The Facial Situation of Presidential Candidates

From InMind (an outstanding article by Dr. Theresa DiDonato from a few years ago):

If your citizenship comes with the responsibility – and privilege – of voting, then every few years you face an interesting challenge. Who will you vote for? Whether you choose to support an incumbent, a celebrated war hero, an experienced government official, or a new face on the political scene, psychologists are incredibly curious about the process by which you come to that decision. There is reason to believe that, coming from a thoughtful and prepared voter, your ballot will reflect an objective assessment of candidate qualifications. You may, for example, use the time before an election to analyze debates, weigh social policies, and scrutinize performance records. With a wealth of political information at the tip of your fingers, only careful, deliberative thinking will contribute to your final decision…right?

Recent research in political psychology tells us that conscious deliberation is only part of the story when it comes to the voter-decision process. Information about candidates is further gathered using no mental effort, through processes operating completely outside of our awareness. Visual cues, for example, such as physical appearance, are instrumental in shaping our impressions of political candidates. Consider the case of Richard Nixon, a United States’ presidential hopeful back in September of 1960. Coming off of a hospital visit and sporting a five-o’clock shadow, Nixon participated in the first-ever televised presidential debate against John F. Kennedy, whose recent return from sunny California left him well-rested and tan. There is reason to believe that Nixon’s arguments were superior: radio listeners thought he won the debate. The estimated 70 million TV viewers, however, overwhelmingly preferred Kennedy. Visual information, i.e. Kennedy’s clean-cut confidence versus Nixon’s haggard appearance, is presumed to have influenced the TV viewers, ultimately shaping their global impressions of both candidates (Kraus, 1988).

Fast forward almost fifty years and researchers are just beginning to understand how physical appearance, particularly facial appearance, factors into voter choice. Nixon’s and Kennedy’s facial expression may certainly have evoked emotional reactions from television viewers during that critical debate. Accordingly, research suggests that feelings, like warmth or happiness, in response to a candidate’s facial gestures can influence voters’ attitudes and subsequent decisions (Sullivan & Masters, 1988). Of particular interest to social-cognitive researchers who study person-perception is how the mind translates facial appearance into beliefs about a candidate’s suitability for office. We now know that in the instant we see a person’s face, an array of fast and implicit cognitive processes take place. In that split second, we unconsciously construct ideas about a person’s personality (Bar, Neta & Linz, 2006). We may think a person is kind, strict, or honest, based only on his appearance. As you might imagine, because we make these personality inferences so easily, they can have important implications for a political candidate seeking election. Indeed, early research had found that a candidate’s photograph can communicate a clear image of his “congressional demeanor,” and fitness for office, affecting his voter appeal (Rosenberg, Bohan, McCafferty, & Harris, 1986). But what is it exactly about a politician’s face that influences his popularity? And which trait inferences matter when it comes to our voting decisions?

As most politicians know, people generally favor familiar faces over unfamiliar faces. What they may not be aware of is people also tend to prefer faces that are similar to their own. Such an idea is firmly grounded in evolutionary theory. Our faces tend to be similar to our family members’ faces, and we also generally share genetic material with them. The evolutionary perspective argues that we are fundamentally wired to protect and spread our genes, so it makes sense that we might be biologically-biased to prefer similar faces. Is this preference sufficiently ingrained so that we might actually prefer candidates who resemble us?

Bailenson, Iyengar, Yee, and Collins (in press) used a creative method to test this idea. Building on their previous work (Bailenson, Garland, Iyengar, & Yee, 2006), they examined the influence of facial similarity on voting behavior by actually manipulating the degree of facial similarity between participants and candidates. How? By digitally morphing images of participants’ faces with photographs of current candidates! Essentially, they screened out participants with glasses and facial hair, and used only high-quality photographs. They then used a computer program to morph, or blend, participants’ faces into the faces of real-life United States’ politicians, such as Hillary Clinton. Participants were unaware of the image modifications.

The researchers conducted three experiments in which they showed participants candidate photos that had been morphed with themselves (self-morph) and/or with a random other participant (other-morph). In some cases, these images were of widely-known politicians, like John Edwards or Rudy Giuliani, while other times they were of unfamiliar candidates. Participants rated each candidate on a set of ten positive personality traits (i.e. moral, intelligent, and friendly), reported their party affiliation (Democrat or Republican), and indicated the strength of that affiliation. In the final experiment, participants also saw a brief description of the candidates’ positions on issues like the Iraq War along with their picture.

The intrigue and appeal of these findings are further enhanced by the researchers’ discovery that judgment speed mattered. They found that immediate, first impressions of competence, made after seeing an image for only 100 milliseconds, were superior to deliberative judgments in anticipating the winner of an election (Ballew & Todorov, 2007). This finding seems counterintuitive: how could gut feelings outperform reflective thinking? At the same time, it fits well with one research study focused not on candidate preferences, but on strawberry jam. Wilson and Schooler (1991) asked participants to taste and rate the quality of different jams, and then tested the “accuracy” of these ratings by comparing them with evaluations offered by trained tasting experts. Results showed that when participants were instructed to reflect on why they liked or disliked the jams, they produced ratings that did not corresponded with the experts’ ratings as well as those who simply rated the jams without reflection.

What is it about judging unfamiliar candidates and unfamiliar jams that champions intuition over careful reflection?

Find out and to read the rest of the superb article, here.

Related Situationist posts:

• Voting for a Face
• Botoxifying Empathy
• A Reminder: Smile
• Stereotyping Political Ideology
• The Situation of Smiling
• The Body Has a Mind of its Own,
• The Situational Power of Appearance and Posture,
• The Magnetism of Beautiful People,
• Interpreting Facial Expressions,
• Smile If You Love Your Future Relationships
• Can You Turn the World on With Your Smile?, and
• A Look Into the Way Culture Affects Facial Expression.

More posts on the situation of politics here.

Elizabeth Loftus on False Memories

From Beyond Belief Conference in 2006 (includes discussion of the role of litigation in altering people’s memories):

Related Situationist posts:

• The Situation of False Confessions
• Elizabeth Loftus and the Situation of False Memories
• Emotional Content of True and False Memories – Abstract
• Mood & Memory
• The Situation of Confabulation
• Emotional Content of True and False Memories – Abstract
• The Situation of Memory
• Mistakes Were Made (but not by me)

Sam McFarland Interview on The Situation of Empathy

From WKU Public Radio:

WKU Psychology professor Sam McFarland has long been fascinated by individuals who put their lives–and the lives of loved ones–at risk in order to save people of a different race, ethnicity, or religious group. Dr. McFarland has an article that’s set to be published in a social psychology journal called “All Humanity is My Ingroup: A Measure and Studies of ‘Identification with All Humanity.’”

In his paper, Dr. McFarland describes the idea of “identification with all humanity” as the ability to view all peoples of the world as part of a sort of extended family, and value the lives of those from different backgrounds equally as those from your own background.

Dr. McFarland recently sat down with WKU Public Radio to talk about his research. Here are some excerpts from our interview:

WKU Public Radio: How did you become interested in the subject of having empathy for people who are different from yourself?

Sam McFarland: “First of all, I became familiar with a number of very heroic examples of people who, during the Holocaust, went out of their way to save Jews from the Nazis. When my wife and I were on an anniversary trip, I read a very interesting book by Kristen Monroe called Heart of Altruism, and she was trying to identify the critical characteristics were of those who risked their own lives and sometimes the lives of their family members to save Jews who were in danger of being killed.

