Below is a tremendous clip from a longer video called Did You Used To Be R. D. Laing? in which the ever provocative psychologist discusses a condition he describes as “Psychophobia”– a fear of our own psyches–and reservations he had about modern psychological thinking. The full video was released a year after his death in 1989. The clip is about 3.5 minutes long.
If you follow a news commentator closely, reading everything he or she writes in whatever venue it appears, you may unknowingly be in a trust trap. Studies have shown that once we invest trust in a particular source of knowledge, we’re less likely to scrutinize information from that source in the future.
Now a new study in the journal Applied Psychological Science has taken this investigation a step further, showing that the trust trap can also result in the creation of false memories — and not only in the short term.
Researchers crafted an experimental design in which they exposed two groups of participants to a series of images followed by narration about the images. The first group (refered to as the “treat-trick” group) received mostly accurate narration about the images. The comparison group received mostly misinformation. Both groups then completed tests of recall to determine how much accurate versus inaccurate information they remembered.
One month later, the participants were brought back to undergo the same experiment, except this time the treat-trick group was given misinformation during the narration (ie. the “trick”), as was the comparison group. Both groups again completed tests of recall.
Here’s what happened: In the first session, the treat-trick group had a significantly higher rate of true memory versus the comparison group (which we’d expect since only the comparison group was given misinformation during this session) — at a rate of about 82% for the treat-trick group and 57% for the comparison group.
But in the second session, in which both groups were given misinformation one month later, the treat-trick group had significantly lower true memory recall than the comparison group: 47% versus 58%. The graph below shows overall results for both sessions of the study.
The most likely reason for this effect is that the treat-trick group fell into a trust trap. Because information provided by the narrative source in the first session was accurate (and test scores were high as a result), participants believed the source to be credible and trustworthy. The comparison group, on the other hand, had no reason to invest trust in the original source and exhibited recall at roughly the same level for both sessions.
What’s most interesting is the timeframe of this effect. Researchers conducted the sessions a month apart, allowing ample time for a trust effect to wear off. But it didn’t.
The real-world implications of this research are important. Eyewitness testimony can be changed when a witness listens to an information source they’ve previously trusted as credible (either media, interrogators, or other people), and this study suggests that the window of opportunity for this effect is large. Any follow-up information received by an eyewitness from any number of sources can significantly alter his or her memory.
Yet another example of how malleable our memories truly are, and the risks we run of putting so much faith in something so changeable.
Zhu, B., Chen, C., F. Loftus, E., Lin, C., & Dong, Q. (2009). Treat and trick: A new way to increase false memory Applied Cognitive Psychology DOI: 10.1002/acp.1637
Every time you see news about a study claiming that “kids who [fill in blank with behavior X] are likely to develop [fill in blank with psychological malady Y] later in life”–or some variation on that theme–the link between X and Y often seems inexplicable. It’s as if by some cruel stroke of fate, children who do ostensibly innocent things are dooming themselves to disorders they can’t even spell yet.
News in this category comes out all the time, and I’m about to contend that the answer is almost always the same.
Here’s an example: A study just came out of Cardiff University in the UK indicating that children who eat candy every day are more likely to become violent adults. Researchers looked at cumulative data on 17,500 people and found that 69% of the participants who were violent at the age of 34 had eaten candy and chocolate nearly every day during childhood (around age 10), compared to 42% who were non-violent.
The link between candy and violence remained constant even after controlling for other factors such as parenting, geography, lack of education after the age of 16 and (oddly) whether they had access to a car when they were 34.
Now, first of all, this is a cohort study that uses droves of health and lifestyle data on large groups of people and attempts to identify linkages. I’m not saying that the methodology alone calls the findings into question, but fishing for correlations in oceans of data has its perils. You’re liable to find several bizarre connections and not all are worth talking about.
Having said that, let’s assume that this finding is accurate. What’s the explanation? Researchers at Cardiff suspect that certain additives in candy may contribute towards aggression. I think it’s fairly easy to rule that out, because the sheer number and variety of additives in candy makes correlation impossible. Do Skittles make kids more violent than Snickers? Is Red #5 a worse contributor to barbarism than Yellow #8? This can get really silly.
We’re also faced with not knowing if eating more of a particular type of confection makes a child become more aggressive than another. If Bobby eats three Hershey’s Kisses every day, will he become more violent than Sandy who eats four Swedish Fish and a Cadbury bar? Again, silly.
Non-chemical explanations are of two varieties, and they’re essentially flip sides of the same coin. Either the kids who ate more candy did so because they didn’t delay (defer) gratification, or because they were difficult personalities to begin with and their parents gave them more candy to appease them. These are not mutually exclusive categories, and I strongly suspect that the answer lies somewhere in the overlap.
And it stands to reason, as a long list of research indicates, that failure to delay gratification combined with parental indulgence are the culprits. The Stanford Marshmallow Test in the 1960s kicked off this line of study. Psychologist Walter Mischel gave each child in a group of 4-year olds a marshmallow and told them that if they didn’t eat it and wait for him to return after 20 minutes, he would give them another as a reward for being patient. Some children ate the marshmallow right away and some of them were able to resist the temptation.
