How framing affects our thought processes

A take-away restaurant near my house offers customers free home delivery or a ten per cent discount if you pick up. It sounds much better than saying you get no discount for picking up and suffer a ten per cent fee for delivery – this is the power of ‘framing’. Now David Hardisty and colleagues have dug a little deeper into framing, to show first, that these kinds of effects can interact with people's political persuasion, and second, that they can act by altering the order of people's thoughts.

Hundreds of online participants chose between various flights, computers and so on. In each case they could plump for a cheaper option or a more expensive, greener option, the latter including either a 'tax' to help reduce carbon emissions, or an 'offset' to do the same – depending on how the choice was framed. Whether the expensive option was framed as a tax or offset made no difference to Democrat (left-wing) participants. By contrast, Republicans (right-wing) and Independents were much less likely to choose the more expensive option when it was labelled as a tax.

In a second study the researchers added a technique known as 'concurrent thought listing', which involved the participants sharing their thoughts as they made their product choices.

This process revealed that when the expensive option was labelled as a tax, the Republicans and Independents, but not Democrats, had a consistent tendency to weigh-up the advantages of the cheaper option first before they considered the benefits of the greener choice. This is significant because past research shows that when we appraise options in sequence, the first item we consider tends to be favoured. Consistent with this, the tax frame led Republican participants to not only consider the cheaper option first but also to generate more supporting evidence for it. By contrast, when the expensive, greener option was labelled as an offset, political affiliation was no longer associated with the order in which options were considered, nor the weight of evidence generated for each option.

A final study tested whether the order in which we consider options really does have a causal role in our decision making. Participants of all political persuasions were instructed to consider the benefits of the greener, more expensive option first, whether it was labelled as a tax or offset. Despite this instruction, 54 per cent of Republicans failed to comply (showing just how averse they were to the 'tax' label). However, among those participants who did comply, this instruction had the effect of eliminating the interaction between framing and political affiliation – that is, the Republicans were no longer repelled by the greener, expensive option even when it was labelled as a tax.

‘Policy makers would be wise to note the differential impact that policy labels may have on different groups,’ the researchers concluded. ‘What might seem like a trivial semantic difference to one person can have a large impact on someone else.’
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Hardisty, D., Johnson, E., & Weber, E. (2009). A Dirty Word or a Dirty World?: Attribute Framing, Political Affiliation, and Query Theory. Psychological Science, 21 (1), 86-92 DOI: 10.1177/0956797609355572

CBT-based self-help books can do more harm than good

Self-help books based on the traditional principles of CBT, including popular titles like 'CBT for Dummies', can do more harm than good, according to a new study. The risks were highest for readers described as 'high ruminators' - those who spend time mulling over the likely causes and consequence of their negative moods.

The new research focuses on the use of self-help books as a preventative intervention for people at risk of developing depression. Gerald Haeffel identified 72 undergrads at risk and allocated each of them randomly to work through one of three self-help books. A third of the students spent four weeks working through a traditional self-help CBT-based book, of the kind typically found in book stores, which involved learning the links between thoughts, behaviour and mood, as well as identifying negative thoughts and re-evaluating them. Another group of students followed a 'non-traditional' CBT-based self-help book, similar to the first but modified so that the task of identifying and challenging one's own negative thoughts was removed. The final group followed a book that taught academic skills such as time-management and memory aids.

Here's the bottom line: among students who tended to ruminate and who had suffered an increase in stress, those who followed the traditional CBT book displayed more depressive symptoms after the four-week study period than those who followed either of the other two books. At four-month follow-up, the traditional CBT study group as a whole tended to have more depression symptoms than the other groups, although high ruminating and stressed students in the traditional group remained the biggest losers.

Haeffel sounded some notes of caution - the findings may not generalise to non-student participants, the samples were fairly small, and the outcomes were based on depression symptoms, not clinically diagnosed depression. That said, the stressed, high ruminators in the traditional CBT group ended up scoring on the 'moderate' range of the depression scale at four-month follow up.

'The current results suggest that cognitive work-books as traditionally operationalised (and sold in stores) may not work for individuals who ruminate,' Haeffel said. 'For these individuals, a modified form of cognitive skills training that does not rely on identifying and disputing negative cognitions may be more effective.'

