Thought for the New Year....

Why we're better at predicting other people's behaviour than our own

Unfortunately, it is a fact that we are better at predicting and understanding the behaviour of other people than our own. Even in a community of fair minded and open people such as our own school misunderstandings and conflict may occur.Psychologists have identified an important reason why our insight into our own behaviour is so poor. Emily Balcetis and David Dunning found that when predicting our own behaviour, we fail to take the influence of the situation into account. By contrast, when predicting the behaviour of others, we correctly base it upon the influence of their circumstances. This means that we're instinctually good social psychologists but at the same time we're poor self-psychologists. This means, for example, that if your friend is going through a rough patch with her parents you will understand why she is sometimes short-tempered with you.

Across three studies, Balcetis and Dunning asked students to predict how they or their peers would behave in various situayions. This included whether or not they, or others, would help a researcher clear up a knocked-over box of jigsaw pieces; donate part of their participation fee to charity; or cheat on a self-marked quiz. The relevant situational factors were, respectively: being alone or in a group of two to three; being in a good or bad mood (induced via funny or very boring videos); having anonymity. Whilst some of the students predicted how they and others would behave in these situations, other students were actually placed in these circumstances and their behaviour was recorded. The predictions were then compared against the reality. 

When predicting the behaviour of others, the students were shrewd psychologists and took situational factors into account. For example, in reality, people were 27 per cent less likely to help clear up the jigsaw when in a group than when alone. When predicting other people's behaviour the students expected this: they said their peers would be 22 per cent less likely to help when in a group. When predicting their own behaviour, however, they didn't think it would make any difference whether they were in a group or alone.

It was similar with the charity donations and the cheating. In reality, students provoked into a bad mood gave 23 per cent less money to charity. And students given the cloak of anonymity cheated more. The students in the predicting role anticipated these situational effects (although they underestimated them) when considering the behaviour of their peers, yet they imagined that their own behaviour would be immune. They thought they'd give just as much money whether in a good or bad mood, and be just as likely to cheat, or not, regardless of whether they had the benefit of anonymity.

Another trend across all the studies was for people to overestimate their own generosity (judged against the average of how people actually behaved), but to estimate other people's generosity ( or lack of it) more reliably. This is in agreement with a mountain of past research showing that we tend to assess ourselves in an unrealistically favourable light.

"The good news," Balcetis and Dunning concluded, "is that people display some level of insight into the ability of situations to shape their potential actions compared with what they think their peers will choose. The bad news is that people may fail to realise, or choose not to realise, that this knowledge should be applied to predictions of their own behaviour as well." The lesson is that we need to reflect more upon our own behaviour by using our expectations of our friends as a guide.
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Christmas a Time of Hope.

Christmas is above all a time of hope. It is the darkest, coldest and most miserable time of the year in the northern hemisphere. In ancient times the winter solstice was celebrated as the time when daylight begins to lengthen and the prospect of Spring seems not too far distant. It was this time that the early Christian Church chose to celebrate the birth of Jesus although his actual birth was probably in Spring time. The Church chose wisely for it is at the darkest times that hope means most of all: when all the natural world seems to be cold and dead.
The Star of Bethlehem has, in a sense, only a bit part in the Christmas story it guides the wise men and the shepherds but its significance is much greater than that. The star is a symbol of hope in a dark and brutal world ,as dark then as it is now: a time of the massacre of the Holy Innocents by the brutal Herod. Yet the wise men followed the star in hope and so too did the shepherds. In a time when Christmas can be about so much less, about materialism, gluttony and greed; all that the babe of Bethlehem stood against, it is well to remember the star that shone in hope above the simple stable yard.
There is some cause for hope in that a recent survey by the Institute of Marketing found that hard times have had a major effect upon people's values they are:
1. a profound need for hope;
2. a sense of post-materialism;
3. a focus on people and things closest to us;
4. the comfort of ritual; and
5. the idea of the rewards of practicality, planning and hard work.

So, people want to hope - to believe in a better future, a long term vision of a society where people have common values which focus on each other rather than on 'things'. Help with our communities and kindness and generosity shown to each other and a concern for family and those closest to us which Christmas renews. Even when we are beset by hardship, illness and all the troubles of everyday life we can hope in time, "all will be well and all manner of things shall be well."

Get Your Swagger On this Christmas!

How to Enjoy Yourself at Christmas...

It's a fact that some of us find Christmas parties and socialising a bore and a pain. We really can't be bothered making the effort to mix with people we don't know and would much rather be at home with our families. In fact, psychologists have shown, if people are asked to choose whether to spend time chatting to a friend or a stranger they will usually choose the friend: no surprise there then.However, we actually get far more satisfaction from talking to a stranger -why ?


Talking to strangers is more fun than we predict because showing off makes us feel good.When you chat to someone you know well it's comfortable, relaxed and familiar—with a friend we know what we're getting. With a stranger, though, anything could happen.

