Far Cry

Hey everyone!

Have you ever, even once in your life, done anything that conflicted with your beliefs?

It could be anything. Maybe you were dieting and sneaked in some cake. Maybe you consider yourself an animal lover but you kicked a puppy once. Or maybe you skipped class even though you think school’s really important.

Chances are, acting against your beliefs made you feel a little bit uneasy. It turns out, that uneasy feeling is called cognitive dissonance! Festinger (1957) put forth this groundbreaking theory about how our behaviors counterintuitively end up shaping our behaviors. Chances are, if you did one of those things I mentioned earlier, you changed your attitude in order to feel better about the choice you made. “I don’t need to diet.” “Dogs don’t count.” “School’s not that important.” By modifying you attitude to justify whatever action you chose to take, you made yourself feel better and reduced your cognitive dissonance.

A whole host of different situations cause cognitive dissonance in people, but the most relevant one for me right now is facing equivalent choices. Many people experience this when deciding which college to attend. (Personally, I fell in love with Southwestern when I visited the campus, but that’s beside the point.) They agonize over the choice and make huge lists of pros and cons. They worry that if they choose “wrong,” they’ll wind up miserable.

However, according to Brehm (1956), people have the uncanny ability to make themselves feel better about these difficult choices. As soon as the choice is made, people convince themselves that the pros of the selected option far outweigh the pros of the other choice. Similarly, the selected option’s cons are nothing compared to all the cons of the other choice. This happens even though just a few days beforehand, they were more or less identical.

In my case, I’m facing some half dozen different career paths. I like I/O psych, stats, forensic psych, behavioral economics, and now this whole social psych field. I’ve got about a month before graduation, when I’m dragged kicking and screaming into the Real World where I need to have some sort of career that pays better than minimum wage in order to support myself.

While I know I can change career paths (and my whole plan after graduation is “get a job in one of these fields and see how you like it), I’m still very nervous about making the “wrong” choice and getting stuck in a job I hate. My hope is that whatever I decide, the magic of cognitive dissonance reduction will make me love it.

And that brings me to today’s song. “Fly by Night” by Rush. (I’m really enjoying the challenge of limiting myself to just Rush songs.) This song is about Neil Peart’s decision to leave Canada at some point in his life. People on a lyrics site for song meanings whose userbase takes everything far too seriously claim that Peart wrote it in the airport in England; in other words, he wrote it after committing to his decision. So, when he says “[his] ship isn’t coming and [he] just can’t pretend,” he’s exaggerating the negatives of the option he forsook. And the lines about the “new life ahead” that “begins today” imply he’s comforting himself with the potential for opportunity, even though he’s risking his life for it. Here’s the song, complete with 70's hair:

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Brehm, J. W. (1956). Post-decision changes in desirability of alternatives. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 52, 384–389.

Festinger, L. (1957). A theory of cognitive dissonance. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

(n = 550 words)

Aqualung

Hey everyone!

Do you enjoy thinking? Do you like to figure out why things work? Do you enjoy finding alternative solutions to problems? If so, you’re probably high in a personality trait called need for cognition.

Cacioppo and Petty (1982) coined this personality trait, defining it as the extent to which a person likes to engage in cognitively effortful tasks. If you’re high in this trait, you’ll enjoy solving puzzles, thinking about fine details, or understanding complex situations.

I am high on this trait, according to a six item sample from the initial survey created by Cacioppo and Petty. Every response I gave indicated that I have that personality trait. This did not surprise me much, because I’ve always enjoyed those things.

For example, a few years back, a friend of mine showed me a computer game called SpaceChem. It looks like this.

SpaceChem!

Does it look complicated? It’s actually simple to describe. Ignore all the chemistry-looking stuff; the gameplay doesn’t use any actual chemistry beyond “bonds are a thing.” Your goal is simply to take the inputs given on the left and use the instructions represented by the red and blue circles to manipulate them into the desired output on the right.

