Illusion of Motion

 

Review more Situationist posts containing illusions here.

Baumeister on the Situation of Self-Regulation

From YoungMinds:

How do we learn self-control as children?What bolsters will power? What undermines it?Is self-control a skill that can be practiced and taught?How can we encourage young people to perform to their potential?

Related Situationist posts:

• Self-Control and Crime
• Bargh and Baumeister and the Free Will Debate – Part II
• The Situation of Self-Regulation
• The Situation of Willpower
• Friends on the Brain
• The Situation of Temptation
• David Vitter, Eliot Spitzer, John Edwards, Jon Ensign, and Now Mark Sanford: The Disposition Is Weaker than the Situation,
• 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

Happiness or Meaningfulness – But Not Both

Roy Baumeister, Kathleen Vohs, Jennifer Lynn Aaker, and Emily N. Garbinsky have just posted their excellent paper, titled “Some Key Differences between a Happy Life and a Meaningful Life” on SSRN.  Here’s the abstract:

Being happy and finding life meaningful overlap, but there are important differences. A large survey revealed multiple differing predictors of happiness (controlling for meaning) and meaningfulness (controlling for happiness). Satisfying one’s needs and wants increased happiness but was largely irrelevant to meaningfulness. Happiness was largely present-oriented, whereas meaningfulness involves integrating past, present, and future. For example, thinking about future and past was associated with high meaningfulness but low happiness. Happiness was linked to being a taker rather than a giver, whereas meaningfulness went with being a giver rather than a taker. Higher levels of worry, stress, and anxiety were linked to higher meaningfulness but lower happiness. Concerns with personal identity and expressing the self-contributed to meaning but not happiness. We offer brief composite sketches of the unhappy but meaningful life and of the happy but meaningless life.

Download the paper for free here.

Related Situationist posts:

• Materialism, Consumerism, and Happiness
• The Situation of Money-Based Happiness
• Adult Well Being and Social Connection
• Dan Gilbert on the Situation of Happy
• On Money and Motivation
• The Situation of High Marginal Income Tax Rates and Motivation
• Money and the Situation of Happiness
• The Situation of Money and Happiness
• Receiving by Giving
  
• Something to Smile About

The Situation of Political Polarization

From This American Life:

Everyone knows that politics is now so divided in our country that not only do the 2 sides disagree on the solutions to the country’s problems, they don’t even agree on what the problems are. It’s 2 versions of the world in collision. This week we hear from people who’ve seen this infect their personal lives. They’ve lost friends. They’ve become estranged from family members. A special pre-election episode of our show.

Listen to the episode here.

Related Situationist posts:

• The Exaggerated Situation of Polarization
• The Situation of Political Ideology
• Random Assignments
• Jon Hanson on Law and Mind Sciences
• The Imagined Ideological Divide
• Ideology is Back
• Ideology Shaping Situation of Vice Versa
• Motivated Skepticism
• Naive Cynicism
• The Situation of Polarization
• Biased? I know you are but what am I?
• I’m Objective, You’re Biased
• Ideology, Psychology, and Law – Introduction
• The Origins of Sports Team Fandom

Citizens United Cartography

Citizens United Cartography

►

From NPR:

Explore political ad spending through creative cartography. This animated map shows where superPACs and other outside groups spent their money — over a six-month period during the general election — to air political ads aimed at influencing the presidential race.

Read the related NPR article here.

Related Situationist posts:

• Citizens United Primer
• The State of Shareholder Power in the Situation of Citizens United 
• The Frontline of Citizens United
• The Situation of State Judiciaries
• The Situation of Judicial Methods - Abstract
• The Political Situation of Judicial Activism
• The Captured Situation of Justice
• The Situation of Judges
• The Situation of Judging – Part I
• The Situation of Judging – Part II
• Situationist Corruption
• The Situation of Corruption
• Larry Lessig’s Situationism
• The Situation of Swift-Boating
• Deep Capture – Part VII
• The Situation of Earmarks
• The Deeply Captured Situation of the Economic Crisis
• Our Stake in Corporate Behavior
• The Situation of Earmarks

The Situational Effect of Negativity on Voting

From Forbes:

Two studies published this month uncover some of the influences that play on the mind as we approach the voting booth.

Think Negative, Think Certain 

The first study, published in the British Journal of Social Psychology uncovers the power of negativity in framing political attitudes.  Researchers presented participants with information about two fictional candidates – one conservative, one liberal – for a position on a government board.

After reading about the two candidates, some participants were asked if they “supported” or “opposed” the liberal candidate and some were asked if they “supported” or “opposed” the conservative candidate. Participants who were led to frame their opinions negatively (“opposed”) – regardless of their underlying preference – expressed more certainty about their attitudes than did participants who were led frame their opinions positively (“supported”).

A follow-up experiment reinforced this result, but also showed that the effect was much stronger when the participants were able to think carefully about the candidates.  The effect was diminished when participants spent less time thinking about the candidates.

Quoting George Bizner, the lead author of the study, “Our prior research showed that framing an opinion in terms of opposition yields stronger attitudes than does framing it in terms of support. The most interesting point from our latest research is that this effect is actually stronger when people process the messages more deeply – when they are motivated and have been able to think about the issue. So, perhaps counter-intuitively, the people who care the most about the issues or candidates seem more likely to be affected by the bias.”

