Swearing patients take a toll on healthcare workers

Although many medical terms are long and difficult to pronounce, medical settings are punctuated with words familiar to most of us – being sworn at is an occupational hazard for healthcare workers. Exactly how often does it happen? A new review published in Aggression and Violent Behaviour by Teresa Stone and colleagues finds one study suggests rates as high as three incidents per shift in a mental health setting; in other contexts the rates appear lower, but even a lower estimate suggests one in three workers experience one or more incidents a week, with seven per cent experiencing this "continuously".

So swearing is common enough, but its effects are far from negligible. It is more likely to provoke persistent negative feelings in health workers than even physical aggressions, as well as resultant problems with sleep and depression, and a greater likelihood of their seeking treatment or even a new role. Healthcare workers are oriented to care for and ease the suffering of their patients, which can make receiving vitriol from them particularly hard to shake off; Stone notes that training simulations to deal with difficult patients rarely include offensive content, meaning that first encounters often happen on the job.

Being sworn at bothers workers less when they perceive less or no intention to harm, such as when the patient is unable to control the utterance.  A classic example of this is coprolalia, where obscenities are generated in an explosive manner in response to surprise or stress, such as can happen with patients with Tourette Syndrome, for instance (although note only around ten per cent of those with TS experience this). Other examples include patients with language impairment due to left hemisphere brain damage, such as those with aphasia (in whom production of swearwords is largely intact, often standing in for unavailable words), along with patients with dementia, traumatic brain injury, and of course, those in high distress or pain.

Pain is a good reason for expletives, as research has shown people can cope longer with pain (40 extra seconds with their hand in an ice bucket) when voicing swear words as opposed to non-swears. Habitual swearers are less likely to experience a benefit, suggesting they have habituated to what is meant as an infrequent venting of distress, a verbal form of an animal’s howl. Other non-toxic reasons for swearing include releasing emotions, certainly in young men with stronger taboos around crying, and as a sign that members of a group have reached the stage where they can safely play with boundaries (true for healthcare workers and patients). However, Stone also notes evidence that swearing as a coping mechanism can turn potential supporters away from you.

Health workers may sometimes find using expletives a necessary part of their job, for example to increase understanding by using informal speech that parallels that of a younger patient, although swearing directed at patients is obviously discouraged. Observation of staff group therapy sessions also shows workers using profanities to a high degree in this context. However we don’t have a clear picture of whether swearing is actually useful for them, either in processing events or in lessening the sting of future ones.

Accident and Emergency, the department with highest rates of swearing, is often busy during the holiday period. If you find yourself attending, spare a thought for the staff and direct your expletives away from them. Perhaps towards Uncle Darrell’s garish Rudolf cardigan, the one with the ever-fucking-flashing nose.

_________________________________

Stone, T., McMillan, M., & Hazelton, M. (2015). Back to swear one: A review of English language literature on swearing and cursing in Western health settings Aggression and Violent Behavior, 25, 65-74 DOI: 10.1016/j.avb.2015.07.012

--further reading--
The dark side of swearing - it may deter emotional support from others
Being fluent at swearing is a sign of healthy verbal ability

Post written by Alex Fradera (@alexfradera) for the BPS Research Digest.

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Look on the bright side – economic recessions mean workers get more sleep and free time

For understandable reasons, we usually think of economic slumps as bad times. But a new paper in The Journal of Occupational Health Psychology has uncovered a silver lining – during these periods, employed people enjoy more free time and more sleep.

Looking at patterns across American states between 2003 and 2010 – spanning the Great Recession which began 2007 – Christopher Barnes’ team found that worsening of the economy, as indexed by unemployment rates, was significantly related to workers sleeping more and spending more time enjoying leisure activities.

When the economy was at its lowest point, compared to its highest, workers were sleeping an average of ten minutes more per week and enjoying an extra 21 minutes of recreational activities. While this doesn’t sound like a lot, consider firstly that like all averages, some individuals may be enjoying much more than that, and secondly that such dividends may not be evenly distributed in time, but come as special bonuses – visiting an extra sports game each month, for instance, or avoiding a quarterly all-nighter, which is otherwise likely to spoil a run of following days.

The data, drawn from over 34,000 participants using an ongoing survey at the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, showed that the reason for this was simple: during economic dips, workers spend fewer hours on the job. There is unlikely to be a single reason for this: in some cases, companies will explicitly reduce employee hours to offset lower revenue, in others formal hours may be unchanged but workers simply find themselves with less to do. This joins other evidence that shows how macro-economic trends can effect people’s behaviour patterns: for instance, in poorer economic periods, workplace accidents drop in frequency, fewer people marry or divorce, but more children are conceived. In each case, the big picture shapes the little one.