“When she did interviews with those people and interview with others, she discovered the critical characteristics seem to be that they had a sense that all humanity is one family. The feelings transcended nationality, religion, ethnic group, and every other distinction we make about human beings.

“Then I became aware that their were psychologists who had talked about that, such as Alfred Adler and Abraham Maslow. They thought that fully mature human beings transcend the ethnocentrisms that are around them. They care about all humanity–past, present, and future.

“But then I realized that psychology had never really studied this, it had never been measured. So I wanted to see if we could build a rational measure of it, and see if that measure predicts the kinds of things we think it ought to predict. “

Your research paper makes reference to a set of interviews that had been previously done with “Holocaust rescuers”–people who had risked their lives to save Jews during WWII. The interviews found a quality present in the rescuers that became known as “extensivity.” What is that, and how does it factor into what you were researching?

“The particular study you’re referring to was done by a man named Sam Oliner, and his wife, Pearl Oliner. They had been longtime professors at Humboldt State University in California.

“Sam was a 10-year-old Jewish child in Poland during the war. And when the Nazis came to his town, his step-mother told him to run away from the Germans. And Sam ran away, and he was taken in by a Christian family who taught him how to act as a Christian, and say the catechism, for example.

“He survived the war. When he tried to find his parents afterwards, he found out they both had died.

“A number of years later, Sam and his wife decided to go back to Poland and interview a large number of people who had been rescuers like the woman who had saved him. They tried to do comparison studies with those who, you might say, just stood by and watched things happen without doing anything.

“He found that those who had rescued Jews felt a sense of responsibility towards all people, and a sense of empathy towards all people. The feelings transcended whether they were Catholic, or atheist, or communist, or any other thing. It was just part of a sense of who they were.”

Are the characteristics you’re talking about, the empathy towards all people–are those innate characteristics? In other words, is this a matter of something you’re either born with, or you’re not? Can a grown person be taught these sorts of things?

“Those are great questions that we do not have answers to. That’s the sort of thing we need to explore and understand.

“Why is it that some people develop a sense of “all humanity is my ingroup”, whereas perhaps the majority of people do not? We don’t really know.

“I think we can point to certain kinds of pre-cursors. For example, excessive punitiveness and excessive parental neglect are things we know can make a person what Alfred Adler called “self-bound”, and much more difficult for that person to care about other people.

“So there are certain things that happen in early childhood that can facilitate (empathy), things like parental affection.

“You raised the question if part of it is possibly just genetics. That’s certainly possible. We just simply don’t know at this point.”

Sam McFarland’s article is to be published in a forthcoming edition of The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Listen to the interview here.

Related Situationist posts:

• The Religious Situation of Compassion and Generosity
• The Financial Situation of Empathy
• Can Meditation Make Us More Compassionate?
• God’s Situational Effects
• Do Doctors Lack Empathy?
• Racial bias clouds ability to feel others’ pain
• Students’ Situations Leave Them Less Empathetic (Situationist)
• The Interior Situation of Complex Human Feelings
• The Neuro-Situation of Violence and Empathy
• It’s Hard to Step into Someone Else’s Shoes
• The Situation of Morality and Empathy
• The Situation of Caring
• New Study Looks at the Roots of Empathy

Jonathan Haidt Changes His Situation

From BusinessWire:

New York University Stern School of Business today announced that Jonathan Haidt will join its faculty in the fall of 2012 as the Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership. Haidt has served as the Henry Kaufman Visiting Professor of Business Ethics at Stern for the 2011-12 academic year.

“Every economic crisis seems to evoke a renewed call for business schools to redouble their emphasis on ethics. The repeated nature of these exhortations suggests that the problem may not be a lack of attention to the issue but the need for thoughtful new approaches. As one of the founders and the pre-eminent researcher in the field of moral psychology, Jonathan Haidt has changed the way that we look at ethics and moral behavior. At Stern, he will bring his knowledge to bear upon questions of design for ethical business systems,” said Peter Henry, dean of NYU Stern.

Haidt is widely recognized for research on the intuitive foundations of morality and how morality and emotion vary across cultures. In recent years, he has used moral psychology to understand America’s ideological and hyper-partisanship. This work is the focus of his best-selling new book, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. His work draws consistent praise from both sides of the political spectrum, and is covered often in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.

Within the Business and Society Program at NYU Stern, Haidt aims to integrate research on moral psychology with research and theory in business ethics, seeking the best ways to create organizations that function as ethical systems, with only minimal need for directly training people to behave ethically. He will create a course at Stern called “Ethical Systems Design.”

Before joining Stern, Haidt was a Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Virginia for 16 years, and served as the Laurance S. Rockefeller Distinguished Visiting Professor at Princeton University in 2006-2007. He was the 2001 winner of the Templeton Prize in Positive Psychology, and a 2004 winner of the Virginia Outstanding Faculty Award, conferred by Governor Mark Warner. In addition to his new book, Professor also is the author of The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom.

More.

Related Situationist posts:

• Jonathan Haidt on the Situation of Moral Reasoning
• The Situation of Morality
• Jonathan Haidt – 5 Moral Values Behind Political Choices
• Haidt on “The Righteous Mind”

Random Assignments

Social Psychologist Dave Nussbaum recently launched his blog, Random Assignments.

The blog already contains several posts worth reading, including a series on the important topic of replication in social science.  The first two parts are “Replicating Dissonance” and “Conceptual Replication.”

Here’s a sample of Nussbaum’s writing:

The 1950s were a bleak time if you were a social psychologist interested in the empirical study of thoughts and feelings and how they affect human behavior. At that time, experimental psychology was dominated by behaviorism, an approach which focused exclusively on observable behavior, exiling ephemeral concepts like beliefs and emotions outside the boundaries of proper science. But things were about to change.

The Theory of Cognitive Dissonance, published by Leon Festinger in 1957, was one of those things. The theory was based on the simple idea that when a person simultaneously holds two conflicting beliefs he will experience a feeling of discomfort – cognitive dissonance – and that he will be motivated to end that discomfort by reducing the conflict between the beliefs, often by changing one of them.

Today, the term cognitive dissonance has entered our vernacular and the idea that we change or discard beliefs that don’t suit us seems like common sense. Research on how people rationalize their beliefs has spread to political science, medicine, neuroscience, and the law, and is one of the cornerstones of our understanding of human psychology. But in 1957, at a time when the field of psychology was dominated by behaviorism, the notion was far more controversial. Luckily, Leon Festinger and his colleagues and students conducted numerous experiments that tested predictions derived from Cognitive Dissonance Theory that could not be accounted for by behaviorist principles.

One of my favorite of these experiments (PDF), published by Elliot Aronson and Judson Mills in 1959, had college women reading obscene words out loud (words so obscene that I don’t feel comfortable writing them here myself, but the F word is in there, as is a four-letter word that also means rooster, and remember, this was 1959!). The women were reading these words as an initiation to get into a discussion group about the psychology of sex – they had to prove they were not going to be too embarrassed to take part in the conversation. This was the “severe initiation” condition. Another group of women recited a milder list of words (e.g., prostitute, virgin); this was the “mild initiation” condition. The women then heard a recording of a discussion by the group to which they had gained entry – as it turned out, the discussion was, according to the study’s authors, “one of the most worthless and uninteresting discussions imaginable.”  The question was which group of women would like the psychology of sex discussion group more, the ones who had to undergo the severe initiation or the mild one?

