their own performance," say Boothby and Cooney. "In light of people's vast optimism in other domains, people's pessimism about their conversations is surprising." The researchers hypothesize that this difference may come down to the context in which we make these self-assessments. When there is another person involved, such as a conversation partner, we may be more cautious and self-critical than in situations when we are rating our own qualities with no other source of input. "We're self-protectively pessimistic and do not want to assume the other likes us before we find out if that's really true," Clark said. This self-monitoring may prevent us from pursuing relationships with others who truly do like us. "As we ease into new neighborhood, build new friendships, or try to impress new colleagues, we need to know what other people think of us," Boothby and Cooney explain. "Any systematic errors we make might have a big impact on our personal and professional lives." This work was supported by the Templeton Foundation and the Economic and Social Research Council (United Kingdom).
Heartbeat paces learning, study finds
The electrophysiological activity of the brain is dominated by rhythmically coupled oscillations with different frequencies. The synchrony between oscillations enables effective communication locally and between brain regions. Many physiological functions, such as breathing and heartbeat, are also rhythmically coupled in nature. Furthermore, the rhythms of the brain and body are coupled. For instance, the neural activities of the hippocampus and the breathing pattern have been shown to oscillate in synchrony. The hippocampus is a crucial brain structure for learning, meaning that the rhythmical coupling of the brain and the body might affect the learning process. The Behavioral Neuroscience Group from the Department of Psychology in the University of Jyväskylä studied the effects of the cardiac cycle in a simple learning task. The group investigated how learning is modulated by the cardiac cycle. In the experiments the conditioned stimulus was a tone followed by an air puff directed at the eye. The unconditioned stimulus, the air puff, causes an involuntary eyeblink. Eventually the blinking of the eye occurs spontaneously before the air puff as a result of learning. The neuronal responses to the tone were modulated by the cardiac cycle in both humans and rabbits. In addition, the learning rates of the rabbits were enhanced when the conditioned stimulus was presented during the resting phase of the cardiac cycle. "Our results showed that the processing of the external information varies during the phases of the cardiac cycle," says Tomi Waselius. "It is possible that the activity of the cardiorespiratory neurons in the brain stem affects the overall neural state of the hippocampus and thus the neural processing of the external information. This is only speculation and we have commenced complementary studies to support these ideas." Waselius suggests that it would be interesting to study how bodily rhythms modulate learning in, for example, Alzheimer patients. The article was selected as an APSselect article by the American Physiological Society. The issue consists of the ten best articles published in July and it is now freely available from the website of the Journal of Neurophysiology.
Social Connection Makes a Better Brain
Matthew Lieberman, a distinguished social psychologist and neuroscientist, basically won the lottery. This past summer, he was offered three million dollars for an academic position—one million in raw income and two to do lab research. That’s a king’s ransom for a psychology professor. On average, psychology professors make less than six figures and rely on a patchwork of modest grants to sustain their research. All Lieberman had to do was spend four months this year and next year in Moscow, a nice enough city, doing some research—which he would have done anyway at home at UCLA. But there was a catch. He would have to be away from his wife Naomi and seven-year-old son Ian for those eight months. They could not join him in Moscow. He had a basic trade-off problem, one that kept him up for many nights: Should I take the money and give up those eight months with my family or should I stay home and give up the money and research opportunities? In one form or another, we've all faced this dilemma, if on a more modest scale. Do you work late tonight or join your family for dinner? Do you go to the conference or to your friend’s wedding? Do you prioritize your career or your relationships? Lieberman’s new book Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect hits the shelves this month. It’s a book about relationships and why relationships are a central—though increasingly absent—part of a flourishing life. Lieberman draws on psychology and neuroscience research to confirm what Aristotle asserted long ago in his Politics: “Man is by nature a social animal … Anyone who either cannot lead the common life or is so self-sufficient as not to need to, and therefore does not partake of society, is either a beast or a god.” Just as human beings have a basic need for food and shelter, we also have a basic need to belong to a group and form relationships. The desire to be in a loving relationship, to fit in at school, to join a fraternity or sorority, to avoid rejection and loss, to see your friends do well and be cared for, to share good news with your family, to cheer on your sports team, and to check in on Facebook—these things motivate an incredibly impressive array of our thoughts, actions, and feelings. Lieberman sees the brain as the center of the social self. Its primary purpose is social thinking. One of the great mysteries of evolutionary science is how and why