Friendly, conscientious people are more prone to "destructive obedience"

In Milgram's shock experiments, a surprising number of people obeyed a scientist's instruction to deliver dangerous electric shocks to another person. This is usually interpreted in terms of the power of "strong situations". The scenario, complete with lab apparatus and scientist in grey coat, was so compelling that many people's usual behavioural tendencies were overcome.

But a new study challenges this account. Recognising that many participants in fact showed disobedience to the scientist in Milgram's studies, Laurent Bègue and his colleagues have investigated what it is about an individual's character that influences the likelihood he or she will obey or not. Specifically, the researchers measured the Big Five personality factors of participants taking part in a quiz-show adaptation of the traditional Milgram situation.

Seventy-six adults (40 men) played the role of questioner in a pilot episode of a French TV show. A quiz host urged the participants to apply increasingly intense electric shocks to a quiz contestant each time the contestant answered a question incorrectly. In the standard version of the set-up, in which the host remained present, 81 per cent of participants obeyed instructions to administer the highest level 460 volt shock marked "xxx".

Eight months later, the participants who played the role of questioner (and electrocutioner) were contacted again, ostensibly as part of a separate investigation, and asked if they would answer some survey questions about their personality and political beliefs. Thirty-five men and thirty women who'd taken part in the TV quiz agreed to answer these questions. The results showed that people who scored more highly on the personality traits of agreeableness and conscientiousness were more likely to be obedient in the Milgram-style situation. Meanwhile, describing oneself as left wing went hand in hand with greater disobedience, and, for women only, a history of having taken part in strikes or other acts of rebellion was also associated with more disobedience.

The researchers acknowledged there is a slim possibility that the TV quiz experience shaped participants' later personality scores. This issue aside, they said their findings showed how "destructive obedience" might actually be facilitated by "dispositions [agreeableness and conscientiousness] that are consensually desirable elsewhere with family and friends." Conversely, behaviours that may be considered disruptive in other contexts (such as political activism)  "may express and even strengthen individual dispositions that are both useful and essential to the whole society, at least in some critical moments," they said.

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Bègue, L., Beauvois, J., Courbet, D., Oberlé, D., Lepage, J., & Duke, A. (2014). Personality Predicts Obedience in a Milgram Paradigm Journal of Personality DOI: 10.1111/jopy.12104

--further reading--
More on Milgram in the Digest archive.

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

Are sweet-toothed people also sweet by nature?

Three years ago psychologists reported that we assume people who like sweet food are also sweet natured. More surprisingly perhaps, Brian Meier and his colleagues also found that the sweet-toothed really do have more agreeable personalities and are more inclined to behave altruistically.

How far can we trust these eye-catching results? There is a growing recognition in psychology of the need to attempt replications of past findings. In that spirit, a new paper led by Michael Ashton has attempted to replicate the specific finding that people who like sweet things are also more sweet natured.

Over 600 student participants completed personality and taste preference tests in pairs; a much larger sample than in the earlier research. In each pair both parties had known each other for at least six months. They scored their own personality and taste preferences, and in private they scored the personality of their friend. This is an advantage over the research from three years ago, which relied solely on people's self-reports of their own personality. Another advantage of the new study is that the researchers used two different personality scales - a measure of the Big Five factors used previously and also a measure of the so-called HEXACO personality dimensions, including honesty and humility.

A preference for sweet tasting foods did correlate with having more agreeable or prosocial personality traits using the HEXACO dimensions, but only weakly: 0.15 based on self-reports of personality and less than 0.10 based on the personality scores given by a friend. This rose to 0.19 and dropped to 0.06 using measures of the Big Five factor of agreeableness. These are modest associations and they're less than half the strength reported by Brian Meier and his colleagues three years ago.

Ashton and his colleagues aren't surprised that with a larger sample and more comprehensive personality measures they found a greatly reduced association between preference for sweet foods and having a sweet personality. They believe there's no compelling psychological explanation for why sweet-natured people should prefer sweet foods. After all, you could just as easily reason that a sweet-natured person doesn't need to seek out sweet tastes because they're sweet enough already, as reason that a sweet natured person is drawn to sweet tastes (this reminds me of a tea-shop waitress I encountered recently who asked every table "Would you like sugar or are you sweet enough already?").

If there isn't really a link between being sweet-natured and sweet-toothed (or only a very weak link), why is it our convention to describe altruistic, kind people as "sweet"? Ashton's team have a simple explanation: "... because sweet foods are generally liked very much, people may use 'sweet' and related words to describe anything - or anyone - that is especially appreciated or enjoyed."

