Letters Remain

  • Perceived Freedom Threats and Our Reactions

    Perceived threats to our behavioural freedom or autonomy–even inconsequential and trivial threats–provoke instinctive and often unusual reactions.

    This reactance, as it is known, must be considered in a business context (and is often completely ignored), argues Andrew O’Connell in Harvard Business Review, noting the many unexpected ways we react to perceived freedom and autonomy threats.

    What’s amazing is the range of things that people interpret as potential threats. There’s the basic implied infringement on autonomy–[summed] up as “We don’t like being told what to do.” But there are a lot of other things we don’t like: Limits on our choices, messages telling us we’re doing something wrong, insistent wording, lectures from on high, suggestions from a boss, helpful advice from a spouse, attempts to persuade us, or incursions in our personal space. A privacy threat (see: Facebook) is implicitly a freedom threat because it potentially limits a person’s autonomy in deciding who gets to see what.

    Perceived threats to our freedom stimulate autonomy-reasserting reactions. For instance, forceful language often backfires because it is interpreted as an attempt to stifle the receiver’s freedom to maintain his or her own opinion. One study found that a message containing the phrase “There is a problem and you have to be part of the solution” triggered reactance, not acceptance, of the idea in the message. Another found that strong language in an anti-smoking message (adolescents were the target) stimulated increased curiosity toward cigarettes.

    Some of the reactions are surprising: In one experiment, subjects responded to the sense of confinement in a narrow aisle in a store by choosing a greater variety of products.

    via Simon Bostock, pointing to another interesting article that I’ve mentioned previously: How thinking about whether we will do a task (“Will I…?”) rather than telling ourselves to do a task (“I will….’) increases the likelihood of us actually undertaking it and how successfully we will perform it.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Nine Diet and Lifestyle Tips for Longevity

    By studying the world’s Blue Zones–“communities whose elders live with vim and vigor to record-setting age”–Dan Buettner and team discovered a set of common behavioural traits in their subjects.

    In his TEDxTC talk Buettner discusses what he discovered to be the myths of living longer and the nine common diet and lifestyle habits of those who live to be active at 100+:

    • Exercise Naturally: They don’t consciously exercise — rather, daily physical exercise was a natural part of their lives (walking, using stairs, cycling for transport, etc.).
    • Downshift: They live a simple life.
    • Have a Purpose: Knowing and acting with purpose and having a higher goal leads to around a seven year increase in life expectancy.
    • Moderate Alcohol Intake: I’ve discussed this at length before.
    • Plant-Based Diet: Not a vegetarian diet, but a largely plant-based one.
    • No Overeating: They avoid overeating, typically by using ‘nudges’.
    • Friends and Family First: They typically think of their close friends and family first.
    • Belong to a Faith-Based Community: Belonging to a faith-based community, and meeting on average four times a month, can add four to fourteen years to one’s life. Does this exclude atheists? I don’t see why a humanist community that meets the same rules (meeting regularly) would be different.
    • Belong to the Right ‘Tribe’: They surround themselves with the ‘right’ people. By doing so they prevent getting bad habits through social network effects (also discussed previously).

    via David DiSalvo

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • More on the Cognitive Benefits of Moderate Exercise

    “There is overwhelming evidence that exercise produces large cognitive gains and helps fight dementia”, says the Harvard University psychologist John Ratey, author of the 2008 book on the subject, Spark.

    While Ratey propounds the “very clear” link between exercise and mental acuity, saying that even moderate exercise pushes back cognitive decline by “anywhere from 10 to 15 years”, the National Institutes of Health are more cautious:

    Looking at reducing the risk of “cognitive decline in older adults,” [the NIH] wrote: “Preliminary evidence suggests a beneficial association of physical activity and a range of leisure activities (e.g., club membership, religious services, painting, gardening) with the preservation of cognitive function.” A few small studies showed that “increased physical activity may help maintain or improve cognitive function in normal adults”.

    I’ve written before about the extensive cognitive benefits of exercise, but as Noah Gray (via) says, “it never hurts to reinforce the message”.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • A History of the Climate Change Controversies

    After obtaining and analysing the documents and emails from the Climate Research Unit email controversy (the so-called Climategate emails), Der Spiegel “reveals how the war between climate researchers and climate skeptics broke out, the tricks the two sides used to outmaneuver each other and how the conflict could be resolved”.

    The result is an exceptional and comprehensive article on the history of the climate change issue and the scientists’ place in it.

    The article concludes:

    Sociologist Peter Weingart believes that the damage could be irreparable. “A loss of credibility is the biggest risk inherent in scientific communication,” he said, adding that trust can only be regained through complete transparency. […]

    It seems all but impossible to provide conclusive proof in climate research. Scientific philosopher Silvio Funtovicz [described] climate research as a “postnormal science.” On account of its high complexity, he said it was subject to great uncertainty while, at the same time, harboring huge risks.

