With colleges and universities moving their face-to-face classes online or into a live video format during this Spring 2020 COVID-19 outbreak, some faculty are being forced to confront an unpleasant reality: they don’t like how they sound or look when recorded. The mere exposure effect The more we see or hear something, the more—in general—we like it. That is called the mere exposure effect. Our voice Because of how the sound of our own voice travels from our throat to our ears, it sounds different in our heads than it does to the people around us. We have spent a lifetime listening to our voices produced that way, and so that is the voice we prefer. Microphones record our “outside” voice. Microphones pick up the sound of our voice as the people around us hear it. They like that voice because it’s the one they hear. We hate it because it doesn’t sound like our voice to us. It’s not the one we hear. Our face Symmetrical faces are perceived to be more attractive than asymmetrical faces. I hate to be the one to deliver this news, but your face probably is not symmetrical. And I know, speaking as one who does not have a symmetrical face. We have, again, spent a lifetime looking at our own faces—in a mirror. We much prefer this “mirrored” view of ourselves than we do, say, a photograph of ourselves, you know, the way other people see us. Try this. Take a photo of yourself. Use your phone’s or computer’s image editing tools to flip the photo to its mirror image. You will probably like the mirrored photograph more than the original—the view of yourself that you see most often. Ask your friends and family which one they prefer. Most often they’ll choose the original photo—the view of yourself that they see most often. No wonder we hate recording ourselves Recordings we make of ourselves don’t sound like us, and the view is not one we’re used to seeing. It’s a wonder that anyone ever consents to being recorded. Keep in mind that any recording you make is not for you. Your recording is—in the case of faculty—for your students. How you look and how you sound matches their reality. While you may not like it, they like matching the sound and face of the real you with the sound and face of the recorded you. And after all, your students are the ones your recordings are for. Check your recording software for a mirror image setting While there’s nothing I can do about your voice, some recording/webconferencing tools—like Zoom—include the ability to switch your webcam to mirror image. This feature was designed to better help you make sense of what you’re seeing on camera. In regular webcam view, it’s a challenge to get your stray hair back in place. Your right hand is on the left side of the screen and as you move your right hand toward your left, on the screen your right hand moves to the right. Everything is backwards! When you enable mirror image, it is just like you are looking in a mirror. Your right hand is on the right. When you move your right hand left, the webcam image of your hand also moves left. And you know what? Since this is how you see yourself all the time in your bathroom mirror, you’ll like how you look a lot more. But here’s the extra cool part. While the camera view looks like a mirror to you, it has not changed for your viewers. They will still see you as they would if they were standing in front of you. And that’s also the view that will be recorded. Not the mirror view. (Shout out to my colleague Eric Baer for showing me this in Zoom!) Theater vs. television/film While we are talking about recording yourself, now is a good time to remember that if you have spent most of your career standing in front of a classroom, you are a performer. Like theater-trained actors, you have honed your craft so that your gestures and emotions carry to the back of your classroom. Many theater-trained actors struggle when they go from the stage to the screen. Television and movie cameras are intimate machines—as are webcams. They are right up in your face, recording every wrinkle and every muscle twitch. Toning down your expressiveness for your webcam recording may not come easily to you. If you are wildly expressive on camera, don’t worry too much about it. Just know that it’s part of your “stage” presentation style. With practice, you could learn to dial it back, but that’s probably not worth your energy right now. No students are going to be harmed by your exuberance.   Go record yourself Go forth. Take a deep breath. And make a recording. ... View more

Ingroups can be pretty powerful. We tend to like people in our ingroups more than people in our outgroups (ingroup bias), and we tend to see people in our outgroups as being more like each other than people in our ingroups (outgroup homogeneity bias), for example. There is much rhetoric about Democrats vs. Republicans, immigrants/refugees vs. native born, the wealthy vs. the middle class vs. the working poor, people with homes vs. people who are homeless. Depending on where you live, the groups may be different than these, but the groups are there. The next time you cover ingroups/outgroups, ask your students what groups are most salient to them – on your campus or in your town/city. If you’re in a small college town, it may be the townies vs. those at the college. Write down the names of the groups where students can see them. If time allows, ask your students to work in pairs or small groups to generate examples of how ingroup bias or outgroup homogeneity bias has affected or could affect how each group sees themselves and sees the other. Next, show this 3-minute TV2 Denmark ad that aired in 2017. Video Link : 2526 Ask students to share their reactions to the video. If they could get their-previously-identified groups together, what questions would they ask? Who likes pizza? Who likes dogs? Who likes cats? Who likes to drive?   Close this activity by pointing out ingroups/outgroups shift depending on context. When one context—politics, for example—is continually salient, it’s easy to forget that we have plenty in common with members of our—say, political—outgroup. What strategies might your students use to help them remember that they may have a lot in common with an outgroup member, and to remember that, in a different context, that person is probably a member of their ingroup? ... View more