When business picks up, that’s good news for organisations, but it demands that employees rein in the recharge activities important for their long-term engagement. Management should be aware of burnout risks during growth periods, and deploy resources to ensure that people aren’t sacrificing their life to sustain that growth. And during the low points, we should take heart that people are getting more opportunities for replenishing themselves. These breathing periods can be a chance to invest in activities with long-term benefits: to take up exercise and develop new skills. Or, simply, to enjoy some idle time.

_________________________________

Barnes, C., Lefter, A., Bhave, D., & Wagner, D. (2015). The Benefits of Bad Economies: Business Cycles and Time-Based Work–Life Conflict. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology DOI: 10.1037/a0039896

Post written by Alex Fradera (@alexfradera) for the BPS Research Digest.

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Here's a simple way to improve your work/life boundaries

Critical goals still unconquered at the day’s end are the path to a spoiled evening, according to new research published in the Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology. But thankfully the paper outlines an effective tactic we can take to minimise their impact.

We all know our worklife can disrupt our free time by supplying unwanted thoughts that pop up when we should be relaxing. But what’s doing the popping: Concerns about pay, whether to bring Christmas cards in, flashbacks to spreadsheets? Severe events such as bullying can certainly cast a shadow beyond working hours. But Ball State University’s Brandon Smit has identified a more common culprit – uncompleted goals.

Taking his inspiration from classic lab studies showing that uncompleted goals are particularly likely to linger in mind, Smit surveyed 103 employed people, asking them to report which goals had been ticked off and which unfinished at the close of each day, and then just before bed to report on how much these goals had occupied their thoughts that evening. As you might expect, the incomplete goals intruded more, unless they had been rated as fairly unimportant. This effect applied only participants who reported a higher level of job involvement; those uninvested were immune.

This is no great surprise, but what can we do about it? In one sense it is advantageous for our minds to keep uncompleted goals "live" in our system, that way they are easily triggered which makes sure we don’t forget them. The trouble is, when a TV advert references "limited time offers" or "customer service", these goals force themselves into mind when we’re unable or don’t want to act on them.

To help prevent this, Smit asked a subset of his participants, once they'd described their incomplete goals, to clearly plan where, when and how they would tackle each one, for example: ‘‘I will go into work and start at 10:00 AM in a call center in my office. Log into my computer and call customers back…” By specifying the context for action, this helped the high-involved participants to put the goals out of mind during off-work hours, and as a result their uncompleted goals produced fewer intrusions, almost as if they had the same status as completed goals. Data from a simple measure of work detachment also suggested that, using Smit’s strategy, the participants found it easier to let go of work in general.

All in all, then, fretting about unfinished goals appears to be one piece of the work-life conflict puzzle, but how big a piece it is remains to be seen. Aside from the specific effect of the planning intervention on detachment, there was actually no relationship between the number of goal-related interruptions participants reported experiencing and their overall levels of work detachment. This is perhaps because unmeasured factors are doing hidden work: take a project review meeting, for instance. This can raise many questions (Do I need to raise my game? Am I being lined up for that promotion?) that may occupy a worker’s mind during his or her leisure time, even though such meetings tend to happen after important goals have already been completed. This suggests we need to gather a more holistic picture of work-life conflict, involving goals, people issues and existential concerns.

That said, this research does offer helpful insights for under-pressure professionals. While switching off work phones and leaving our briefcase at the office may be useful in developing work-life boundaries, this study reminds us that our heads will still carry work memories with us, ready to trigger. The solution tested here by Smits resembles the “open loop” concept popularised by management consultant Dave Allen (an open loop is anything that pulls at your attention when it shouldn’t). The implication is that if you capture and schedule your work activities, you’ll be more likely to find some much needed peace during downtime.

_________________________________

Smit, B. (2015). Successfully leaving work at work: The self-regulatory underpinnings of psychological detachment Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology DOI: 10.1111/joop.12137

--further reading--
When Korea imposed a limit on working hours, did it make people happier?
How do male scientists balance the demands of work and family?
Work/Life Separation Is Impossible. Here's How to Deal with It

Post written by Alex Fradera (@alexfradera) for the BPS Research Digest.

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In search of the optimum level of trust between human and machine

A computer screen at the NASA flight control room is used to
remotely pilot a Proteus aircraft during flight demonstrations of
collision avoidance systems. April 3, 2003 in Mojave, California.
(Photo by David McNew/Getty Images)

By guest blogger Craig Aaen-Stockdale

We live in a world where volatile industrial processes, military actions and our morning commute are increasingly controlled by automated systems. The arrival of the autonomous vehicle on our roads, drones in our skies and unmanned vessels at sea throws into sharp relief the challenges faced in collaboration between human and machine.