    The experts therefore face a dilemma: They have little chance of giving the right advice. If they don’t sound the alarm, they are accused of not fulfilling their moral obligations. However, alarmist predictions are criticized if the predicted changes fail to materialize quickly.

    Climatological findings will probably remain ambiguous even if further progress is made. Weingart says it’s now up to scientists and society to learn to come to terms with this. In particular, he warns, politicians must understand that there is no such thing as clear results. “Politicians should stop listening to scientists who promise simple answers,” Weingart says.

    via Art and Letters Daily

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Task Perception (Serious vs. Fun) and Performance

    When a task is described as being a serious test of skill or proficiency, high achievers perform significantly better on the task than low achievers (as one would predict).

    When the same task is described as ‘fun’, however, the opposite is seen: low achievers outperform high achievers.

    Obviously, how we perceive tasks (or describe them to others) can have a drastic influence on our performance.

    When high achievers are primed to achieve excellence, the idea that a task is “fun” undercuts their desire to excel. If something is enjoyable and fun, how could it possibly be a credible gauge of achievement?

    Conversely, low achievers who are similarly primed with achievement words perceive a “fun” task as worthwhile. Not only is their motivation to perform improved, so is their ability.

    This intriguing twist says much about why one-size-fits-all educational strategies so often fail. For students motivated to achieve excellence, making tasks entertaining may actually undermine their performance. Likewise, for those not normally motivated to achieve, describing a task as urgent and serious yields the predictable result.

    It also sheds light on the “lazy genius” phenomenon. Everyone has known someone who is remarkably intelligent but gets mediocre grades and doesn’t seem to care. Clearly, low-achievers are not necessarily less intelligent or less capable than high-achievers; instead, they just don’t respond well to status quo motivational cues. A jolt of enjoyment could turn that around.

    via Ryan Sager

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Malcolm Gladwell’s Public Speaking Secrets

    After discovering that he was to share a double bill with the “famously good” public speaker Malcolm Gladwell, Gideon Rachman decided to use the experience to learn how to improve his own speaking abilities.

    In his write-up of the experience, Rachman discusses the lessons he learnt from Malcolm Gladwell’s ‘public speaking secrets’:

    The first lesson came from simply looking at the programme. The photo of me was unexceptional […] Gladwell’s photo was very different. It was taken from a distance and showed off his magnificent Einstein-like Afro – it said, here is a mad genius. […] But there are other things he does that might be easier to emulate.

    First, he is a master of the “look no hands” style of speaking. He just stands up there, with a button mike and talks – and it all sounds very spontaneous, with little asides and jokes, and messages tailored to his […] audience. Second, he tells stories – there are theories attached to the stories – but the bulk of the talk is made up of charming anecdotes to illustrate rather simple themes. […]

    So how does Gladwell do it? […] He answered – “I know it may not look like this. But it’s all scripted. I write down every word and then I learn it off by heart. I do that with all my talks and I’ve got lots of them”.

    It occurred to me afterwards that Gladwell’s success as a speaker illustrates one of his homespun themes – hard work pays off. But he has also made an important realisation. He is not giving a speech or a lecture – he is giving a performance. And like any good actor, he knows that you have to learn your lines.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Vowel Sounds and Price Perceptions

    How the vowels in words are pronounced has an influence on how we perceive the size of an item. This ‘phonetic symbolism’ has also been shown to effect how we perceive prices:

    Researchers have known for 80 years about a symbolic connection between speech and size: back-of-the-mouth vowels like the “o” in “two” make people think of large sizes, whereas people associate front-of-the-mouth vowels like “ee” with diminutiveness. Marketers can use this effect to make consumers think a discount is bigger or smaller than it truly is. […]

    In one experiment, researchers told consumers the regular and sale prices of a product, asked them to repeat the sale price to themselves, and then, a few minutes later, told them to estimate the size of the discount in percentage terms. Products with “small-sounding” sale prices (like $2.33) seemed like better deals than products with “big-sounding” sales prices (like $2.22).

    In another experiment, the researchers used a pair of sale prices — $7.88, which sounds “big” in English, and $7.01, which sounds “small” — but are the other way around in Chinese. Chinese and English speakers had opposite perceptions of the products’ relative value.