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Ashton, M., Pilkington, A., & Lee, K. (2014). Do prosocial people prefer sweet-tasting foods? An attempted replication of Meier, Moeller, Riemer-Peltz, and Robinson (2012) Journal of Research in Personality, 52, 42-46 DOI: 10.1016/j.jrp.2014.06.006

--further reading--
Sweet-toothed and sweet natured - how people who like sweet things are sweet
Not so easy to spot: A failure to replicate the Macbeth Effect across three continents
A replication tour de force

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

There's a problem with assuming the most intelligent candidates make the best employees

Workplace research through the 20th Century suggested that selecting for intelligence is the best way to identify good performers. General mental ability (GMA), a popular recruitment measure that maps closely to the colloquial meaning of "intelligence", is strongly correlated with on-the job performance, well ahead of any other single measure.

This consistent finding came from studies that mostly defined job performance as carrying out the duties expected in that role. Although intuitive, this neglects two types of "extra-role" behaviours identified and studied in more recent years: citizenship behaviours, such as volunteering time or treating colleagues with courtesy; and counter-productive work behaviours, such as spreading rumours, shirking, or theft. Now a new meta-analysis suggests that GMA isn't the best predictor of these crucial aspects of performance. In fact, intelligence may be of little use in predicting who will behave badly at work - although it may predict who can get away with it.

The meta-analysis winnowed the available literature down to 35 relevant studies that looked at citizenship and counterproductive behaviours in real organisations. Intelligence (GMA) was correlated with engaging in more citizenship behaviours, but the association was far weaker than between intelligence and traditional task-based measures of performance. The researchers led by Erik Gonzalez-Mulé then cross-compared their results with previous meta-analyses focused on personality, and concluded that personality and GMA each account for about half the variance in citizenship behaviours. Put another way, you're just as likely to do good because you're inclined that way, as you are because you're smart.

Turning to counterproductive workplace behaviours, the authors predicted a relationship here with intelligence/GMA based on evidence from criminology that’s shown helping people see the consequences of their actions has an inhibitory effect on aberrant behaviour. In fact, the new analysis found no association between intelligence and aberrant behaviour. It's possible that this discrepancy with the criminology findings is because of differences in samples: there may be low-intelligence individuals who are more disposed to malfeasance, but they are underrepresented in workplaces because of adolescent anti-social issues, such as truancy or criminal behaviour. Meanwhile, personality, particularly the trait of agreeableness (but also conscientiousness and openness to experience) was strongly associated with performing fewer unhelpful behaviours at work.

An interesting footnote - when self-ratings of counterproductive behaviour were removed from the analysis (leaving only third-party ratings), the results showed a significant relationship between intelligence and (fewer) unhelpful workplace behaviours. This means that smarter people report engaging in just as much bad behaviour as the rest of us, but others, such as work supervisors, notice less of it.

In summary, while GMA is the undisputed king of predicting better task performance, it holds equal footing with personality in predicting helpful, altruistic work behaviour, and cedes the ground almost entirely to personality for bad behaviour. Looking at performance as a composite of these three areas, Mulé's team conclude that when it comes to workplace selection, GMA still has a prominent role, but a much diminished one.

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Gonzalez-Mulé E, Mount MK, & Oh IS (2014). A Meta-Analysis of the Relationship Between General Mental Ability and Nontask Performance. The Journal of applied psychology PMID: 25133304

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

Managers, conservatives, Europeans and the non-religious show higher levels of psychopathic traits

Christian Bale played the archetypal
psychopath in American Psycho (2000).

Mention psychopathic personality traits and the mind turns to criminals. The archetype is a callous killer who entraps his victims with a smile and easy charm. However, recent years have seen an increasing recognition that psychopathic traits are on a continuous spectrum in all of us (akin to other personality factors like extraversion), that they don't always manifest in criminality, and that in certain contexts, they may even confer advantages.

This perspective is captured in the title of psychologist Kevin Dutton's recent book The Wisdom of Psychopaths, and in the article published earlier this year in The Psychologist magazine: "On the trail of the elusive successful psychopath".

A useful consequence of this increased popular interest in the positive side of psychopathy is that it's given researchers the chance to conduct large-scale public surveys. This summer, Scott Lilienfeld and his colleagues have published the results of an online survey they ran in collaboration with Scientific American Mind magazine in 2012 (the invitation to participate appeared alongside extracts from Dutton's book).

Over three thousand people (51 per cent were female; the sample was skewed towards the highly educated) completed a 56-item measure of psychopathic traits known as The Psychopathic Personality Inventory-Revised Short Form, together with brief questions about religion, occupation and political orientation.