It might seem counter-intuitive, ridiculous even, to discuss matters of trust between human and machine; but a relationship of trust between people and the automated systems they use is often a critical factor in making these systems safe and efficient. Trusting that an automated system can handle the more hum-drum aspects of its assignment with a minimum of human interference frees up its operators for tasks that are more deserving of their attention that might require more human skills such as problem-solving, improvisation and ingenuity. But trust is a delicate balance. Trusting an automated system too much, perhaps adopting a hands-off approach, can lead to delays, inefficiencies and risk of damage or injury when there is no goal-directed supervision of its behaviour or if the environment in which it is operating changes. Not trusting an automated system enough, on the other hand, by constantly tweaking its assignment parameters or continuously monitoring it, takes the operator’s attention away from tasks that require human intervention and can even render the idea of automating the system redundant.

Trust, or the lack of it, between human and machine can also impact much simpler systems than the automated vehicles of the future. For example, in a control room, multiple telecommunication functions – radio, telephone, e-mail, emergency telephone and public announcement system – can now easily be integrated into single touch-screen devices. However, many older operators do not trust that these devices will function correctly in an emergency situation and prefer to have hard-wired back-ups available, leading to unnecessary expense, project management time and, ultimately, a cluttered control room environment – which brings with it yet more ergonomic problems.

In a new paper published in Human Factors, researchers at MIT have investigated what sorts of characteristics make someone a good operator of unmanned vehicles, and how operators can be encouraged to trust the automated systems that are under their influence, leaving them to take care of the mundane aspects of an operation. Specifically, Andrew Clare and his colleagues tested how easily operators can be primed through simple verbal prompts to have just the right level of trust in the machines with which they are, for want of a better word, collaborating. "Collaboration" is a more appropriate term to use here than "controlling", "commanding" or "operating". The vessels are making many of the decisions themselves based on algorithms that optimise their respective workload, schedules and tasks. The human operator sets the high-level goals for the team of vessels, but does not control any one vessel directly.

Forty-eight participants were recruited from the local university population and the researchers gave them the task of controlling a simulated team of autonomous vehicles searching an area for hostile forces and targeting them for weapons deployment. The task was a computer-based simulation, based on existing software for controlling multiple autonomous vehicles. The algorithms that controlled the "vehicles" were written to be deliberately imperfect, thereby requiring some intervention by the participant to optimise their performance. While being trained in the use of the interface, participants in the positively- or negatively-primed groups were given a short passage to read which consisted of actual quotes from participants in a previous experiment. For the positively-primed participants, the quotes reflected positive naturalistic impressions of the software, for example, “The system is easy to use and intuitive to work with.” For the negatively-primed participants, the quotes reflected dissatisfaction with the system, for example, “I did not always understand decisions made by the automated scheduler.” The third group received no priming passage during training.

The control interface used in the task. Image from Clare et al, 2015.

A participant’s performance was quantified via various metrics such as the amount of area covered, the percentage of targets found, the percentage of hostile targets correctly destroyed and the percentage of non-hostile targets incorrectly destroyed. Trust in the automated system was measured by questionnaire after the experiment and online subjective assessments of current perceived performance trust in the automated system and expectations of performance were taken throughout the experiment via a scale that popped-up on-screen at regular intervals.

There were a wide range of trust levels amongst the participants, and as you’d expect, positive-priming lead to higher ratings of trust, while negative-priming lead to lower ratings of trust. However, across all subjects, there were no significant differences in performance between the different priming groups. Upon picking apart their subject pool, Clare and colleagues discovered that priming was, however, significantly affecting the performance of participants who were regular or experienced players of computer games.

It has long been known that experienced gamers suffer from "automation bias" or a tendency to over-trust automation. In the initial stages of this experiment, gamers who had been positively primed, or had not been primed at all, trusted the (deliberately sub-optimal) algorithms too much. Trust has substantial inertia, even when we are talking about trust in non-conscious machines: many small errors will be "forgiven" whilst a single significant error – a "betrayal" if you will – poisons the relationship immediately and trust has to be rebuilt over a long period of time. The initial over-confidence in the automated system displayed by the positively-primed or non-primed gamers took considerable time to unlearn, which lead to higher subjective ratings of trust in the system, but ultimately worse performance. Gamers who had been negatively primed, on the other hand, began with a much more sceptical view of the system (closer to that of the non-gamers) and as a result of this scepticism of the system, they took more action to correct the behaviour of their search teams. In other words, negative priming improved gamers’ performance, in that it recalibrated their level of trust in the automated systems to more appropriate levels.

The findings of this and similar studies can be used for developing both recruitment strategies and training programs for supervisors of autonomous vehicles. Based on their experiences with technology, some recruits will benefit from prompting to be more or less trustful of automated systems. Identification of recruits who might be too trusting or distrustful of automation, combined with introduction of appropriate priming into their training could act to reduce the amount of training time, and exposure to an automated system’s actual performance that is required to build an effective human-machine team.

Automated systems will never be perfect, and it is likely that they will remain under human supervision for some time, if not permanently. However, unmanned vehicles and their human operators can make a powerful – and safe – team if we can strike a balance between blind faith in technology and our more Luddite instincts. We merely have to find the Goldilocks Zone for our interaction with technology: not too trusting, not too distrustful, but just right.