Probably like you, a lot of my Intro Psych students are interested in medicine. Most are interested in nursing, but a smattering are interested in becoming physicians or another type of medical professional, such as respiratory therapists. This New York Times article (Brown & Bergman, 2019), coauthored by nurse and a physician, will be of interest to these future medical professionals in your course. After covering ingroups/outgroups and superordinate goals in the social psychology chapter, ask your students to read the article and address these questions. What factors contribute to dividing medical professionals into the subgroups of doctors and nurses? For example, physicians have higher status than nurses.   What superordinate goal do the article authors suggest would bring nurses and doctors together? At about 1,000 words, the article is short enough for students to read and discuss in class. Alternatively, it’s an excellent real-world example to bring into your lecture.   From the new APA Intro Psych student learning outcomes, this activity addresses: Identify examples of relevant and practical applications of psychological principles to everyday life. Integrative theme: Applying psychological principles can changes our lives in positive ways.   Reference Brown, T., & Bergman, S. (2019, December 31). Doctors, nurses and the paperwork crisis that could unite them. New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/31/opinion/doctors-nurses-and-the-paperwork-crisis-that-could-unite-them.html ... View more

Cartoonists have pretty good insight into the workings of the human mind. How many of them took Intro Psych? These comics will jazz up your next research methods, cognition, personality, learning, and social psych lectures. Dilbert's boss does not have an operational definition of "employee engagement," and, thus, no way to measure it. Also, on the ethics side, no, it's not okay to make up data. Lio, having no trouble with functional fixedness, repurposes an object into a sled. Lio’s friends aren’t typical. His ingroups include monsters, aliens, and death himself. When everyone else sees those creatures as part of a threatening outgroup, to Lio, they are just his friends. Also, you don’t have to read through too many strips to see Lio’s strong internal locus of control. Rat in Pearls Before Swine can be counted on for a solid outgroup homogeneity bias. Jeremy’s mom in Zits provides a nice example of positive punishment. No, I don’t think he’ll forget his textbook at home again. Or, perhaps more likely, if he does forget it at home, he won’t ask his mom to bring it to school. After all, punishment makes us better at avoiding the punishment. Caulfield, the boy in Frazz, wonders if Santa has fallen victim to the just-world phenomenon. Pig in Pearls Before Swine, whose sweetness and innocence may be unparalleled in the comics universe, does not fall for the fundamental attribution error. Looking for more example from the comics? Here are some previous comic-focused blog posts: Spotlight effect Door-in-the-Face, classical conditioning, and operant conditioning Change blindness, priming, and positive reinforcement ... View more

Here’s some information the business majors taking your Intro Psych class should be thinking about. During the social psychology chapter, pose this question to your students: Is it good for employees to know how much money their managers and their coworkers are making? Why? Give students a couple minutes to think about this. If you’d like, let students discuss with one or two people around them. If you have an audience response system, ask each question separately. “Is it good for employees to know how much money their managers are making?” Ask volunteers to share their reasoning. Next, ask “Is it good for employees to know how much their coworkers are making?” Again, ask volunteers to share their reasoning. Zoë Cullen (Harvard Business School) and Ricardo Perez-Truglia (UCLA) wondered the same thing. You’re welcome to read the working paper or a summary written by the authors for the Harvard Business Review. Managers (vertical inequality) Cullen and Perez-Truglia (Cullen & Perez-Truglia, 2018) asked a couple thousand employees of “a large commercial bank in Asia” to guess how much their manager made. They thought that their managers made about 14% less than they actually did. The researchers then randomly assigned the employees to either learn how much their managers actually made or to remain in the dark. With the assistance of the bank, researchers “gathered daily timestamp, email, and sales data for the year following our survey.” Learning that their managers made more money than they thought resulted in employees working more hours, sending more email messages, and selling more than those who did not learn how much their managers actually made. In fact, the more off employees were in their estimates, the more work they did. And the closer the manager was on the corporate ladder to the employee, the more pronounced the effect. “[A]fter realizing that these managers get paid more, employees became more optimistic about the salaries they will earn themselves five years in the future.”  