    The authors of the study have also shown how, for discounted items, we perceive the discount on items to be larger when the right-most digit of its price is small (less than 5): the right digit effect.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Scientifically-Proven Ways to Improve Creativity

    Fourteen acts or mindsets that have been shown–using science!–to increase creativity, from a two-article series on scientifically-proven methods to increase your creativity:

    1. Psychological distance: Imagine your creative task as distant and disconnected from your current location.
    2. Chronological distance: Project yourself or the task forward in time.
    3. Absurdist stimulation: Read some Kafka: absurdity is a ‘meaning threat’, making our mind work harder to find meaning and enhancing pattern recognition abilities.
    4. Use highly emotional states: Highly-charged emotional states increase problem solving and flexible thinking.
    5. Combine opposites: ‘Janusian thinking‘ helps integrative ideas emerge.
    6. Take resistive paths: The path of least resistance typically leads to ideas lacking in creativity (as they’re inherently built on existing ideas).
    7. Re-conceptualisation: Re-conceive the problem in different ways before trying to solve it, focusing on discovery at the problem-formulation stage.
    8. Counterfactual mindset: Two types of ‘what could have been’ thinking:
      • Subtractive for analytical problems (what could have been removed?).
      • Additive for expansive problems (what could have been added?).
    9. Two simultaneous problems: Multiple concurrent problems help the recall of previous creative solutions that may be related.
    10. Generic verbs: Focus on abstract rather than specific details of the problem (by thinking of problem-specific verbs in more generic terms).
    11. Synonyms and category taxonomies: Look at the problem category or type and discover hidden structures (by thinking of problem-specific details as synonyms and category taxonomies).
    12. Engage conflict: Social conflicts give us intense motivated focus.
    13. Think love not sex: Thoughts of love shift our minds to a long-term viewpoint while sexual thoughts shift them to the immediate, which is more analytical.
    14. Stop daydreaming: Somewhat against Csikszentmihalyi’s advice, incubation has shows minimal creative improvements. However its advantage may be in that it helps us forget previous bad ideas.

    Alternatively you could take advice from Grayson Perry:

    Being creative is all about being unself-conscious; being prepared to make a bit of a fool of myself. In my experience, embarrassment is not fatal. […] I’d like to make a plea for difficulty over cool. In the end, being difficult is the coolest thing you can be.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Hand Washing Leads to Rational Evaluations

    Postdecisional dissonance–an extremely close relative of both post-purchase rationalisation and the choice-supportive bias–is the phenomenon whereby once we have made a decision we perceive our chosen option as the most attractive choice and the discarded alternatives as less attractive, regardless of the evidence.

    Some intriguing recent research suggests that the physical act of cleaning one’s hands helps us rationally evaluate our past decisions–cleaning our hands cleans our minds, too.

    After choosing between two alternatives, people perceive the chosen alternative as more attractive and the rejected alternative as less attractive. This postdecisional dissonance effect was eliminated by cleaning one’s hands. Going beyond prior purification effects in the moral domain, physical cleansing seems to more generally remove past concerns, resulting in a metaphorical “clean slate” effect.

    The article is behind the Science paywall but there is an interesting conversation in the comments of Overcoming Bias (via).

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Fooled by Pseudoscience: A Philosophy of Science

    The “huge quantities of data” collected on the subject show that the principal reason people are deceived by pseudoscientific claims and alternative therapies is not intellectual ability, but personal experience: a bad personal experience with mainstream medicine is the overwhelming reason, regardless of medical training.

    That’s from Ben Goldacre in an interview for The Philosophers’ Magazine where he discusses at length the philosophy of science, pseudoscience, and the medical practice.

    One important thing to recognise always is that an extremely good tool has to be used in the right situations […] Philosophy is one of those tools, but I’m not sure it’s the meta-tool which tells you which tool to use.

    There’s something very seductive about the absolute precision and clarity you can get in some philosophical arguments that I think can be self-flattering and a bit misleading, and that’s a real danger. Because one thing that you really learn in medicine is that having a particular professional qualification or educational background is certainly a risk factor for competence in a particular area, but it is not a guarantee.

    Asked if he overestimates the competence of the general public in being able to research the overwhelming number of pseudoscientific claims and discover the truth, Goldacre replies:

    There are two problems here. One is are you intellectually capable? Do you have the basic intellectual horsepower? And the second thing is, are you motivated? And I think what people are generally lacking is the motivation, But to an extent it’s habit. […]

    It’s often not about failures of reasoning that lead people into these blind alleys, into irrationality. It’s not because of a lack of intellectual horsepower or reasoning skills. It’s because of something else. It’s because of a whole complex interlocking web of social and cultural and political and personal issues that people bring to a problem. When somebody says standing next to a boiling kettle can give you birth defects, as a pregnant woman, what they’re actually saying is, ‘I’m really freaked out by modernity. I just don’t like new stuff. I wish it could be a bit like it was when I was a kid, and I think that means rural, because I remember spending a lot of time in the garden.’ That’s a very crude, stylised version of it, but, you know this world.

    via The Browser

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    Lloyd Morgan