_________________________________

Clare, A., Cummings, M., & Repenning, N. (2015). Influencing Trust for Human-Automation Collaborative Scheduling of Multiple Unmanned Vehicles Human Factors: The Journal of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, 57 (7), 1208-1218 DOI: 10.1177/0018720815587803

Post written for the BPS Research Digest by Craig Aaen-Stockdale, Principal Consultant / Technical Lead, Human Factors & Ergonomics at Lloyd’s Register Consulting in Oslo, Norway. Previously Aaen-Stockdale has worked as a postdoctoral research fellow at McGill University in Montreal, and at Bradford School of Optometry & Vision Science. In 2012 he was a visiting research fellow at Buskerud University College in Kongsberg, Norway.

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Careful – a long-running rivalry can make you reckless

Victory is always gratifying and acquires an even more delicious taste when it involves the defeat of a rival. But new evidence published recently in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology suggests that rivalries, as well as spurring us on, also promote a mindset that favours eagerness, even recklessness – a mindset that seeks to achieve a legacy for the history books, but carries a risk to our chances on the day.

NYU psychologist Gavin Kilduff defines rivalry as a relationship characterised by repeated competitive encounters. It’s personal – the mirror image of a friendship, meaning "Yankees and Mets loathe each other" is a rivalry whereas "everyone hates Chelsea" is not. Kilduff’s work shows that repeated contact and geographical proximity encourage rivalries. In the present research from the University of Virginia, the authors Benjamin Converse and David Reinhard suggest this is because rivalries provide the opportunity for the competitors to develop an ongoing narrative, making each side’s rival an integral part of their own history and so, inevitably, part of their future.

Initial surveys with sports fans showed this in action: games against a rival (as opposed to another talented team) were seen as having greater links to the past and future – in relation to these games, participants gave higher ratings to items like “it feels like the newest chapter in a longer narrative” and “has the potential to become part of the [my team’s] history.” This was also true of personal rivalries in domains such as sports or work: participants expressed a greater preoccupation with the future and "legacy" when contemplating competitors they had a longer history with.

So rivalry involves looking at the bigger picture. We know from past research that this influences our behaviour: more distant, abstracted goals – in this case "how we will be remembered" – trigger a preference for making gains rather than focusing on avoiding losses. This means we would expect people to display eagerness over caution in rivalry situations.

Converse and Reinhard explored this by surveying US women’s soccer fans shortly before their team competed in the 2015 World Cup final. America’s interest in soccer is recent but burgeoning, making for a green fanbase who don’t automatically know their team’s history. And it is quite a history, as half of the 144 participants were reminded: opponents Japan had beaten the US in a penalty shootout in the previous World Cup final in 2011, with the US partly avenged by beating Japan for Olympic gold the year after. Compared to the participants who were not reminded of these facts, participants who read about the rivalry showed a greater focus on riskier, more aggressive tactics, as shown by a greater amount of time spent examining a survey page showing an offensive formation (4-3-3) rather than the alternative defensive one. This was taken as sign that these participants favoured a more attacking approach from their team, supporting the idea that an ongoing rivalry encourages eagerness.

Not just eagerness, but unwise eagerness. The next study of 200 recreational athletes asked them to prove themselves on a test of visual search ability, the instructions emphasising that the abilities required here were also crucial for sports. Participants had the chance to have a practice round to warm up before the main task but some decided to tackle the task cold. And they were more likely to do this if they were primed beforehand to think about their biggest rival.

More than unwise eagerness, rivalry seems to promote error-full eagerness. A final study of fantasy sports league members tested performance on the Cognitive Reflection Test, where snap judgments are likely to lead you to the wrong answer – try: “If it takes 5 machines 5 minutes to make 5 widgets, how long would it take 100 machines to make 100 widgets?” Good performance requires a cautious approach, but participants who considered a rival beforehand were more likely to make errors.

Research by Kilduff and others have shown that rivalry can have benefits for the competition at hand, such as by enhancing motivation. Here we see the flip side: the possibility of over-extension in search of the great win, all in the hope of writing the greatest chapter of the ongoing story.

_________________________________

Converse, B., & Reinhard, D. (2015). On Rivalry and Goal Pursuit: Shared Competitive History, Legacy Concerns, and Strategy Selection. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology DOI: 10.1037/pspa0000038

--further reading--
The Surprising Benefits of a Creative Rivalry

Post written by Alex Fradera (@alexfradera) for the BPS Research Digest.

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"Super recognisers": more than just clever lab rats

It's only within the last 10 years that psychologists have realised some people have extremely good face recognition abilities that set them apart from the rest of the population, a group they call "super recognisers". These individuals excel on established lab tests of their abilities, such as the Cambridge Face Memory Test. Understandably, this has led to interest in using these people's skills in real-life settings, such as to help identify rioters whose faces have been captured on CCTV. In fact, there are reports that the Metropolitan Police in London already have a team of super-recognisers for just such purposes.