Coworkers (horizontal inequality) Cullen and Perez-Truglia (Cullen & Perez-Truglia, 2018) asked those same research participants to guess the salaries of “the other employees with the same position and title, from the same unit.” While the participants were closer in accuracy with their guesses than they were with managers, most still underestimated how much their coworkers were making. Again, participants were randomly assigned to learn how much their coworkers actually made or to remain in the dark. Using the same “daily timestamp, email, and sales data for the year following our survey,” researchers found employees worked less than their in-the-dark counterparts. And they didn’t work just a little bit less. “ Finding out that peers earn on average 10% more than initially thought caused employees to spend 9.4% fewer hours in the office, send 4.3% fewer emails, and sell 7.3% less.” This is a beautiful – if unfortunate – example of relative deprivation. Relative deprivation is “the perception by an individual that the amount of a desired resource (e.g., money, social status) he or she has is less than some comparison standard. This standard can be the amount that was expected or the amount possessed by others with whom the person compares himself or herself” (American Psychological Association, n.d.) When we experience relative deprivation, we feel worse. And when that relative deprivation is experienced in a work setting, that feeling worse translates into working less. Discussion Ask your students to imagine that they are employers. How might they handle salary information? Would they be transparent, letting everyone know how much everyone is paid? Would they release average salaries by position type rather than attach names to salaries? And should different people who hold the same position be paid different salaries? Cullen and Perez-Truglia (Cullen & Perez-Truglia, 2018) offer a couple suggestions. “[K]eep salaries compressed among employees in the same position, but offer them large raises when they get promoted to a higher position.” “[T]ransparency about average pay for a position, without disclosing individual salaries.”   The researchers conclude their Harvard Business Review article with this advice.   We encourage you to start experimenting with transparency at your company.  The first step is to figure out what your employees want. You can find out through anonymous surveys. Just mention some alternatives that you consider viable, and let them voice their preferences. For instance, do your employees feel informed about their salaries five years down the road? Would they want to find out the average pay two or three promotions ahead? Once you look at the survey results, you can decide what information to disclose and how. According to our findings, signals about the enticing paychecks waiting five years in the future is the push they need to be at their best.   References American Psychological Association. (n.d.). Relative deprivation. Retrieved December 26, 2018, from https://dictionary.apa.org/relative-deprivation Cullen, Z., & Perez-Truglia, R. (2018). The motivating (and demotivating) effects of learning others’ salaries. Retrieved December 27, 2018, from https://hbr.org/2018/10/the-motivating-and-demotivating-effects-of-learning-others-salaries ... View more

There are a lot of social psychological concepts that can help explain road rage. This Seattle Times article (Doughton, 2018) beautifully identifies a number of these concepts. Students will see how social psychology tells us something about our everyday lives. And, hopefully, students will remember this the next time they find themselves overly angry at the behavior of strangers. You can use the article in any number of ways. Pull out the examples to frame your social psychology lecture After students read the chapter, but before you cover the concepts in class, ask students, as a homework assignment, to identify the social psychological concepts Before you cover these concepts, ask students to read the article, then, in small groups, identify the social psychological concepts After your social psychology lecture, ask students to read the article, and then in small groups, identify the social psychological concepts If your students are reading the article and identifying the concepts, ask students to define the concepts they find in their own words, quote sections of the article that illustrate each of those concepts, and, finally, explain how the quotes they found illustrate each of the concepts students have identified. To make it easier, give students these concepts to find in the article: Deindividuation Fundamental attribution error Self-serving bias Outgroup homogeneity bias If you’d like students to reflect on previous content they’ve learned about in their Intro Psych course, ask them to identify examples of these concepts in the article: Sympathetic nervous system arousal Observational learning Long-term effects of stress References Doughton, S. (2018, November 2). How to keep your head from exploding in Seattle traffic. Seattle Times. Retrieved from https://www.seattletimes.com/pacific-nw-magazine/how-to-keep-your-head-from-exploding-in-seattle-traffic ... View more

In my last blog post, I wrote about one of the common street scams in Paris, the petition scam that relies on foot-in-the-door to work. Another common street scam is the friendship bracelet. The scam A person approaches the mark, wraps string around the mark’s finger, makes a string bracelet, ties it around the mark’s wrist, and then demands money in exchange for the bracelet that the mark cannot remove without a pocket knife. Here it is in action. Notice how the mark tries to ignore the scammer and how the scammer ignores the mark’s protests and gets the string around his finger and starts twisting the string. It’s tight enough that the mark can’t get it off. At the end, another scammer demands the fee while the original scammer readies his string for the next mark – and scratches himself. Video Link : 2269 Norm of reciprocity What drives the scam is the norm of reciprocity. When someone does something for us, we feel compelled to do something