To find out, pay a visit to Nussbaum’s blog.

Related Situationist posts:

• Double-Checking Our Science
• John Bargh Responds
• Ideological Bias in Social Psychology?

Money Feelings

Hyun Young Park and Tom Meyvis, recently posted their paper, “Feeling Immoral About Money: How Moral Emotions Influence Spending Decisions” on SSRN.  Here’s the abstract:

Prior literature suggests that consumers who feel negative moral emotions engage in a moral compensation process that is generalized and flexible. In contrast, the current research demonstrates that consumers who feel guilty or angry about money seek compensation in a strikingly specific way. We find that feeling guilty about money increases pro-social spending, but not volunteering of time or spending on personal virtues. Moreover, this increase in pro-social spending only occurs when the guilt is moral in nature and the money being spent is the money consumers feel guilty about. The specific nature of this effect suggests that consumers who feel guilty about money try to cleanse the money rather than try to redeem themselves. Feeling angry about money, on the other hand, is shown to decrease pro-social spending, highlighting the need to distinguish between specific emotions when examining how feelings about money affect consumer spending decisions.

Download the paper for free here.

Related Situationist posts:

• The Religious Situation of Compassion and Generosity
• The Financial Situation of Empathy
• The Situational Consequences of Poverty on Brains
• Resisting Materialism
• Money Priming
• Body Image and Materialism
• The Situational Effects of Wealth and Status
• Shocking for Money

The Racial Situation of 2012 Election

From University of Washington Newswire:

After the 2008 election of President Barack Obama, many proclaimed that the country had entered a post-racial era in which race was no longer an issue. However, a new large-scale study shows that racial attitudes have already played a substantial role in 2012, during the Republican primaries. They may play an even larger role in this year’s presidential election.

The study, led by psychologists at the University of Washington, shows that between January and April 2012 eligible voters who favored whites over blacks – either consciously or unconsciously – also favored Republican candidates relative to Barack Obama.

“People were saying that with Obama’s election race became a dead issue, but that’s not at all the case,” said lead investigator Anthony Greenwald, a UW psychology professor.

The study’s findings mean that many white and non-white voters, even those who don’t believe they tend to favor whites over blacks, might vote against Obama because of his race. These voters could cite the economy or other reasons, but a contributing cause could nevertheless be their conscious or unconscious racial attitudes.

“Our findings may indicate that many of those who expressed egalitarian attitudes by voting for Obama in 2008 and credited themselves with having ‘done the right thing’ then are now letting other considerations prevail,” said collaborator Mahzarin Banaji, a psychology professor at Harvard University.

In the study, a majority of white eligible voters showed a pattern labeled “automatic white preference” on a widely used measure of unconscious race bias. Previous studies indicate that close to 75 percent of white Americans show this implicit bias.

In a study done just prior to the 2008 presidential election, Greenwald and colleagues found that race attitudes played a role in predicting votes for the Republican candidate John McCain.

The 2012 data, collected from nearly 15,000 voters, show that race was again a significant factor in candidate preferences.

In an online survey, Greenwald asked survey-takers about their political beliefs, how “warmly” they felt toward black and white people, and which presidential contender they preferred. Because the survey was conducted in the first four months of 2012, it included the five main Republican hopefuls – Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich, Ron Paul, Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum – as well as Obama.

Greenwald also measured unconscious race attitude using the Implicit Association Test, a tool he developed more than a decade ago to gauge thoughts that people don’t realize they have. Different variations of the test measure implicit attitudes about race, gender, sexuality, ethnicities and other topics.

Greenwald found that favoritism for Republican candidates was predicted by respondents’ racial attitudes, both their self-reported views and their implicit biases measured by the IAT. Greenwald emphasized that the study’s finding that some candidates are more attractive to voters with pro-white racial attitudes does not mean that those candidates are racist.

“The study’s findings raise an interesting question: After nearly four years of having an African-American president in the White House, why do race attitudes continue to have a role in electoral politics?” Greenwald said.

He suspects that Obama’s power as president in 2012, compared with his lesser status as candidate in 2008, may have “brought out race-based antagonism that had less reason to be activated in 2008.”

Another possibility is that Republican candidates’ assertions that their most important goal is to remove Obama from the presidency “may have strong appeal to those who have latent racial motivation,” Greenwald said.

Greenwald and his research team will continue to collect people’s attitudes about the 2012 presidential candidates as part of their Decision 2012 IAT study. Now that Mitt Romney has emerged as the presumptive Republican nominee, the researchers are modifying their survey to focus on voters’ comparisons of Romney with Obama.

They plan to post summaries of the data each month until the November election. Anyone can take the test online: https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/demo/featuredtask.html

More.

Related Situationist posts:

• The Situation of the Voting Booth
• The Informational Situation of Voters
• Reporting Social Facts vs. Pining for Jim Crow: No Comparison Between Reid and Lott
• Racial Attitudes in the Presidential Race
• The Situation of Pollworkers and Voting Booths – Abstract
• The Racial Situation of Voting
• The Interior Situation of Undecided Voters
• On Being a Mindful Voter
• Implicit Associations in the 2008 Presidential Election
• The Situation of Political Animals
  
• Your Brain on Politics.

Haidt on “The Righteous Mind”

From Wired:

Jonathan Haidt is a professor in social psychology and author of The Righteous Mind, an examination of the intuitive foundations of morality and its consequences. He has some disgusting stories for you.

Imagine, if you will, a man going to a supermarket, buying a ready-to-cook chicken, taking it home, and having sexual intercourse with it. He then cooks it and eats it.

Or imagine a brother and sister who go on holiday, and end up sleeping together. They feel that it brings them closer, and are very careful with birth control so there’s no absolutely chance of pregnancy.

Don’t worry if you found these stories sick and wrong — most people do. But trying to pin down what exactly is wrong with these stories can be tricky. No one is harmed, the food isn’t wasted, the siblings are happy, yet it’s somehow still wrong. This is “moral dumbfounding’, the strong feeling that something is wrong without clear reasons as to why that is. According to Haidt, this offers a deep insight into human morality, and has profound implications for politics and religion.

Haidt’s studies bear out his message is that for every one of us, however rational we think we are, intuition comes first, and strategic reasoning second. That is, we rationalise our gut instincts, rather than using reason to reach the best conclusion. So, with the chicken story, you’re left scrabbling around for reasons to explain why something is wrong when you just know that it is. For Haidt, this is something that modern thinking has failed to recognise. “In America there was a long period where we were trying to teach kids critical thinking, and you never hear about it anymore because it didn’t work,” says Haidt.

Haidt sees our reasoning mind and intuition as a rider on top of an elephant, with the rider (reason) serving the elephant (intuition). But he doesn’t necessarily see this as a flaw. “You need to learn how to get the rider and elephant to work together properly. Each have their separate skill, and if if you think that the rider is both in charge and deserves to rule, you’re going to find yourself screwing up, and wondering why you keep screwing up. I think maturity and wisdom occur when someone gets good integration between the rider and the elephant — and I picked an elephant rather than a horse because elephants are really big and really smart. If you see a trainer and an elephant working together it’s a beautiful sight.”

Not only do we start with a conclusion and work backwards when making moral judgements, the different moral tenets you use define where you lie on the political spectrum. Broadly, the left makes moral judgements mostly based on harm and fairness, while the right has a broader palette — harm, fairness, loyalty, authority, and sanctity.