A new study published in Applied Cognitive Psychology is helping psychological science catch up with these developments. Anna Bobak and her colleagues have tested seven super recognisers (already known to their lab) on two tasks to see if their excellent lab performance translates to more practical uses.

The first test involved the super recognisers (and a group of 22 student control participants) looking at a still image of an unfamiliar face captured on CCTV and then picking out this individual from an array of ten more photographs of faces (shown from a different angle, and taken with a different camera; see figure below). This process was repeated 80 times, and the target was present in the array of ten on half of these trials. In real life, something like this situation can occur if a criminal is recorded on CCTV, suspects are later arrested, and police must decide if any of the suspects are the person seen on CCTV.

Most people are known to find this task tricky. However, the super recognisers' performance was remarkable – they correctly identified the target face on more than 93 per cent of trials, compared with an average hit rate of just over 80 per cent among the controls. The super recognisers were also more confident in their answers and made fewer false identifications. Looking at individual rather than group performance, four of the seven super recognisers significantly outperformed the controls.

The second test involved the super recognisers and controls studying CCTV stills of twenty faces and imagining that these people were missing or wanted. Then they performed a distracting filler task (involving searching for letters). Then they watched 40 five-second video clips, each of which depicted a person walking down a dimly lit corridor. For each clip, the participants had to say whether they recognised the person or not (as being among the twenty faces they'd looked at earlier). This is like a police officer memorising wanted or missing posters and then looking out for these people when out on the street.

The super recognisers struggled at this task, but they still outperformed the controls by some way. The groups' average accuracy rates were 67 per cent and and 58 per cent, respectively. Another insight from this and the first task, was that while the participants' performance correlated with their success on the Cambridge Face Memory Test at a group level, there were some anomalies at the individual level. For example, one of the super recognisers who aced the standard Cambridge Test failed to outperform controls on the two life-like tests used in this study. The researchers concluded that super recognisers could be a real boon to real-life security agencies, but that recruiters would do well to use a mix of established lab-based and more applied tests to find the best candidates for performing real-life identification tasks.

_________________________________

Bobak, A., Hancock, P., & Bate, S. (2015). Super-recognisers in Action: Evidence from Face-matching and Face Memory Tasks Applied Cognitive Psychology DOI: 10.1002/acp.3170

--further reading--
Meet a super recogniser
I never forget a face!

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
Figures from Bobak et al.

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The surprising truth about which personality traits do and don't correlate with computer programming skills

What do Lisbeth Salander, Chloe O'Brien and Elliot Alderson have in common? They are all expert computer programmers or hackers, and (like most fictional portrayals of people with their skills), they're all, well, rather odd and socially awkward. In other words, they all conform to the commonly held stereotype of the IT guy (or girl) – which must be one of the most stereotyped occupations in the world – as good with machines and programming code, but lousy with people and emotions. Is this stereotype fair? A new meta-analysis published in the Journal of Research in Personality, combining data from 19 previous studies involving nearly 1700 people, suggests the answer is (mostly) "No". 

Timo Gnambs trawled the research literature looking for relevant studies that had measured people's programming ability objectively (e.g. based on the number of errors in their programming code), and had measured their personality traits and intelligence. He found 19 relevant studies published between 1974 and 2014 and involving 1695 people (27 per cent were female) from the US, Australia, England and Canada (it's a shame Gnambs doesn't tell us more about who these people were, for example whether they were programming students or professionals). 

Unsurprisingly, and somewhat in line with the programmer stereotype, the strongest correlate with programming ability was intelligence. Cleverer people make better programmers. Also, introversion was correlated with programming skill – which makes sense seeing as introverts generally prefer a quiet environment away from crowds, and working on a computer and writing code fits with that preference. Conscientiousness was another relevant trait. Again this makes sense, because conscientiousness is about attention to detail. 

However, the personality trait most strongly correlated with programming ability was not introversion or conscientiousness, but openness: a trait that's related to being creative and imaginative. What's more, over time to the present day, openness has become a more important correlate of programming ability, while conscientiousness has become less important. This is speculation, but perhaps more creative people are today drawn to careers in programming because of all the opportunities for imaginative expression in a world of apps, video games, snazzy websites, and social networks. Finally, the traits of agreeableness (essentially how friendly someone is) and neuroticism (how anxious and emotionally unstable) were not correlated with programming ability, pretty much refuting the tired stereotype of the socially awkward programming geek.

A final thought: knowing someone's personality and mental ability doesn't actually tell you a great deal about their likely computer programming skills. Personality traits and IQ in fact only accounted for around 12 per cent of the difference between people in their programming abilities, which just goes to show that the very idea that there is such a thing as a computer wiz "personality type" is nonsense anyway. 