This latest warning about self-help comes after a study published in 2009 that showed use of positive mantras such as 'I'm a lovable person' can actually be harmful to people with low self-esteem.
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Haeffel, G. (2010). When self-help is no help: Traditional cognitive skills training does not prevent depressive symptoms in people who ruminate. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 48 (2), 152-157 DOI: 10.1016/j.brat.2009.09.016

Shiny, swanky car boosts men's appeal to women, but not women's appeal to men

It's a widely held, if much derided, belief that ownership of a prestige sports car can increase a man's sex appeal to women. Indeed, there's a scene in the American sit-com Friends in which Joey dons a ridiculous Porsche-branded costume of peak cap, gloves, jacket and trousers, so determined is he to convince female passers-by that he owns a fast, shiny car. Now Michael Dunn and Robert Searle have tested the shiny car effect scientifically, looking at the influence of apparent car ownership on both male and female perceived attractiveness.

Hundreds of passers-by in Cardiff city centre were asked to rate the attractiveness of a young man or woman portrayed in a photograph sitting in a car. Male participants all rated the same woman, and female participants all rated the same man. Crucially, half the participants saw the man or woman sat at the wheel of a Ford Fiesta whilst the other half saw the man or woman sat at the wheel of a Bentley Continental (worth a cool £75000, approximately, at the time of testing).

Pilot research had established that, against a blank background, the photographed man and woman were perceived as equally attractive by the opposite sex (both scoring approximately mid-way on an attractiveness scale) and also that male and female participants didn't differ from each other in the aesthetic ratings they gave to the two models of car. The stand out message from the research proper, however, is that the man was rated as significantly more attractive when he was seen sat in the Bentley rather than the Fiesta, whereas the woman's perceived attractiveness was unaffected by the car she happened to be sitting in.

This finding appears to support prior research showing that in cultures all round the world, heterosexual women are attracted to men with greater status and resources, whereas heterosexual men tend to be attracted to women who appear youthful and fertile.

'It would appear that even though recent years have witnessed dramatic increases in female ownership of prestige luxury cars, such ownership does not enhance female attractiveness, as is the case with male attractiveness,' the researchers said.

'Also,' they added, 'the results contradict the "structural powerlessness" hypothesis, i.e. the belief that as economic differences diminish men and women will become more alike, as the rise in female economic fortune has not, it would appear, emancipated them from attraction to cues that are indices of wealth and status in males.'
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Dunn, M., & Searle, R. (2010). Effect of manipulated prestige-car ownership on both sex attractiveness ratings British Journal of Psychology, 101 (1), 69-80 DOI: 10.1348/000712609X417319

The Special Issue Spotter

We trawl the world's journals so you don't have to:

Adolescent Brain Development: Current Themes and Future Directions (Brain and Cognition). Open Access.

Psychotherapy, Medicine and the Body: A Tribute to the work of Alexis Brook (Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy).

The interaction of online technology on the consumer shopping experience (Psychology and Marketing).

Dynamics of Social Networks (Social Networks).

Towards a Fetal Psychology (Infant and Child Development).

Physical activity research showcasing theory into practice (Psychology and Health).

Why we tip and how to get a bigger tip

'I don't tip because society says I have to. All right, if someone deserves a tip, if they really put forth an effort, I'll give them a little something extra. But this tipping automatically, it's for the birds. As far as I'm concerned, they're just doing their job.'
Mr Pink, Reservoir Dogs.

Stats from the USA suggest that $40 billion is spent on tips every year. Yet from the traditional economic perspective, which sees us as rational agents operating in our own interest, tipping waiters, barbers, taxi drivers and other service workers is crazy. You don't have to so why do you? That's if you do. Not everyone does. In an effort to explore our motivations for tipping, Stephen Saunders and Michael Lynn sent out 29 fieldworkers to survey 530 South African citizens after they'd had an encounter with a car guard. These unpaid workers are a common sight in South Africa at shopping centres, hospitals and schools. They help with parking, protect the car from vandalism and assist drivers with loading shopping and luggage.

