This will probably be my final blog post, sorry to say! But
it’s about love, so that should make up for it.
I had a hard time picking this week’s Rush song. They have
quite a few songs about love, but not a whole lot about actually falling in
love. Neil Peart has mentioned before that he’s not a huge fan of writing about
a concept as clichéd as love. But “Ghost of a Chance” is about falling in love with
your “soul mate” despite the odds being completely against ever encountering
him or her.
Zajonc (1968) discovered a fascinating concept called the mere exposure effect: that repeated
exposure to a stimulus will cause someone to like it more. The stimulus can be
more or less anything: a number, a picture, a person. And you don’t have to be
aware of it, either. If the stimulus is presented subliminally, the effect
still works. For example, if I show you a particular foreign word several
times, for a few milliseconds each time, you’ll likely prefer that word if I
later ask you to rate a few different words that you’ve “never seen before.”
This applies to music, too. I have several stories about
this effect in regards to music, but I’ll have mercy on you, dear reader, and
only share my most salient memories.
I’ve seen this one band a few times (surprise! It’s Rush),
and on their 2011 tour they played a couple songs off the album they were still
working on at the time. And it was the most fascinating thing to me: As soon as
they said “We’re gonna give you a taste of our new album,” about 15% of the
audience just left to get another beer or whatever. On the tour after that
album was released, the same thing happened! After intermission they started
playing half of the new album, and multiple people around us left and never
came back.
This is an example of how repeated exposure to a song causes
you to like it more. People go to a concert to hear the band play their hit
singles, not their new stuff with hopefully-trendy acronym song titles!
Another memorable example for me is when another band I
love, Muse, released a new single from their upcoming album. They started out
as a Radiohead clone, but quickly became known for some wonderfully
over-the-top prog rock songs. But then last semester, they released “Madness”
to the world.
I’d never seen a song have such a polarizing effect on its
audience. People left comments in the YouTube videos about how they would never
listen to Muse again, and others left comments saying that they would never
listen to Muse’s old stuff again. At
first, I was not a fan of the song. It was too minimalistic and dancelike for
me. As a drummer, I typically need the song to have an interesting drum part
for it to keep my attention. But over
repeated listens, I started to notice some of the subtlety to it, like the
guitar in the second verse. And every time I heard it, I started to like it
more.
My roommate felt the same way. So did everyone else I talked
to who had listened to the band enough to know how different this song was from
their usual style. I think it took an average of four listens to actually start
to like the song, aside from my girlfriend who liked it instantly. I still find
myself liking it more every time I hear it.
I need to figure out how that trick works.
—————————————
Zajonc, R. B. (1968). Attitudinal effects of mere exposure. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
Monograph Supplement, 9(2), 1–27.
This week we learned about how people behave in groups. And
as I’m sure will be true for almost everyone this week, the concept that
resonated with me most strongly was that of social loafing. This occurs when a member of a group puts in less
effort than the other members of the group, and also less effort than if they
were trying to fulfill the group’s goals on their own. Latané and colleagues (1979) coined
this term in their study on the volume of participants’ screams when told they’re
either alone or in the presence of others. It turned out that people put in
less effort when they believed they were in a group, presumably because they
believed that other people would compensate for their lack of enthusiasm.
I could
recount one of my many horror stories regarding social loafing, such as the
person in my business capstone who literally lied to both me, his only partner
for the project, and the professor about completing his work. There was also a
person in my main business capstone four-person group (I believe she has been
referred to as Demon Harlot Spawn or something to that effect) who put zero
effort into her work, which necessitated the other three members’ working
overtime to transform it into something presentable.
I could
recount those horror stories, but I guess I already did without meaning to.
But I
also have an example of when I, myself, loafed socially.
(I’m
sure it’s the only example that exists.)
When I
was a wee tot in the 5th grade, I played in the school band. I was
second of five trombones, and I had a great time. For practicing I mostly just
figured out songs by ear rather than play the assigned pieces, which is
something I’ve continued to enjoy since on other instruments.
But,
that summer, tragedy struck, and I had to get braces.
Braces cause
a pain in your mouth not unlike a broken bone. Sharp, stabbing pains at first,
and then a dull, throbbing, unyielding ache for the next six months until they’ve
moved.
Unless
you play a brass instrument, and have to shove a piece of curved metal against
your lips every afternoon. In that case, braces cause constant pain. The metal
bites into your lip as you play, and the sensitive teeth resent being pressed
on after being pulled fifteen miles through solid gum.
In
other words, playing the trombone hurt. But I couldn’t quit the band. I had to
get my fine arts credit to “graduate” intermediate school.
So... I
loafed.
I
pretended to play the horn. I went through all the motions (which are quite
large on a trombone), but I wouldn’t apply enough pressure to hurt myself, or
to be able to play.