_________________________________

Gnambs, T. (2015). What makes a computer wiz? Linking personality traits and programming aptitude Journal of Research in Personality, 58, 31-34 DOI: 10.1016/j.jrp.2015.07.004

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

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Put more effort into a project and you'll become more passionate about it

The entrepreneur is one of the archetypes of our age, defined above all – if countless commencement speeches and hagiographies are anything to go by – by the passion they hold for their business, allowing them to devote so much to it. New research by Michael Gielnik and colleagues published in the Academy of Management Journal suggests this common belief has things backwards: in fact entrepreneurs get passionate because they get stuck in.

The first study spent eight weeks surveying 54 German entrepreneurs during the pre-launch period of their budding business opportunity. They answered questions like “In the last week, how much effort did you put into venture tasks beyond what was immediately required?” and rated their agreement with statements like “In the last week, establishing a new company excited me”. Their answers were used to generate ratings of effort and passion. The researchers found that for each entrepreneur, fluctuation in these two ratings could be explained by one relationship: the previous week’s effort influenced this week’s passion, such that more effort led to more passion.

Another study looked at this more systematically, asking 136 students to develop a business idea by answering questions about likely competitors, customers, and the conditions and trends of the market. In the primary condition, participants could choose between twelve possible business ideas or even put forward one of their own. The key question was whether their entrepreneurial passion would be higher following the task than it was prior to it. The experiment established that it was, but only under certain conditions.

Firstly, in a variation in which participants were only given 30 minutes to spend on the task, and told it was an unimportant pilot study (as opposed to being given an hour and told that their efforts would make a real difference), their subsequent appetite for founding a business was unaffected. This suggests investing minimal effort is not enough to boost passion. Secondly, half of the participants received feedback that their analysis was superficial and that they hadn’t advanced the readiness of this business idea. For these participants, it didn’t matter how much effort they invested, their passion didn’t tip upwards. Making an effort without seeing any impact is also not enough to boost passion.

One more factor: in another variant of the study, participants weren’t given free reign to select their entrepreneurial goal, but were handed one to work on. In this case, their passion never went up, even with positive feedback on making progress – and when there was no progress, it actually dropped.

Although there are undoubtedly character traits that lead some people to find passion more readily, it doesn’t emerge from a vacuum. It requires an engagement with the world, an engagement this study suggests has a particular structure. Free choice, results, and genuine effort: the three ingredients that passion needs.

_________________________________

Gielnik, M., Spitzmuller, M., Schmitt, A., Klemann, D., & Frese, M. (2014). "I Put in Effort, Therefore I Am Passionate": Investigating the Path from Effort to Passion in Entrepreneurship Academy of Management Journal, 58 (4), 1012-1031 DOI: 10.5465/amj.2011.0727

Post written by Alex Fradera (@alexfradera) for the BPS Research Digest.

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Self-doubting bosses prefer to delegate to self-doubting staff

It’s possible to earn great success in your professional career, rise to great heights, but all the while experience the "imposter phenomenon": the sense that your position is undeserved, your unmasking possible at any time. For people like this, who doubt their own abilities, it would seem wise to rely on others who are confident they can get things done. But new research published in Personality and Individual Differences suggests the opposite: the more prone managers are to that imposter feeling, the more they choose to delegate tasks to those who also feel unworthy.

Myriam Bechtoldt of the Frankfurt School of Management recruited 190 managers – all highly educated – and had them complete online surveys that measured their identification with imposterism, including feeling like a fake, attributing one’s current position to luck, and feeling unworthy of praise for past successes.

Following this, the managers had to decide how to delegate six work activities, half of which were routine, such as compiling a mailing list or organising an outing, while the remainder were more challenging, such as making an important presentation or developing a mission statement.

The four junior candidates available to complete these delegated tasks were described in short profiles, which presented them all as similar: all highly competent, all qualified, all hungry to prove themselves. They differed only in gender, and the fact that one male and female candidate were described as self-confident, whereas the other two were described as secretly doubting their abilities.

The results were clear: the higher a manager scored on feelings of imposterism, the more they preferred to delegate to another self-doubter, and this was true for tasks of all stripes.

Why did this happen? Bechtoldt believes it a simple matter of self-image. In the self-doubting candidates, imposter participants see some part of themselves, and prefer to rely on someone with a similar mindset – even though self-confident people are on average a surer bet, being more ambitious about outcomes and persevering more through problems.

It may also be that the participants feel the urge to give their counterparts a leg up the ladder, perhaps treating them as a proxy for their own journey, and trying to convince themselves that a self-doubting profile can still reliably succeed. I should note that Bechtoldt doesn’t see such a strategic motive at work, arguing that explanation would account only for delegation of the high impact activities, not the menial ones that were unlikely to raise anyone’s profile. Further study will tell.