The study uncovered several modest correlations. People in managerial positions scored higher on the inventory overall than non-managers, and particularly on the Fearless Dominance factor (measured with items like "When my life becomes boring I like to take some chances to make things interesting").

People in high-risk occupations, such as military or dangerous sports, also scored higher on the inventory overall than those in low-risk occupations, and on all three sub-scales: Fearless Dominance, Coldheartedness (e.g. "Seeing an animal injured or in pain doesn't bother me in the slightest") and Self-Centred Impulsivity (e.g. "I would enjoy hitch-hiking my way across the United States with no prearranged plans").

Turning to religion, politics and geography, the survey revealed that non-religious people scored higher on the inventory overall, as well as on Self-Centred Impulsivity and Coldheartedness; that self-identified political conservatives scored higher on the inventory overall, as well as on all three sub-scales; and that Western Europeans scored higher on the inventory overall than US citizens, on Self-Centred Impulsivity and Coldheartedness.

The nature of the research means these results must be interpreted with great caution, as the authors explained - this includes the fact the scores were self-report and therefore may be distorted by attempts at impression management; and that the results are purely cross-sectional, so perhaps working as a manager increases people's psychopathic personality traits, rather than people with such traits being attracted to management. It's also a shame that the requirement to keep the survey short meant that other measures of personality were not recorded. This means we can't know whether the results are specific to psychopathic traits, or whether they might be more parsimoniously explained in terms of, say, (lack of) agreeableness - one of the Big Five personality traits.

Nonetheless, this study represents one of the first attempts to measure psychopathic traits in the general population and it raises many interesting questions for future investigation. The authors said their findings are "consistent with the hypothesis [that] at least some psychopathic traits ... are linked to adaptive attributes in everyday life, including leadership positions, management positions, and high-risk occupations."

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Lilienfeld, S., Latzman, R., Watts, A., Smith, S., & Dutton, K. (2014). Correlates of psychopathic personality traits in everyday life: results from a large community survey Frontiers in Psychology, 5 DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00740

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

The stability of your personality peaks in mid-life (then grows increasingly wobbly again)

As we continue to settle into ourselves, you might think that personality would be something that becomes ever more cemented through life.  Not so, according to a survey of nearly 4000 New Zealanders aged from 20 to 80 years (including 2409 women). Petar Milojev and Chris Sibley report that the stability of personality increases through youth, peaks in mid-life and then gradually reduces again into old age, presumably in response to the variations in social and biological pressures we experience at the different stages of life.

The researchers asked their participants to complete short personality questionnaires twice, two-years apart. The questionnaires measured the Big Five traits (extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness to experience) and also an honesty-humility factor. The researchers then looked to see how the "rank-order stability" of people's traits (how their scores ranked compared to other people's) varied across that two-year gap, and how this stability varied as a function of age.

The participants' personalities showed "impressive" stability, as you'd expect since personality is meant to be a description of people's pervasive traits. Extraversion was the most stable trait, and agreeableness the least. However, the key finding was that personality stability varied through the lifespan, increasing from the 20s to the 40s and 50s, and then declining towards old age, up to age 80. This broad pattern was found for all traits, except for agreeableness, which showed gradually reduced stability through life. For conscientiousness, openness to experience, and honesty-humility, trait instability had returned at the oldest age to the levels seen at the youngest age.

For the five traits that showed an inverted U-shape pattern of changing stability through life, Milojev and Sibley found that the specific point of peak stability varied - extraversion and neuroticism showed highest stability in the late 30s, while the other traits (openness, honesty-humility, and conscientiousness) showed peak stability in the late 40s, early 50s. The researchers said these "domain specific" variations in personality stability point to different environmental and social demands influencing different personality traits to varying degrees at slightly different times of life.

"This report further highlights the need to test ... the effects of events that might cause the lower stability [of personality] in younger and older adulthood," the researchers said. "In addition our finding of systematically different peaks in stability between different personality dimensions suggest the need to further investigate age-specific changes in environmental and social pressures that are associated with such domain-specific effects."

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Milojev, P., & Sibley, C. (2014). The stability of adult personality varies across age: Evidence from a two-year longitudinal sample of adult New Zealanders Journal of Research in Personality, 51, 29-37 DOI: 10.1016/j.jrp.2014.04.005

--further reading--
How your mood changes your personality
Why are extraverts happier?