One explanation for why we tip is that we're trying to encourage good service in the future. However, Saunders and Lynn found no evidence that people who used a car guard more were more likely to tip, as you'd expect if this were their true motive. By contrast, perceived service quality was associated with both the likelihood of giving a tip and the amount tipped, thus suggesting that participants were using tipping as a form of reward. Similarly, those who said they thought it was important to help others in need tended to tip more (although they weren't any more likely to tip), suggesting altruism was another motive. Finally, social norms were a key factor - participants who said their friends and relatives thought it was important to tip were more likely to tip themselves, especially if there were more people with them at the time of questioning. Size of tip was not associated with this factor, perhaps because it's only the act of tipping that's visible to others, rather than the amount tipped.

'Hopefully this paper will encourage more economists to look beyond the apparent irrationality of tipping and to study it from both a behavioural economics and psychological perspective,' the researchers said.

In a separate study, based in Utah, John Seiter and Harry Weger tested the effects of ingratiation on food servers' tips. They had two waiters and two waitresses go about their usual duties but with a twist: for half the parties they served they were instructed to compliment the customers, telling them that they'd made an excellent choice in what they'd ordered. Counting the tips received from 348 dinner parties showed that complimenting customers on making a shrewd order led to tips that were three per cent greater on average than when no compliment was made - a statistically significant boost.

'A roughly 3 per cent increase may seem a small amount,' the researchers said, '[but] an additional $1 to $5 per shift could translate into hundreds of dollars per year for each food server.'

More in-depth analysis showed that complimenting customers on their order only led to bigger tips for parties of two to three people. It made to no difference with a party of four and actually led to smaller tips for groups larger than this (the research involved parties of up to seven). It also turned out that one of the waiting staff had received smaller tips after complimenting customers (even though the group average was for larger tips in this condition). Seiter and Weger surmised this could be because she didn't come across as sincere.

This study builds on earlier research showing that use of mimicry, light touches on customers' shoulders, happy faces on the bill and squatting to customers' eye level can all help provoke larger tips.
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Saunders, S., & Lynn, M. (2010). Why tip? An empirical test of motivations for tipping car guards. Journal of Economic Psychology, 31(1), 106-113 DOI: 10.1016/j.joep.2009.11.007

Seiter, J., & Weger, Jr., H. (2010). The Effect of Generalized Compliments, Sex of Server, and Size of Dining Party on Tipping Behavior in Restaurants. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 40 (1), 1-12 DOI: 10.1111/j.1559-1816.2009.00560.x

What kind of Internet user are you?

Before Kraft's Executive Board had even heard of Cadbury's, there used to be an advert on British television that showed people eating Cadbury's cream-eggs in a number of odd and inventive ways. The tag-line was 'How do you eat yours?' Now a pair of researchers based in Turkey, Leman Tosun and Timo Lajunen, have taken a similar tack with Internet use, asking hundreds of undergrad students how they use their time on the global interweb.

More specifically, the researchers were interested in whether the students used the Internet for the benefit of their existing face-face relationships - for example for arranging meet-ups and sharing photos - and how much they used it for establishing new friendships or conducting Internet-only relationships. The researchers also wanted to know whether the students found it easier to express their true selves online than in the flesh. The point of all this was to see whether people with certain personality types tend to use the Internet in particular ways.

Using Eysenck's classic personality test, Tosun and Lajunen found that students who scored high on extraversion (agreeing with statements like 'I am very talkative') tended to use the Internet to extend their real-life relationships, whereas students who scored high on psychoticism (answering 'yes' to statements like 'does your mood often go up and down?' and 'do you like movie scenes involving violence and torture?') tended to use the Internet as a substitute for face-to-face relationships. Students who scored high on psychoticism were also likely to say that they found it easier to reveal their true selves online than face-to-face. The personality subscale of neuroticism (indicated by 'yes' answers to items like 'Do things often seem hopeless to you?) was not associated with styles of Internet use.

'Our data suggest that global personality traits may explain social Internet use to some extent,' the researchers concluded. 'In future studies, a more detailed index of social motives can be used to better understand the relation between personality and Internet use.'
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Tosun, L., & Lajunen, T. (2010). Does Internet use reflect your personality? Relationship between Eysenck’s personality dimensions and Internet use. Computers in Human Behavior, 26 (2), 162-167 DOI: 10.1016/j.chb.2009.10.010

Extras

Eye-catching studies that didn't make the final cut:

Attractive women tend to be happier, but only in cities, not the countryside.