The problem with strangers is that we have to make more of an effort: psychologists call it 'impression management'. With friends we can 'be ourselves', which means letting it all hang out; but with strangers we control our behaviour more tightly and our impression management goes into overdrive.

It's this effort and stress of controlling ourselves with strangers that puts us off and why sometimes we can't be bothered and sulk in a corner while everybody else seems to be having a good time. But according to recent research there are hidden benefits to this effort and a lesson for all of us about how we (should) treat those we know well.

Get your swagger on

In their research Dunn et al. (2007) had participants in long-term relationships predict how pleasurable it would be to interact with:

Their partner.
An opposite sex stranger.
They then had a quick chat and rated how good they felt afterwards. What they found was that people enjoyed talking to their romantic partner less than they predicted. On the other hand they had more fun talking to a stranger than they had predicted.

So what's going on here? How can people be having more fun than they imagine talking to complete strangers and less with the person they are in a long-term relationship with?

What the researchers found was that it comes down to whether or not you're making an effort. Sometimes when we talk to our friends and partners we don't make much of an effort to entertain them, show off or to present ourselves in the best light. But we do tend to make more of an effort with strangers.

In a follow-up study the researchers told participants to make an effort with their partners and then their enjoyment of the social interaction improved in line with their predictions. This suggests we can all have more fun with our partners and friends if we make an effort.

There's a fascinating point that comes out of this research. When we predict how fun talking to a stranger will be, we fail to factor in the extra effort we make. But when we think about our partners we fail to factor in how lazy we tend to be.

There are two morals to this story: the sad but unsurprising fact that we take our partners and friends for granted and the less intuitive idea that strangers are more fun than we imagine because showing off makes us feel good.So, when it comes to party time get that swagger going and make the effort!

A Christmas Lesson for All of Us.

What Lesson does Scrooge have for us ?

Ebenezer Scrooge is probably one of Charles Dickens most famous characters. Every Christmas there are plays, cartoons and films which star this famous figure. We all know the story of how a mean, selfish, spiritually blind and cruel man became kind and benevolent through a series of traumatic encounters with four ghosts – these encounters transform Scrooge from a miser into a virtual saint. I'm writing about it because it's a story I have loved since I was a child and hold before me as a model of how we, ourselves, ought to behave towards others. If I am tempted to be mean or cruel ,or to be less than generous I think of Scrooge and the following exchange:

“Plenty of prisons,’ said the gentleman, laying down the  pen again.’And the Union workhouses.’ demanded Scrooge. ‘Are  they still in operation?’
‘Both very busy, sir.’
‘Oh. I was afraid, from what you said at first, that something had occurred to stop them in their useful course,’ said Scrooge. ‘I’m very glad to hear it.’
‘Under the impression that they scarcely furnish Christian cheer of mind or body to the multitude,’ returned the gentleman, ‘a few of us are endeavouring to raise a fund to buy the Poor some meat and drink, and means of warmth. We choose this time, because it is a time, of all others, when Want is keenly felt, and Abundance rejoices. What shall I put you down for?’
‘Nothing!’ Scrooge replied.
‘You wish to be anonymous?’
‘I wish to be left alone,’ said Scrooge. ‘Since you ask me what I wish, gentlemen, that is my answer. I don’t make merry myself at Christmas and I can’t afford to make idle people merry. I help to support the establishments I have mentioned-they cost enough; and those who are badly off must go there.’
‘Many can’t go there; and many would rather die.’
‘If they would rather die,’ said Scrooge, ‘they had better  do it, and decrease the surplus population.”
We can still hear such opinions today about our own poor and unemployed. The ghosts show Scrooge how love, warmth, affection and generosity can transform his life from one of absolute poverty to one of joy and giving. A Christmas message for everybody. Scrooge was liberated from the deadness of his spiritual prison by doing good to others and so becoming a better person himself. What greater message could there be at this time of the year than the hope ,that we may all learn with Scrooge, that loving others is the secret to being loved ourselves.

Children see Pollution as Immoral

Children's moral judgments about environmental harm
When I was a boy at junior school the teacher always had a 'nature table ' in her classrom and she used to take us for nature walks in the local woods and moss lands. I enjoyed the opportunity of being outside in the natural world among, the birds, flowers and trees.Somehow, it gives you a feeling of being part of nature and of the natural world.As you all know we are a school which is very envionmentally conscious. Most of us feel angry when we see people randomly dropping paper or wasting food. A study of young children in northeastern USA shows that they see harm against the environment as morally worse than bad manners. And asked to explain this judgement, many of them referred to the moral standing of nature itself - displaying what is called "biocentric" reasoning. This means that the natural world in and of itself deserves our respect for what it is. This advance shows a change from similar research conducted in the 1990s, leading the authors of the new study, Karen Hussar and Jared Horvath, to speculate about "the possible effects of the increased focus on environmental initiatives during the last decade ... Although typically thought to emerge in later adolescence, a willingness to grant nature respect based on its own unique right-to-existence was present in our young participants."