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

Why was Darth Vader so evil? Blame his lack of parental care, say psychologists

Image: wikipedia

Why was Darth Vader such a bad dude? According to a team of psychologists led by Peter Jonason, it's down to his lack of parental care: the fact he was separated from his mother at age 9, and his father's absence. The researchers believe such circumstances can catalyse the emergence of the Dark Triad of personality traits: Machiavellianism, Narcissism and Psychopathy. These traits are usually seen as negative, but Jonason and his colleagues believe they may be an adaptive response to tough early circumstances that signal to a child "life is bad".

To test their theory, Jonason and his colleagues surveyed 153 students online and 199 other adults  (across both groups, average age was 25, and there were 60 men). The participants answered questions about their personality, in terms of the Dark Triad; about the care they received from their parents; and about their adult attachment style.

The results threw up a web of correlations. Untangling the threads, Jonason's team say their analysis suggests that poor maternal care increases the likelihood of people developing insecure attachment styles, and in turn this increases levels of Machiavellianism, Primary Psychopathy (i.e. callousness) and the entitlement and exhibitionist elements of Narcissism. There were also direct associations between better maternal care and lower levels of the leadership and grandiosity elements of Narcissism. Better quality paternal care was associated, rather oddly, with increased avoidant attachment styles, but it had few if any links with the Dark Triad traits.

The researchers acknowledged some of the limitations of their study, including the fact the correlations were mostly weak. But they said they'd "provided unique insights into the Dark Triad." And returning to their assessment of Darth Vader, the researchers said their results suggest the reason Vader became a ruthless baddie while his son (Luke Skywalker), who shares many of his genes, did not, comes down to their contrasting parenting experiences.

Whereas Luke was raised by a loving Aunt and Uncle, argue Jonason et al., "[Darth Vader], in contrast, arguably lacked any such parental figure, indeed his mother died in his own arms only after he had been taken from her when he was just a child a decade or so earlier." They added: "[Vader], then, lacking the anchor provided by good parents, was easily swayed by the appeal of the 'fast life' offered by the dark side of the force. For those like [Vader], perhaps turning to the dark side of the force - and the Dark Triad - is an adaptive response."

Sceptical readers may not be convinced that the data back up these bold conclusions. Any studies that look at the effects of parenting style on children need to control for the parallel influences of genetic inheritance, otherwise the results are virtually meaningless. For instance, it's possible, indeed likely, that genetic influences on parenting style in the parent also have a bearing on the development of personality traits in offspring. Moreover, because this study was cross-sectional in design (i.e. the data present a single snapshot in time), it's just as likely that the participants' personality influenced the way their parents treated them, as it is that their personality was shaped by their parents' style of care. In the words of C-3P0, " I suggest a new strategy."

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Jonason, P., Lyons, M., & Bethell, E. (2014). The making of Darth Vader: Parent–child care and the Dark Triad Personality and Individual Differences, 67, 30-34 DOI: 10.1016/j.paid.2013.10.006

--further reading--
Does Darth Vader meet the diagnostic criteria for Borderline Personality Disorder?
Why it's apt - psycho-acoustically speaking - that Darth Vader wasn't called Barth Vaber

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

How your mood changes your personality

Participants scored higher on neuroticism & lower on extraversion when they were sad

Except in extreme cases of illness or trauma, we usually expect each other's personalities to remain stable through life. Indeed, central to the definition of personality is that it describes pervasive tendencies in a person's behaviour and ways of relating to the world. However, a new study highlights the reality - your personality is swayed by your current mood, especially when you're feeling down.

Jan Querengässer and Sebastian Schindler twice measured the personality of 98 participants (average age 22; 67 per cent female), with a month between each assessment. Before one of the assessments, the participants either watched a ten-minute video designed to make them feel sad, or to make them feel happy. The sad clip was from the film Philadelphia and Barber's Adagio for Strings was also added into the mix. The happy video showed families reunited after the fall of the Berlin Wall, together with Mozart's Eine klieine Nachtmusik. Before their other personality assessment, the participants watched a neutral video about people with extreme skills.

When participants answered questions about their personality in a sad state, they scored "considerably" higher on trait neuroticism, and "moderately" lower on extraversion and agreeableness, as compared with when they completed the questionnaire in a neutral mood state. There was also a trend for participants to score higher on extraversion when in a happy mood, but this didn't reach statistical significance. The weaker effect of happy mood on personality may be because people's supposed baseline mood (after the neutral video) was already happy. Alternatively, perhaps sad mood really does have a stronger effect on personality scores than happiness. This would make sense from a survival perspective, the researchers said, because sadness is usually seen as a state to be avoided, while happiness is a state to be maintained. "Change is more urgent than maintenance," they explained.