Fourteen years later, Mischel followed up on the children. Those who couldn’t wait suffered low self-esteem and were generally regarded by their teachers and parents as “stubborn, prone to envy and easily frustrated.” Meanwhile, those who did not eat their marshmallows were self-motivated, educationally successful and emotionally intelligent.
There’s some debate about the exact details of the marshmallow study, but the general result has been born out by other studies over the years (as documented in this excellent New Yorker piece by science writer Jonah Lehrer). Further studies have also gone on to link delayed gratification to varying levels of intelligence.
I’d argue that nearly all of these results, similar to candy correlating with violence, link back to delayed gratification. Why they do is the real question, and I’m not sure anyone has sufficiently answered it yet. Perhaps failing to delay gratification impairs learning, or triggers indulgent habits that grow harder to change with time, or short-circuits impulse control networks in the brain. Maybe all of the above, and likely more. Whatever the case, it seems clear that the problems start early in life, and left unchecked the path of least resistance leads to a difficult adulthood.
Futurist Ray Kurzweil, author of The Age of Spiritual Machines and The Singularity is Near, visits Google’s Mountain View, CA headquarters to discuss his book “The Web Within Us: When Minds and Machines Become One.” This event took place on July 1, 2009, as part of the Authors@Google series.
Before our first son was born, my wife and I took labor preparation classes at the hospital. The instructor suggested that when the big day arrived, husbands (or partners) should bring to the hospital a photograph of someone or something that their wives love (kids, pets, family members, etc). While in labor, the instructor said, the photo will help the soon-to-be mother cope with the pain.
This seemed like decent counsel to me, though probably more of a “good feeling” suggestion than a scientific one. I’ve just come across a new study, however, that injects some sound science into the advice.
The study, published in the journal Psychological Science, investigated whether the pain-reducing effects of social support can be activated with a photograph of a supporter instead of the real thing. Previous research has demonstrated that activating mental representations of individuals can produce effects similar to the person being there. But in this study researchers wanted to know if a photograph could produce an effect similar to someone in pain holding a loved one’s hand — a higher benchmark to achieve.
The subjects were 28 women in long-term relationships. They were brought into a testing room and their partners were brought into another to have photos taken. The women underwent testing to determine their pain thresholds via thermal stimulation. Once the thresholds were established for each subject, they were then exposed to a series of conditions while experiencing pain, including (1) holding the hand of their partner as he sat behind a curtain, (2) holding a squeeze ball, (3) holding the hand of a stranger, (4) viewing a photograph of their partner on a computer screen, (5) viewing a photograph of a male stranger, and (6) viewing nothing. Subjects rated each condition’s unpleasantness on a 21-box numerical scale (the Gracely Box Scale, used in similar previous studies).
Here’s what happened: As expected, holding their partner’s hand resulted in significantly reduced pain ratings when compared to holding an object or a stranger’s hand. Viewing their partner’s photograph also produced significant pain reduction when compared to the object and stranger conditions. Interestingly, viewing a photo was also marginally MORE effective than holding their partner’s hand. The graph below shows the results.
What seems to be happening here is that our brains can be primed to conjure mental associations with being loved and supported just by viewing a photo — and this priming is potent enough to actually reduce how much pain is felt. And, as the results suggest, in some cases a photo may be even more effective than the real thing.
Master, S., Eisenberger, N., Taylor, S., Naliboff, B., Shirinyan, D., & Lieberman, M. (2009). A Picture’s Worth: Partner Photographs Reduce Experimentally Induced Pain Psychological Science DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2009.02444.x
A man accused of a crime is brought into a police interrogation room and sits down at an empty table. There’s no polygraph equipment in sight, and the typical two-cop questioning team isn’t in the room either. Instead, one officer enters the room with a piece of paper and a pencil in his hands. He sets them in front of the suspect, steps back, and calmly says, “draw.”
That’s a greatly oversimplified description of what could happen in actual interrogation rooms if the results of a recent study in the journal Applied Cognitive Psychology are widely adopted. The study is the first to investigate whether drawing is an effective lie detection technique in comparison to verbal methods.
Researchers hypothesized that several tendencies would become evident in the scribbles and sketches of liars not found in those of non-liars. For instance, they suspected that liars, when asked to sketch out the particulars of a location where they hadn’t really been to meet someone they hadn’t really met, would provide less detail in their drawings. They also suspected that the drawing would seem less plausible overall, and would not include a depiction of the person they allegedly met.
Finally, they hypothesized that non-liars would use a “shoulder-camera” perspective to draw the situation – a direct, line-of-sight view that previous research suggests is more indicative of truth telling. Liars, they suspected, would use an “overhead-camera” perspective, indicating a sense of detachment from the situation.
Subjects were given a “mission” that included going to a designated location and meeting a person with whom they would exchange information. In all, four different missions were conducted. The particulars of the missions were constructed such that about half of the participants would, when interviewed, be able to tell the truth about what happened, and half would have to lie (the researchers used a fabricated espionage theme to work this out – very clever).