Near-conversational synthetic speech generated via brain-machine interface.

Review of eight meta-analyses of psychodynamic psychotherapy effectiveness: 'The perception that psychodynamic approaches lack empirical support does not accord with available scientific evidence and may reflect selective dissemination of research findings.'

The individual and situational factors that predict work place bullying. Men and victims of bullying are more likely to bully. Stressful work places with role conflict and interpersonal conflict also host more bullying.

Women process multisensory emotion expressions more efficiently than men.

Lookism in a Facebook age: 'The results indicated that both male and female subjects were more willing to initiate friendships with opposite-sex profile owners with attractive photos.'

Lusting while loathing: 'We show how being “jilted”—that is, being thwarted from obtaining a desired outcome—can concurrently increase desire to obtain the outcome, but reduce its actual attractiveness'.

Dreaming and the brain: 'It is now possible to ... address fundamental questions: how conscious experiences in sleep relate to underlying brain activity; why the dreamer is largely disconnected from the environment; and whether dreaming is more closely related to mental imagery or to perception'.

Wiley has a new cognitive science review journal.

Time flew by ... I must have been enjoying myself

Have you ever been in the cinema and felt the time drag? It's happened to me. A glance at my watch and then the thought that I can't be enjoying the film all that much or else the time would surely have flown. My experience matches the findings from a series of studies by Aaron Sackett and colleagues. The folk psychology belief 'time flies when you're having fun' is so powerful and ubiquitous, the researchers say, that whenever we feel an event has passed more quickly than we expected, we infer that we must have been enjoying ourselves, and vice versa for events that drag.

The researchers first had dozens of undergrads look through passages of text and underline any words with adjacent repeats of a particular letter. Crucially, the researchers told the participants that the task would last ten minutes, but in reality it lasted either five minutes or twenty minutes, thus creating the illusion of time flying or dragging, respectively. A sneaky switch of stop-watches helped create the illusion. Afterwards, the participants who'd experienced the sense of the time flying rated the task as far more enjoyable than did the participants who'd experienced the sense of time dragging.

Further experiments showed that provoking the feeling of time flying led participants to be more tolerant of an irritating noise, and led them to enjoy their favourite song more than usual. This last finding was important because there was a possibility that it would feel unpleasant for a pleasurable activity to end earlier than expected.

If people really do use the 'time flies when you're having fun' adage to evaluate their own enjoyment, then challenging or encouraging the truth of the adage ought to affect the kind of findings described above. That's exactly what Sackett's team found. When participants read a scientific article challenging the 'time flies' adage, speeding up their subjective sense of time no longer increased their enjoyment of a word-based task.

It was a similar story when participants were given an alternative explanation for why time might have raced by. Participants were given ear plugs, which they were told could speed people's time perception. Again, the illusion of time flying didn't lead these participants to enjoy a task more, presumably because they attributed the sense of time flying to the ear plugs rather than to their enjoyment.

'Taken together, these findings have important implications for understanding and changing hedonic experience,' the researchers said. The Digest got in touch with lead author Aaron Sackett, Marketing Professor at the University of St. Thomas, to ask him how this might apply in the real world. He said the first thing to do is minimise people's access to accurate time cues. Next, alter their subjective time perception. There are numerous ways to do this. For example, physiological arousal speeds time perception so a free coffee at the start of a long queue could work (as long as no clocks were in sight). Even music that's incongruent with the context (e.g. Chinese music in an English restaurant) has been found to speed time. Finally, you need the surprise moment, when people are alerted to the true passage of time. That provokes in people the sensation of time having flown, followed by the gratifying inference that they must therefore have been enjoying themselves.
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AM Sackett, LD Nelson, T Meyvis, BA Converse, & AL Sackett (2010). You're having fun when time flies: The hedonic consequences of subjective time progression. Psychological Science : 10.1177/0956797609354832

I'm not lying: Brain stimulation boosts people's deception skills

There's been so much excitement and hyperbole surrounding the promise of brain imaging as a lie detection technique, but what about the needs of the cads, thieves and vagabonds of this world? Has contemporary cognitive neuroscience nothing to offer them? It has now. In an exciting development for fibbers everywhere, Ahmed Karim and his team have shown that the application of transcranial direct current stimulation over the anterior prefrontal cortex - the front bit of the brain - improves people's lying skills.