Actually making that happen, though, can be a frustrating, maddening, soul-deadening experience. I’m still on the first half of the puzzles, and I’m completely stuck. My friend has been attempting to solve one of the final levels of the game off and on for months.

But the feeling of accomplishment when you finally do solve the puzzle goes far beyond that of mindless entertainment. Every time I come back to the game after a break, I can solve a few more levels than I could before. It's almost like charting my logical reasoning ability throughout the past two years.

Some people can’t stand games like this. And for good reason. SpaceChem is an infuriating game and you hardly get any immediate satisfaction. But people who are high in the need for cognition might learn to love the puzzles.

Speaking of puzzles, that brings me to my song for the week. I picked a song called “Anagram (for Mongo)” by Rush. As you may have guessed from the title, it uses a fair amount of anagrams in its lyrics. In fact, every line of the song uses words that are anagrams of another word in the line. For example, “he and she are in the house, but there’s only me at home.” When I first heard this song, I had a great time trying to solve the puzzle. If you’ve got a high need for cognition, I’ll bet you will, too.

Here’s a link to the lyrics if you want to play, and here’s the song:

Cacioppo, J. T., & Petty, R. E. (1982). The need for cognition. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 42, 116–131.

(n = 424 words)

Presto

Hey everyone!

Have you ever felt that you aren't completely satisfied with your personality? Or maybe you're satisfied with it, but someone close to you has suggested you shouldn't be? Or maybe you're just curious what it'd be like to be different for a while.

Today's blog highlights my experience with this.

I've always been a reserved man. The "strong, silent type." A stoic person who never lets his true feelings show through. Always taking the rational approach, only making decisions that maximize an automatic, unconscious benefit/cost analysis.

Or at least, that's what introspection tells me I am. This is the process of thinking about ourselves and our actions, and drawing conclusions from them. Except in reality, they aren't conclusions. They're guesses. According to Nisbett and Wilson (1977), we rarely know the real reasons for our actions. He let people sample four pairs of panty hose on a table and pick the one they thought was best. People tended to pick the one on the far right. They would say, "Oh this one's softer," or "It has a better texture." Except there was a catch. The panty hose were all the same. So when people thought that one pair had better qualities, they were wrong. It turned out people just like things that are located to the right.

So maybe my guesses about myself aren't right. Maybe I'm not so rational in my thinking after all. Maybe it leads me astray. Besides, my girlfriend has told me for years that I should be less inhibited and not think about everything.

That's what I decided to change.

I tried to keep from keeping such control over myself. I attempted to just "go" for things that didn't matter. Carpe diem. YOLO. It made me more outgoing, impulsive, emotional. I also had a great time acting, which put me in a good mood. (I probably just seemed drunk throughout half of this.)

In the locker room before weight training, an older man came in while I was changing. We exchanged hellos, which is where I'd ordinarily leave it. But emboldened by my newfound carefree nature, I introduced myself and talked to him for a few minutes before I had to go. Absolutely nothing came of it, but he seemed grateful for the conversation. While I never had any other interesting events happen from my outgoing nature, I felt happier in general.

I attribute this increase in happiness to the fact that I attempted to make eye contact with and smile at everyone I saw. There's a concept known as the facial feedback hypothesis, which suggests that smiling actually causes you to be happier (Laird, 1974) Essentially, if you make yourself smile enough, your brain thinks to itself, "Why am I smiling? I only smile when I'm happy. Therefore, I must be happy," and presto, you're happy. It is a fascinating phenomenon. If I learned one thing from this experience, it would be that this trick works. And I will probably employ it for the rest of my life.

The next big behavior change resulting from my intentional disinhibition, impulsiveness, was also fun. That is probably not a surprise to anyone. I  "aggressively marketed" T-shirts to hapless passersby outside the commons, played a ridiculous video game about racing Volkswagen beetles with friends instead of working on homework (I was able to rationalize it as working on this assignment), and acted like I was going to completely blow off an essay.

It was good fun. But there's no way I could keep that up.