This
went on for the rest of the year, and I took up a different fine art (theatre)
in junior high.
Recently,
I found out that proper brass technique doesn’t even require you to jam your
mouthpiece into your face. I could’ve had it all. (Rolling in the deep.) I didn’t
need to give up playing, and if I’d just done something crazy like ask the band
director he probably could’ve told me that.
Speaking
of music in a vague way, there are no Rush songs about social loafing. I know;
I’m as surprised as you are. But they do have a song about how different groups
conflict, which is more relevant to the chapter than other songs I’ve used in
the past! It’s a critique of nationalism, suggesting that we’ll never truly end
conflict until we recognize that our true affiliation is not to our country,
but to our species.
————————————————————
Latané,
B., Williams, K., & Harkins, S. (1979). Many hands make light the work: The
causes and consequences of social loafing.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 37, 822–832.
Today I’m going to discuss the book I’ve been reading over the
past few weeks! Daniel Gilbert’s Stumbling
on Happiness, while titled like a self-help book about how to find
happiness, instead offers an explanation of what happiness really is and how
the human brain attempts (successfully and otherwise) to maintain it. And in
the face of that lack of success, Gilbert offers a solution that no one takes.
Gilbert asserts that the maintenance of happiness requires the
ability to imagine the potential future. We can’t make decide what would make
us happy without being able to think about how our lives would be after the
choice. However, Gilbert demonstrates that the very process of imagination we
use to make these decisions is very much flawed.
Imagination has three main failings, according to Gilbert. First, we
do not recognize that our imagination “works so quickly, quietly, and
effectively” that we don’t stop to think whether it is accurate (Gilbert, 2006).
Second, we cannot prevent our
imagination from framing in our present situation its projected results. And third,
imagination does a terrible job predicting how we will feel after we make a
decision.
However, Gilbert doesn’t leave us without a solution to the
problem we face when envisioning the results of a decision. All imagination’s
faults can be countered by merely asking someone who is currently experiencing
what we would be trying to imagine. Unfortunately, people prefer to think of
themselves as unique, and consequently discount those people’s feelings
(McFarland & Miller, 1990).
Each of these claims has relevant research to support it, and the
author himself has led several studies cited in the book during his career in
social psychology. Daniel Gilbert is a psychology professor at Harvard University
and has received several awards for his research. Furthermore, many of the
concepts and theories discussed in this course appear in his explanations, which
further demonstrates that he supports his claims with established research.
For example, Gilbert uses the availability
heuristic to explain why we always think that we’re in the slowest checkout
line. When people have to decide how frequent something is, they tend base
their answer on how many examples of it come to mind (Tversky & Kahneman,
1973). Gilbert shows that in the case of checkout lines, those examples are
generally the unusually slow ones, regardless of how many checkout lines we’ve
sped through. Because the slow checkout lines are more memorable for us, we
have more slow examples than average examples from which to base our decision
about what kind of luck we have at the checkout counter.
I knew that Gilbert was an esteemed social psychologist, which was
the first facet to draw my interest to this particular book. I didn’t want a
book from an author I hadn’t heard of or that I wasn’t confident would cite
research. However, I knew that many books on the list met those criteria. So,
after narrowing the pool down somewhat, I selected based on the content.
Happiness has always interested me, so I jumped on the opportunity to read a
book that would focus on it. (At the time of selection, I expected everyone
else to also jump on the opportunity to read this book. Later in the class, I
realized this was an example of the false
consensus effect. Ross, Greene and House (1977) showed that people
typically assume that most people feel the same way that they do. But when I
got there, no one I talked to was even interested in Stumbling on Happiness!)
Ultimately, I’m glad that I read this book. Not only was it full
of interesting information, it was relayed through a type of dry absurdity that
resonates perfectly with my own sense of humor. Psychological concepts would frequently
be followed by examples that were either immediately relatable or incredibly
outlandish, which aided understanding. However, people more serious than me might
find Gilbert’s writing style off-putting.
Aside from stylistic concerns, I believe that both experts and
laypeople would enjoy this book. For me, it applied my knowledge of social
psychology in a new way to an interesting topic. For laypeople, the book
provides the knowledge in an easily understandable way. (Perhaps people with
considerably more knowledge than me will not benefit from reading the book, but
Gilbert has shown me that I cannot actually assume that how I imagine I would
feel in that situation is correct.)
I would have liked it if the author had expanded on the final
section, about how to combat our imagination’s faults. Although I’m sure he
would have put in more strategies if research had uncovered them, I believe
that is part of Gilbert’s point: We can’t easily do it. Even after we learn
about these errors, we still can’t do
it. We don’t pay attention to the problems, and we don’t recognize how much damage
they do, even in hindsight.