Read the entire article, including the summary of the second study here.

Related Situationist posts:

• Peer Pressure and Voting
• 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.

Citizens United Primer

Related Situationist posts:

• The State of Shareholder Power in the Situation of Citizens United 
• The Frontline of Citizens United
• The Situation of State Judiciaries
• The Situation of Judicial Methods - Abstract
• The Political Situation of Judicial Activism
• The Captured Situation of Justice
• The Situation of Judges
• The Situation of Judging – Part I
• The Situation of Judging – Part II
• Situationist Corruption
• The Situation of Corruption
• Larry Lessig’s Situationism
• The Situation of Swift-Boating
• Deep Capture – Part VII
• The Situation of Earmarks
• The Deeply Captured Situation of the Economic Crisis
• Our Stake in Corporate Behavior
• The Situation of Earmarks

Don Kinder on the Role of Race in the 2012 Election – Today

“He’s Still Black: The Role of Race in the 2012 Presidential Election”
With Dr. Don Kinder, University of Michigan Political Science
Thursday, Nov. 1, 12 pm
Austin North
Free Chinese food!

In 2008, Americans chose Barack Obama to be the 44th president of the United States. The following morning, The New York Times proclaimed that Obama had succeeded in “sweeping away the last racial barrier in American politics with ease.” With ease? No. There are good reasons to believe that Obama was elected president in spite of his race. But that was then. Four years later, are we any closer to post-racial politics? What role will race play in the 2012 election?

Related Situationist posts:

• Race and Implicit American-ness
• Racial Attitudes in the Presidential Race
• The Situation of Being ‘(un)American’ 
• The Racial Situation of Voting
• On Being a Mindful Voter
• Implicit Associations in the 2008 Presidential Election
• Political Psychology in 2008
• The Psychology of Barack Obama as the Antichrist
• Why Race May Influence Us Even When We “Know” It Doesn’t
• The Situation of Presidential Death Threats
• The Situation of the Obama Presidency and Race Perceptions
• Racial Attitudes in the Presidential Race

Peer Pressure and Voting

From The Harvard Gazzette:

Many people believe that idealism motivates them to open their wallets for a favorite candidate or that civic duty motivates them to go to the polls to vote. But don’t discount peer pressure as an important factor in elections, a political scientist says.

“We operate as a family, a neighborhood, a team,” said Betsy Sinclair, an assistant professor at the University of Chicago. “Family, friends, and neighbors affect” choices involving “the candidate, issues to support, the political party to identify with, whether to donate to political candidates, and whether we turn out to cast a ballot.”

Sinclair, author of the new book “The Social Citizen: Peer Networks and Political Behavior,” spoke Thursday at Harvard Law School’s Austin Hall about how social networks enforce behavior in American politics. Her lecture was titled “Mind Sciences and the Election: The Social Citizen.”

Why we write a check or cast a ballot is often for the same reason that we buy Girl Scout cookies or Tupperware: pressure to conform with a group. Sinclair came to that realization after observing a fundraising coffee session for a 2009 Democratic U.S. House candidate from Illinois, Julie Hamos.

The coffee klatch was held in an affluent, politically engaged Chicago district. The two previous election cycles, this group backed another candidate. But this time, the hostess invited Hamos to speak. When the candidate finished her remarks, the hostess asked everyone to get out their checkbooks. Many wrote checks, according to Sinclair.

The candidate lost. Sinclair, in her post-mortem, learned that many guests regretted backing the loser.

Sinclair called the pressure to back Hamos “the Tupperware effect,” where people are invited to a party for the plastic container ware and drink coffee, hear testimony about its worth, and then pony up money for their own plastic ware, just like at the campaign meeting.

“People reported a sense of social obligation,” Sinclair said. “Campaigns know this works.”

Indeed, Sinclair pointed to another congressional candidate fundraiser invitation. It listed the names of all the invitees to pressure as many people who knew others on the list to attend as possible.

Fundraising is one thing. No one believes his or her vote can be influenced. Yet, Sinclair said, we all believe we can persuade an acquaintance to vote for the candidate we support. The ability of one person to influence another person can be demonstrated by analyzing a get-out-the-vote effort.

In 2009, Sinclair put her theory to the test after U.S. Rep. Rahm Emanuel stepped down from his seat to take a job in the Obama White House. She picked a tiny nine-digit ZIP code in his district to test voter turnout. Democrat Michael Quigley ran unopposed to fill the seat, so turnout would be low.

She contacted residents with a mailing that showed their lackluster voting record in previous elections. (Voting records are public.) It asked them to do their “civic duty and vote,” and pointed out they’d failed to make it to the polls in the past two elections.

Sinclair’s target wasn’t the mailing’s recipients, though. It was the person they shared their home with and who voted regularly.

Someone who lived with a rare or infrequent voter was less likely to make it to the polls. But Sinclair noticed that people voted when they lived with someone who always goes to the polls.

“There’s a shame effect,” Sinclair said. “It’s not the message but the messenger that matters.”