in return – even when what we received is not something we wanted. A new research article, reported on by the British Psychological Society Research Digest, suggests that some people experience more “reciprocity anxiety” than other people do. “The scale taps two related components of reciprocity anxiety: avoidance, both of receiving favours/help/compliments and of feeling the need to reciprocate these things (factor 1) and distress, not only about not being able to reciprocate, but also at what others will think if you don’t (factor 2).” Those who scored higher on the “reciprocity anxiety” scale were more likely to say that if they were customers in a restaurant and the server gave them a “free money-off coupon,” they would be more likely to purchase the expensive dessert the server later recommended. The blog post author, Christian Jarrett, pointed out – and rightly so – that he’d have more confidence in the value of the scale if the research measured actual behavior rather than hypothetical behavior. Research idea Imagine if we could measure reciprocity anxiety in tourists before turning them loose on Paris’ Montmarte or Rome’s Spanish Steps. Would those tourists who scored high on the avoidance subscale work harder to avoid the friendship bracelet scammers than those who scored low? Of the tourists who get fished in, would those who scored higher on the distress subscale give more money than those who scored low? If you can’t get a research grant that would take you to Paris or Rome, you could do it on your own campus – returning the money to the marks during your debriefing, of course! Volunteer participants would take a battery of self-report measures included among those is the reciprocity anxiety scale, and then the participants are turned loose. As the participants leave the building, your confederate scammers pounce on them with string. Although, there may be a floor effect on the dependent variable. How much cash do students carry? In-class discussion After covering the norm of reciprocity, discuss this new study on reciprocity anxiety. Ask students to consider what behaviors the reciprocity anxiety subscales might predict, and then brainstorm some ways those predictions could be tested. ... View more

Before taking my first trip to Paris earlier this month, I was told to beware of some of the common street scams. I was targeted for the petition scam twice. The petition scam uses foot-in-the-door and, sometimes as a bonus, diverted attention. The scam In the petition scam, the thief approaches a likely mark with a clipboard in hand and asks, “Do you speak English?” When the mark says, “Yes,” the thief asks something like, “Would you sign this petition to support people who are deaf and mute?” When the mark says they are indeed willing, the thief hands over the clipboard and a pen. After the mark signs, the thief asks for a donation to support the cause. The money “donated” does not go to a cause other than the thief’s own. Foot-in-the-door research shows that, for example, people are more willing after signing a petition, to put ugly signs in their yards (Freedman & Fraser, 1966) or donate more money to a cause (Schwarzwald, Bizman, & Raz, 1983). Foot-in-the-door The foot-in-the-door technique starts with an innocuous question: “Do you speak English?” The mark’s response of “yes” is the foot getting in the door. The response also quickly identifies the mark as a tourist. Although, frankly, tourists are not that hard to spot. They’re the ones standing on sidewalks looking at maps. With their foot in the door, the thief aims to wedge it in even farther. The thief next asks the mark to sign a petition for a good cause. After all, who doesn’t want to support people who are deaf and mute? Most people have a pretty easy time signing their name to support a cause – and the door is opened even wider. And now comes the “sales pitch.” “Donate some money to the cause – you know, that cause that you just signed your name to supporting.” The thief hopes that the person wants to avoid the dissonance caused by saying one thing (“I support this cause”) but doing something else (“I’m not going to donate any money”) by actually handing over money. Pickpocket bonus Sometimes the petitioners work with an accomplice. While the mark holds the clipboard with one hand and signs with the other – distracted by the task and with their hands off their belongings, an accomplice rifles through the mark’s bags or pockets. If the mark donates money, the thief and their accomplice see which pocket or area in a bag the money comes from and follows the mark waiting for another opportunity to pickpocket. Distraction caused by a staged commotion by other accomplices makes for easy pickings. My experience The first petitioner who approached me in the Latin Quarter, asked if I spoke English. I said, “Yes.” She asked if I’d sign her petition to support people who are deaf and mute. That’s when alarm bells went off in my head. I’m in France. Who is she petitioning that she needs English-speakers? And “supporting” a group isn’t much of a petition. It helped that I was aware of the foot-in-the-door literature, so the only endings I could see were either being asked to donate money or being asked to put an ugly sign in my yard. I immediately declined her invitation to sign while simultaneously retaining a firm grip on my bag. When the second petitioner, this time on the Champs-Élysées, approached with the same “do you speak English” question, I said in my best French accent which, admittedly, is not very good, “Non.” She looked at me as if she didn’t believe me – probably because she just saw me holding a Paris guidebook written in English and because she heard me speaking English to my wife. Either way she knew I wasn’t going to fall for it and decided not to waste her time. I regret not finding a shady spot and watching these women in action. I guess the only choice I have is to go back to Paris. References Freedman, J. L., & Fraser, S. C. (1966). Compliance without pressure: The foot-in-the-door technique. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0023552 Schwarzwald, J., Bizman, A., & Raz, M. (1983). The Foot-in-the-Door Paradigm: Effects of Second Request Size on Donation Probability and Donor Generosity. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 9(3), 443–450. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167283093015 ... View more