So when, for example David Cameron suggests children should be more deferential, Haidt sees this as textbook: “That’s the authority foundation right there. Respect for authority is an offensive idea to people on the left, but it is quite sensible to social conservatives. It’s speaking directly to the elephant. Did he suggest this because he has really long been upset about the decline of authority, or is he maybe doing this to appeal to the more working-class traditionalist voters, those who vote Labour but are socially conservative at heart?”

But isn’t this simply another typical liberal college professor finding yet another way to attack the right? Haidt says that his work into morality has changed his politics, making him less of a liberal, and more of a centrist: “I’ve really become less enamoured of liberalism and more enamoured of conservatism. I think both are important. It’s a yin-yang thing, you need both and if you let either side run things they’re going to screw it up in very predictable ways.”

Our flawed post-hoc reasoning, our cherry-picking of evidence to suit our instincts, makes us poor policy makers, and creates politics that is tribal, confrontational and ill-suited to solving the world’s problems. “Our reasoning is very good as a press agent and lawyer,” says Haidt, “But we’re so biased, no individual can design social policy just using reason. But once you can accept what reasoning is and what it is designed to do, you can start to design groups and institutions that can do a pretty good job of it. When you put people together, you can think of each person as being like a neuron, and if you put us together in the right way then you can get some very good reasoning coming out of it.”

Haidt’s plea is for us to avoid the demonisation of those we see as morally suspect by understanding the way we reach these moral judgements. Like any evolved mechanism, our brain is a hotchpotch of compromises rather than a perfectly designed machine. Our understanding of others starts with understanding ourselves.

“It’s easy to see how flawed and biased and post-hoc everyone else is. If you realise that it’s true about you too, at least you’ll be a little more modest, and if you’re a little more modest then you’ll at least be a little bit more open to the possibility that you might be wrong. There is some wisdom to be found on all sides, because nobody can see the whole problem.”

Watch Haidt’s TED talk on “the real difference between liberals and conservatives” below:

Related Situationist posts:

• Jonathan Haidt on the Situation of Moral Reasoning
• The Situation of Morality
• Jonathan Haidt – 5 Moral Values Behind Political Choices

To review a collection of posts examining the the situation of ideology, click here.

The Situation of Political Ideology

Related Situationist posts:

• Low-Effort Cognition and Political Ideology
• Ideology, Psychology, and Law – Introduction
• Ideology and Grading
• The Imagined Ideological Divide
• Ideology, Psychology, and Law – Available Now!
• The Situation of Ideology – Part I
• Ideology is Back
• Ideology Shaping Situation of Vice Versa
• The Great Attributional Divide
• Naive Cynicism
• The Situation of Polarization
• Psychology of Inequality,
• Jim Sidanius ‘Terror, Intergroup Violence, and the Law’
• The Palliative Function of Ideology
• The Motivated Situation of Inequality and Discrimination
• John Jost on System Justification Theory

The Religious Situation of Compassion and Generosity

From UC Berkeley:

“Love thy neighbor” is preached from many a pulpit. But new research from the University of California, Berkeley, suggests that the highly religious are less motivated by compassion when helping a stranger than are atheists, agnostics and less religious people.

In three experiments, social scientists found that compassion consistently drove less religious people to be more generous. For highly religious people, however, compassion was largely unrelated to how generous they were, according to the findings which are published in the most recent online issue of the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science.

The results challenge a widespread assumption that acts of generosity and charity are largely driven by feelings of empathy and compassion, researchers said. In the study, the link between compassion and generosity was found to be stronger for those who identified as being non-religious or less religious.

“Overall, we find that for less religious people, the strength of their emotional connection to another person is critical to whether they will help that person or not,” said UC Berkeley social psychologist Robb Willer, a co-author of the study. “The more religious, on the other hand, may ground their generosity less in emotion, and more in other factors such as doctrine, a communal identity, or reputational concerns.”

Compassion is defined in the study as an emotion felt when people see the suffering of others which then motivates them to help, often at a personal risk or cost.

While the study examined the link between religion, compassion and generosity, it did not directly examine the reasons for why highly religious people are less compelled by compassion to help others. However, researchers hypothesize that deeply religious people may be more strongly guided by a sense of moral obligation than their more non-religious counterparts.

“We hypothesized that religion would change how compassion impacts generous behavior,” said study lead author Laura Saslow, who conducted the research as a doctoral student at UC Berkeley.

Saslow, who is now a postdoctoral scholar at UC San Francisco, said she was inspired to examine this question after an altruistic, nonreligious friend lamented that he had only donated to earthquake recovery efforts in Haiti after watching an emotionally stirring video of a woman being saved from the rubble, not because of a logical understanding that help was needed.

“I was interested to find that this experience – an atheist being strongly influenced by his emotions to show generosity to strangers – was replicated in three large, systematic studies,” Saslow said.

In the first experiment, researchers analyzed data from a 2004 national survey of more than 1,300 American adults. Those who agreed with such statements as “When I see someone being taken advantage of, I feel kind of protective towards them” were also more inclined to show generosity in random acts of kindness, such as loaning out belongings and offering a seat on a crowded bus or train, researchers found.

When they looked into how much compassion motivated participants to be charitable in such ways as giving money or food to a homeless person, non-believers and those who rated low in religiosity came out ahead: “These findings indicate that although compassion is associated with pro-sociality among both less religious and more religious individuals, this relationship is particularly robust for less religious individuals,” the study found.

In the second experiment, 101 American adults watched one of two brief videos, a neutral video or a heartrending one, which showed portraits of children afflicted by poverty. Next, they were each given 10 “lab dollars” and directed to give any amount of that money to a stranger. The least religious participants appeared to be motivated by the emotionally charged video to give more of their money to a stranger.

“The compassion-inducing video had a big effect on their generosity,” Willer said. “But it did not significantly change the generosity of more religious participants.”

In the final experiment, more than 200 college students were asked to report how compassionate they felt at that moment. They then played “economic trust games” in which they were given money to share – or not – with a stranger. In one round, they were told that another person playing the game had given a portion of their money to them, and that they were free to reward them by giving back some of the money, which had since doubled in amount.

Those who scored low on the religiosity scale, and high on momentary compassion, were more inclined to share their winnings with strangers than other participants in the study.

“Overall, this research suggests that although less religious people tend to be less trusted in the U.S., when feeling compassionate, they may actually be more inclined to help their fellow citizens than more religious people,” Willer said.

More.

Related Situationist posts:

• The Financial Situation of Empathy
• Can Meditation Make Us More Compassionate?
• God’s Situational Effects
• Do Doctors Lack Empathy?
• Racial bias clouds ability to feel others’ pain
• Students’ Situations Leave Them Less Empathetic (Situationist)
• The Interior Situation of Complex Human Feelings
• The Neuro-Situation of Violence and Empathy
• It’s Hard to Step into Someone Else’s Shoes
• The Situation of Morality and Empathy
• The Situation of Caring
• New Study Looks at the Roots of Empathy
• Atheism-ism
• The Fundamental(ist) Attribution Error
• With God on Our Side . . .
• The Situation of Political and Religious Beliefs?
• Seeing Faces,
• Self-Fulfilling Doomsday Prophecies
• The Stressful Situation of Religious Zealotry
• Holier Than Thou,
• Think Progress or Die
  
• The Situation of Faith in God or Science,.