Hussar and Horvath presented 61 children (aged 6 to 10 years) with 12 story cards: 3 portrayed a moral crime against another person (e.g. stealing money from a classmate); 3 portrayed bad manners (e.g. eating salad with fingers); 3 portrayed a boring personal choice (e.g. colouring a drawing with purple crayon); and 3 portrayed an environmentally harmful action (e.g. failing to recycle; dropping litter,damaging a tree). For each card, the children were asked to say if the act was OK, a little bad or very bad, and to explain their reasoning.

The children rated moral crimes against other people as the worst of all, followed by harm against the environment, and then bad manners. Dull personal choices were judged largely as "OK". There were no differences with age.

Asked to justify their judgments about environmental harm, 74 per cent of the explanations given referred to "biocentric" reasons (e.g. "A tree is a living thing and, it's like, breaking off your arm - someone else's arm or something"); 26 per cent invoked human-centred reasons (e.g. "Because without trees we wouldn't have oxygen"). The ratio of these categories of explanation didn't vary by age, but did vary by gender, with girls more likely to offer biocentric reasons. This fits with a wider, but still inconclusive, literature suggesting that women tend to base their moral judgments on issues of care, whereas men tend to base their moral judgments on issues of justice.

Hussar and Horvath said it was revealing that the children placed environmental harms midway between harms against other people and bad manners. "This environmental domain [of moral harm] implies a sophisticated comprehension by young children such that consideration is afforded to environmental life over social order, but, at the same time, consideration is afforded to human life over environmental life."

In contrast with the present findings, research conducted in the 90s found that young children tended to offer human-centred reasons for the wrongness of environmental harm, only invoking biocentric reasons more frequently in late childhood or adolescence.

"To conclude, it is evident that the participants in the current study are constructing morally-based views about nature and humans' place within it from a very young age," the researchers said. "This moral stance was succinctly articulated by one of our participants: 'Even if there's no rules you should respect ... (and) be good to the environment.'."
So, it looks as if environmental education in school is making children far more conscious of the importance of the natural world to our lives.

Me and My Teddy Bear...

Feeling socially excluded? Try touching a teddy bear (seriously). My teddy was exactly like the one on the right.

It is not a matter for shame that when we are small, or not so small children we are very attached to our teddy bears. When I left home for university when I was 18 I hid my teddy bear in the back of my wardrobe. However, on returning home after my first term I discovered my mother had found him and put him in the bin. The fact that I still remember this after forty odd years tells you something.

Feeling as though we belong is important for our mental and physical wellbeing. Social exclusion hurts and it darkens our mood many of us feel that we are deliberately left out by others. Very rarely do other people think about how they exclude people on grounds of gender, sociability or even age.

Unfortunately, this sets up a vicious circle because we're then less likely to engage in friendly, prosocial acts, and so less likely to form new bonds with others.Why should we show friendship to others when it clearly isn't returned ? A new study documents an effective way to break this cycle - excluded people should touch a teddy bear. Seriously.

Across two studies Kenneth Tai and his colleagues prompted some of their participants to feel socially excluded, either by giving them false feedback on a personality questionnaire ("You're the type who will end up alone later in life") or by contriving an uncomfortable situation in a group task with other participants ("I hate to tell you this, but no one chose you as someone they wanted to work with"). Other participants were given more heartening feedback (e.g. lots of people chose you to be in their group) and acted as a comparison.

Next, all the participants had to rate a "consumer product" - a 80cm, furry teddy bear. Some of the participants were given the teddy bear to hold; others evaluated him from a distance.

The researchers were interested in how being socially excluded would influence the participants' willingness to volunteer for more experiments in the future, and their willingness to share money with another person in an economic game (both taken to be signs of pro-social behaviour). And most of all, the researchers wanted to know if touching a teddy first would make any difference to these behaviours.

It did. Socially excluded participants who had the chance to touch the teddy bear were more likely to volunteer for future experiments and they shared money more generously with another participant. By contrast, touching the teddy made no difference to the behaviour of participants who weren't socially excluded.

Touching a teddy increased the prosocial behaviour of excluded participants by increasing their experience of positive emotion. The researchers tested this by asking participants to explain their decision about sharing money in the economic game. Excluded participants who touched the teddy were more likely to give answers like this one, featuring mentions of positive emotions: "There is no urgent need for myself to have the money and it is always comforting to be pleasantly surprised by others, even if it's from a stranger. So I just hope the money can be useful for the person who receives it."