the human brain got to be so large. Brain size generally increases with body size across the animal kingdom. Elephants have huge brains while mice have tiny ones. But humans are the great exception to this rule. Given the size of our bodies, our brains should be much smaller—but they are by far the largest in the animal kingdom relative to our body size. The question is why. Scientists have debated this question for a long time, but the research of anthropologist Robin Dunbar is fairly conclusive on this point. Dunbar has found that the strongest predictor of a species’ brain size—specifically, the size of its neocortex, the outermost layer—is the size of its social group. We have big brains in order to socialize. Scientists think the first hominids with brains as large as ours appeared about 600,000-700,000 years ago in Africa. Known as Homo heidelbergensis, they are believed to be the ancestors of Homo sapiens and the Neanderthals. Revealingly, they appear to be the first hominids to have had a division of labour (they worked together to hunt), central campsites, and they may have been the first to bury their dead. One of the most exciting findings to emerge from neuroscience in recent years underlines the brain’s inherently social nature. When neuroscientists monitor what’s going on in someone’s brain, they are typically interested in what happens in it when people are involved in an active task, like doing a math problem or reaching for a ball. But neuroscientists have looked more closely at what the brain does during non-active moments, when we’re chilling out and the brain is at rest. Every time we are not engaged in an active task—like when we take a break between two math problems—the brain falls into a neural configuration called the “default network.” When you have down time, even if it’s just for a second, this brain system comes on automatically. What’s remarkable about the default network, according to Lieberman’s research, is that it looks almost identical to another brain configuration—the one used for social thinking or “making sense of other people and ourselves,” as he writes: “The default network directs us to think about other people’s minds—their thoughts, feelings, and goals.” Whenever it has a free moment, the human brain has an automatic reflex to go social. Why would the brain, which forms only 2 percent of our body weight but consumes 20 percent of its energy, use its limited resources on social thinking, rather than conserving its energy by relaxing? “Evolution has made a bet,” Lieberman tells me, “that the best thing for our brain to do in any spare moment is to get ready for what comes next in social terms.” Evolution only makes bets if there are payoffs—and when it comes to being social, there are many benefits. Having strong social bonds is as good for you as quitting smoking. Connecting with other people, even in the most basic ways, also makes you happier—especially when you know they need your help. One study of adults found that the brain’s reward center, which turns on when people feel pleasure, was more active when people gave $10 to charity than when they received $10. In another study, comforting someone in distress activated the reward center in a powerful way. Couples were brought into the lab and the girlfriend was placed inside a brain scanner while the boyfriend sat in a chair right next to her. In some cases, the boyfriend would receive a painful electrical shock. The girlfriend, who knew when her boyfriend was being shocked, was instructed to either hold her boyfriend’s hand or to hold onto a small ball. When the scientists looked at the girlfriend’s brain activity, they found that her reward system was active when she was holding the hand of her boyfriend both when he was being shocked and when he wasn't in pain—but it was most activewhen she held his hand as he was being shocked. Holding your boyfriend’s hand feels nice, but it’s especially meaningful when you know that he needs your love and affection.
Yuvraj Bhatia
Buy Experiences, Not Things
Forty-seven percent of the time, the average mind is wandering. It wanders about a third of the time while a person is reading, talking with other people, or taking care of children. It wanders 10 percent of the time, even, during sex. And that wandering, according to psychologist Matthew Killingsworth, is not good for well-being. A mind belongs in one place. During his training at Harvard, Killingsworth compiled those numbers and built a scientific case for every cliché about living in the moment. In a 2010 Science paper co-authored with psychology professor Daniel Gilbert, the two wrote that "a wandering mind is an unhappy mind." For Killingsworth, happiness is in the content of moment-to-moment experiences. Nothing material is intrinsically valuable, except in whatever promise of happiness it carries. Satisfaction in owning a thing does not have to come during the moment it's acquired, of course. It can come as anticipation or nostalgic longing. Overall, though, the achievement of the human brain to contemplate events past and future at great, tedious length has, these psychologists believe, come at the expense of happiness. Minds tend to wander to dark, not whimsical, places. Unless that mind has something exciting to anticipate or sweet to remember. Over the past decade, an abundance of psychology research has shown that experiences bring people more happiness than do possessions. The idea that experiential purchases are more satisfying than material purchases has long been the domain of Cornell psychology professor Thomas Gilovich. Since 2003, he has been trying to figure out exactly how and why experiential purchases are so much better than material purchases. In the journal Psychological Science last