These results complement previous research suggesting that a person's personality traits are associated with more frequent experience of particular emotions. For example, there's evidence that high scorers on extraversion experience more happiness than lower scorers. However, the new data highlight how the relationship can work both ways - with current emotional state also influencing personality (or the measurement of personality, at least). We are familiar with this in our everyday lives - even our most vivacious friends can seem less friendly and sociable when they're down. With strangers though, it's easy to forget these effects and assume that their behaviour derives from fixed personality rather than temporary mood.

Although this research appears to challenge the notion of personality as fixed, the results, if heeded, could actually help us drill down to a person's underlying long-term traits. As Querengässer and Schindler explained, "becoming aware of participants' emotional state and paying attention to the possible implications on testing could lead to a notable increase in the stability of assessed personality traits."
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  Querengässer, J., & Schindler, S. (2014). Sad but true? - How induced emotional states differentially bias self-rated Big Five personality traits BMC Psychology, 2 (1) DOI: 10.1186/2050-7283-2-14

--further reading--
Why are extraverts happier?
Situations shape personality, just as personality shapes situations

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

Is it the darkness within? Some people would rather shock themselves with electricity than spend time with their own thoughts

"All of man's troubles come from his inability to sit quietly in a room by himself," Arnold Rothstein quotes Blaise Pascal in Season Four of the HBO Series Boardwalk Empire. 

Go people-watching in any Western country and it's rare to come across a person sat alone in quiet contemplation. Most lone individuals are seen playing with their mobile phone, reading, watching a movie on their tablet, or people-watching. Why this need for distraction? Is there something so aversive about spending time immersed in our own thoughts?

A team of psychologists led by Timothy Wilson has investigated. Across six initial studies they invited hundreds of undergrads, one at a time, to spend 6 or 15 minutes (depending on the specific study) in a sparse room "entertaining themselves with their thoughts." Afterwards most of the students said they'd found it difficult to concentrate, their mind had wandered, and they'd not enjoyed the experience all that much (the average enjoyment rating was 5 on a 9-point scale; half the sample gave a rating at, or below, the midpoint of the scale).

The gist of these results remained the same when participants were invited to spend time thinking in their own homes; when people were given time to prepare to think about specific pleasurable fantasies (e.g. going hiking somewhere beautiful); and when a community sample of adults was tested (they had an average age of 48). Comparison participants, who spent time assigned to external activities like reading or listening to music, consistently reported more enjoyment. Participants' personalities didn't make much difference to the results - introverts and extraverts alike seemed averse to contemplation.

The most dramatic evidence for people's unwillingness to spend time with their own mind comes next. After first excluding a minority of participants who said they enjoyed the sensation of an electric shock, the researchers invited the remainder to entertain themselves with their own thoughts for 15 minutes. During this time, the undergrad participants were told they could press a button to give themselves a shock (4 milliamperes for men; 2.3 milliamperes for women). All had previously stated that they'd pay money not to receive a shock of this intensity because of its unpleasantness. And yet 67 per cent of these male participants shocked themselves at least once during the contemplation period, and 25 per cent of the women. One strange fellow who zapped himself 190 times was omitted from the analysis.

The researchers observed: "What is striking is that simply being alone with their own thoughts for 15 minutes was apparently so aversive that it drove many participants to self-administer an electric shock that they had earlier said they would pay to avoid."

These results are consistent with past research that found people are happier when engaged with a task, than when their mind wanders from that task. The difference here is that people were specifically invited to spend time in pleasurable contemplation.

Why are people so averse to their own thoughts? One possibility, the researchers suggested, is that it's very difficult for most of us to control our minds such that we only dwell on what's pleasant. Hence the popularity of meditation and other mind control practices, they surmised. "Without such training," Wilson and co added, "people prefer doing to thinking, even if what they are doing is so unpleasant that they would normally pay to avoid it. The untutored mind does not like to be alone with itself."

It will be interesting to see if the electric shock finding replicates with a non-student sample, and more generally, to see how these findings compare in samples from other cultures. With smart phones and 24-hour news, today there are more ways than ever to avoid our own thoughts. I wonder, has the constant stimulation of the modern world made us nervous strangers to our own minds, or is it the horror of what lies within that has driven us to build this world of distraction?

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Timothy D. Wilson, David Reinhard, Erin Westgate, Daniel T. Gilbert, Nicole Ellerbeck, Cheryl Hahn, Casey Brown, & Adi Shaked (2014). Just Think: The Challenges of the Disengaged Mind Science.

--further reading--
MAYBE PEOPLE ACTUALLY ENJOY BEING ALONE WITH THEIR THOUGHTS
We're happier when busy but our instinct is for idleness

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

A small proportion of the population are responsible for the vast majority of lies

Obviously some people lie more often than others. What's surprising is new research showing that the spread of lying propensity through the population is uneven. There is a large majority of "everyday liars", and a small minority of "prolific liars".

