The central role of "construals" in determining performance... the power of brief interventions

An article in the Sept. 1 issue of Science by Cohen et. al. and an accompanying review by Wilson point out the power of brief interventions that change people's self- and social perceptions.

You may... "undoubtedly be surprised, or even incredulous, that a 15-min intervention can reduce the racial achievement gap by 40%. Yet this is precisely what Cohen et al. .... African American seventh graders randomly assigned to write about their most important values achieved significantly better end-of-semester grades than students in a control condition. How can this be?"

The table shows the result of this and similar studies (click to enlarge):

Legend: Brief theory-based interventions improved students' grades [increases shown on a four-point grade point average (GPA) scale, relative to randomly assigned control groups].

"The Cohen et al. study and the others like it illustrate key social psychological points. It can be as important to change people's "construals"--their interpretations of the social world and their place in it--as it is to change the objective environment....It is not clear why students in the Cohen et al. sample failed to self-affirm on their own. Why did it take an in-class essay to focus students' attention on values that were important to them? Issues of generalizability also arise, such as whether the self-affirmation exercise would work with younger age groups."

Complex Choices Better Made Unconsciously? A critical exchange...

I thought it worth reproducing a current exchange in Science Magazine:

In their Report "On making the right choice: The deliberation-without-attention effect" (17 Feb., p. 1005), A. Dijksterhuis and colleagues reported the intriguing finding that when participants had to choose among four cars on the basis of various attributes, a period of conscious reflection worsened performance. They took this as evidence that complex choices are better when made unconsciously. A close examination of their methods, however, suggests a less startling interpretation.

Because of the easily confusable statements about the four cars, the 4-min period of reflection would cause considerable memory interference and leave participants utterly confused (was it the Hatsdun that had good handling and the Kaiwa no cupholders, or the other way round?). Memory research in the Bartlettian tradition has revealed many examples of such self-generated interference (1). The unconscious group made their decision after a similar 4-min period filled with a distractor task. Knowing that they would have no further opportunity for reflection prior to being required to make their choice, these individuals probably just made their decision at the end of the study period based on their overall impression of which car was best. This alternative account makes a simple and testable prediction, namely, that memory recall will be worse in the conscious condition.

An interesting but unnoted aspect of the findings was that the deliberation group chose the best car on only about 25% of occasions, exactly at chance. Does conscious deliberation yield no more than random results? The alternative account suggested here offers an explanation: It must have been because these individuals were faced with an insurmountable memory challenge and were completely confused about which attributes went with which car.

In any event, the decision problem presented in this study is very unlike the way we normally deliberate about a problem. When choosing between cars, we don't expend effort struggling to recall their attributes; we familiarize ourselves with the relevant attributes during the information search stage, and if we can't recall some attribute, we find it out. Dijksterhuis et al.'s findings would be altogether more compelling if they were replicated in a situation in which the 4-min deliberation period was spent studying the cars' attributes. But the likelihood is that under such circumstances, the best alternative would be selected by close to 100% of participants.

Reference 1. H. L. Roediger, E. T. Bergman, M. L. Meade, in Bartlett, Cognition and Culture, A. Saito, Ed. (Routledge, London, 2000), pp. 115-134.

David R. Shanks
Department of Psychology
University College London
Gower Street
London WC1E 6BT, UK

Response
In our work on the "Deliberation-without-attention" effect, we found that, under complex decision circumstances, unconscious thinkers made better decisions than conscious deliberators. Conscious deliberators suffer from the low memory capacity of consciousness, which renders it impossible for them to take into account substantial amounts of information simultaneously. Unconscious thinkers, on the other hand, are not negatively affected by such capacity constraints. Shanks offers alternative explanations for our findings for both conscious deliberators and unconscious thinkers.

Shanks argues that our conscious thinkers may have faced memory problems. However, memory problems are not causing the effects we see. We have shown that even when the statements are presented in blocks (i.e., first all information on car A, then on car B, etc.), conscious deliberation still produces poor results (1). In addition, we have shown that even when people do have all the information at hand during conscious deliberation, it still produces poor results (2).

Shanks's suggestion that unconscious thinkers simply stick to the initial decision they made immediately after processing the information is not correct. In other experiments (1-3), we have compared unconscious thinkers with people who made decisions immediately after having received all the information, and unconscious thinkers performed better. Unconscious thought does lead to changes in preference, and it does so for the better.