This election cycle, some people have learned through Facebook that their social networks aren’t politically uniform, leading to nasty arguments and “unfriendings.” Sinclair contends that people forge online relationships outside of politics. But holding onto those bonds with people who surprise and enrage can be politically enlightening.

“That’s the person most likely to hear what you’re saying and engage you about what you’re saying,” Sinclair said.

The Student Association for Law & Mind Sciences, Harvard Law School Republicans, Harvard Law School Democrats, and the Harvard Law School American Constitution Society sponsored the lecture. J.D. candidate Rebecca Matte ’14, vice president of the Student Association for Law & Mind Sciences, introduced Sinclair.

Learn more about Professor Sinclair’s book here.

Related Situationist posts:

• Social Tuning and Ideology – Part 2
• Social Tuning and Ideology – Part 1
• Ideology, Psychology, and Law – Introduction
• Christakis Speaks to Harvard Freshmen about Social Networks
• Nicholas Christakis on the Situation of Epidemic
• The Situation of Social Networks
  
• Social Networks
• Common Cause: Combating the Epidemics of Obesity and Evil
• Situational Obesity, or, Friends Don’t Let Friends Eat and Veg

Judge Nancy Gertner on the Situation of Discrimination Claims

From YLJO (the essay of an essay titled Losers’ Rules by Judge Nancy Gertner):

Each year, the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts holds an extraordinary panel. All active judges are present to answer questions from the bar. A lawyer’s question one year was particularly provocative: “Why are the federal courts so hostile to discrimination claims?” One judge after another insisted that there was no hostility. All they were doing when they dismissed employment discrimination cases was following the law—nothing more, nothing less.

I disagreed. Federal courts, I believed, were hostile to discrimination cases. Although the judges may have thought they were entirely unbiased, the outcomes of those cases told a different story. The law judges felt “compelled” to apply had become increasingly problematic. Changes in substantive discrimination law since the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964were tantamount to a virtual repeal. This was so not because of Congress; it was because of judges.

Decades ago, law-and-society scholars offered an explanation for that phenomenon, evaluating the structural forces at work in law-reform litigation that lead to one-sided judicial outcomes. Focusing on employment discrimination claims, Marc Galanter argued that, because employers are “repeat players” whereas individual plaintiffs are not, the repeat players have every incentive to settle the strong cases and litigate the weak ones.Over time, strategic settlement practices produce judicial interpretations of rights that favor the repeat players’ interests.More recently, Catherine Albiston went further, identifying the specific opportunities for substantive rulemaking in this litigation—as in summary judgment and motions to dismiss—and how the “repeat players,” to use Galanter’s term, take advantage of them.In this Essay, drawing on my seventeen years on the federal bench, I attempt to provide a firsthand and more detailed account of employment discrimination law’s skewed evolution—the phenomenon I call “Losers’ Rules.” I begin with a discussion of the wholly one-sided legal doctrines that characterize discrimination law. In effect, today’s plaintiff stands to lose unless he or she can prove that the defendant had explicitly discriminatory policies in place or that the relevant actors were overtly biased. It is hard to imagine a higher bar or one less consistent with the legal standards developed after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, let alone with the way discrimination manifests itself in the twenty-first century. Although ideology may have something to do with these changes, and indeed the bench may be far less supportive of antidiscrimination laws than it was during the years following the laws’ passage, I explore another explanation. Asymmetric decisionmaking—where judges are encouraged to write detailed decisions when granting summary judgment and not to write when denying it—fundamentally changes the lens through which employment cases are viewed, in two respects. First, it encourages judges to see employment discrimination cases as trivial or frivolous, as decision after decision details why the plaintiff loses. And second, it leads to the development of decision heuristics—the Losers’ Rules—that serve to justify prodefendant outcomes and thereby exacerbate the one-sided development of the law.

Read the entire essay here.

Related Situationist posts:

• Nancy Gertner on The Situation of Dispositionist Criminal Sentencing
• Nancy Gertner on the Situation of Feminism
• Judge Nancy Gertner on her Situation
• Liability for Unconscious Discrimination?
• Krieger on the Situation of Discrimination in France
• What Are the Legal Implications of Implicit Biases?
• Colorblinded Wages – Abstract
• Firefighters and the Situation of “Merit”
• The Situation of Situation in Employment Discrimination Law – Abstract

For a list of Situationist posts discussing the research on implicit bias and the IAT, click here. To review a collection of Situationist posts discussing Nancy Gertner‘s work, click here.

The Social Situation of the Citizen – Today!

When: Thursday, October 25, 2012, 12 – 1pm
Where: Austin North
Event type: Lectures
Sponsor: Student Association for Law & Mind Sciences, HLS Republicans, HLS Democrats, HLS American Constitution Society, PLMS

Do social networks really influence individuals’ politics? If social networks matter, how do they work? Utilizing a variety of experimental and survey data from settings as diverse as the wealthy suburbs of Illinois and the streets of South Los Angeles, Dr. Besty Sinclair will identify the social influences that underlie political activities ranging from voter turnout to political contributions. Rather than being merely a source of information, our social networks have a direct and immediate influence on members’ political behavior.

Learn more about Professor Sinclair’s book here.