A few years ago Kim Serota and his colleagues put a figure on this. They surveyed a thousand US citizens and found that five per cent of the sample were responsible for 50 per cent of all lies told. Now Serota's group have analysed data from nearly 3000 people in the UK and they've found the same pattern - the existence in the population of a minority of extremely prolific liars.

This new online survey is based on data collected as part of a public engagement project by the Science Museum in London in the Spring of 2010. Participants (51 per cent were female; average age 44.5) reported how often they told little white lies and how often they told big lies, as well as sharing their attitudes to, and experiences of lying.

The spread of answers was clearly skewed. Serota's statistical analysis showed that 9.7 per cent of the UK sample were prolific liars. They averaged 6.32 little white lies per day and 2.86 big lies per day, compared with an average of 1.16 daily white lies and 0.15 daily big lies (about one per week) by the majority group of everyday liars. This means the prolific liars tell an average of 19 big lies for each single big lie by the everyday liars. The two groups generally agreed what counts as a big lie, with lying about whether you love someone being the most popular example.

The research also uncovered some intriguing differences between prolific and everyday liars. Prolific liars were more likely to be younger, male and to work in more senior occupational roles, although note these differences were modest. Prolific liars tended not to see lying as something that people grow out of. They were also most likely to lie to their partners and children (whereas everyday liars were most likely to lie to their mothers). Prolific liars were also more likely to say that their lying had landed them in trouble, including losing jobs and relationships.

Caution is required because of the different survey methods used, but this new research also allows a cross-cultural comparison between US and UK lying. Combining everyday and prolific liars, it seems that people lie more frequently in the UK - just over two lies per day on average, compared with an average of between one and two lies per day in the US, based on Serota's earlier research. Another statistic - 24.4 per cent of the UK sample said they didn't lie on a typical day, compared with 59.9 per cent of the US sample.

An obvious problem with this research is its dependence on people's honesty about how often they lie. We're in a somewhat bizarre situation of trusting prolific liars' answers about their own lying. However, Serota and his colleague Tim Levine reassure us that past research has generally found self-reported lying to be fairly accurate. When more objective or third-party measures of lying are deployed, these usually correlate well with people's self-reported lying rates. The current survey was anonymous, which would have helped.

The finding that lying frequency is distributed unevenly in the population has serious implications for deception research, most of which assumes that lying propensity is a "normally distributed" trait more like height or weight. "These data provide a strong case that the people who tell a lot of lies are not only different," said Serota and Levine, "they are a population that needs to be studied independently of everyday liars in order to better understand the motivation and production of lies." I wonder if future research might find that "prolific liars" are the same people who score highly on the Dark Triad of personality traits - psychopathy, narcissism and Machiavellianism?_________________________________


Serota, K., & Levine, T. (2014). A Few Prolific Liars: Variation in the Prevalence of Lying Journal of Language and Social Psychology DOI: 10.1177/0261927X14528804

--further reading--
A case of pseudologia fantastica, otherwise known as pathological lying

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

Narcissists can be taught to empathise

Narcissists are apparently growing in number. These are people who put their own interests first, constantly showing off, and taking credit where it's not deserved. You might know someone like this - perhaps your boss, or even your romantic partner. If so, a new study offers hope. Apparently narcissists can be taught to be more empathic.

Erica Hepper and her colleagues first confirmed that narcissistic traits go hand in hand with low empathy. They surveyed nearly 300 people online, mostly students, and found that those who scored higher in narcissism (they agreed with numerous self-aggrandising and controlling statements like: "I have a natural talent for influencing people", "I insist on getting respect" and "I wish somebody would write my autobiography") tended to be unmoved by the story of a person's distressing relationship breakup.

Next, the researchers tested the effect of a simple intervention. Across two further studies, nearly 200 students either watched a video of a women describing her experience of domestic abuse, or they heard an audio recording of a woman describing her traumatic relationship break up. Crucially, half the students were instructed to: "Imagine how Susan feels. Try to take her perspective in the video/audio, imagining how she is feeling about what is happening." The other half were told to imagine they were  simply watching the video /listening to the audio, at home.

As expected, students who scored highly on narcissism (especially maladaptive narcissism, involving exhibitionism, sense of entitlement and exploiting others), tended to say they had less concern for the women and felt less distress at the stories. The narcissists also showed less of an emotional reaction in terms of their heart rate. However, when they were instructed to take the women's perspective, the narcissists showed normal levels of empathy, both in terms of their self-reported feelings, and having a raised heart rate. This suggests narcissists are capable of change - their lack of empathy is not due to lack of capacity, but more to do with lack of motivation.