Money matters. For entering U.S. collegians, the number one life goal—surpassing “helping others in difficulty,” “raising a family,” and 17 other aspirations—is “being very well off financially.” In the most recent UCLA “American Freshman” survey, 82 percent rated being very well off as “essential” or “very important.” Think of it as today’s American dream: life, liberty, and the purchase of happiness.   For human flourishing, fiscal fitness indeed matters . . . up to a point. In repeated surveys across nations, a middle-class income—and being able to control one’s life—beats being poor. Moreover, people in developed nations tend to be happier and more satisfied than those in the poorest of nations.   Beyond the middle-class level, we seem to have an income “satiation point,” at which the income-happiness correlation tapers off and happiness no longer increases. For individuals in poor countries, that point is close to $40,000; for those in rich countries, about $90,000, reports a new analysis of 1.7 million Gallup interviews by Andrew Jebb and colleagues. And consider: The average U.S.  per-person disposable income, adjusted for inflation, has happily tripled over the last 60 years, enabling most Americans to enjoy today’s wonderments, from home air conditioning to wintertime fresh fruit to smart phones. “Happily,” because few of us wish to return to yesteryear. Yet not that happily, because psychological well-being has not floated upward with the rising economic tide. The number of “very happy” adults has remained at 3 in 10, and depression has been on the rise. What triggers the diminishing psychological payoff from excess income? Two factors: Our human capacity for adaptation: Continual pleasures subside. Our tendency to assess our own circumstances by “social comparison” with those around us—and more often those above us. People with a $40,000 income tend to think $80,000 would enable them to feel wealthy—whereas those at $80,000 say they would need substantially more. Become a millionaire and move to a rich neighborhood, you still may not feel rich. As Theodore Roosevelt said, “Comparison is the thief of joy.”   The outer limit of the wealth–well-being relationship also appears in two new surveys (by Grant Donnelly, Tianyl Zheng, Emily Haisley, and Michael Norton) of an international bank’s high net-worth clients. As you can see in figures I created from their data, having $2 million and $10 million are about the same, psychologically speaking. If wealth increases well-being only up to a point—and much evidence indicates that is so—and if extreme inequality is socially toxic (great inequality in a community or country predicts lower life quality and more social pathology), then could societies increase human flourishing with economic and tax policies that spread wealth?   Let’s make this personal: If earning, accumulating, and spending money increases our happiness only to a satiation point, then why do we spend our money for (quoting the prophet Isaiah) “that which is not bread” and our “labor for that which does not satisfy?” Quite apart from moral considerations, what’s to be lost by sharing our wealth above the income-happiness satiation point?   And if one is blessed with wealth, what’s to be gained by showering inherited wealth, above the satiation point, on our children? (Consider, too, another Donnelly and colleagues finding: Inherited wealth entails less happiness than earned wealth.)   Ergo, whether we and our children drive BMWs or Honda Fits, swim in our backyard pool or at the local Y, eat filet mignon or fish filet sandwiches, hardly matters. That fact of life, combined with the more important facts of the world’s needs, makes the case for philanthropy. ... View more

The British, American, and Australian press—and hundreds of millions of royal wedding viewers—were unexpectedly enthralled by Bishop Michael Curry’s 13.5 minutes of fame: “Stole the show” (Telegraph and Vox). “Electrifying” (New York Times). “Wholly un-British, amazing, and necessary” (Esquire). “Will go down in history” (Guardian). “His star turn is set to impact the Most Reverend Michael Curry’s life for years to come” (news.com.au) His gist: “We must discover the power of love, the redemptive power of love,” God’s love. “And when we do that, we will make of this old world, a new world.” A positive message—and an appealing synopsis of authentic Christianity—but why was it so effective? Why did it connect so well and capture media coverage? What persuasion principles did he illustrate that others—preachers, teachers, students, all speakers—might want to emulate? The power of repetition. Experiments leave no doubt: Repetition strengthens memory and increases belief. Repeated statements—whether neutral (“The Louvre is the largest museum in Paris”), pernicious (“Crooked Hillary”), or prosocial (“I have a dream”)—tend to stick to the mind like peanut butter. They are remembered, and they are more likely to be believed (sometimes even when repeated in efforts to discount them). Few will forget that Curry spoke of “love” (66 times, in fact—5 per minute). We would all benefit from emulating Curry’s example: Frame a single, simple message with a pithy phrase (“the power of love”). From this unifying trunk, the illustrative branches can grow. The power of speaking from the heart. A message rings authentic when it