Acting with less self-discipline seemed like it would be extremely self-destructive in the long term, such as by ignoring homework. Some people seem to be able to operate without any stress despite failing to uphold their responsibilities. I, for better or worse, am not one of them.

Responsibility is one of my schematic traits. That means I think it's incredibly important, and I pay attention to it and judge it in myself and others (Markus, 1977). Forcing myself to act in the opposite manner was draining and stressful. And because it's a schematic trait, I think it would be a terrible decision to attempt to embody making impulsive decisions and living in the moment. I feel bad enough that I let myself procrastinate on homework, even if it was for science.

Another feature of schematic traits is that we filter our memory such that we only see ourselves with the traits we want to have. I can clearly remember the times I have been proactive regarding assignments, but specific examples of procrastination are harder to bring up. I automatically ignored the events that might counter the notion that I'm not responsible.

The same applies here. I loved playing that stupid Beetle game. I spent an hour learning a new drum rudiment instead of writing my last blog post. I went to the store with my roommate to prepare for APO Senior Wills when I had 118 pages of African History to read that night. I formed flour into an imitation brick of cocaine as a gag gift to a hyperactive friend while another friend sat on my couch waiting to work on chemistry together. But I'm not irresponsible, no; I was just pretending to be for the sake of an assignment. That rationalization let me take it further than I intended, causing me to miss quite a few hours of sleep fixing those mistakes as my responsible old self came back from his little vacation and found the house a wreck.

A couple of my friends noticed, and even made a few sarcastic comments about it. "Shouldn't you be reading instead of going to the store?" "Why did you make me play Beetle Adventure?" (I didn't make him.) This was probably the most out-of-character behavior for me. It was fun while it lasted.

The last big change included in my mission of controlling myself less appeared most clearly when commiserating with a friend about an upcoming assignment in a different class. I hadn’t fully committed to this idea yet at the time, and I wasn’t sure if it would work. I had no other ideas. As a result of that plus the other assignment, I was feeling a little bit of stress. That’s when I decided to just go with it. It would be like a pilot test of my idea.

I probably played it up a bit, in reality. I got unreasonably frustrated with the assignment and ranted to my friend for around twenty minutes about how unreasonable it was and how little it amounted to and how I should just not do it. Eventually, he got frustrated and quit trying to talk me down, because I was clearly having none of it. I was a little tempted by my own rationalization, which was especially interesting to me.

I believe one of the reasons I was able to make these changes for a time is that I am a high self-monitor. Self-monitoring is the ability to change your behavior in order to adapt to whatever social situation you’re in (Snyder, 1974). For example, people who score high on tests of self-monitoring tend to be good actors. That’s exactly what this project required.

The effects of that acting, such as being happier, showed me just how easily you can change how you see yourself if you put effort into it. Even though I approached this assignment with a bit of skepticism regarding how it would benefit me, I had fun experimenting and am now glad I experienced it.

Although some of the changes didn’t suit me, such as the impulsivity, I liked how it felt to be more outgoing. I will continue to smile at random passersby, and I will continue to trick my brain into making me a happier person.

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Laird, J. D. (1974). Self-attribution of emotion: The effects of expressive behavior on the quality of emotional experience. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 29, 475–486.

Markus, H. (1977). Self-schemata and processing information about the self. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 35, 63–78.

Nisbett, R. E., & Wilson, T. D. (1977). Telling more than we can know: Verbal reports on mental processes. Psychological Review, 84, 231–259.

Snyder, M. (1974). The self-monitoring of expressive behavior. Journal

of Personality and Social Psychology, 30, 526–537.

(N = 1300 words)

Us and Them

Hey everyone!

This week’s all about stereotypes, prejudice, and discrimination. In the world of social psychology, these have come to have much more specific definitions than in regular use. The authors of the textbook for my course, Kassin, Fein, and Markus (2011), define them as follows. Stereotypes consist of thoughts or beliefs about a specific group as a whole. Prejudice means negative feelings about a person resulting from his or her group connections. Discrimination occurs when individuals act negatively toward people of a specific group. Each of these captures a nuanced aspect of the overall concept.