"We hope that the present findings represent a first step toward better understanding of how narcissists can be moved by others, thereby improving their social behaviour and relationships," said Hepper and her team.

We shouldn't get too carried away by these findings - the samples are relatively small, and made up mostly of students. The scenarios all involved romantic relationships, so it's not clear if the results would generalise. We also don't know if the apparent boosts to narcissists' empathy would translate to more altruistic behaviour. The researchers recognise these shortcomings, and they're planning studies involving "real social interactions and ongoing relationships." Meanwhile, if there's a narcissist in your life, this study suggests it could be worth asking them make the effort to take other people's perspective.

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Hepper, E., Hart, C., & Sedikides, C. (2014). Moving Narcissus: Can Narcissists Be Empathic? Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin DOI: 10.1177/0146167214535812

-further reading-
Arrogant, moi? Investigating narcissists' insight into their traits, behaviour and reputation
Student narcissists prefer Twitter; more mature narcissists favour Facebook
For group creativity, two narcissists are better than one

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

I mean, you know, I'm a conscientious person: Links between use of "speech fillers" and personality

Few people are capable of speaking spontaneously without, er, you know, pausing and using filler words every now and again. However, we all differ in the extent to which we do this, and now a study by US researchers has examined how use of filler words varies according to age, gender and personality.

Charlyn Laserna and her colleagues used recordings of everyday speech collected from hundreds of participants in earlier studies performed between 2003 and 2013. They specifically looked at utterances of uh, um (known as "filled pauses") and I mean, you know, and like (known as "discourse markers").

The purpose of these kinds of words is not straightforward - they can be a sign of being tongue tied, but they can also be a way to keep hold of one's turn in a conversation, to form a bridge between phrases or sections of conversation, to seek consensus, or convey uncertainty.

Use of discourse markers was more frequent among younger people, and among women versus men. However, the gender difference was only present in teen and student participants, and had disappeared from age 23 and up. Discourse markers were also used more frequently by people with a more conscientious personality. Uhs and ums became less common with age, but their use was not related to gender or personality. This last point is somewhat surprising since such hesitations are often assumed to be a sign of anxiety.

Why should use of phrases such as "like" and "you know" be related to conscientiousness? One possibility is that this is a false positive result - the researchers performed multiple comparisons looking for links between personality and word use, and this is known to increase the risk of spurious findings. However, assuming the finding is reliable, the researchers believe the explanation is that "conscientious people are generally more thoughtful and aware of themselves and their surroundings," and their use of discourse markers shows they have a "desire to share or rephrase opinions to recipients."

Stated slightly differently, discourse fillers are a sign of more considered speech, and so it makes sense that conscientious people use them more often. This is a result that may surprise some, including the veteran actress Miriam Margoyles, who publicly castigated pop star Wil.I.Am for his overuse of "like". The researchers didn't propose any explanation for why age and gender are related to use of discourse fillers.

Laserna and her team believe their findings are useful because they suggest that people's habits of speech can be used to make inferences about their personality, age and gender. "From a methodological standpoint, the use of discourse markers can provide a quick behavioural measure of personality traits," they said. So, you know, don't be put off next time you hear someone, like, using discourse fillers. I mean, it could actually be a sign that they're conscientious.

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Laserna, C., Seih, Y., & Pennebaker, J. (2014). Um . . . Who Like Says You Know: Filler Word Use as a Function of Age, Gender, and Personality Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 33 (3), 328-338 DOI: 10.1177/0261927X14526993

--further reading/watching--
The effect of, er, hesitations in speech
Greater use of "I" and "me" as a mark of interpersonal distress
Miriam Margolyes castigates Wil.I.Am for his use of the discourse filler "like"

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

Why are extraverts happier?

Numerous personality studies have found the same pattern time and again – extraverts tend to be happier than introverts. But why? A popular theory holds that extraverts are happier because they find fun activities more enjoyable, as if they have a more responsive “pleasure system” in their brains than introverts.

A new investigation puts this idea to the test, and is one of the first to compare introverts’ and extraverts’ momentary happiness in response to different activities in everyday life.

Wido Oerlemans and Arnold Bakker recruited 1,364 Dutch participants (average age 45; 86 per cent were female) to complete a detailed retrospective record of one or more days. The research used the “Day Reconstruction Method”, which involves the participants recalling the previous day’s activities in chronological order, who they were with, what they were doing, and how they felt during each activity. In total 5,595 days were examined in this way.