emanates from one’s own life experience and identity—when it has enough self-disclosure to be genuine, but not so much as to be self-focused. Curry, a slave descendant, speaking in an epicenter of White privilege, began and ended with the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., and he told how his ancestors, “even in the midst of their captivity” embraced a faith that saw “a balm in Gilead to make the wounded whole.” The power of speaking to the heart. My wife—an Episcopalian who has heard Curry’s preaching—has told me that his presence lends power beyond his written words. Curry was well prepared. But rather than safely reading his polished manuscript, he made eye contact with his audience, especially Prince Harry and Ms. Markle. He spoke with passion. His words aroused emotion. They spoke to troubled hearts in a polarized world. The power of vivid, concrete examples. The behavioral scientist in me wishes it weren’t true, but, alas, compelling stories and vivid metaphors have, in study after study, more persuasive power than truth-bearing statistics. No wonder each year, 7 in 10 Americans, their minds filled with images of school shootings and local murders, say there is more crime than a year ago—even while crime statistics have plummeted. William Strunk and E. B. White’s classic, The Elements of Style, grasped the idea: “If those who have studied the art of writing are in accord on any one point, it is on this: the surest way to arouse and hold the attention of the reader is by being specific, definite, and concrete. The greatest writers—Homer, Dante, Shakespeare—are effective largely because they deal in particulars.” And Curry, too, offered particulars, with simplicity, repetition, and rhythmic cadence: When love is the way, poverty will become history. When love is the way, the earth will be a sanctuary. When love is the way, we will lay down our swords and shields down by the riverside to study war no more. When love is the way, there’s plenty good room—plenty good room—for all of God’s children. When love is the way, we actually treat each other like we are actually family. When love is the way, we know that God is the source of us all. We are brothers and sisters, children of God. Brothers and sisters: that’s a new heaven, a new earth, a new world, a new human family. With such repeated, heart-filled, concrete words, perhaps all preachers and speakers could spare listeners the fate of Eutychus, who, on hearing St. Paul’s preaching, “sunk down with sleep, and fell down from the third loft, and was taken up dead” (Acts 20:9). ... View more

On April 12, 2018, a Philadelphia Starbucks manager called police on two African American men for doing nothing (not buying coffee while awaiting a friend). Was this but “an isolated incident”—as 48 percent of White and 10 percent of Black Americans presume? Or did the arrests reflect “a broader pattern” of bias? Starbucks’ CEO later apologized for the incident, said the manager was no longer with the company, and announced that on May 29, the company would close 8000 domestic stores to enable employee racial bias training. The Starbucks fiasco drew national attention to implicit bias. It also illustrates what we social psychologists agree on, what we disagree about, and what can be usefully done: Agreement: Bias exists. When one study sent out 5000 resumes in response to job ads, applicants with names such as Lakisha and Jamal received one callback for every 15 sent, while names such as Emily and Greg received one callback for every 10 sent. Similar racial disparities have been found in Airbnb inquiry responses, Uber and Lyft pickup requests, and descriptions of driver treatment during police traffic stops. Agreement: Unconscious (implicit) biases underlie many racial disparities. Such biases are modestly revealed by the famed Implicit Association Test (IAT).  Likely the Starbucks manager never consciously thought “those two men are Black rather than White, so I’ll call the police.” Disagreement: How effective is the IAT at predicting everyday behavior? Its creators remind us it enables study of a real phenomenon, but was never intended to assess and compare individuals and predict their discrete behaviors. Disagreement: How effective is implicit bias training? Skeptics argue that “blame and shame” diversity training can backfire, triggering anger and resistance.  Or it may seem to normalize bias (“Everybody is biased”). Or it may lead to a temporary improvement in questionnaire responses, but without any lasting benefits. Even Anthony Greenwald and Brian Nosek, social psychologists and two of the IAT co-creators, echo some of these concerns. Greenwald notes that “implicit bias training . . . has not been shown to be effective, and it can even be counterproductive.” And Nosek warns that “diversity trainings are filled with good intentions and poor evidence.”   Greenwald and Nosek doubt the likely effectiveness of Starbucks’ planned training day. Nosek believes the company would be better advised to pilot and assess their intervention in a few stores and then scale it up.  