Shanks also notes that under complex conditions, decisions made by conscious deliberators are no better than chance. Although conscious deliberation itself cannot be said to be random, the decisions produced by conscious deliberation are under some circumstances not superior to randomly generated decisions. There are moderators at work here, of course (e.g., expertise). Thus, the idea that conscious deliberation before making decisions is always good is simply one of those illusions consciousness creates for us.

Finally, Shanks observed that our experiments do not reflect the way people normally make decisions. This is true, as is usually the case with lab experiments. However, that is exactly the reason we included two field studies in our Report. In the field studies, people made real decisions with real consequences. These studies also confirmed the "deliberation-without-attention" hypothesis.

References 1. A. Dijksterhuis, J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 87, 586 (2004). 2. A. Dijksterhuis, Z. van Olden, J. Exp. Soc. Psychol., in press. 3. A. Dijksterhuis, L. F. Nordgren, Pers. Psychol. Sci. 1, 95 (2006).

Ap Dijksterhuis
Maarten W. Bos
Loran F. Nordgren
Rick B. van Baaren
Department of Psychology
University of Amsterdam
Roetersstraat 15, 1018 WB
Amsterdam, the Netherlands

"Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind" and "The Wayward Mind"

These are the titles of two books by British psychologist Guy Claxton (see his website) that I think have received less attention than they should. (It seems to me that British and American psychologists group themselves in quite separate worlds.) The first book is a lucid presentation of experimental work that supports Herbert Spenser's dictum "The determined effort causes perversion of thought." Claxton uses the term "undermind" to describe intuitive and integrative processes normally beyond the range of, and can be inhibited by, our focused awareness. Extremes of being indiscriminately intuitive or insisting on lots of high-quality information can block results.

The term 'undermind' hasn't caught on, and the subsequent excellent book "The Wayward Mind" reverts to using the term "unconscious". "The Wayward Mind" is a history of human attempts to explain the unconscious mind, from ancient descriptions of the 'underworld' to the theories of modern neuroscience.

Here are (clipped and truncated) some lines from pp 348-352 of "Wayward Mind" that I like:
"What we call our ‘self’ is an agglomeration of both conscious and unconscious ingredients: cans, needs, dos, oughts, thinks….these constructions hold out an overwhelming temptation: to assume that the “I” is the same in all of them… so that instead of having an intricate web of things that make me Me, I have to create a single imaginary hub around which they all revolve, to which they all refer…the attempt to keep this fiction going, to ‘hold it together’ can become quite tiring and bothersome… If “I” am essentially reasonable, if I imagine that my zones of control – over my own feelings for example – are wider and more robust than they are, then I am going to get in a tangle trying to ‘control myself.’ If I have decided that who I am is clever, attractive, athletic, stable, creating the hub of “I” locks everything together and prevents it moving. It stops Me expanding to include the unconscious, or graciously shrinking to accommodate old age. I can’t enjoy my waywardness, nor see it as an intrinsic part of ME….All the evidence is that a more relaxed attitude toward the bounds of self makes for a richer, easier and more creative life. Perhaps, after all, waywardness in all its forms is in need not so much of explanation, but of a mystified but friendly welcome. We can explain it if we wish, and the brain is beginning to a reasonable job. But the need to explain, when not motivated by the dispassionate curiosity of the scientist, is surely a sign of anxiety: of the desire to tame with words that which is experienced as unsettling.. "

How emotions nudge rationality - brain correlates of "framing"

A very elegant report by Martino et al. from Dolan's laboratory has the title: "Frames, Biases, and Rational Decision-Making in the Human Brain"

"Human choices are remarkably susceptible to the manner in which options are presented. This so-called "framing effect" represents a striking violation of standard economic accounts of human rationality, although its underlying neurobiology is not understood. We found that the framing effect was specifically associated with amygdala activity, suggesting a key role for an emotional system in mediating decision biases. Moreover, across individuals, orbital and medial prefrontal cortex activity predicted a reduced susceptibility to the framing effect. This finding highlights the importance of incorporating emotional processes within models of human choice and suggests how the brain may modulate the effect of these biasing influences to approximate rationality."

From the brief review of this article by Miller in the same issue of Science, one example of framing:

Faced with a decision between two packages of ground beef, one labeled "80% lean," the other "20% fat," which would you choose? The meat is exactly the same, but most people would pick "80% lean." The language used to describe options often influences what people choose, a phenomenon behavioral economists call the framing effect. The Martino et al. experiments look directly at brain activity correlating with this effect.