Is this result good news or bad for a typical organisation? The fact that low-confident, high ability workers will be given a chance to prove themselves by like-minded superiors could be a source of relief – although if such people are favoured to take on duties of every sort, this could turn out to be a source of stress for them. More broadly, the result is another example of organisational cloning, where leaders look to stack their ranks with those who most resemble them, even though a degree of diversity - here, a mix of those who self-doubt and those who are self-sure – is what helps organisations flourish.

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Bechtoldt, M. (2015). Wanted: Self-doubting employees—Managers scoring positively on impostorism favor insecure employees in task delegation Personality and Individual Differences, 86, 482-486 DOI: 10.1016/j.paid.2015.07.002

--further reading--
Feeling like a fraud: The psychology of the impostor phenomenon

Post written by Alex Fradera (@alexfradera) for the BPS Research Digest.

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The psychological toll of being off-duty but "on call"

That increasingly common end-of-day feeling: of physically leaving the office, only for it to tag along home. Thanks largely to technology, our availability – to clients, bosses and co-workers – extends into our evenings, weekends and even holidays. Getting a clear account of what this means for us isn’t easy, as jobs that intrude more into leisure time are also distinguished by higher pace and further factors known and unknown, making it hard to pinpoint what harmful effects, if any, are specifically due to our constant availability.

A new study published in the Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, and led by Jan Dettmers at the University of Hamburg, takes a fresh tack on this, investigating workers who have two types of free-time: on-call periods where they are free to please themselves but must remain available for potential work demands, and other periods where they are truly off-duty. For each individual participant, this set up keeps job-role demands and responsibilities equal while varying the need to be available. The data suggest that extended work availability has a negative effect: dampening mood and also increasing markers of physiological stress.

The 132 participants – mostly men in 13 organisations ranging from IT to transport – spent periods of their calendar on-call, meaning they were available out of office hours to deal with special customer requests or troubleshoot technical emergencies. For the purposes of the study, the researchers focused on a four-day on-call period (including the weekend) and a similar period without on-call responsibilities.

During the study, participants completed morning mood diaries that showed them to be more tired, tense and unwell following an on-call day. The effect remained even after controlling for the number of work calls taken the previous day – suggesting it isn’t explained purely by lengthy and draining interactions. It’s likely that the mere anticipation of interruption, and the resulting loss of control over one’s free time, eats away at the benefits of leisure, even if the interruptions turn out to be minor.

In addition to the diary information, 51 participants provided physiological data in the form of the hormone cortisol. Cortisol can be used as a physiological marker of stress: specifically, the degree of its post-waking climb in concentration, which appears to be a preparation for the anticipated stresses of the day. A larger increase suggests a more stress-oriented state, and Dettmers and his team were able to analyse this from cotton balls that participants chewed on immediately after waking, and 15 minutes and 30 minutes after waking, before popping them into the freezer to await collection. The cortisol awakening response was greater the morning after an on-call day, with this effect also persisting once the volume of the previous day’s interruptions was controlled for.

We already know that use of work technology during free time makes it harder to relax and detach. Here we see further evidence that the mere prospect of work-related interruptions during free time can exacerbate stress. In the organisations researched in this study, on-call periods were formally identified as such and represented just a fraction of the work calendar; an unspoken truth in many organisations is that on-call is the unofficial default mode. In these cases, carving out truly off-call periods that allow people to reclaim control over their experiences is long overdue.

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Dettmers, J., Vahle-Hinz, T., Bamberg, E., Friedrich, N., & Keller, M. (2015). Extended Work Availability and Its Relation With Start-of-Day Mood and Cortisol. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology DOI: 10.1037/a0039602

Post written by Alex Fradera (@alexfradera) for the BPS Research Digest.

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Having strong political skills can be a handicap in the workplace

If you overheard someone at work refer to you as "a real political operator", would you feel complimented, or alarmed? The latter turns out to be a sensible reaction, as new research suggests that supervisors and colleagues have less faith in the performance of the highly politically skilled.

Study authors Ingo Zettler and Jonas Lang noted a conundrum in their field: researchers treat political skill as a uniform good, the more the better, yet a meta-analysis of relevant research (pdf) found a spotty relationship between more political skill and improved outcomes like job performance. Zettler and Lang identified two reasons why political skill might not produce steadily rising benefits. Firstly, deft politicking, however well-intentioned, can create suspicions in co-workers: if you handle the suppliers, and the system, mightn’t you be handling me as well? Once others lose trust in a politically-focused performer, their ability to get things done is stymied. Secondly, politicking isn’t always well-intentioned, and if you have a political skill hammer, everything may start looking like a nail. Habitually working the angles may lead highly skilled individuals to make like Machiavelli and potentially do harm. Zettler and Lang predicted that thanks to these reasons, those who live and breathe political approaches would actually do worse at their jobs compared to those merely competent in political skill.