Related Situationist posts:

• Social Tuning and Ideology – Part 2
• Social Tuning and Ideology – Part 1
• Ideology, Psychology, and Law – Introduction
• Christakis Speaks to Harvard Freshmen about Social Networks
• Nicholas Christakis on the Situation of Epidemic
• The Situation of Social Networks
  
• Social Networks
• Common Cause: Combating the Epidemics of Obesity and Evil
• Situational Obesity, or, Friends Don’t Let Friends Eat and Veg

Sunstein on Motivated Judicial Reasoning

From Bloomberg (an op-ed by Harvard Law School’s Cass Sunstein):

In the context of affirmative action, some of the nation’s most important and distinguished conservative legal thinkers, including Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, appear to have abandoned their own deepest beliefs about how to interpret the Constitution.

Unfortunately, this is not the only area in which they have done so. To appreciate the problem, we have to step back a bit.

For at least 25 years, there has been a clear division between leading conservatives and liberals with respect to constitutional interpretation. Conservatives have tended to favor “originalism” — the view that the meaning of the Constitution is fixed by the original understanding of its provisions at the time they were ratified.

Liberals have tended to reject originalism. They contend that the Constitution establishes broad principles whose specific meaning changes over time and that must, in the words of the influential legal theorist Ronald Dworkin, be given a “moral reading.”

Consider debates over the right to choose abortion and to engage in sexual relationships with people of the same gender. Many conservatives insist, rightly and to their credit, that our moral judgments must be separated from our judgments about the meaning of the Constitution. They go on to argue that if no provision of the Constitution was understood to protect these rights when it was ratified, then none protects these rights today.

* * *

Just this month, Justice Scalia put the point unambiguously: “Abortion? Absolutely easy. Nobody ever thought the Constitution prevented restrictions on abortion. Homosexual sodomy? Come on. For 200 years, it was criminal in every state.” By contrast, liberals have urged that the meaning of the Constitution’s broad principles evolves, and that judges can legitimately help shape the evolution.

Last week, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments involving the constitutionality of an affirmative-action policy at the University of Texas. Here is the great paradox: None of the conservative justices asked a single question about whether affirmative-action programs are consistent with the original meaning of any provision of the Constitution.

This failure to consider history is long-standing. Justices Scalia and Thomas, the court’s leading “originalists,” have consistently argued that the Constitution requires colorblindness. But neither of them has devoted so much as a paragraph to the original understanding. As conservative Ramesh Ponnuru, liberal Adam Winkler and others have suggested, their silence is especially puzzling because for decades, well-known historical work has strongly suggested that when passed by Congress in 1866 and ratified by the states in 1868, the 14th Amendment did not compel colorblindness.

Perhaps the most important evidence is the Freedmen’s Bureau Act of 1866, which specifically authorized the use of federal funds to provide educational and other benefits to African-Americans. Opponents of the act (including President Andrew Johnson) explicitly objected to the violation of colorblindness, in the form of special treatment along racial lines. In fact, much of the congressional debate involved colorblindness. Along with many others, Representative Ignatius Donnelly of Minnesota gave what the strong majority of Congress saw as a decisive response: “We have liberated four million slaves in the South. It is proposed by some that we stop right here and do nothing more. Such a course would be a cruel mockery.”

As law professor Eric Schnapper has shown, the 1866 Freedmen’s Bureau Act was one of several race-conscious measures enacted in the same period during which the nation ratified the 14th Amendment — which is now being invoked to challenge affirmative action. If Congress enacted race-conscious measures in the same year that it passed that amendment, and just two years before the nation ratified it, we should ask: Isn’t it clear that the 14th Amendment doesn’t require colorblindness?

* * *

Maybe this question can be answered. Maybe current affirmative-action programs, including the one at the University of Texas, are meaningfully different from the measures enacted by Congress after the Civil War. But to invalidate current programs, constitutional originalists have to say more. They must show that such programs are fatally inconsistent with the original understanding. Maybe they can do this, but remarkably, they haven’t even tried.

How can we explain this conspicuous lack of historical curiosity? . . . .

To read the entire article, including Sunstein’s answer to that question, click here.

Related Situationist posts:

• Motivated Judicial Reasoning
• The Situation of Judicial Activism
• The Situation of Biased Perceptions
• The Bias of the Bar?
• Judicial Ideology – Abstract
• The Situation of Judicial Methods - Abstract
• The Situation of Constitutional Beliefs – Abstract
• The Political Situation of Judicial Activism
• Ideology is Back!
• The Situation of Judges (1)The Situation of Judges (2)Blinking on the Bench
• The Situation of Judging – Part I
• The Situation of Judging – Part II Justice Thomas and the Conservative Hypocrisy

The Situation of Not Helping

From Youtube:

A man tries to help a woman being attacked, but instead he is stabbed and left to die in the streets of New York. As Paul Johnson reports, over 20 people pass the dying man and do nothing to help. A look at the various cases in the U.S. and Canada where bystanders could have saved people but chose to look the other way.

In the video below, Situationist Contributor, Philip Zimbardo describes the bystander effect and introduces an excellent series of demonstrations of the effect.