The experiments used a novel financial decision-making task. Participants (20 university students or graduates) received a message indicating the amount of money that they would initially receive in that trial (e.g., "You receive £50"). Subjects then had to choose between a "sure" option and a "gamble" option presented in the context of two different frames. The "sure" option was formulated as either the amount of money retained from the initial starting amount (e.g., keep £20 of the £50; "Gain" frame) or as the amount of money lost from the initial amount (e.g., lose £30 of the £50; "Loss" frame). Subjects - who performed the task while inside an fMRI scanner! - were risk-averse in the Gain frame, tending to choose the sure option over the gamble option and were risk-seeking in the Loss frame, preferring the gamble option.

The amygdala (A, in the figure) was relatively more activated when subjects chose in accordance with the frame effect. When subjects made decisions that ran counter to their general behavioral tendency enhanced activity in the anterior cingulate cortex was observed (C, in the figure). This suggests an opponency between two neural systems, with ACC activation consistent with the detection of conflict between predominantly "analytic" response tendencies and a more "emotional" amygdala-based system.

Decreased susceptibility to the framing effect correlated with enhanced activity in the orbital and medial prefrontal cortex, specifically in the right orbitofrontal cortex (A, in the figure). The findings support a model in which the OMPFC evaluates and integrates emotional and cognitive information, thus underpinning more "rational" (i.e., description-invariant) behavior.

The framing bias occurs because "individuals incorporate a potentially broad range of additional emotional information into the decision process. In evolutionary terms, this mechanism may confer a strong advantage, because such contextual cues may carry useful, if not critical, information. Neglecting such information may ignore the subtle social cues that communicate elements of (possibly unconscious) knowledge that allow optimal decisions to be made in a variety of environments. However, in modern society, which contains many symbolic artifacts and where optimal decision-making often requires skills of abstraction and decontextualization, such mechanisms may render human choices irrational."

The Middle East - contribution of basic cognitive errors to cycles of retribution.

Daniel Gilbert, whose book (Stumbling on Happiness) I abstracted in a series of posts on 6/29/06, has a fascinating Op-Ed piece in today's New York Times that seems particularly relevant to the current maelstrom of violence in the middle east. Here are a few clips from his writing:

"He hit me first" provides an acceptable rationale for doing that which is otherwise forbidden. Both civil and religious law provide long lists of behaviors that are illegal or immoral — unless they are responses in kind, in which case they are perfectly fine...a punch thrown second is legally and morally different than a punch thrown first....That’s why participants in every one of the globe’s intractable conflicts — from Ireland to the Middle East — offer the even-numberedness of their punches as grounds for exculpation.

The problem with the principle of even-numberedness is that people count differently...In a study conducted by William Swann and colleagues at the University of Texas, pairs of volunteers played the roles of world leaders who were trying to decide whether to initiate a nuclear strike. The first volunteer was asked to make an opening statement, the second volunteer was asked to respond, the first volunteer was asked to respond to the second, and so on. At the end of the conversation, the volunteers were shown several of the statements that had been made and were asked to recall what had been said just before and just after each of them...The results revealed an intriguing asymmetry: When volunteers were shown one of their own statements, they naturally remembered what had led them to say it. But when they were shown one of their conversation partner’s statements, they naturally remembered how they had responded to it...

What seems like a grossly self-serving pattern of remembering is actually the product of two innocent facts. First, because our senses point outward, we can observe other people’s actions but not our own. Second, because mental life is a private affair, we can observe our own thoughts but not the thoughts of others. Together, these facts suggest that our reasons for punching will always be more salient to us than the punches themselves — but that the opposite will be true of other people’s reasons and other people’s punches...Examples aren’t hard to come by. Shiites seek revenge on Sunnis for the revenge they sought on Shiites; Irish Catholics retaliate against the Protestants who retaliated against them; and since 1948, it’s hard to think of any partisan in the Middle East who has done anything but play defense. In each of these instances, people on one side claim that they are merely responding to provocation and dismiss the other side’s identical claim as disingenuous spin. But research suggests that these claims reflect genuinely different perceptions of the same bloody conversation.

If the first principle of legitimate punching is that punches must be even-numbered, the second principle is that an even-numbered punch may be no more forceful than the odd-numbered punch that preceded it. Legitimate retribution is meant to restore balance, and thus an eye for an eye is fair, but an eye for an eyelash is not. When the European Union condemned Israel for bombing Lebanon in retaliation for the kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers, it did not question Israel’s right to respond, but rather, its “disproportionate use of force.” It is O.K. to hit back, just not too hard.