month, Gilovich and Killingsworth, along with Cornell doctoral candidate Amit Kumar, expanded on the current understanding that spending money on experiences "provide[s] more enduring happiness." They looked specifically at anticipation as a driver of that happiness; whether the benefit of spending money on an experience accrues before the purchase has been made, in addition to after. And, yes, it does. Essentially, when you can't live in a moment, they say, it's best to live in anticipation of an experience. Experiential purchases like trips, concerts, movies, et cetera, tend to trump material purchases because the utility of buying anything really starts accruing before you buy it. Waiting for an experience apparently elicits more happiness and excitement than waiting for a material good (and more "pleasantness" too—an eerie metric). By contrast, waiting for a possession is more likely fraught with impatience than anticipation. "You can think about waiting for a delicious meal at a nice restaurant or looking forward to a vacation," Kumar told me, "and how different that feels from waiting for, say, your pre-ordered iPhone to arrive. Or when the two-day shipping on Amazon Prime doesn’t seem fast enough." Gilovich's prior work has shown that experiences tend to make people happier because they are less likely to measure the value of their experiences by comparing them to those of others. For example, Gilbert and company note in their new paper, many people are unsure if they would rather have a high salary that is lower than that of their peers, or a lower salary that is higher than that of their peers. With an experiential good like vacation, that dilemma doesn't hold. Would you rather have two weeks of vacation when your peers only get one? Or four weeks when your peers get eight? People choose four weeks with little hesitation. Experiential purchases are also more associated with identity, connection, and social behavior. Looking back on purchases made, experiences make people happier than do possessions. It's kind of counter to the logic that if you pay for an experience, like a vacation, it will be over and gone; but if you buy a tangible thing, a couch, at least you'll have it for a long time. Actually most of us have a pretty intense capacity for tolerance, or hedonic adaptation, where we stop appreciating things to which we're constantly exposed. iPhones, clothes, couches, et cetera, just become background. They deteriorate or become obsolete. It's the fleetingness of experiential purchases that endears us to them. Either they're not around long enough to become imperfect, or they are imperfect, but our memories and stories of them get sweet with time. Even a bad experience becomes a good story. When it rains through a beach vacation, as Kumar put it, "People will say, well, you know, we stayed in and we played board games and it was a great family bonding experience or something." Even if it was negative in the moment, it becomes positive after the fact. That's a lot harder to do with material purchases because they're right there in front of you. "When my Macbook has the colorful pinwheel show up," he said, "I can't say, well, at least my computer is malfunctioning!" "At least my computer and I get to spend more time together because it's working so slowly," I offered. "Yes, exactly." "Maybe we should destroy our material possessions at their peak, so they will live on in an idealized state in our memories?" "I don't know if I'd go that far," he said. "The possibility of making material purchases more experiential is sort of interesting." That means making purchasing an experience, which is terrible marketing-speak, but in practical terms might mean buying something on a special occasion or on vacation or while wearing a truly unique hat. Or tying that purchase to subsequent social interaction. Buy this and you can talk about buying it, and people will talk about you because you have it. "Turns out people don't like hearing about other people's possessions very much," Kumar said, "but they do like hearing about that time you saw Vampire Weekend." I can't imagine ever wanting to hear about someone seeing Vampire Weekend, but I get the point. Reasonable people are just more likely to talk about their experiential purchases than their material purchases. It's a nidus for social connection. ("What did you do this weekend?" "Well! I'm so glad you asked ... ") The most interesting part of the new research, to Kumar, was the part that "implies that there might be notable real-world consequences to this study." It involved analysis of news stories about people waiting in long lines to make a consumer transaction. Those waiting for experiences were in better moods than those waiting for material goods. "You read these stories about people rioting, pepper-spraying, treating each other badly when they have to wait," he said. It turns out, those sorts of stories are much more likely to occur when people are waiting to acquire a possession than an experience. When people are waiting to get concert tickets or in line at a new food truck, their moods tend to be much more positive. "There are actually instances of positivity when people are waiting for experiences," Kumar said, like talking to other people in the concert line about what songs Vampire Weekend might play. So there is opportunity to connect with other people. "We know that social interaction is one of the most important determinants of human happiness, so if people are talking with each other, being nice to one another in the line, it's going to be a lot more pleasant experience than if they're being mean to each other which is what's (more) likely to happen when people are waiting for material goods." Research has also found that people