Dan Ariely on the Situation of Expectation

The good folks at Big Think interviewed behavioral economist Dan Ariely and asked him about the the nature of objective reality. Among other things, Ariely had this to say:

It turns out that if a physician comes to you and injects you with whatever – saline water – your body expects pain relief.  And your body secretes substances that are very much like morphine.  So it doesn’t matter what you get from the injection.  You actually get pain relief from your own body as a reaction to that.  Now you can’t just close your eyes and say, “Please can I have some pain killers.”  That doesn’t work.  But when a physician injects you with anything – even saline water – you get the pain relief that is actually a substance you can’t buy over the counter.  It’s like morphine.  But what is the reality there?

The video of his complete response is below.

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To review previous Situationist posts about Dan Ariely’s work click here.

Situatiolympics – Abstracts

Today’s Boston Globe section “Uncommon Knowledge” abstracts several interesting studies related to the olympics, including two that are quite situationist: one discussing bias in Olympic coverage and the other examining the influence of expectations and counterfactual thinking among medalists. We’ve excerpted those two abstracts below.

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Billings, A. et al., “The Games Through the NBC Lens: Gender, Ethnic, and National Equity in the 2006 Torino Winter Olympics,” Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media (June 2008):

This study out of Clemson catalogued all commentary by NBC-affiliated personalities during the network’s prime-time coverage of the 2006 Winter Olympics. Not only were men covered and mentioned more extensively (even when the women were more successful), but attributions of success and failure differed by gender, too. Male athletes were seen as more composed and intelligent in victory, and less committed in defeat. Female athletes were seen as more courageous in victory, and weaker athletes in defeat. The differences were more prevalent among on-site reporters than among the (more scripted) anchors. A similar pattern was found with regard to nationality. Americans were seen as having more concentration, composure, commitment, and courage in victory, while non-Americans were granted more athletic skill. The authors note that “parallels between long-held racial stereotypes (e.g., blacks being ‘born’ athletes and whites being superior intellectually) may transfer in similar ways within the domain of nationalism.”

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McGraw, P. et al., “Expectations and Emotions of Olympic Athletes,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology (July 2005) (pdf here):

After the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, a team of psychologists published a widely cited study showing that Olympic athletes who had just won a bronze medal appeared to be happier than those who had just won a silver medal. The psychologists concluded that athletes’ emotional responses were not explained by missed expectations but, instead, by close-call counterfactuals: Bronze-medal winners were focused on the fact that they had come close to not winning a medal at all, while the silver-medal winners were focused on the fact that they had come close to winning a gold medal. After the 2000 Sydney Olympics, another team of psychologists updated these findings with a renewed emphasis on the role of prior expectations. They repeated the earlier study – but this time with Sydney athletes, and not just with bronze- and silver-medal winners – and found that performance, relative to media predictions or qualifying-event finishes, was the primary determinant of athletes’ emotions.

The Impact of Expectations on Teaching and Learning

Barbara Glesner Fines, recently posted her 2002 article, “The Impact of Expectations on Teaching and Learning” (38 Gonzaga Law Review, Vol. 38, 200) on SSRN. The abstract is as follows.

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Law schools are in a crisis of confidence in the abilities and motivations of their students. Conferences on law school teaching feature presentations such as “The Challenges of Connecting with 21st Century Students.” Journal articles lament “The Happy Charade” that constitutes the learning and motivation of law students today. Professor Maranville of the Association of American Law Schools (“AALS”) Section on Teaching Methods summarized these sentiments:

“Many law students are so bored by the second year that their attendance, preparation, and participation decline precipitously; by graduation they have lost much of the passion for justice and the enthusiasm for helping other people that were their strongest initial motivations for wanting to become lawyers. And even in the first year, when most students remain engaged, many fail to learn even the black-letter law at a level that faculty consider satisfactory.”

Proposed solutions to these widespread concerns often focus on changing curriculum, teaching methods, or materials.

To improve learning in law schools, however, faculty may need a change of mind. A basic principle of good teaching is that of maintaining high expectations: “Expect more and you will get [more].” Nearly a century of research has established that teachers’ expectations of their students can become self-fulfilling prophecies: high expectations are correlated with high achievement, low expectations with low achievement. Moreover, once expectations are established, they tend to be self-sustaining for both students and teachers.

This Article explores the research on expectation effects in education and offers suggestions for putting the research into practice. This Article also suggests that faculty can improve legal education by critically examining their assumptions and attitudes. Finally, this Article addresses high-expectation teaching methodologies. The Article concludes by addressing concerns about institutional resistance to raising expectations. The conclusion addresses the role of student expectations and teacher evaluations, along with suggestions for addressing the emotional dimensions of teaching and learning.