The Economic Situation of the Middle Class

From Harvard Gazzette:

The American middle class has been battered by the loss of well-paying jobs for the 70 percent of the workforce without a college degree and failed by would-be protectors in government and private institutions, said panelists at the 35th Anniversary Forum of the Harvard Institute for Learning in Retirement on Friday.

Former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, whose forthcoming book “A Nation of Wusses” criticizes politicians of both parties for failing to act in the country’s best interest, pointed to elected officials and corporate leaders who can’t see beyond the next election or quarterly earnings report.

“Nobody is looking at what happens 15 or 20 years down the road,” he said.  And regardless of political persuasion everyone has a stake in the future: “We can’t have a good economy if middle class income continues to go down.”

Frank Levy, an MIT urban studies and economics professor, outlined how the middle class has suffered declines since the 1970s as a result of trends ranging from globalization to rising tuition costs.

“Roughly speaking, the society, including the government and individuals, has made a lot of promises about payments to make in future that we can no longer make,” he said.

The middle class has been hurt by the failure of policymakers to plan and account for a sharp rise in health care costs and the widespread job losses tied to the housing collapse.

The question, Levy said, is: “How are we going to distribute the losses? How much will be absorbed by lower incomes and how much will be absorbed in the present versus the future?”

New York Times columnist Joe Nocera assigned another aspect of diminished incomes to the zeal corporate leaders since the 1980s have had for downsizing to boost profits, and the shift from pensions to mutual funds for retirees.  Nocera disavowed the conclusion of his 1995 book, “A Piece of the Action,” which painted a rosy picture of transition from a “country full of people who had money in the bank to a country of people who invested in the stock market.”

But as wages flattened with the decline of U.S. manufacturing, he said,  “This shift has turned out to be terrible for the people who have to save for their own retirement.”

It transferred risk from the institution to the individual, putting more pressure on the middle class, said Nocera, whose latest book, “All the Devils Are Here,” is about the hidden history of the financial crisis.

The best way to help middle-income residents in the United States would be to address the housing crisis, Nocera said. “We have no housing policy. Most people’s equity is tied up in their house and the country has not decided what to do with Fannie and Freddie.”

“Is it all the Republicans’ fault?” asked moderator Paul Solman, PBS business and economics correspondent and Harvard M.B.A. ’79, in introducing Rendell, a leading Democrat.

“Yes,” Rendell said, to widespread laughter at the nearly full First Parish church in Cambridge.

Rendell said the best thing that could happen to corporate America would be to get rid of quarterly earnings reports that put shareholders’ returns ahead of visionary and wise business management.

There was agreement among the panelists that U.S. corporations should pay more taxes.

Levy noted that the United States is in the bottom third of corporate taxes paid in the world.

Nocera said that tax reform would free up a lot of corporate money for better purposes.

“You would generate more revenue and make the corporations more efficient because GE wouldn’t have a 1,000-person tax office to find loopholes,” Nocera said. “But the reason it will never happen is this is how Congress lives and dies. They generate their own revenues by saving those loopholes or creating new ones.”

The panelists agreed that skyrocketing tuition is hitting the middle class hardest.

“If you’re poor, you can get grants and the rich pay full price,” said Nocera, using the example of the California public college system that now charges in-state students $30,000. “If you’re middle class you can’t afford it.

“The state of California has taken this jewel and said we’re not going to cut back on our prison system but we’re going to cut back on our university system and balancing its budget on the backs of the middle class.”

Nocera concluded, however, “The middle class is under siege but it’s not quite as hopeless as people like me portray it.”

Related Situationist posts:

• The Situational Effects of Wealth and Status
• The Situation of Social Justice
• The Deep Capture of Financial Institutions
• Capture (Animated)
• Susan Fiske’s New Book
• Perceptions of Income Distribution and Preferences for Redistribution,
• Psychology of Inequality
• Even monkeys know when they’re being treated unfairly
• A Discussion about (In)Equality
• The Interior Situational Reaction to Inequality
• Tort Law’s Distributional Injustice
• Barbara Ehrenreich on the Sources of and Problems with Dispositionism,
• The Motivated Situation of Inequality and Discrimination
• The Unequal Situation of Seperation
• Examining Why Estimated “Costs” of Racial Inequality Vary by Race,
  
• The Situational Consequences of Poverty on Brains
• Toward a Situationist Perspective on Regulation
• Deep Capture – Part VI
• Deep Capture – Part VII
• Situationist Corruption
• The Situation of Corruption
• Larry Lessig’s Situationism
• The Situation of Earmarks
• The Illusion of Wall Street Reform
• The Situation of the Mortgage Crisis

Some Upsides to Terror Management

From Science Daily:

Past research suggests that thinking about death is destructive and dangerous, fueling everything from prejudice and greed to violence. Such studies related to terror management theory (TMT), which posits that we uphold certain cultural beliefs to manage our feelings of mortality, have rarely explored the potential benefits of death awareness.

“This tendency for TMT research to primarily deal with negative attitudes and harmful behaviors has become so deeply entrenched in our field that some have recently suggested that death awareness is simply a bleak force of social destruction,” says Kenneth Vail of the University of Missouri, lead author of the new study in the online edition of Personality and Social Psychology Review this month. “There has been very little integrative understanding of how subtle, day-to-day, death awareness might be capable of motivating attitudes and behaviors that can minimize harm to oneself and others, and can promote well-being.”

In constructing a new model for how we think about our own mortality, Vail and colleagues performed an extensive review of recent studies on the topic. They found numerous examples of experiments both in the lab and field that suggest a positive side to natural reminders about mortality.

For example, Vail points to a study by Matthew Gailliot and colleagues in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin in 2008 that tested how just being physically near a cemetery affects how willing people are to help a stranger. “Researchers hypothesized that if the cultural value of helping was made important to people, then the heightened awareness of death would motivate an increase in helping behaviors,” Vail says.

The researchers observed people who were either passing through a cemetery or were one block away, out of sight of the cemetery. Actors at each location talked near the participants about either the value of helping others or a control topic, and then some moments later, another actor dropped her notebook. The researchers then tested in each condition how many people helped the stranger.

“When the value of helping was made salient, the number of participants who helped the second confederate with her notebook was 40% greater at the cemetery than a block away from the cemetery,” Vail says. “Other field experiments and tightly controlled laboratory experiments have replicated these and similar findings, showing that the awareness of death can motivate increased expressions of tolerance, egalitarianism, compassion, empathy, and pacifism.”

For example, a 2010 study by Immo Fritsche of the University of Leipzig and co-authors revealed how increased death awareness can motivate sustainable behaviors when pro-environmental norms are made salient. And a study by Zachary Rothschild of the University of Kansas and co-workers in 2009 showed how an increased awareness of death can motivate American and Iranian religious fundamentalists to display peaceful compassion toward members of other groups when religious texts make such values more important.

Thinking about death can also promote better health. Recent studies have shown that when reminded of death people may opt for better health choices, such as using more sunscreen, smoking less, or increasing levels of exercise. A 2011 study by D.P. Cooper and co-authors found that death reminders increased intentions to perform breast self-exams when women were exposed to information that linked the behavior to self-empowerment.

One major implication of this body of work, Vail says, is that we should “turn attention and research efforts toward better understanding of how the motivations triggered by death awareness can actually improve people’s lives, rather than how it can cause malady and social strife.” Write the authors: “The dance with death can be a delicate but potentially elegant stride toward living the good life.”