Related Situationist posts:

• The Situation of Penn State Bystanders
• The Bystander Effect at Penn State
• Bystanders in Child Abductions
• The Situation of Bystanders,
• The Situation of Gang Rape,
• The Situation of Helping,
• The Situational Effect of Groups,
• The Positive Situation of Crowds,
• The Situation of Helping,
• Solomon Asch’s Famous Compliance Experiment
• The Situation of Bullying
• The Situation of Hazing, Torture, Gender, and Tears, and
  
• Journalists as Social Psychologists & Social Psychologists as Entertainers.

Seduction by Contract

Oren Bar-Gill recently posted his introductory chapter for his intriguing new book, “Seduction by Contract: Law, Economics and Psychology in Consumer Markets” on SSRN.   Here’s the abstract.

Consumers routinely enter into contracts with providers of goods and services. These contracts are designed by sophisticated sellers to exploit the psychological biases of consumers. They provide short-term benefits, while imposing long-term costs – because consumers are myopic and optimistic. They are excessively complex – because complexity allows sellers to hide the true cost of the product or service from the imperfectly rational consumer. Using both general theory and detailed case studies, this book explains the costs – to consumers and society at large – imposed by seductive contracts, and outlines a promising legal policy solution: Disclosure mandates. Simple, aggregate disclosures can help consumers make better choice. Comprehensive disclosures can facilitate the work of intermediaries, enabling them to better advise consumers. Effective disclosure would expose the seductive nature of consumer contracts and, as a result, reduce sellers’ incentives to write inefficient contracts.

Download the introduction for free here.

Related Situationist posts:

• Taking the Situation of Consumers Seriously
• The Situation of Creating a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau
• Hey Dove! Talk to YOUR parent!
• Tamara Piety on Market Manipulation
• Taking Behavioralism Seriously (Part I) – Abstract and Top Ten List
• Promoting Smoking through Situation
• The Big Game: What Corporations Are Learning About the Human Brain
• Warren on the Situation of Credit
• The Financial Squeeze: Bad Choices or Bad Situations?
• No Contract for Old Men
• The Situation of Subprime Mortgage Contracts - Abstract
• The Situation of Our Food – Part II
• The Situation of Our Food – Part III
• The Changing Face of Marketing?

One of the very first legal-academic articles (part of  a trilogy) devoted to the way sellers manipulate consumers is Taking Behavioralism Seriously: The Problem of Market Manipulation (74 N.Y.U.L. Rev. 363 (1999)) available for free download on SSRN.

Todd Rogers on “The Psychology of the Politics of Politics” – Today!

Mind Sciences & the Election
“The Psychology of the Politics of Politics”
Dr. Todd Rogers (Kennedy School)
Thursday, Oct. 18, 12 p.m.
Austin North
Free pizza lunch!

Dr. Rogers will discuss research on two aspects of the politics of politics.  First, he will share a series of large field experiments (involving hundreds of thousands of people) exploring how behavior change insights from psychology can be used to increase the impact of get-out-the-vote efforts, and understand why people fail to vote.  These are now best practices in many practitioner circles, so this research will help you better understand the logic behind voter mobilization efforts in which you have been involved.  Second, Dr. Rogers will present a series of experiments exploring the cognitive reasons why politicians can dodge questions they are asked without voters noticing or punishing them for their evasiveness.  This work concludes with a practical intervention for preventing artful dodging.

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.

Warmth or Competence – Not Both

From the Daily Princtonian (an article about a paper co-authored by Situationist Contributor, Susan Fiske):

To appear warm people convey themselves as less competent, and to appear competent people convey themselves as less warm, according to a recent study conducted by a team of researchers in the psychology department.

The study, published by Ph.D. candidate Deborah Holoien GS and psychology professor Susan Fiske, concluded that there is an inherently negative relationship between being perceived as friendly and being perceived as competent. This, Fiske said, causes people to stereotype societal groups — like different ethnic, religious, social or gender groups — based on how warm or competent they appear.

Fiske explained that this trade-off is rooted in evolutionary theory.

“It makes sense because the first thing you need to know about another [is] what their intentions are. If their intentions are good, that means they’re friendly and trustworthy and warm,” Fiske said. “The second thing you need to know is whether they can act on those intentions — whether they’re competent and capable — because if they can’t act on those intentions, they don’t matter to you that much,” she explained.

The study asked participants to draft emails and maintain chat conversations. One group was instructed to try to appear warm, and the other was instructed to appear competent. The selection of words or phrases these participants chose to use had been previously rated by a separate group of participants. The subjects’ choices were then evaluated based on these ratings.

Subjects’ choices indicated that in trying to create a certain impression, they had to sacrifice conveying warmth or competence in order to portray the other.

“When people want to appear warm, they tend to select words that are low in competence,” Holoien explained. “Similarly, when people want to appear very competent, they select words that are low in warmth.”

The paper argues that participants do not intend to convey a lack of one or the other. Yet to appear positively in one dimension, appearing negatively in the other is an unavoidable sacrifice.

This report builds on previous studies conducted by University faculty on the evolution of stereotyping. In trying to avoid stereotyping, people tend to emphasize positive stereotypes of ethnic groups. However, in doing so, the studies found that people are inherently implying the negative stereotype.