tend to be more generous to others when they've just thought about an experiential purchase as opposed to a material purchase. They're also more likely to pursue social activities. So, buying those plane tickets is good for society. (Of course, maximal good to society and personal happiness comes from pursuing not happiness but meaning. All of this behavioral economics-happiness research probably assumes you've already given away 99 percent of your income to things bigger than yourself, and there's just a very modest amount left to maximally utilize.) What is it about the nature of imagining experiential purchases that's different from thinking about future material purchases? The most interesting hypothesis is that you can imagine all sort of possibilities for what an experience is going to be. "That's what's fun," Kumar said. "It could turn out a whole host of ways." With a material possession, you kind of know what you're going to get. Instead of whetting your appetite by imagining various outcomes, Kumar put it, people sort of think, Just give it to me now. It could turn out that to get the maximum utility out of an experiential purchase, it's really best to plan far in advance. Savoring future consumption for days, weeks, years only makes the experience more valuable. It definitely trumps impulse buying, where that anticipation is completely squandered. (Never impulse-buy anything ever.) That sort of benefit would likely be a lot stronger in an optimistic person as opposed to a pessimistic person. Some people hate surprises. Some people don't anticipate experiences because they dwell on what could—no, will—go wrong. But we needn't dwell in their heads. Everyone can decide on the right mix of material and experiential consumption to maximize their well-being. The broader implications, according to Gilovich in a press statement, are that "well-being can be advanced by providing infrastructure that affords experiences, such as parks, trails, and beaches, as much as it does material consumption." Or at least the promise of that infrastructure, so we can all look forward to using it. And when our minds wander, that's where they'll go.
If pigeons were brilliant, would they flock?
Crowd panics, market bubbles, and other unpredictable collective behaviors would not happen if people were smart about these things and just thought through their behavior before they acted. Right? That's the perspective in economics, and even psychology and sociology. But a UC Davis researcher looked at how people behave in simple reasoning games and found that people are usually driven to "flock," or behave similarly to others in a given situation. Seth Frey, an assistant professor of communication at UC Davis, said this happens "even when people use the fancy reasoning processes that are supposed to make humans so special." Frey is lead author of an article, "Cognitive mechanisms for human flocking dynamics." The paper appeared in the Journal of Computational Social Science this month. "The basic idea is that we have this preconception about fads and panics and flocks and herds, that they are driven by our basest animal spirits, and that adding thoughtfulness or education or intelligence would make those things go away," Frey said. "This paper shows that people who are being thoughtful (specifically people who are doing dizzying 'what you think I think you think I think' reasoning) still get caught up in little flocks, in a way that the game they end up playing is driven less by what seems rational and more by what they think the others think they're going to do." Each game used in the study is based on a very different way of thinking and should have evoked different varieties of reasoning by players, Frey said. But they did not. The same sophisticated flocking behavior bore out in all three games. Flocking can be good or bad Researchers looked at the behavior of hundreds of players, who came from student and online pools, repeated for many rounds of the games over time. They analyzed behavior over high and low payoffs, over multiple populations and with very experienced players, with the well-known "Beauty Contest" game and two they devised for the research, "Mod Game" and "Runway Game," Frey said. Rules and methods of winning each game varied. In Beauty Contest, players receive a reward for guessing the number 0-100 whose number is closest to two-thirds the value of the average of all numbers submitted by all players. In the Mod Game, players choose an integer between 1 and 24. Players earn points by choosing a number precisely one above another's number, except that 1 beats 24, such as in Paper-Rock-Scissors, in that every number can get beaten by another. And in the Runway Game, players practice the same one-upmanship of the Mod Game, but they can choose literally any number, -1, a million, pi, anything. These subtle differences lead to big differences in theory, but they don't seem to matter to players, who get caught up in their group mates' flocking no matter what. Frey explained that flocking, in life, can be good or bad. It can be good for schools of fish, flocking birds, or team cyclists in a race -- where in each case group members gain a greater ability to obtain food, be safe or to win. But flocking can be undesirable in a stock market fall or a riot, for instance, where safety, survival or "winning" can be jeopardized. ." ..These games show that sophisticated human reasoning processes may be just as likely to drive the complex, often pathological, social dynamics that we usually attribute to reactive, emotional, nondeliberative reasoning," the researchers conclude. "In other words, human intelligence may as likely increase as decrease the complexity and unpredictability of social and economic outcomes."