But some research offers more hopeful results. As part of their research on automatic prejudice, Patricia Devine and her colleagues trained willing volunteers to replace biased with unbiased knee-jerk responses. Throughout the two-year study follow-up period, participants in their experimental intervention condition displayed reduced implicit prejudice. Another team of 24 researchers held a “research contest” that compared 17 interventions for reducing unintended prejudice among more than 17,000 individuals. Eight of the interventions proved effective. Some gave people experiences with vivid, positive examples of Black people who countered stereotypes. Recently, Nosek and Devine have collaborated with Patrick Forscher and others on a meta-analysis (statistical summary) of 494 efforts to change implicit bias. Their conclusion meets in the middle: “Implicit bias can be changed, but the effects are often weak” and may not carry over to behavior. So, what should we do? And what can we—and Starbucks and other well-intentioned organizations—do to counteract implicit bias? First, let’s not despair. Reacting with knee-jerk presumptions or feelings is  not unusual—it’s what we do with that awareness that matters. Do we let those feelings hijack our behavior? Or do we learn to monitor and correct our behavior in future situations? Neuroscience evidence shows that, for people who intend no prejudice, the brain can inhibit a momentary flash of unconscious bias in but half a second. Second, we can aim toward an all-inclusive multiculturalism. As race-expert Charles Green explains, “Working for racial justice in your organization is not about ‘going after’ those in the majority. It’s about addressing unequal power distribution and creating opportunity for all. It is structural, not personal.” Third, we can articulate clear policies—behavior norms—for how people (all people) should be treated in specific situations. Organizations can train employees to enact expected behaviors in various scenarios—dealing with customers in a coffee shop, with drivers  at a traffic stop, with reservation inquiries at a rental unit. Happily, as people act without discrimination they come to think with less prejudice. Attitudes follow behavior. ... View more

Macmillan Learning author, Elliot Aronson was interviewed by Newsweek on the 20th anniversary of Columbine. In this article Elliot Aronson, well-respected psychologist and professor emeritus from UC Santa Cruz, discusses his research and work on the jigsaw classroom. Regarding schools and school shootings, he favors an approach that makes people not hate each other. That’s the central solution. He first started jigsaw because of school desegregation in Austin, Texas. The main thing is: How do we bridge the gap between people? If they don’t hate each other, they're not going to shoot each other up. Read the full article here: http://www.newsweek.com/columbine-anniversary-psychologist-prevent-school-shooting-parkland-nra-arming-889146 ... View more

A young man, raising funds for his high school football team, knocked on the door of a Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) researcher. And not just any CTE researcher: a CTE researcher who looks specifically at teenage brains. The two sat down, and the young man learned about how concussions are not necessary to trigger CTE; repeated shots to the head will do it. The young man listened, and, in fact, chose CTE as his research project in English. When I read this NPR story, I was hoping for a better ending. And what did the young man decide about playing football? He’s still going to play. “This is something I love. I dedicate myself to [this]. This makes me healthier physically, mentally. I'm doing what I love, making friends, there's a lot of great experiences that I'm having from this.” He did decide, however, to cut back on boxing, so that’s something. When I read this article I was immediately struck by the power of immediate reinforcement over the potential of bad things happening at some unknown time in the distant future. [As an operant conditioning bonus, in the very first paragraph, the student gives us a great example of discriminative stimuli. “He’d look for lights on and listen for kids’ voices.” Those stimuli signaled a greater likelihood of receiving a donation.] But the reinforcement aside, I wondered about the social psychology of playing an intense team sport, like football. The student said, “I’m doing what I love, making friends, there’s a lot of great experiences that I’m having from this.” In Sebastian Junger’s book, War, the author writes about his experience spending 15 months with a U.S. Army platoon in Afghanistan. Once, when out on patrol, the platoon got into a firefight along a road, taking cover behind a rock wall. Afterwards, Junger asked one of the soldiers if he was scared. He said he was. Junger asked why he didn’t run. He said he stayed because the soldier on his left stayed and the soldier on his right stayed.   While still considering the power of groups, my news feed produced a fascinating article on identity fusion. Research “suggest[s] that extreme self-sacrifice is motivated by 'identity fusion', a visceral sense of oneness with the group resulting from intense collective experiences (e.g. painful rituals or the horrors of frontline combat) or from perceptions of shared biology.” Once a person fuses their identity with the group, all it takes is a threat to the group to lead the person to self-sacrifice. And those groups need to be “local” groups, like a team or a platoon. “Extended fusion” to bigger groups like one’s country can happen, but it looks like it can only happen after “local fusion.” Those who have experienced identity fusion with a local group describe the others in the group as family. It’s common to hear teammates and platoon-mates describe each other as brothers (Whitehouse, 2018). What sacrifices are you willing to make for your family?   References Whitehouse, H. (2018). Dying for the group: Towards a general theory of extreme self-sacrifice. Behavioral and Brain Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X18000249 ... View more

