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O BEHAVE!Issue 14 • May 2015
The Secret Behind Resisting Chocolate Cake 3
Bias of the Month 4
The Unintended Consequence of Self-Promotion 5
Don’t Worry, I’ll Google It 6
Suit Up for Success 7
A Beautiful Mind 8
Real Life Nudge of the Month 10
Upcoming Events 10
CONTENTS
THE SECRET BEHIND RESISTING CHOCLATE CAKE
The language we use fundamentally shapes the world we live in. As mentioned In O Behave Issue 4, Zuni speakers only have one
word for yellow and orange and therefore find the task of telling the difference between these colours extremely difficult. The
Australian aboriginal speakers of the Kuuk Thaagorre language don’t use the words left or right but instead describe direction
using North South East and West and have therefore developed the skill to tell what direction they are facing at all times and finally
research done on futured languages have found people in these countries are more likely to save for the future than people who
live in a country who speak a futureless language.
New research in this field has looked at whether words we use when talking to ourselves influence our behaviour and they did so
in a situation that will be very familiar to all of you reading this….resisting chocolate. Saying “no” to temptation is a critical skill
required for us all to lead a healthy life but it’s a skill we all wish we were better at. This research lets you in on a the secret on how
this skill can be improved.
There is an array of research that shows that feeling empowered and having perceived control over and a behaviour, particularly
over goal-directed behaviour such as being on a diet or eating healthy can have a positive influence on this behaviour.
Using these insights, a study looked at whether using an empowered word
and a word that puts the person in control such as “”don’t” will have a more
positive effect on peoples behaviour than a word that connotes external
focus such as “cant”. A group of participants with a healthy eating goal
were told that each time they faced a temptation they were told to tell
themselves that “I don’t do X” or “I can’t do X”; depending on the
experimental condition and told to rehearse this strategy a few times. They
then moved onto a unrelated study. When the experiment was over and
they were leaving the room the researcher provided snacks to say thank
you, choices being a chocolate bar or a healthy granola bar. Results
showed that those in the can’t group were significantly more likely to
choose the chocolate bar than those in the empowering don’t group who
were more likely to choose the granola bar. So remember, next time that
chocolate cake is calling your name, you don’t want it, not you can’t have
it!.
Patrick, V. M., & Hagtvedt, H. (2012). “I Don’t” versus “I Can’t”: When Empowered Refusal Motivates Goal-Directed Behavior. Journal of Consumer Research, 39(2), 371-
381.
BIAS OF THE MONTH
Rhyme as Reason Effect
This is a bias whereby we judge a statement to be more truthful and accurate when it is written so that it rhymes. In
experiments, subjects judged variations of sayings which did and did not rhyme, and tended to evaluate those that
rhymed as more truthful (controlled for meaning). For example, the statement "What sobriety conceals, alcohol
reveals" was judged to be more accurate than by different participants who saw "What sobriety conceals, alcohol
unmasks“
The Keats Heuristic has been given as one explanation as to why this happens. This heuristic states that the truth of a
statement is evaluated by its aesthetic qualities whereby statements that are cognitively easy to process are preferred
and therefore more believed; such as rhymes.
McGlone, M. S., & Tofighbakhsh, J. (2000). Birds of a feather flock conjointly Rhyme as reason in aphorisms. Psychological Science, 11(5), 424-428.
The most famous case of this bias in the real world comes from
the OJ Simpson murder trial where the signature phrase used by
one his lawyers Johnnie Cochran was “If it doesn’t fit than you
must acquit”. Not only was he a great lawyer, seems he was a
also a secret behavioural scientist.
Scopelliti, I., Loewenstein, G., & Vosgerau, J. (2015). You Call It “Self-Exuberance”; I Call It “Bragging” Miscalibrated Predictions of Emotional Responses to Self-
Promotion. Psychological science, 0956797615573516.
It is human nature that we want people to like us. It can be essential for a business that clients like those representing the
business as this can influence whether the client stays or not. When we are trying to be impressive to others we all often
indulge in a little self-promotion but it turns out that this self-promotion might be doing us more harm than good. According
to new research out this month, people over estimate how much their self-promotion works in their favour and
underestimate how much it achieves the opposite effect.