Why on earth would touching a teddy bear have these effects on grown adults? Part of it could have to do with the links between emotional and physical warmth. Past research has shown that socially excluded people rated a room's temperature as colder, and people who feel more lonely tend to take more hot baths. There are also obvious links with past research showing the emotional and physical benefits of contact with pets. Finally, it could also be to do with people anthropomorphising the teddy (i.e. seeing it as human). Touch from another human can boost oxytocin levels - a hormone involved in feelings of trust and social closeness - perhaps touching the teddy had a similar effect.

Tai and his colleagues said there are lots of avenues for future research to explore - would touching a soft blanket have the same benefits observed in this study, or what about touching a plastic teddy? Would the results be replicated in a culture that tends not to anthropomorphise teddies?

"Often times, it may be hard to renew affiliative bonds with other people when one has been socially excluded by others," the researchers concluded. "During situations that may be hard for people to regain social connection with others after being rejected, one can choose to seek solace in the comfort of a teddy bear." So get cuddling that there teddy!

GHOSTS, what exactly are they ?

Ghosts 'all in the mind'

My postings on ghosts have attracted a great deal of interest. They have always been a source of fascination to psychologists .In the nineteenth century William James wrote extensively about the supernatural a topic which also interested his brother Henry. Modern psychology considers ghosts to be the mind's way of interpreting how the body reacts to certain surroundings.

Dr. Wiseman of Hertfordshire university has carried out one of the most extensive studies of ghostly phenomena. Dr Wiseman's team used hundreds of volunteers
A chill in the air, low-light conditions and even magnetic fields may trigger feelings that "a presence" is in a room - but that is all they are, feelings.

This explanation of ghosts is the result of a large study in which researchers led hundreds of volunteers around two of the UK's supposedly most haunted locations - Hampton Court Palace, England, and the South Bridge Vaults in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Dr Richard Wiseman and his colleagues say their work has thrown up some interesting data to suggest why so many people can be spooked in the same building but provides no evidence that ghosts are real.

Clustered experiences

In Hampton Court - alleged to contain the ghost of the executed Catherine Howard, 5th wife of Henry VIII - the volunteers were asked to face their fear.

UNUSUAL EXPERIENCES

The top image was taken in South Bridge Vault 9
The bottom image was taken just five minutes later
How does one explain the white fuzz? An artefact of processing?
They had to record any unusual experiences, such as hearing footsteps, feeling cold or a presence in the room, as well as marking the location and intensity of the experience on a floor plan.

Before this, candidates were also asked to reveal any prior knowledge of hauntings at the site.

The researchers then examined the distribution of unusual experiences.

In a "normal" setting, you would expect the ghostly encounters to be evenly spaced, but in classic haunting, they would be clustered around certain places.

The results were striking: participants did record a higher number of unusual experiences in the most classically haunted places of Hampton Court, areas such as the Georgian rooms and the Haunted Gallery.

And in the Edinburgh vaults, the result was the same - the vaults considered most haunted were the locations where the most unusual encounters occurred during the study.

Environmental cues

The researchers interpret this as evidence that hauntings are a real phenomenon because they are concentrated in specific places over time.

THE ROLE OF MAGNETISM

When we measure houses where pervasive haunts occur, the place where the occupants find they can sleep, by trial and error, has the most consistent and normal magnetic field strengths
Dr Michael Persinger

Indeed, it is known for people from different cultures to consistently report similar experiences over perhaps hundreds of years.

"Hauntings exist, in the sense that places exist where people reliably have unusual experiences," Dr Wiseman said "The existence of ghosts is a way of explaining these unusual experiences."

But are the ghosts real? Dr Wiseman and his colleagues are not so sure.

They claim, somewhat paradoxically, that the hauntings exist but the ghosts do not.

"People do have consistent experiences in consistent places, but I think that this is driven by visual factors mainly, and perhaps some other environmental cues," he said.

Sensitive people

Making detailed measurements at each place, such as temperature, light intensity and room space, Dr Wiseman thinks that people are responding unconsciously to environmental cues and the general "spookiness" of their surroundings.


He cites examples of mediums successfully indicating haunted areas of buildings with no prior knowledge of them and suggests that they may be particularly sensitive to magnetic fields.

Spiritualists interpret this as evidence that the ghosts are there, but another explanation is that the mediums are simply more sensitive to the environmental cues that result in haunted feelings - not sensitivity to the ghosts themselves.

Sceptics have long maintained that ghostly encounters are influenced by a person's knowledge of the place and its history, the "prior knowledge hypothesis".

But this study refutes that explanation, as the statistics showed that prior knowledge did not affect the areas in which strange experiences were recorded.

"We found little if no evidence that people's prior knowledge mattered," said Dr Wiseman. "If anything, it made them veer away from having experiences in the known haunted sites."

So, in a sense, the question is still open, there ARE phenomena - just not necessarily supernatural.

Dr Wiseman and colleagues report their to the BPS.