On most subjective and socially desirable dimensions, we tend to exhibit self-serving bias. We perceive ourselves as more moral than most others, healthier than others, more productive at work, better able to get along with others, and even better drivers. With apologies to Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “How do I love me? Let me count the ways.”   But most of us also experience a different sort of social misperception that’s biased in the opposite direction. First, a question: Who goes to more parties—you or others?   Across 11 studies, Cornell University’s Sebastian Deri and his colleagues found that university students, mall shoppers, and online respondents perceived others’ social lives to be more active than their own duller life. Other folks, it seems, party more, dine out more, and have more friends and fun.   Can you imagine why most people perceive their social lives as comparatively inactive?       Our social perceptions, according to the Deri team, suffer from biased information availability. We compare ourselves not to social reality but to what’s mentally accessible. We hear more about our friends’ activities than we do about the nonevents of their lives. If Alexis goes to a party, we’re more likely to hear about that than if she sits home looking over her toes at the TV.   Social media amplifies our sense of social disadvantage. People post selfies while out having fun—which we may browse while sitting home alone. Thus, our normal self-serving perceptions are overcome by a powerful social exposure bias.   The others-are-having-more-fun finding joins reports by Jean Twenge and her collaborators that the spread of smart phones and social media have precisely paralleled a recent increase in teen loneliness, depression, and suicide. Twenge reports that Teens who visit social-networking sites every day but see their friends in person less frequently are the most likely to agree with the statements “A lot of times I feel lonely,” “I often feel left out of things,” and “I often wish I had more good friends.”   Does your life seem pallid compared to all the fun others seem to be having?  Do you believe you are not one of the socially active “cool” people? Does your romantic life seem comparatively unexciting? Do you wish you could have as many friends as others seem to?   Well, be consoled: most of your friends feel the same way.   As Teddy Roosevelt long ago surmised, “Comparison is the thief of joy.” ... View more

[A growing body of research suggests that true humility helps us grow intellectually and to learn from and connect with each other.] In his recent essay, “You’re Wrong! I’m Right!,” Nicholas Kristof notes that our polarized culture would benefit from a willingness to engage those who challenge our own thinking and “to hear out the other side.” In a word, our civic life needs a greater spirit of humility. In his recent European Psychologist review of evidence on wise thinking, Igor Grossmann concurs with Kristof: Wisdom, he argues, grows from the integration of “intellectual humility, recognition of uncertainty [and] consideration of different perspectives.” Humility was the animating idea of John Templeton in founding his science-supportive foundation, which declares: “In keeping with the Foundation’s motto, ‘How little we know, how eager to learn,’ we value proposals that exhibit intellectual humility and open-mindedness.” Thanks partly to support from the Templeton Foundation (which—full disclosure—I serve as a trustee), we have a new generation of humility studies with titles such as “Awe and Humility,” “Humility as a Relational Virtue,” and “Intellectual Humility.” From 2000 to 2017, the annual number of PsycINFO-indexed titles mentioning “humility” has increased from one to 85: Psychology has a deep history in studying the powers and perils of humility’s antithesis: pride. We have, for example, documented: self-serving bias. We tend to see ourselves (on subjective, socially desirable dimensions) as better than most others—as more ethical, less prejudiced, and better able to get along with people. self-enhancing attributions. We willingly accept responsibility for our successes and good deeds, while shifting the blame elsewhere for our failures and misdeeds. cognitive conceit. We tend to display excessive confidence in the accuracy of our judgments and beliefs. Humility, by contrast, entails an accurate self-understanding. To paraphrase C. S. Lewis, humility is not clever people believing they are fools. Humility allows us to recognize both our own talents and others’. modest self-presentation. When we share and accept credit without seeking attention, we are not (to again paraphrase Lewis) thinking less of ourselves but thinking of ourselves less. an orientation toward others. Prioritizing others’ needs helps us regulate our own impulses. With a spirit of humility we can engage others with the anticipation that, on some matters, the other is our superior—thus giving us an opportunity to learn. True humility can be distinguished from pseudo-humility, which comes to us in two forms. One is the pretense of humility: “I am humbled to accept this award . . . to serve as your president . . . to have scored the winning goal.” No, actually, you are proud of your accomplishment—and deservedly so. The other is the delightful new research by Ovul Sezer, Francesca Gino, and Michael Norton on “the humblebrag.” Humblebragging is boasting disguised as complaining or humility: “I’ve got to stop saying yes to every interview request.” “I can’t believe I was the one who got the job over 300 other applicants!” “No makeup and I still get hit on!” But such self-promotion usually backfires, they report, by failing to convey humility or impress others. Although religious dogmatism can feed “You’re wrong, I’m right!” attitudes, theism actually offers a deep rationale for the humility that underlies science, critical thinking, and an “ever-reforming” open mind. Across their differences, most faith traditions assume two things: 1) there is a God, and 2) it’s not you or me. As fallible creatures, we should hold our own beliefs tentatively. And we should assess others’ ideas with openness, using observation and experiments (where appropriate) to winnow truth from error—both in our own thinking and that of others. In a spirit of humility, we can “Test everything, hold fast to what is good” (St. Paul). ... View more