And this is as close as I can get to making “Bravado” fit in here,
my favorite Rush song. I picked it weeks ago to appear in this blog, because
the song is about happiness persisting despite constant setbacks. I expected
this book would be about that. Instead, it was about how our imagination does a
terrible job of ensuring our happiness, but damn if I’ll let that stop me from
shoehorning in a great and uplifting song!
We will pay the price (of our faulty imagination), but we will not
count the cost (of how exactly it harms us).
... Close enough.
Now that we’ve had that nice interlude, I’ll provide a personal
example for each of Gilbert’s three main errors of imagination: realism,
presentism, and rationalization.
Gilbert ascribed the error of realism to flaws in memory and
perception. We both add details that we might expect to have been there, and
ignore details that we might not expect. What’s worse, we don’t realize that we’ve
done so, causing us to blindly accept our imagined future at face value. Most
of his examples resonated with me. Except for one.
Gilbert describes a situation where you happily agree to babysit
your friend’s children and look forward to having a fun time with the kids,
until the time arrives and you realize that there’s a lot of work involved. In
other words, you imagine an idealized version of the situation that doesn’t
include any of the gritty details that you would ultimately find unpleasant
(Eyal et. al, 2004).
I spent a long time thinking about it, but could not think of a
single instance when I’ve done that. Whenever I’ve agreed to do a task I’m
familiar with, I’m aware of everything it entails from the start. I can’t
recall a time I’ve felt surprised by the unpleasant details of an experience if
I’d ever done it before. All of the other heuristics brought fairly
uninteresting examples to mind, ones that didn’t seem unique enough to share.
In contrast, I thought it was very interesting that I don’t experience this “universal”
imagination heuristic. Maybe I’m more rational than the average person, but I
think it’s more likely I simply haven’t had the opportunity to experience it
since I started paying attention. Hopefully I’ll be cognizant of this error in
the future. I could say I’d imagine I would, but then I’d be committing the
error of presentism.
When people imagine the future, they do not properly disentangle
it from their present state, hence “presentism” (Gilbert, 2006). So because I’m
currently dwelling on the previous example, I would imagine I would still be
thinking about it months from now. But according to Gilbert, I would be wrong.
Presentism affects large decisions, too. When I first came to
Southwestern, I had not really decided my major. I enjoyed Economics and
Psychology most in high school, so I pursued those here. Upon reflection, those
were the most “scientific” courses I had taken in that they included both
models for predicting behavior and also clear, relatable examples as evidence.
Sure, Rutherfold’s gold foil experiment was interesting, but also too esoteric
to prompt rational thought at the age of 14.
Unfortunately, in an upper level economics class we learned about
a particular theory, the quantity theory of money. It was a simple theory, MV = PQ. The amount of money times the
number of times that money changes hands is equal to the price of the average
widget/employee times the total output. It seems logical enough (actually, I
think I understand the concept better now than I did at the time), but it
required a set of assumptions longer than the set of variables in the equation!
And it turned out that none of those assumptions was ever true. I recall
thinking in class, “what good is this theory, then, if it’s unusable outside of
the classroom?”
That day, my perspective shifted involuntarily, and I lost my ability
to perceive economics as predictive rather than descriptive. I changed that
major to business (which may have ended up being even less useful, but that is
beside the point). This may have been an extreme reaction, but the belief I
held in the present when I decided to take economics was shattered in the future.
Had I been able to predict that I would feel so strongly about that, I would
have not gotten involved in the first place. But instead, my imagination
committed the error of rationalization (Gilbert, 2006).
We think we know why we feel the way we do, so we think we can
predict how we will feel in the future (Gilbert, 2006). The example he provided
was one of the stock market. You expect feel considerably sadder if you make a
bad decision that costs you a thousand dollars than if you sit idly by and
simply fail to make the decision that would realize the gain. But in fact, you
feel sadder from the results of inaction, despite what people predicted
(Kahneman & Tversky, 1982).
For me, the greatest source of regret through inaction is my
failure to practice a musical instrument diligently enough in my youth (aka
before college). I could be so much more capable of expressing myself if I had
put in so much as an hour a day back then. The last time I said this, someone
laughed at the thought of my “youth” being over at 21. And they’re right, I
have plenty of time, especially after graduation when I don’t have overloaded
semesters. But I would prefer to enjoy the benefits now, in the present.
Overall, I feel that Gilbert’s goal was to bring people’s
attention to the fact that their imagination works against their own happiness,
and to provide tools to counteract that. However, he also recognizes the
futility of challenging the millions of years of evolution that have produced a
mind that actively resists using those new tools instead of the tricks it
already knows. The moment of glory (for his recommendations) was over before it
begun. But just because you might imagine no one will take the advice to heart,
doesn’t mean they won’t.