Research shows that people have as much trouble applying the second principle as the first. In a study conducted by Sukhwinder Shergill and colleagues at University College London, pairs of volunteers were hooked up to a mechanical device that allowed each of them to exert pressure on the other volunteer’s fingers.

The researcher began the game by exerting a fixed amount of pressure on the first volunteer’s finger. The first volunteer was then asked to exert precisely the same amount of pressure on the second volunteer’s finger. The second volunteer was then asked to exert the same amount of pressure on the first volunteer’s finger. And so on. The two volunteers took turns applying equal amounts of pressure to each other’s fingers while the researchers measured the actual amount of pressure they applied.

The results were striking. Although volunteers tried to respond to each other’s touches with equal force, they typically responded with about 40 percent more force than they had just experienced. Each time a volunteer was touched, he touched back harder, which led the other volunteer to touch back even harder. What began as a game of soft touches quickly became a game of moderate pokes and then hard prods, even though both volunteers were doing their level best to respond in kind.

Each volunteer was convinced that he was responding with equal force and that for some reason the other volunteer was escalating. Neither realized that the escalation was the natural byproduct of a neurological quirk that causes the pain we receive to seem more painful than the pain we produce, so we usually give more pain than we have received.

Research teaches us that our reasons and our pains are more palpable, more obvious and real, than are the reasons and pains of others. This leads to the escalation of mutual harm, to the illusion that others are solely responsible for it and to the belief that our actions are justifiable responses to theirs.

None of this is to deny the roles that hatred, intolerance, avarice and deceit play in human conflict. It is simply to say that basic principles of human psychology are important ingredients in this miserable stew. Until we learn to stop trusting everything our brains tell us about others — and to start trusting others themselves — there will continue to be tears and recriminations in the wayback.

Our Wayward Minds

I want to mention the excellent book by Guy Claxton - THE WAYWARD MIND, an intimate history of the unconscious (2005, Little, Brown, and Co. Great Britan, published only in Britan but available from amazon.com with 4-6 week wait) Here is a excerpt and paraphrase from pp. 348-252:

"What we call our "self " is an agglomeration of both conscious and unconscious ingredients, cans, needs, dos, oughts, thinks - the temptation is to assume that the "I" is the same in all of them - so that instead of having an intricate web of things that make me ME, I have to create a single imaginary hub around which they all revolve, to which they all refer - the attempt to keep this fiction going, to "hold it together" can become quite tiring and bothersome - If "I" am essentially reasonable, if I imagine that my zones of control - over my own feelings for example - are wider and more robust than they are, then I am going to get in a tangle trying to "control myself." If I have decided that who I am is clever, attractive, athletic, stable, creating the hub of "I" locks everything together and prevents it moving. It stops Me expanding to include the unconscious, or graciously shrinking to accommodate old age. I can not enjoy my waywardness, nor see it as an intrinsic part of ME - (note: he gives Ramachandran's two foot nose pinocchio demonstration as evidence of plasticity of self image), and then says - The orthodox sense of self is thrown by such experiences, and tends to suffer a sense-of-humour failure. It sees all waywardness as an affront, and tends to become earnest or myopic in response. In a nutshell: it is bad enough to have a nightmare, without your rattled sense of self telling you that you are going mad. Weird experience can never be just funny (as the pinocchio effect can be) or matter-of fact (as possession is in Bali), or transiently inconvenvient (as a bad dream is), or wonderful (as a mystical experience can be), or just mysterious (as a premonition might be). For the locked-up self they have to be denied, explained or dealt with. All the evidence is that a more relaxed attitude toward the bounds of self makes for a richer, easier and more creative life. Perhaps, after all, waywardness in all its forms is in need not so much of explanation, but of a mystified but friendly welcome. We can explain it if we wish, and the brain is beginning to a reasonable job. But the need to explain, when not motivated by the dispassionate curiosity of the scientist, is surely a sign of anxiety: of the desire to tame with words that which is experienced as unsettling.

Complex decisions solved better by unconsious than by conscious thought

Ap Dijksterhuis et al. , Univ. of Amsterdam, had a group of students read a comparison of many different aspects of four different cars. They were told they had 4 minutes to choose the best deal and divided into two groups. One group was distracted by being given anagrams to solve during this period. It did better at the choice that the group that spent the 4 minutes consciously thinking about it.