A key finding is that extraverts reported more happiness than introverts during what the researchers defined as effortful “rewarding” activities, such as sports and exercise, and financially rewarding work tasks. In contrast, there was no difference in extraverts’ and introverts’ happiness during merely low effort, low importance “pleasurable, hedonic” activities, such as watching TV, listening to music, relaxing, and shopping.

The one exception to this pattern was reading – surprisingly perhaps, extraverts appeared to derive more enjoyment from this activity than introverts. Oerlemans and Bakker proposed this could be because reading isn’t always just for pleasure, but can also be completed in pursuit of a reward, such as to pass a course.

Based on the broad pattern that extraverts experience more happiness during rewarding activities, but not during pleasurable activities, the researchers suggested that existing theories should be refined. It’s not that extraverts have a more responsive pleasure system, but rather that they have a more active and responsive “desire system”.

Another strand to this study was that it found extraverts experience a bigger happiness boost (than introverts) when they perform rewarding activities with other people, rather than alone. The results also showed that extraverts spend more time on rewarding activities than introverts, and they tend to have more social contact during their daily activities. All this helps explain why extraverts are happier than introverts (or say they are, at least), but it’s not the whole story. Even after controlling statistically for the fact that extraverts spend more time with other people and on rewarding activities, there remained a strong relationship between extraversion and happiness.

“Extraverts, because of their active nature, are more likely to seek and spend more time on rewarding activities,” the researchers said. “When they do so, they also experience a higher boost in momentary happiness as compared to their introverted counterparts. This partly explains the direct relationship between extraversion and momentary happiness.”

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Oerlemans, W., and Bakker, A. (2014). Why extraverts are happier: A day reconstruction study. Journal of Research in Personality, 50, 11-22 DOI: 10.1016/j.jrp.2014.02.001

--further reading--
Introverts use more concrete language than extraverts

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

Student narcissists prefer Twitter; more mature narcissists favour Facebook

Media headlines frequently link young people's widespread use of Facebook with the narcissism of their generation (e.g. "Facebook's 'dark side': study finds link to socially aggressive narcissism). A new investigation involving hundreds of US college students and hundreds of members of the US public has found that it's actually the older generation for whom this claim is more accurate. However, use of Twitter tells another story.

First to challenge those Facebook headlines. Shaun Davenport and his colleagues found that students (average age 20) who scored higher on narcissism (measured by the Narcissistic Personality Inventory) were no more likely to post Facebook status updates, nor did they tend to have more Facebook friends.

By contrast, among the general public recruited online (average age 32), higher narcissism was linked with more use of Facebook, in terms of number of updates and number of friends. The researchers speculated that for young people who have grown up with Facebook, it's common practice to use the social network regardless of one's personality type. For older generations who did not grow up with Facebook (the age range for the public sample was 18 to 75), Davenport and his team said sending status updates was "not part of their social norms" and may instead be driven by narcissistic motives.

What about Twitter? Analysis showed that for the students, higher narcissism was associated with more active usage of Twitter. Moreover, higher narcissism was associated with students' motives for using the site. More narcissistic students were likely to say they posted updates to attract followers and to gain admiration on the site. There were associations between student narcissism and vain motives for using Facebook too, but these links were weaker than for Twitter. "This pattern of results suggests that college narcissists prefer Twitter to Facebook and narcissism predicts reasons for usage as well as active usage," the researchers said. They added that Twitter may have a number of features that particularly appeal to narcissists, including the fact that relationships need not be reciprocal (people can follow you on Twitter, without you having to follow them).

For the general public, higher narcissism was also linked with more active Twitter usage (more so even than Facebook usage). However, for this sample, links between narcissism and vain motives for using Twitter were weaker than for links between narcissism and vain motives for using Facebook.

A strength of this study is the use of two large samples covering different age groups. A weakness is its correlational design, which means we can't know for sure if one factor (say, narcissism) is really driving a second factor (e.g. more Twitter updates). It's possible the relationship works in reverse or that some other factor or factors are at play. "We concur with other researchers who have called for a greater use of experimental designs," said Davenport and his team. "Given the early stages of SNS [social networking site] research, such methods would allow for greater control to isolate variables and allow for tests of causality."

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Shaun W. Davenport, Shawn M. Bergman, Jacqueline Z. Bergman, & Matthew E. Fearrington (2014). Twitter versus Facebook: Exploring the role of narcissism in the motives and usage of different social media platforms. Computers in Human Behavior DOI: 10.1016/j.chb.2013.12.011

Further reading

Facebook or Twitter: What does your choice of social networking site say about you?
These are the unwritten rules of Facebook
What your Facebook picture says about your cultural background

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