Related Situationist posts:

• Sheldon Solomon on Ernest Becker and Terror Management
• Sheldon Solomon (Briefly) on Terror Management
• Edward P. Schwartz at Harvard Law Tomorrow (Tuesday)
• Trampling People While Whistling Rights: Normative Visions, Judicial Realities in Times of Terror
• The Situation of Attiudes about Progress
• Think Progress or Die
• Terror Management Theory Goes Mainstream 
• The Situation of Ideology – Part II

How Much Choice Would You Choose?

From Harvard Gazette:

Undergraduates packed Science Center E on Monday to hear two of Harvard’s leading social scientists discuss the way that humans make decisions, and whether having more choices really makes us happier.

The event, “What is Your N? A Personality Test for 4 AM Philosophers,” featured a conversation between social psychologist Dan Gilbert and economist N. Gregory Mankiw, and was sponsored by the Harvard University Initiative on the Foundations of Human Behavior. The discussion was moderated by professors Nicholas Christakis of Harvard Medical School and the Department of Sociology and David Laibson of the Department of Economics.

Laibson began the debate with the following thought experiment:

“We have pre-selected 100 different bottles of alcohol, covering all popular categories — beer, wine, rum, gin, vodka, whiskey, etc. Another person (who remains anonymous) is going to take one (regular-sized) drink, poured from one of the 100 bottles. Call him/her the recipient.

You will pick the number of bottles that the recipient will be able to choose among. To give the recipient complete choice, you would pick N = 100. To simplify the recipient’s decision, you would pick N < 100. You can pick any N value from 1 to 100.

If you pick N < 100, a robot will randomly determine which of the original 100 bottles the recipient will receive (with no repeats). You don’t get to pre-select the specific bottles the robot will choose. The N bottles will be presented to the recipient in categories (like whiskeys or vodkas), so the recipient can easily sort through them.

Your job is to pick N so as to maximize the happiness of the recipient.”

Next, Laibson asked the group to choose the number of bottles that they would send to the recipient under two different scenarios. In the first, the recipient would never know that there were 100 bottles to begin with. In the second scenario, he or she would.

As the students tapped on their laptops to submit their responses to the question online, Mankiw and Gilbert had at it. Mankiw kicked off the discussion by saying that the answer was easy for him and, he hoped, for anyone who had taken his introductory economics class. He would send the anonymous stranger all 100 bottles. Without any knowledge of the recipient’s tastes, it made sense to send as many bottles as possible in order to increase the chance that the stranger would get a drink that they would like.

“My wife and I [recently] went to a bar and had a drink and dinner,” he explained. “The bar had a big selection. I had no trouble at all. I said ‘I want a Tanqueray martini on the rocks with a twist.’ If the bartender had said ‘We randomly reduced the number of selections, so we don’t have Tanqueray tonight. We have Bombay Sapphire,’ I would have been a little disappointed. If they had said ‘We only have Gordon’s gin tonight,’ I would have been really upset. And if they had said ‘All we have is Kahlua, and crème de menthe,’ I would have walked out. So it was very clear to me that more selection is good.”

Gilbert said that Mankiw’s answer was not surprising. Americans like choices; the more the better. We want to choose what we want, even if the options are so great that our decision becomes essentially random. But Gilbert said there is more to choice than simply matching selection with preferences, and that there are costs associated with decision making, particularly when the options are too great. To illustrate his point, Gilbert described a study by Princeton psychologist Eldar Shafir.

Shafir presented doctors with a pink pill that was said to treat osteoarthritis. The physicians learned about the drug, and then were asked whether or not they would be likely to prescribe it. Most said that they would.

Shafir then went to another group of physicians, this time with a pink and blue pill. He told the group that both would treat osteoarthritis and that the drugs were similar in their effects, aside from their color. He asked this group of doctors whether they would prescribe the pink pill, the blue pill, or neither. Fewer doctors said that they would give patients a pill — either pink or blue — than the group that had been presented with only one pill.

“You should get at least the same number prescribing one of the pills,” said Gilbert. “Or even more, because some will only like blue pills. However, the actual number goes down. Why? Because the physicians say ‘Well, I could do nothing, or choose between one of these two similar pills and I really can’t decide between them, so I’ll do nothing, because nothing looks really different than the pill.”

In terms of Laibson’s thought exercise, Gilbert noted that more bottles and more types of liquor could make the decision more difficult for the recipient. If you offer the drinker wine or beer, and the drinker likes wine, the choice is easy. But if the drinker likes wine and gets four different bottles to choose from versus one type of beer, they might actually choose the beer, even though they prefer wine.

“Because I’ve given you extra choices, you have now gone to the thing you like less, because you can’t think of a good reason to pick among the wines that are so similar,” Gilbert said.

After some waffling, Gilbert, half seriously, gave the number of bottles he would send to the stranger: two.

“Then you have only Kahlua and crème de menthe!” laughed Mankiw.

After Gilbert and Mankiw held forth, Laibson revealed the results of the online poll. Under conditions where the recipient would not be informed if their choices were narrowed, there was a barbell-shaped distribution. A large group of the 220 student respondents said that they would send between zero and 30 bottles to the drinker, with another group up at 100 bottles. In the second scenario, however, where the recipient would know if the selection had been pared, undergraduates overwhelmingly voted to send all 100 bottles to the drinker.

The results were fascinating to Laibson, who has studied employee participation in retirement plans and discovered that enrollment increases dramatically when workers are automatically enrolled and must voluntarily opt out. Given that the criticism for making auto enrollment the default in business is often that the policy is paternalistic, the results of the survey shed light on when people are OK with “Big Brother” and when they are not.

“The message here seems to be ‘Be a paternalist, but keep it a secret,’” Laibson said, eliciting laughter from the students. “The minute the recipient knows [his or her choices have been narrowed], this community gives a different answer [to the thought experiment]. Paternalism is bad when the recipient understands that paternalistic motives organize what happens to them.”

Related Situationist posts:

• Slow Choose the Jam
• The Situation of Self-Regulation
• Choice and Inequality
• The Situation of Choice
• The Situation of “Opting Out”
• Dan Kahneman on Fast and Slow Thinking
• Nicole Stephens on “Choice, Social Class, and Agency”
• Sheena Iyengar on the Art of Choosing
• Just Choose It!
• Sheena Iyengar on the Situation of Choice,
• The Blame Frame – Abstract,
• Sheena Iyengar’s Situation and the Situation of Choosing,
• Sheena Iyengar on ‘The Multiple Choice Problem,’
• ‘Situation’ Trumps ‘Disposition’- Part II
• The Science of Addiction, The Myth of Choice
• Barry Schwartz on the Choices that Matter
• Renata Saleci on “The Paradox of Choice”
• The Blame Frame – Abstract
• Can’t Get No Satisfaction!: The Law Student’s Job Hunt – Part II
• Dan Gilbert on the Situation of Our Decisions

You can review hundreds of Situationist posts related to the topic of “choice myth” here.

Racism is Still on the Table

From CBS Charlotte:

A study conducted by researchers at North Carolina State University found that approximately 40 percent of wait staff decide how they are going to treat patrons based on their race.

The official study, “‘Because They Tip for S***!’: The Social Psychology of Everyday Racism in Restaurants,” and its controversial findings garnered national attention when they were published recently in the Journal of Black Studies.

Their collected data showed that 38.5 percent of servers said that race influenced their approach to waiting on patrons, and that 52.8 percent of servers saw co-workers engaging in discriminatory behavior through poor service.

Researchers were motivated by the potential to further discourse about a form of racism not frequently discussed, especially in a society described by some as “post-racial.”