“If I say there’s a new immigrant group who’s really nice, the implication is that they’re not smart. If I say there’s an immigrant group who’s really smart, the implication is that they’re not nice,” Fiske explained. “What that means is that you can get away with stereotyping and even negative stereotyping by just accentuating the positive and omitting the negative.”

The two characteristics of warmth and competence determine 80 to 85 percent of impression formation, according to Fiske. In daily interactions, Fiske said, “these are the two key things that need to be communicated.”

This has implications in business strategies and in the workplace. Fiske found that how companies are viewed in light of these two characteristics affects what brands customers choose to purchase.

“Johnson & Johnson and Campbell’s and Hershey’s are seen as American, warm and competent companies, but the energy companies and the cigarette companies are seen as not only incompetent but also bad-intentioned,” Fiske said. “The luxury brands are seen as cold and competent, like Rolex and Porsche. And the U.S. government-subsidized companies like the Post Office and Amtrack are seen as well intentioned but incompetent.”

Holoien said the findings are also relevant for workplace interactions and job interviews, which are largely about first impressions.

Career Peer Advisor Claudine Quadrat ’13 said that the priority for students looking to be hired is to come across as confident in job interviews.

“It’s difficult to say [whether warmth or competence] is more important because you don’t want to be warm without selling anything, but you don’t want to sell in a condescending manner,” Quadrat said. “We definitely try to encourage both.”

Quadrat emphasized that a good manager or team leader commands respect through both warmth and competence rather than just fear or love.

Fiske extended the comparison to the highest elected office in the country.

“It’s clear that these same two dimensions matter to the presidential candidates,” Fiske said. “They have to establish both their competence and their trustworthiness, integrity and warmth. Neither one is sufficient by itself.”

Though the conclusions of this paper and similar studies have not been contradicted, an alternate theory would challenge the trade-off hypothesis. The “Halo Effect” psychological theory argues that people are generally rated positively or negatively on both scales.

Fiske said she hopes to publish her findings in a forthcoming book.

Related Situationist posts:

• Susan Fiske — Varieties of Dehumanization
• The Dehumanized Situation of Atrocities
• Susan Fiske — on Teaching Situationism
• Susan Fiske’s New Book
• Susan Fiske Discusses her Work on Different Types of Prejudices
• The Situation of Objectification
• Women’s Situational Bind
• You Shouldn’t Stereotype Stereotypes

Image from Flickr.

The Rewards of Cooperation

From the Harvard Gazette:

It turns out nice guys can finish first, and David Rand has the evidence to show it.

Rand, a postdoctoral fellow in Harvard’s Department of Psychology and a lecturer in human evolutionary biology, is the lead author of a new paper, which found that dynamic, complex social networks encourage their members to be friendlier and more cooperative, with the possible payoff coming in an expanded social sphere, while selfish behavior can lead to an individual being shunned from the group and left — literally — on his or her own.

As described this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), the research is among the first studies to examine social interaction as a fluid, ever-changing process. Previous studies of complex social networks largely used static snapshots of groups to examine how members were or were not connected. This new approach, Rand said, is the closest scientists have yet come to describing the way the planet’s 7 billion inhabitants interact daily.

“This model is closer to real life; thus the results are closer to real life,” Rand said. “What this is showing is that a key aspect of real-world social networks is the dynamic component. The point of this paper is to say that those networks are always shifting, and they’re not shifting in random ways.

“There are many nasty things that happen between people, but for the most part we are fantastically cooperative,” Rand said. “We do an amazing job of having thousands or even millions of people living in very close quarters in cities all over the world. In a functioning society, things like trade, friendship, even democracy itself require high levels of cooperation, and when everyone does it, you get good collective outcomes.”

“Cooperation is a fascinating topic,” said Sociology Professor and Pforzheimer House Master Nicholas Christakis. “We see cooperation everywhere in the biological and sociological worlds, but it’s actually very hard to explain. Why do creatures, including ourselves, cooperate?

“What our paper shows is that there is a deep relationship between cooperation and social networks. In particular, we found that if you allow people to rewire their social networks, cooperation persists in the population. I believe this paper is the first to show, empirically, how that relationship works. As humans, we do two unique things: We re-shape the social world around us, and in so doing, we create a better place for ourselves by being nice to each other.”

To demonstrate how groups reach those good collective outcomes, the scientists, including Sam Arbesman, a former postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School, recruited nearly 800 volunteers, who, in groups of between 20 and 30, took part in the study by playing a simple game.

At the outset, Rand said, each player begins with an equal number of points, and is randomly connected with one or more players. As the game progresses, players have the opportunity to be either generous, and pay to give points to each player they are connected with, or be selfish, and do nothing. Following each round, some players are randomly given the opportunity to update their connections, based on whether other players have been generous or selfish.

The findings, Rand said, showed that players re-wired their social networks in intriguing ways that helped both themselves and the group they were in.  They were more willing to make new connections or maintain existing connections with those who acted generously, and break connections with those who behaved selfishly.

“Because people have control over who they are interacting with, people are more likely to form connections with people who are cooperative, and much more likely to break those links with people who are not,” Rand said. “Basically, what it boils down to is that you’d better be a nice guy, or else you’re going to get cut off.”