THE UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCE OF SELF-PROMOTION
In a series of experiments researchers asked one group of people to
remember and describe a time when they bragged about themselves.
They asked them to note the emotions they felt along with how they
thought the person listening felt. Parallel to this, they asked another group
of people to think of and describe a time when they had to listen to
someone brag about themselves. Similarly, they asked them to note the
emotions they felt along with how they thought the other person felt.
Results showed that the bragging group thought that their audience felt
more happier and more proud of them than they actually did. They also
underestimated how annoying the listener thought they were. A final
aspect of the study asked one group to make a positive impression on the
other group which in line with the previous research showed that they did
in fact brag, which as I am sure you have guessed, had a negative effect
on the person they were trying to impress.
The researchers noted that these results are extremely important when we think about the internet and social media where people
often display self-promotion behaviours. In these situations the effects can be even more exaggerated as the lack of personal
connection can increase the negative emotions felt by the recipient of the self-promotion.
So remember, next time you are trying to impress someone in your personal life or in a business setting, maybe tone down the
bragging if you want to insure you impress rather than irritate.
DON’T WORRY, I’LL GOOGLE IT
Advances in technology have inarguably had a huge impact on us as a species; we’re able to communicate and retrieve
information with unprecedented speed and ease, revolutionising our professional and personal lives alike. This has had a
myriad of positive effects, but also some negative; nomophobia, for example, is the very modern phobia of being without one’s
mobile phone, running out of battery or losing service contact (Bragazzi & Puenete, 2014).
Fisher, M., Goddu, M. K., & Keil, F. C. (2015, March 30). Searching for Explanations: How the Internet Inflates Estimates of Internal Knowledge. Journal of Experimental
Psychology: General, forthcoming.
This overreliance on technology – even amongst those of us who wouldn’t
consider ourselves phobic of losing contact – can be problematic, and not
just for pub quiz masters who now have a lot more policing to do. A study
by Fisher, Goddu and Keil (2015) suggests that people conflate the
knowledge they can find on the Internet with their own, an effect which can
lead to overconfidence in our abilities. Humans have always formed
transactive memory systems, allocating certain cognitive tasks within their
personal communities and relying on specific people to store certain
information. These networks often form organically, and can help us to
perform more efficiently. The Internet, however, is like a supercharged
version of our cleverest friend; referred to as a “supernormal stimulus”, the
breadth and depth of the knowledge it contains far exceeds any memory
partner we would previously have adapted to. In a series of studies, the
authors found that participants who were able to search for explanations
for preliminary questions rated themselves as far more likely to give good
explanations for subsequent questions without Internet access, than those
who were shown the preliminary questions alone.
Interestingly, giving participants direct links to sites answering the questions did not improve these confidence ratings;
however, when a filter was applied to the search engine so that any search term would return a message saying it “did not
match any documents”, this overconfidence in their abilities improved again – despite the fact they had not managed to access
any new information. This suggests that the act of searching in itself is responsible for the increase in confidence; as they are
actively seeking the information themselves, people neglect the lack of knowledge they started with. Perhaps it’s worth
remembering how Google-happy you are next time you’re showing off about your trivia knowledge ahead of that pub quiz.
SUIT UP FOR SUCCESS
The phenomenon of enclothed cognition, where the clothes we wear influence the way we think and behave, has
started to receive attention from the academic community. This goes beyond a simple increase in confidence when
wearing something that looks and feels good; for example, Hajo and Galinsky (2012) found that just putting on a lab
coat improved their participants’ performance on attention-oriented tasks. Moreover, in a subsequent experiment, they
found that this effect was greater when the lab coat was framed as a doctor’s coat, than when framed as a painter’s
coat. This shows how our clothing can activate associations in our mind, priming our behaviour based on knowledge
and previous experiences.