This prediction was confirmed in two studies. The first, involving 178 on-the-job apprentices, found that the relationship between self-ratings of political skill and supervisors’ ratings of their job performance was positively correlated, but only up to a point. Beyond a political skill score of 3.5 on a five-point scale, supervisor ratings flatlined and then began dropping. The second study found the same overall pattern in 115 employees with longer work experience, each rated by a supervisor and also a colleague. This study also found that this “curvilinear relationship” between political skill and job performance (whereby intermediates in political skill outperformed low- and high-skilled participants) – was most pronounced when the rater was not personally close to the participant. Savviness and bluntness alike can be forgiven by close colleagues - “that’s just how Chris gets things done” – but others are less trusting.

These are cross-sectional studies, which means we can’t confirm that the differences in perceived performance are being caused by differences in political skill; we can only infer this from patterns shown in previous studies on politicking. I would also like to have seen the study account for motivators or personality traits that might cluster with high political skill – is skill itself really the problem, or a mindset that accompanies it? We should also take into account that political skill is judged quite differently in people in other parts of an organisation that weren’t studied here, such as in leadership circles. But this research is a preliminary validation of a new idea gaining currency in organisational research – that you can have "too much of a good thing" – that even traits considered universally positive can in excess have negative consequences.

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Zettler, I., & Lang, J. (2015). Employees' Political Skill and Job Performance: An Inverted U-Shaped Relation? Applied Psychology, 64 (3), 541-577 DOI: 10.1111/apps.12018

--further reading--
Employees should be taught political skills
When work conditions are tough, Machiavellians thrive

Post written by Alex Fradera (@alexfradera) for the BPS Research Digest.

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Experts are especially prone to claiming they know more than they do

Experts often exhibit "overclaiming" –
believing they know things that they don't.

If you consider yourself a science buff, see if any of these terms seem familiar: meta-toxin, bio-sexual, retroplex. Ringing any bells? If so, you may be surprised to hear that these terms are entirely made-up. They are “trap items” invented to study overclaiming, the claiming of knowledge you could not possibly possess. If you overclaimed, you’re not alone; one early study showed as many as one in five consumers have opinions on entirely imaginary products. Now, new research by Stav Atir and her colleagues suggests knowledge can be a dangerous thing, as those most confident about a topic are most likely to fall prey to this error.

Atir’s team suspected overclaiming is driven by a "feeling of knowing": a generalised sense that we’ve seen something before, that we lean on in the absence of a true memory. This feeling can be led astray by our confidence. Imagine being certain that you know “biology stuff” and that you have some real biology knowledge. In this case, the genuine biology words in your memory – metabolic, retrograde, complex – give a ring of familiarity to made up biology-ish words like meta-toxin. Based on this reasoning, Atir and her colleagues predicted expertise in a field should lead to overclaiming, and set out to examine this in five studies involving 570 participants.

Each study asked participants to rate their familiarity with a series of items within a topic area (e.g. finance), some of which, like pre-rated stocks, were plausible but false. Across the first three experiments, the team found that people more knowledgeable in a given area – finance, biology, philosophy or literature – were significantly more likely to overclaim false knowledge in those areas. This relationship held after controlling for a "know it all factor" of their overall confidence in their general knowledge.

It could be that self-proclaimed experts are just trying to look good, and claiming familiarity they don’t actually feel. To assess this, the fourth experiment added a condition that explicitly stated that some items were invented, giving a new incentive to the show-offs: to spot the fakes. After this warning, participants were warier, and in general more willing to choose the "never heard of it" option, but the higher rate of overclaiming errors by experts remained unchanged.

A final investigation suggested that while overclaiming may be influenced by an existing abundance of related concepts in a person’s mind, it can also be produced simply by heightening a person’s confidence in their knowledge. Participants took a quiz on US geography before the actual test of overclaiming (based on the same topic). When the quiz was constructed to be easy, giving participants the feeling they had a good grasp of geography, they went on to overclaim more. It suggests that merely feeling like an expert also sways our evaluation of ambiguous cues firmly towards the "seen it!" camp.

Minor overclaiming is likely quite common and harmless – remarking "I think I’ve heard of it" about the obscure foreign film you probably skimmed over when it was mentioned in The Guardian. More serious instances involve making claims or recommendations on more important issues, such as finance or health, areas where people often seek the advice of experts. Unfortunately, experts have a particular vulnerability that puts them at risk of overclaiming. This research shows this isn’t simply a question of losing face: it can be difficult for experts to recognise when they are out of their depth.

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Atir, S., Rosenzweig, E., & Dunning, D. (2015). When Knowledge Knows No Bounds: Self-Perceived Expertise Predicts Claims of Impossible Knowledge Psychological Science, 26 (8), 1295-1303 DOI: 10.1177/0956797615588195

--further reading--
Armchair experts have their limits
Can psychologist and psychiatrist expert witnesses be trusted to know how memory works?
Young children trust kindness over expertise

Post written by Alex Fradera (@alexfradera) for the BPS Research Digest.

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