Twenty-two participants role-played stealing money from an office before being interrogated by a researcher acting the role of police detective. The participants were given extra incentive to deceive the 'detective' with the promise that they could keep the money if they succeeded. Crucially, the participants answered some questions with a mild electric current applied over their prefrontal cortex via scalp electrodes. The effect of this 'cathodal' stimulation, which lasted about 13 minutes, was to inhibit brain activity in the affected area, thus creating a kind of temporary, 'virtual' lesion. By contrast, they answered other questions in a 'sham' condition, involving all the same kit but with the current switched off after just thirty seconds. The interrogator and participants couldn't tell whether they were in the stimulation or sham condition.

Past brain imaging research has shown that some forms of lying are associated with increased activity in the anterior prefrontal cortex, and one prediction was that inhibiting this region would impair people's lying skills. In fact, compared with the sham condition, the stimulation improved participants' lying ability: they lied more skillfully in terms of only lying when they needed to; lied more quickly; and remained calmer whilst lying, as reflected by their sweating less.

A second study used 'anodal' stimulation, which unlike 'cathodal' stimulation, excites rather than inhibits underlying brain cells. This had no effect on the participants' lying ability. A third study showed that 'cathodal' stimulation had no effect on the famous Stroop task, which requires participants to name the ink colour that a colour word (e.g. blue) is written in. In other words, the effect of the stimulation appears to be specific to deception, not to cognitively demanding tasks in general.

So why does knocking out prefrontal cortex activity improve people's deception skills? The researchers can't be sure, but stated crudely, one possibility is that the stimulation puts the conscience to sleep, freeing the mind to lie without the usual inconvenience of moral conflict. This would appear to tally with research suggesting that psychopaths have reduced grey matter in the anterior prefrontal cortex and also with a recent study showing that people with brain damage to this region make more utilitarian moral decisions.

'If neuroscience research can demonstrate that deceptive behaviour and moral cognition are not only associated with the activation of specific brain areas, but may even be modulated by noninvasive stimulation of these areas, what implications will such findings have on our concept of personal responsibility?' the researchers asked.
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Karim, A., Schneider, M., Lotze, M., Veit, R., Sauseng, P., Braun, C., & Birbaumer, N. (2009). The Truth about Lying: Inhibition of the Anterior Prefrontal Cortex Improves Deceptive Behavior. Cerebral Cortex, 20 (1), 205-213 DOI: 10.1093/cercor/bhp090

Early risers are more proactive than evening people

I've always envied early risers, those who spring out of bed at the crack of dawn, ready, it seems, to take on the world. Of course their early vitality could be short-lived. Morning friskiness gives the impression of a positive nature but are 'larks' really more proactive people than 'owls'?

Yes, according to Christoph Randler who surveyed 367 student participants and found a correlation between their self-reported 'morningness' (as revealed by their answers to questions about how easy they find it to get up in the morning and how alert they feel) and their self-reported proactivity (measured by their agreement with statements like 'I spend time identifying long-range goals for myself' and 'I feel responsible for my own life'). The correlation was relatively weak (.11, where 1 would be a perfect match) but was statistically significant.

Randler also found proactivity to be (inversely) correlated with so-called 'social jetlag'. This is caused by the mismatch between one's biological time-keeping and the demands of social time, as betrayed by the difference in students' choice of rise times between weekdays and weekends.

These findings suggest that morning people really are more proactive. What's not clear is why - whether it's because they really do have an inherent energy and drive or if instead it's simply easier for morning people to be proactive in a world that is generally tailored towards rising early, rather than working late.

'... [W]hether evening people could be more proactive in their lifestyles if they had less restrictive schedules (e.g. they could start work later in the day)' is a question for future research, Randler said.

This is far from being the first study to look for associations between people's sleep habits and other personality factors. Prior research suggests that evening people are more extraverted, pessimistic and creative, whilst morning people are more conscientious. Twin studies suggest that genetic differences explain a lot of the variation in people's morningness and eveningness.
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Randler, C. (2009). Proactive People Are Morning People. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 39 (12), 2787-2797 DOI: 10.1111/j.1559-1816.2009.00549.x