“[We] were interested in studying tableside racism, or ‘dining while black,’ because of the continuing prevalence of subtle discrimination against African-Americans in everyday situations,” PhD candidate Sarah Nell Rusche told CBS Charlotte via e-mail. “Other forms of racial profiling … have been well documented and we wanted to further understandings of these forms of discrimination.”

 Surveys were administered by Rusche and the study’s co-author, Zachary W. Brewster, to 200 servers working at 18 full-service chain restaurants throughout the state during the summer and fall of 2004.

The study also chronicled the races waiters’ and waitresses’ sentiments regarding the most and least ideal races to serve, in addition to noting how a patron’s race may influence their behavior.

Those findings were consistent with the overall reported bias against black patrons – a reported 64.7 percent of waiters asked named whites as the most ideal race to serve, while 54.6 percent said African-Americans were the least ideal.

Rusche added that a significant contributing factor to such behavior was the stigma against African-Americans labeling them as bad tippers – a gesture sometimes meant to be indicative of inferior service, and what the study calls a “self-fulfilling prophecy.”

“[T]here is widespread belief among restaurant waitstaff that African-American customers are poor tippers,” she explained of the findings. “Since the bulk of servers’ income is from tips, many servers feel that prejudicial service based on perceived tip (which is also a race-based perception) is economically justifiable.”

Rusche suggested that restaurants looking to create an environment free of racial prejudices should take care to curb any speech or activity that may foster such sentiments.

“One thing our research shows is that workplace discourse frequently involves racist comments and discussions of customers’ race, including the use of code words meant to avoid overt bigotry,” Rusche observed. “So instead of recommending how establishments can avoid hiring racist individuals, I would recommend that they work to minimize the prevalence of racist workplace discourse that fosters these sentiments.”

More.

Related Situationist posts:

• Racial Stereotyping and Alcohol
• The Situation of Prejudice: Us vs. Them? or Them Is Us?
• The ‘Turban Effect’
• The Situation of Racial Profiling
• Do We Miss Racial Stereotypes Today that Will Be Evident Tomorrow?
• Race, Guns, and the Danger of Private Law Enforcement
• The Psychology of Guns and Race
• The Pretense of Colorblindness
• Colorblind? Really?
• Color Conscious Situation of Neighborhood Choice
• Wages Are Only Skin Deep – Abstract
• Why Race May Influence Us Even When We “Know” It Doesn’t
• Wages Are Only Skin Deep – Abstract
• Colorblinded Wages - Abstract

The Situation of Emotion

From by UCtelevision:

Robert Levenson, UC Berkeley Department of Psychology, explores the changes in emotion that occur with age. Much of his research focuses on the nature of human emotion, in terms of its physiological manifestations, variations in emotion associated with age, gender, culture, and pathology, and the role emotion plays in interpersonal interactions.

A sample of related Situationist posts:

• The Situation of Smiling
• The Body Has a Mind of its Own
• The Situation of Fear
• Phillippe Golden on Emotions
• Situating Emotion
• Joseph LeDoux on the Neural Situation of Emotion and Memory
• The Interior Situation of Complex Human Feelings
• The Interior Situation of Complex Human Feelings
• Accidentally Us

A Battle of Wills – Friday

The Harvard Society for Mind, Brain and Behavior presents:

A Battle of Wills: A discussion on free will, with professors Daniel Dennett, Joshua Greene, and Steven Pinker

What is free will? Do we have it? How can we coherently speak about it? How should ideas about free will impact our ideas of moral responsibility?

Join us for a symposium on these questions and more, featuring world-renowned professors of philosophy and psychology.

FRIDAY, APRIL 27, 2012
SCIENCE CENTER HALL B
3:00 PM – 4:45 PM

** Seating will be available on a first-come, first-serve basis **

Daniel Dennett is a University Professor and Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy and the co-director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. His work has addressed consciousness, free will, evolution, and many other topics. He is the author of Consciousness Explained, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, The Mind’s I, and Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon.

Joshua Greene is an Associate Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. He leads the Moral Cognition Lab, a group dedicated to the study of moral judgment and decision-making that has been profiled in Discover magazine.  He is also the author of the forthcoming book The Moral Brain and How to Use it.

Steven Pinker is a Harvard College Professor and Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology. He conducts research on language and cognition, writes for publications such as the New York Times and Time, and is the author of eight books, including The Language Instinct, The Blank Slate, How The Mind Works, and, most recently, The Better Angels of Our Nature.

Related Situationist posts:

• The Situation of Self-Regulation
• The Situation of Willpower
• Bargh and Baumeister and the Free Will Debate — Part I & Part II
• The Death of Free Will and the Rise of Cheating
• Interview of Eric Kandel
• Coalition of the Will-less
• Dan Dennett – “Free Will, Responsibility, and the Brain”
• Dan Dennett at Harvard Law on ‘Free Will, Responsibility, and the Brain’
• Interview with Professor Joshua Greene
• Daniel Dennett on the Situation of our Brain
• Dan Dennett on our Interior Situation
• The Death of Free Will and the Rise of Cheating
• Clarence Darrow on the Situation of Crime and Criminals
• Person X Situation X System Dynamics
• Situation” Trumps “Disposition” – Part I & Part II
• The (Unconscious) Situation of our Consciousness – Part I, Part II, Part III, & Part IV
• Pinker on the Changing Situation of Violence

Low-Effort Cognition and Political Ideology

From University of Arkansas Newswire:

When people use low-effort thought, they are more likely to endorse conservative ideology, according to psychologist Scott Eidelman of the University of Arkansas. Results of research by Eidelman and colleagues were published online in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.

“People endorse conservative ideology more when they have to give a first or fast response,” Eidelman said. “This low-effort thinking seems to favor political conservatism, suggesting that it may be our default ideology. To be clear, we are not saying that conservatives think lightly.”

While ideology – either conservative or liberal – is a product of a variety of influences, including goals, values and personal experiences, Eidelman said, “Our data suggest that when people have no particular goal in mind, their initial cognitive response seems to be conservative.”

Eidelman collaborated with Christian Crandall of the University of Kansas; Jeffrey A. Goodman of University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire; and John C. Blanchar, a University of Arkansas graduate student, on studies reported in “Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism.”

The researchers examined the effect of low-effort thought on the expression of ideology in several situations. In a field study, bar patrons were asked their opinions about several social issues before blowing into a Breathalyzer. Whether the individual self-identified as liberal or conservative, higher blood alcohol levels were associated with endorsement of more conservative positions. The results indicated that this was not because the conservatives drank more than the liberals.

The results were not just the alcohol talking: In one lab experiment, some participants were asked to respond quickly to political ideas, while others had ample time to respond. In another, some participants were able to concentrate while responding to political statements, while others were distracted. In both cases, participants with less opportunity to deliberate endorsed conservative ideas more than those who were able to concentrate.

In a fourth study, deliberation was manipulated directly. Some participants gave their “first, immediate response” to political terms, while others gave “a careful, thoughtful response.” Those instructed to think in a cursory manner were more likely to endorse conservative terms, such as authority, tradition and private property, than those who had time to reflect.

The researchers stressed that their results should not be interpreted to suggest that conservatives are not thoughtful.

“Everyone uses low-effort thinking, and this may have ideological consequences,” they write. “Motivational factors are crucial determinants of ideology, aiding or correcting initial responses depending on one’s goals, beliefs and values. Our perspective suggests that these initial and uncorrected responses lean conservative.”