During the interview, subjects were asked questions about their experience, as would happen in a normal interrogation, and also asked to draw the particulars of their experience. Results of the verbal responses could then be compared to the drawn responses to determine which were more effective in identifying liars.
Here’s what happened: No significant differences in level of detail were found between verbal and drawn statements, but the plausibility of truthful drawings was somewhat higher than deceptive drawings. A similar difference in plausibility was not evident between truthful and deceptive verbal statements.
More interestingly, significantly more truth tellers included the “agent” (other person in the situation) in their drawings than did liars (80% vs. 13%). In addition, significantly more truth tellers drew from a shoulder-camera view than liars, who by in large drew from an overhead view (53% vs. 19%). In verbal statements, more truth tellers also mentioned the agent (53%) than liars (19%).
Using the “sketching the agent” result alone, it was possible to identify 80% of the truth tellers and 87% of the liars – results superior to most traditional interview techniques.
The main reason drawing seems to be effective in identifying liars is that they have less time to work out the details. Someone who is telling the truth already has a visual image of where they were and what happened (even if it’s not perfect, which of course it never is), but liars have to manufacture the details. It’s easier to concoct something verbally than to first visualize and then create it on paper.
Vrij, A., Leal, S., Mann, S., Warmelink, L., Granhag, P., & Fisher, R. (2009). Drawings as an innovative and successful lie detection tool Applied Cognitive Psychology DOI: 10.1002/acp.1627
One of the consistent elements in political discussions is the influence of religious belief on attitudes toward government. And typically it’s assumed that a high degree of religiosity is synonymous with a high degree of moral conviction – they’re popularly thought to go hand-in-hand. So, if someone’s attitude toward governmental authority is influenced by his or her religiosity, it should logically follow that this attitude is further buttressed by his or her moral conviction; the influence should be the same.
But is that true?
A new study in the journal Psychological Science sought to find out how religiosity and moral conviction influence attitudes toward authority. A survey was administered to a representative sample of 727 Americans, ages 19-90, to asses the degree of trust or mistrust people have in major decisions made by the Supreme Court (in this case, physician assisted suicide, a.k.a ’PAS’). The sample drew from a wide socioeconomic and educational background.
Measures evaluated via the survey included:
Here’s what researchers found out: First, the stronger a person’s moral conviction, the less they trust the Supreme Court to make a judgment about PAS. Conversely, the higher the degree of a person’s religiosity, the MORE they trust the Supreme Court to make a decision on this sensitive issue.
Just to be clear about that — the results for moral conviction were exactly the opposite of those for religiosity.
Also, the stronger a person’s moral conviction, the faster they responded to the trust question, indicating a visceral reaction as opposed to a more considered one. Likewise, the higher the degree of someone’s religiosity, the faster they responded to the trust question. So in the case of both moral conviction and religiosity, responses were significantly visceral.
At least two major implications can be drawn out from this study. The first is that the typical assumption that religiosity and moral conviction are necessarily synonymous is false. Moral conviction in this study was strongly linked to distrust in legitimate authority, while religiosity was strongly linked to trust in legitimate authority.
The second implication is that morally convicted people don’t merely “react” to decisions with which they don’t agree. Instead, it’s clear that they don’t trust legitimate authorities to make the right decisions in the first place. Their reaction is simply a projection of a predisposition already strongly held.
The one crucial area this study didn’t tease out fully enough, in my opinion, is where religiosity and moral conviction overlap. Presumably, level of moral conviction would trump level of religiosity on attitudes toward authority (at least it certainly seems this way) – but it’s also possible that religiosity has a moderating effect on moral conviction’s influence in some cases. It would have been useful to see this worked out more carefully in the study; nevertheless, the results are telling.
UPDATE: It’s always great when an author of a study reviewed here comments on the post. Dr. Linda Skitka, one of the authors of this study, left the comment below, which provides an important clarification. Many thanks!
I’m one of the authors of this article. FYI: we did test whether religiosity moderated the effects of moral conviction, and it did not–in other words, the effects of moral conviction on trust in the Supreme Court did not change as a function of whether the perceiver was low or high in religiosity. We measured both general religiosity, as well as whether people’s feelings about PAS were based on religious convictions, and got the same pattern of results regardless of which way we operationalized “religiousness”. Interestingly (and counter-intuitively), about one-third of those whose attitude about PAS reflected a strong religious conviction did not report that their attitude about PAS was a strong moral conviction.
Wisneski, D., Lytle, B., & Skitka, L. (2009). Gut Reactions: Moral Conviction, Religiosity, and Trust in Authority Psychological Science, 20 (9), 1059-1063 DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2009.02406.x
David DiSalvo is a freelance writer and research wonk who has written and lectured on topics involving public health, air and water quality, branding, education, energy efficiency, healthcare and social marketing. More info here.
Visit my other blog, Brainspin, on the True/Slant Network
Follow me on Twitter
Scientific American Wired Science Science Blogs Select