Intriguingly, the study also uncovered a correction mechanism inherent to social groups. Those who were initially noncooperative, Rand said, were found to be twice as likely to become cooperative after being shunned, suggesting that being cut off from the group acts as a sort of internal discipline, ensuring that cooperation remains high within a social network.

“As a result, when you have a network that’s dynamic, you see stable, high levels of cooperation, whereas in a static network you see a steady breakdown of cooperation,” Rand said.

Read the rest of the article here.

• Related Situationist posts:
• The Situation of Cooperation
• The Situation of Kindness
• New Study Looks at the Roots of Empathy
• Monkey Fairness
• Merit and Fairness

Image from Flickr.

Dr. Ryan Enos at HLS on the Role of Trivial Things on Elections

Today, October 4th
12 pm, Austin North
Dr. Ryan Enos (Harvard Government)
“Mitt Romney is Really, Really Good Looking: Do Attractiveness and Other Trivial Things Affect Elections?”
Free Chinese food!

Cognitive and social psychology have evidence that physical appearance can powerfully shape human behavior through “thin slice” judgments. Advances in measurement allow us to measure the appearance of individual politicians. Evidence consistently shows that good-looking politicians tend to win elections. But do voters really cast votes for politicians based on good looks? Dr. Enos evaluates the evidence and explains the possible role for these heuristic evaluations in voting.

Here is an excerpt from a related blog post (The Monkey Cage) by Enos and his work with co-authors:

Mitt Romney is better looking than almost everyone reading this blog.  Back in 2008, I wrote about how Sarah Palin’s looks put her in the 95th percentile of politicians.  Romney has even Palin beat—he scores above the 99th percentile.

These results come from a study with my colleagues Matthew Atkinson and Seth Hill, in which we developed a method for obtaining the ratings of the facial competence of governor and Senate candidates from 1994 to 2006 by showing the images of these candidates to undergraduate students for 1 second, as pioneered by Alex Todorov.  In 2007, when we collected this data, we removed highly-recognizable candidates so that opinions about the candidates, other than their appearance, would not affect the ratings.  However, as with Palin, we are fortunate that Romney was a relative unknown at the time (at least to the undergraduates in California that we used), so we obtained a rating of his face.

And what a face it is!  We gathered the ratings of 728 candidates for Senate and Governors’ seats and Romney outscored all but four of them.  The only persons to win election that beat him are Russ Feingold (the best looking Democrat) and John Thune (the best looking overall).  Romney also appears to far outdo Paul Ryan, who came in in the 67th percentile of the 2004 House candidates (although the photos did not include abs).  (Also, that study only included white male candidates and the House was not measured on a common scale with Senators and Governors, but I’d feel pretty confident saying the 67th percentile of the House puts you well behind Romney).

We don’t have a rating of Obama because we deemed him too well-known, even in 2007, because his Senate race had attracted a lot of attention and there was already an excitement building around a possible White House bid.  However, we do have a score for Biden—and Romney has him beat badly.  Biden only comes in the 62nd percentile of Senate and governor candidates.

So, if the election were decided on looks, it would be no contest.  Fortunately for Obama and Biden, the election is not decided by looks.  As we point out in our paper associated with the study, most of the correlation between candidate appearance and election outcomes is probably spurious.  Very few voters are willing to cast their ballot for a candidate based on looks – we estimate that if a candidate moves from the 25th to the 75th percentile in attractiveness, this is likely to gain that candidate about 3.5 percentage points in vote among independent voters, which was not enough to decide the winner of even a single Senate race out of 99 that we examined.  Rather than good looks directly affecting voters’ decisions, it is likely that good looking people like Romney have a lot of success in life, obtain significant human capital—education, career success, education—and because of all they have to lose, they are strategic about which races they enter.

In a certain respect, Romney’s career both fits and is counter to this explanation, because he ran for Senate in 1994, against Ted Kennedy when he did not have a good chance of winning, but he did not run for Governor until 2002 where he used his good looks and the considerable capital he had earned from the Salt Lake City Olympics to run in a seat with no incumbent.  Of course, Romney may not have been able to be as strategic about when to run for President – and unfortunately for him, most voters seem to have made up their mind long ago—nevertheless, if a candidate’s appearance every can make a difference, it should make a difference for Mitt Romney and his face in the 99th percentile.

Related Situationist posts:

• The Facial Situation of Presidential Candidates
• 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?
• A Look Into the Way Culture Affects Facial Expression
• The Situation of Imitation and Mimickry
• The Situation of Trust
• The Situation of Body Image
• The Magnetism of Beautiful People
• The Situation of Hair Color

More posts on the situation of politics here.

Situationist Contributor Mahzarin Banaji Speaks at HLS

Dr. Mahzarin Banaji
Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People

Friday, October 12 at 5:00 pm
Wasserstein Hall, Room 2019
Harvard Law School
1585 Massachusetts Ave.
Cambridge, MA

Followed by a public reception at 7:00 pm

Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People*
Mahzarin R. Banaji , Richard Clarke Cabot Professor of Social Ethics  at Harvard University

Most human beings take seriously the idea that their behavior ought to be consistent with their stated beliefs and values. The last fifty years of research in psychology has challenged that possibility by revealing that our minds operate, much of the time, without conscious awareness. Professor Banaji will speak to the question of how well-intentioned people behave in ways that deviate from their own intentions, and how this state of affairs compromises our decisions in legal, medical, financial, and political contexts.