More.

Related Situationist posts:

• Racial Stereotyping and Alcohol
• Jon Hanson on Law and Mind Sciences
• The Imagined Ideological Divide
• The Situation of Perceived Intentionality
• The Sound Situation of Beer Drinkers
• Ideology, Psychology, and Law – Available Now!
• The Situation of Ideology – Part I
• Ideology is Back
• Ideology Shaping Situation of Vice Versa
• The Great Attributional Divide
• Naive Cynicism
• The Situation of Polarization
• The Situation of Willpower

Image from Flickr.

Racial Stereotyping and Alcohol

From Kansas City Infozine:

Accusations of racism accompanying the death of Trayvon Martin and the subsequent actions of Florida police are prevalent in the national media. Many are questioning the psychological motivations of everyone involved. Recent research by MU Professor of Psychological Sciences Bruce D. Bartholow has shown that consuming alcohol can lead to increased expression of racial bias. A new study by Bartholow and his colleague, Elena Stepanova of Florida Gulf Coast University, shows that simply being exposed to alcohol-related images can have similar effects, even when no alcohol is consumed.

“Simply seeing images of alcohol, but not drinking it, influences behaviors like racial bias on a subconscious level,” Bartholow said. “Walking by a bar or seeing an ad for beer could be enough to affect someone’s mindset. You don’t have to be aware of the effects for it to affect you.”

The recent study found that participants who had initially viewed a series of magazine ads for alcoholic beverages made more errors indicative of racial bias in a subsequent task than did others who had initially seen ads for non-alcoholic beverages, such as water or coffee.

Test participants were shown a series of ads for either alcoholic or non-alcoholic beverages. They then completed a computerized task in which pictures of white and black men’s faces were shown for a split second, followed immediately by either a picture of a handgun or a tool. Numerous previous studies using this same task have shown that people often mistakenly identify tools as guns following presentation of a black face, a response pattern attributed to the effects of racial stereotypes. The fast pace of the experiment kept participants from thinking about their responses, which allowed the subconscious mind to control reactions.

In the real world, snap decisions in which one object is mistaken for another can be deadly.

“As for the Trayvon Martin case, it very much reminds me of the Amadou Diallo case in 1999, when an unarmed black individual was shot to death by New York City police officers,” Stepanova said. “Diallo was shot because officers claimed that they thought he pulled a gun, while in fact he reached for his wallet. The wallet was misconstrued as a gun by police officers.”

“Associations between blacks and guns, violence and criminal behavior played a role in Mr. Martin’s case,” Stepanova said. “Mr. Martin was essentially a victim of racial stereotypes that so many in our society hold, and that cost him his life.”

The results of Bartholow and Stepanova’s study don’t contend that every test participant was a racist, however.

“Even if people do their best to be open-minded, we are all aware of stereotypes,” Bartholow said. “Participants’ responses could have been due to associations they are aware of but don’t personally endorse. Also the results could be influenced by people’s ability to control their behaviors. A member of the KKK could hide his prejudice if he had good control of his responses.”

Analysis of the results showed people’s automatic, subconscious behaviors were most affected after seeing an alcohol ad, whereas earlier studies found actually drinking alcohol most influenced conscious, controlled reactions. Bartholow suggested the mental associations people have with the effects of drinking alcohol may have been what caused their increased expression of racial bias after seeing alcohol ads. Upon seeing alcohol, they subconsciously felt they could relax their inhibitions and allow their behaviors to be more influenced by stereotypes.

The study was led by Elena Stepanova, a post-doctoral fellow in Bartholow’s lab, now a professor of social and behavioral science at Florida Gulf Coast University. The study was published online in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

Bartholow’s research focuses on basic aspects of social cognition as well as how social and environmental factors, along with individual differences, contribute to alcohol involvement among young adults.

Related Situationist posts:

• Comparing Distractions – Beer versus Facebook
• The Situation of Willpower
• The Situation of Temptation
• The Situation of Perceived Intentionality
• The Sound Situation of Beer Drinkers
• Students’ Situations Leave Them Less Empathetic (Situationist)
• Studying the Situation of Drinking among College Students
• The Situation of Prejudice: Us vs. Them? or Them Is Us?
• Legitimate Responses to Illegitimate Acts
• The ‘Turban Effect’
• The Situation of Racial Profiling
• The Situation of Being ‘(un)American’
• Do We Miss Racial Stereotypes Today that Will Be Evident Tomorrow?
• Justice for Trayvon
• New Research on the Dangers of Private Law Enforcement
• Race, Guns, and the Danger of Private Law Enforcement
• If Guns Don’t Kill People, Sometimes Gun-Saturated Situations Do
• The Psychology of Guns and Race

Image from Flickr.

Humility and Helpfulness

From the University of Maine Press Office:

Helping one another in times of need is a cornerstone of quality human relationships, according to a University of Maine psychology researcher who has determined that humility trumps arrogance when it comes to offering assistance.

In a three-part research project involving 310 students at Baylor University in Texas, UMaine psychology lecturer Jordan LaBouff and colleagues found that people determined to be humble were more willing to donate time and resources to a hypothetical student in need. The results held true even when researchers controlled the study for potential influencers like empathy, agreeableness and other personality traits.

“The finding is particularly surprising since nearly 30 years of research on helping have demonstrated that the situation, not the person, tends to predict whether someone in need will receive help,” says LaBouff, who also is a UMaine Honors College preceptor.

“This research builds upon a growing body of evidence that humility is an important trait that results in a variety of pro-social and positive outcomes,” says LaBouff, the lead author of an article on the study with Baylor researchers Wade Rowatt, Megan Johnson and Jo-Ann Tsang in Texas. “It also suggests that if we can encourage humility in our communities, people may be more helpful to those in need.”

The researchers believe the study is one of the first laboratory studies to document a correlation between a personality dimension like humility or narcissism with willingness to help others. Humility could be a personality trait that is linked with altruistically motivated acts of helping, according to LaBouff.

Researchers reached their conclusions by measuring participant humility through self-reporting, or answering questions about their perceived sense of humility, in addition to gauging reaction time on tasks designed to measure implicit humility, LaBouff says. Participants were then introduced to a fictitious classmate who had suffered a personal tragedy and was requesting help to overcome the tragedy with time and resources from each participant.

“Participants who were more humble were most likely to help their peers, even when social pressure to do so was lowest,” says LaBouff. “That is, humble people were most likely to help even when they had the fewest external pressures to do so.”

The study results are reported in the January 2012 issue of The Journal of Positive Psychology.

More.

Related Situationist post:

• Holier Than Thou
• Students’ Situations Leave Them Less Empathetic (Situationist)
• Racial bias clouds ability to feel others’ pain
• The Neuro-Situation of Violence and Empathy
• The Situation of Morality and Empathy
• The Situation of Caring
• New Study Looks at the Roots of Empathy

Dan Rather Reports on the Brain’s Plasticity

Related Situationist posts:

• Phillippe Golden on Emotions
• Imagine You Could Change Your Brain. Oops, You Just Did!
• Joseph LeDoux on the Neural Situation of Emotion and Memory
• The Interior Situation of Complex Human Feelings
• The Situation of Practice
• The Situation of Memory
• The Interior Situation of Complex Human Feelings
• Accidentally Us
• The Neuro-Situation of Violence and Empathy
• The Affective Situation of Ethics and Mediation
• Situating Emotion