——————————————————
Eyal, T.,
et. al. (2004). The pros and cons of temporally near and distant action. Jouranl of Personality and Social
Psychology, 86, 781–95.
Gilbert,
D. (2006). Stumbling on happiness. New York, NY: Knopf.
Kahneman,
D., & Tversky, A. (1982). The psychology of preferences. Scientific American, 246, (160–74).
McFarland,
C., & Miller, D.T. (1990). Judgments of self-other similarity: Just like
other people, only more so. Personality
and Social Psychology Bulletin, 16, 475–84.
Ross,
L., Greene, D., & House, P. (1977). The false consensus phenomenon: An
attributional bias in self-perception and social-perception processes. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology,
13, 279–301.
Tversky,
A., & Kahneman, D. (1973). Availability: A heuristic for judging frequency
and probability. Cognitive Psychology,
5, 207–232.
If you’ve ever encountered a salesperson, you’ve no doubt
experienced the use of compliance
techniques: ways of making people agree to a request without holding power
over them. Many of these were defined by Robert Cialdini over his years of
field and laboratory research, and ultimately compiled into his 2007 book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion.
Recently, I found myself in a situation that involved a few
compliance techniques. One is the door-in-the-face
technique. According to Cialdini (1975), this technique involves making an
extreme request that will be turned down, in order to make the pre-planned
follow-up request seem more appealing than it would without having the previous
request to which to compare it. For example, you could ask someone to donate a
thousand dollars to your cause, and then “back down” to twenty. You’ll receive
considerably more donations than if you just asked for twenty dollars at the
start.
Not all compliance techniques were defined by Cialdini,
however. The other technique relevant to my experience is the exploitation of
the norm of reciprocity. When
someone gives you something, you typically feel guilty and seek to assuage that
guilt by returning the favor to the person (Gouldner, 1960). Almost everyone
feels this way. Salespeople can take advantage of this social norm by giving
their mark something small and then inducing feelings of guilt until he or she
concedes to buy the product.
Someone used both of these techniques on me a few weeks ago,
while I was filling up at a gas station before going home for Spring Break. My
friends had written something on my car’s rear windshield earlier that day, and
I started to clean it off while my car was filling up.
Suddenly, a woman approached me, seeming to come from
nowhere. She said hi and introduced herself and asked me where I was headed. Instead
of being paranoid, I was more confused by her overly friendly demeanor. At
first thought I knew her from somewhere. But then she offered to demonstrate
her fancy cleaning product on my graffiti-ed windshield, and I figured out her
intent.
While I’d already read about some of Cialdini’s techniques
before, I had no idea about the norm of compliance. So although I knew that she
wanted me to buy something, I didn’t know the real mechanism that “free samples”
worked: By cleaning my windshield, I would feel compelled to buy her cleaning
product. And it cleaned amazingly, far better than my scrubbing with the cheap
gas station scrubber! It also included some sort of fancy hydrophobic wax
coating. I could use it on my whole car. Plus, they’d donate fifty cents to
some non-Susan B. Komen breast cancer charity (though I knew that these
donations all occur at the salesperson’s initial purchase and were thus donated
regardless of whether the salesperson sold their product). I valued it at about
ten bucks.
She asked if I wanted to buy it, and I immediately said no.
She laughed and said, “You haven’t even asked the price.” So I asked the price,
and she said I could get two cans for $50 or one for $30. I laughed aloud and
said no. She was unfazed, and said I could get one for $20 or two for $35. This
was the second step of the door-in-the-face technique, making the follow-up
offer. I still rejected her, and she walked away.
I went to get in my car, and then she came back with renewed
energy. She put both cans of the product into my hands, and said I could take
both for $20, or one for $15. Well, I could buy both for twenty bucks since I
valued a can at ten, but I didn’t realistically expect to use both. So I
offered her ten bucks for just one. She happily took it, which made me wonder
just how little she paid for the cans to begin with.
Maybe I was taken advantage of, but I did get a half decent
cleaner out of it at a fairly reasonable price.
Now if only I had the time to use it…
I’m a bit over my word limit, so I’ll skip explaining the
song today. It should speak for itself. Rush – “Subdivisions”
————————————————————————————
Cialdini, R. B. (2007). Influence:
The psychology of persuasion. New York: HarperCollins.
Cialdini, R. B., Vincent, J. E., Lewis, S. K., Catalan, J.,
Wheeler, D., & Darby, B. L. (1975). Reciprocal concessions procedure for
inducing compliance: The door-in-the-face technique. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 31, 206–215.
Gouldner, A. W. (1960). The norm of reciprocity: A
preliminary statement. American
Sociological Review, 25, 161–178.