*Book to be published February 2013

This is the keynote address of our Cooper v. Aaron conference. Please RSVP here if you plan to attend this talk.

The Situation of the 53 Percent

Situationist Contributor Eric Knowles recently published this excellent piece on Huffington Post:

What has crystallized in the last few weeks of the 2012 presidential campaign is nothing less than a battle between two competing theories of success — about where success comes from and the role of government in fostering it.

However, this question, which both campaigns have signaled will feature prominently in the upcoming presidential debates, is not one of competing values, personal philosophies, or party platforms. In fact, it has a right and a wrong answer, and social science can tell us which is which.

Mitt Romney’s “47 percent” comments reveal the governor’s belief in two alternative paths to success. On the one hand, some people achieve their goals because they possess the “right stuff” — talent, intelligence, and drive. Alternatively, people can get help from external sources — including, of course, the government. For Romney, aptitude and aid are inversely related: the more of one you have, the less of the other you need.

President Barack Obama’s “you didn’t build that” remarks express a theory of success very different from Mr. Romney’s. According to Mr. Obama’s theory, success is most likely when individuals and the environment, including the government, both bring something to the table. For Obama, good environments are no substitute for aptitude and hard work — rather, they allow these qualities to most fully reveal themselves.

The scientific literature speaks clearly to the debate between these two theories of success, and it tells us that Mr. Obama is right.

Consider a recent study in which a team of researchers examined how genes and socioeconomic status combine to foster the development of cognitive abilities in young children.

The authors followed 750 pairs of identical and fraternal twins from the ages of 10 months to two years, measuring the growth in each child’s cognitive abilities over this period. By examining the relationship between cognitive development and the twins’ varying degrees of genetic similarity, the researchers were able to estimate the extent to which cognitive ability is genetically determined. The socioeconomic status (SES) of the children was judged through a combination of measures, including parental educational attainment and household income.

What the researchers found was striking. Among high-SES children, genes were strongly predictive of age-related increases in cognitive ability. In other words, children from relatively well-to-do families performed better or worse depending on their genes. These kids developed up to their intrinsic potential. Yet at the lowest levels of SES, genetic variation wasn’t related to cognitive development at all. This means that, if you’re poor, even having the right stuff doesn’t guarantee good developmental outcomes.

This research indicates that poor environments limit children’s opportunity to develop aptitudes that they are, in a sense, genetically “destined” to acquire. Like a good seed planted in poor soil, even the best equipped of us cannot be expected to thrive in impoverished circumstances. This, in a nutshell, is Mr. Obama’s theory of success.

The implications of this theory are clear: if we want the so-called 47 percent to succeed or fail on its merits — a requirement from which Mr. Romney believes they are currently spared — then the solution is more government assistance, not less.

Mr. Obama’s theory of success also gains credence from psychological research on “stereotype threat,” the experience of anxiety that results from awareness of being negatively stereotyped by others. Members of stigmatized groups often experience such threat in contexts where they know they are expected to do poorly, as when an African American student takes a test of verbal reasoning skills.

Owing to the anxiety caused by stereotype threat, students of color routinely underperform relative to their abilities — a self-fulfilling pattern that only serves to bolster the negative stereotypes that give rise to threat.

Fortunately, recent research by Stanford University’s Gregory Walton and [Situationist Contributor] Geoffrey Cohen has identified simple interventions that inoculate students from the experience of stereotype threat. For example, simply by increasing students’ sense of “belongingness” in academic settings, the researchers drastically reduced racial gaps in academic performance. Protected from the effect of a threatening stereotype environment, minority students’ true abilities shone through.

This work shows that inherent gifts and helpful environments are not inversely related routes to achievement, as Mr. Romney’s theory of success would have us believe. Rather, as Mr. Obama asserts, creating a good environment is the only way of ensuring that individuals’ aptitudes see the light of day.

If this is so, perhaps the government should be in the business of helping people after all — through, for instance, progressive taxation that reduces financial burdens on poor families or affirmative action policies that might help change our stereotypes of minority and women professionals.

Studies like ones I’ve described repudiate the notion that ability and help are interchangeable routes to achievement (the Romney theory of success). Rather, social science corroborates Mr. Obama’s contention that the government has a role to play in enabling its citizens to express whatever talents and aptitudes they possess to the greatest possible degree.

Eric D. Knowles is a Situationist Contributor and assistant professor in New York University’s Department of Psychology. He studies the psychological factors that influence people’s political choices.

Chart from here.

Related Situationist posts:

• The Situation of Success
• Randomness, Luck, Chance, and other Situational Forces
• Seeing Michael Phelps’s Gold Medal Situation
• Randomness, Luck, and other Situational Sources of Success and Failure
• The Situation of ‘Winners’ and ‘Losers’
• Geoffrey Cohen on “Identity, Belief, and Bias
• The Situation of the Achievement Gap
• Stereotype Threat
• Sian Beilock and Allen McConnell on Stereotype Threat
• Belonging