A new study by Slepian, Ferber, Goal and Rutchick (2015) has
found that wearing more formal clothing can actually make people
more creative and abstract thinkers. Formal dress is usually worn
on specific occasions, dictated by social norms or to signal status
and professionalism. As such, it can influence our self-perception;
people who wear formal clothes tend to describe themselves as
competent and rational, while those who wear casual clothing
describe themselves as friendly and laidback. In their study, Slepian
et al asked participants to bring an outfit they would wear to a job
interview and one they would wear to lectures to the experiment,
where they were randomly assigned to change into one of these
two outfits. Those who changed into formal clothes displayed more
abstract thought, as demonstrated by a categorisation task. For
example, they were more likely to include the word “camel” in the
“vehicle” category, showing more creative thinking than those in
casual clothes who were more anchored in rigid definitions.
The implications of this study are damning for casual Fridays, but it is important to note that it was performed with
students who presumably spend more of their time in lectures than job interviews, so it is not clear whether this was
more a result of the novelty of wearing something new than the formality itself. Further research is required to find out
whether people wearing suits at work every day could benefit from a change of style, or if suits are helping them to
perform at their best.
Slepian, M.L., Ferber, S.N., Gold, J.M., & Rutchick, A.M. (2015). The Cognitive Consequences of Formal Clothing. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 1-8.
A BEAUTIFUL MIND
This week brought the sad news that John Nash, Nobel Prize winner in economics,
and his wife Alicia were killed in a car accident in New Jersey.
The brilliant mathematician was best known for his work in game theory, defining the
Nash equilibrium in his 28-page PhD thesis in 1950. This advanced Von Neumann’s
original theory by accounting for situations with multiple players and different
motivations, where players could reach equilibrium by choosing the best strategy
according to their and the other players’ options. A Nash equilibrium is where no
player has anything to gain by changing their strategy. Nash’s flourishing career was
sadly curtailed by his diagnosis of schizophrenia in 1958, which claimed three
decades of his life before gradually dissipating with the hormonal changes of age.
This recovery and the Nobel Prize meant Nash was again accepted in mathematics
circles, and his biography A Beautiful Mind and the Oscar-winning film of the same
name completed this almost miraculous turnaround.
Alicia Nash was also an inspirational individual; an El Salvadoran aristocrat, they
met at MIT where she was majoring in physics, one of only sixteen women in the
class of 1955. As Nash’s mental illness took hold, she continued to care for him and
supported him and their young son by working as a computer programmer. Sylvia
Nasar, author of A Beautiful Mind, notably said, “It was Nash’s genius to choose a
woman who would prove so essential to his survival.”
The couple were on their way home from Norway, where Nash received the Abel
Prize for his contribution to mathematics. They are survived by their son, John
Charles Martin Nash, and John David Stier, Nash’s son from a previous relationship.
Only a handful of seats left! Get yours at www.nudgestockfestival.com
Spotted: Social norms in an HIV testing campaign, Clapham
Being tested for HIV is important for peace of mind, making informed decisions
and starting treatment if the test is positive; but instead of focusing on the
rational benefits or the risks that can be prevented, this campaign is entirely
based on the number of people getting tested. Furthermore, this social norm is
localised to London, which makes it even more compelling as we like to do what
people like us are doing. This is reminiscent of Goldstein, Cialdini and
Griskevicius’ (2008) hotel towels study, where hotel guests were 26% more likely
to reuse their towels when told the majority of other guests did, which jumped to
33% when they were told the previous guests staying in their room reused their
towels, compared with an environmental message. This shows that norms can
be more effective than more rational arguments for behaving in a certain way.
REAL LIFE NUDGE OF THE MONTH
UPCOMING EVENTS
Behavioural Boozeonomics with the London Behavioural Economics Network
Monday 8th June, 6.30-11.00pm
The Comedy Pub, Piccadilly
Beyond Rationality: Behavioural Economics and the Modern Economy
Monday 29th June – Friday 3rd July
LSE’s New Academic Building
Nudgestock 3
Friday 12th June
Leas Cliff Hall, Folkestone
Cíosa Garrahan
@CiosaGarrahan
BROUGHT TO YOU BY
Juliet Hodges
@hulietjodges