Because of the nature of the topic, I had my pick of songs this week, but one in particular seemed perfect. “Witch Hunt (Part III of Fear)” by Rush. (Maybe one day I’ll run out of Rush songs.) It’s about a mob gathering and preparing to “beat and burn and kill” based on “fear and lies” and “ignorance and prejudice.” Oh, and since they’re a prog band, it starts out pretty weird. Enjoy.

Moving on! I took a couple of Implicit Association Tests (IATs) in preparation for this blog post. These tests, developed by Greenwald et al. (1998), attempt to assess unconscious associations the participant has regarding various groups. For example, the Race IAT determines how strongly you associate either white or black faces with either good or bad words.

The Race IAT operates by calculating how quickly you can press keys to categorize words or faces into the correct category, with the catch being that each key has two conditions attached to it. Pressing the letter E could signify that the presented face is white or the word is bad; the letter I would thus signify a black face or a good word.

After a period of time with this configuration, one pair is switched: now E means both white and good, instead of white and bad, and I is the opposite. If in this second configuration you assign words and faces more quickly than in the first one, it means you have greater association between “white–good” and “black–bad.” If you are faster in the first configuration, then you have stronger associations with the opposite kind: “black–good” and “white–bad.” Essentially, it is easier to sort the stimuli when the quality of the faces and words assigned to the keys “match” your internal stereotypes.

However, even the authors of the test admit that it is not a perfectly valid and reliable assessment of a person’s implicit biases. Making errors in categorizing the stimuli can completely throw off the delicate timing needed for assessment. Because you have to go as quickly as possible, you will make mistakes. Additionally, they recognize that receiving a score that implies prejudice does not mean it is actually there. Stereotypes can be automatic; even if we actively choose not to behave in discriminatory ways and not to entertain prejudiced feelings, we will still be affected by stereotypes on some level (Devine, 1989).

I bring up the reliability of the test because my results were very interesting to me. I took both the Race IAT and the Religion IAT twice each. The Race IAT informed me once that I had “strong preference toward whites” and also “little/no preference toward whites.” The Religion IAT informed me once that I preferred Muslims slightly more than Christians, Jews, and Hindus, who were all equal. But it also told me that I have a much higher preference for Muslims and Jews, no preference for Christians, and an extreme dis-preference for Hindus.

Aside from the consistently high rating of Muslims, the two sets of results differed severely.

According to the site, I should average the two pairs, giving me a slight/moderate preference toward whites and Muslims and a moderate dis-preference for Hindus.

These results directly correlate with my education with each group, or lack thereof. I was raised Christian, studied the history of white men as taught in public high school, and in college took a course on Islam. In contrast, I have met very few practicing Hindus or studied them. I believe the IAT results reflect my implicit associations, and that these associations may relate to how educated or familiar I am with each group. (Despite being unable to find a source for this, I am confident that someone has already made this connection and tested it in some sort of longitudinal study comparing IAT scores before and after taking a course like Introduction to Islam or African History.)

However, these results do not reflect my conscious beliefs or behavior. I hardly encounter any Hindus against whom I would potentially discriminate, but I do not feel any prejudice toward them. Similarly, I don’t find myself consciously judging black people more harshly than white people. But I had never thought about the ability of education to potentially lessen unconscious stereotypes until taking the IAT and thinking about my own experiences.

That means I never thought about the last line of today’s song, either: “Ignorance and prejudice and fear walk hand in hand.”

Devine, P. G. (1989). Stereotypes and prejudice: Their automatic and controlled components. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 56, 5–18.

Greenwald, A. G., McGhee, D. E., & Schwartz, J. L. K. (1998). Measuring individual diff erences in implicit cognition: The implicit association test. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74, 1464–1480.

Kassin, S., Fein, S., and Markus, H.R. (2011). Social Psychology, 8^th edition. California: Cengage.

(n = 798)