Thinking in a foreign language reduces decision biases.

From Keyser et al.:

Would you make the same decisions in a foreign language as you would in your native tongue? It may be intuitive that people would make the same choices regardless of the language they are using, or that the difficulty of using a foreign language would make decisions less systematic. We discovered, however, that the opposite is true: Using a foreign language reduces decision-making biases. Four experiments show that the framing effect disappears when choices are presented in a foreign tongue. Whereas people were risk averse for gains and risk seeking for losses when choices were presented in their native tongue, they were not influenced by this framing manipulation in a foreign language. Two additional experiments show that using a foreign language reduces loss aversion, increasing the acceptance of both hypothetical and real bets with positive expected value. We propose that these effects arise because a foreign language provides greater cognitive and emotional distance than a native tongue does.

Unconscious actions of testosterone

Here is an interesting observation from Terburg et al.:

Throughout vertebrate phylogeny, testosterone has motivated animals to obtain and maintain social dominance—a fact suggesting that unconscious primordial brain mechanisms are involved in social dominance. In humans, however, the prevailing view is that the neocortex is in control of primordial drives, and testosterone is thought to promote social dominance via conscious feelings of superiority, indefatigability, strength, and anger. Here we show that testosterone administration in humans prolongs dominant staring into the eyes of threatening faces that are viewed outside of awareness, without affecting consciously experienced feelings. These findings reveal that testosterone motivates social dominance in humans in much the same ways that it does in other vertebrates: involuntarily, automatically, and unconsciously.

My amygdala made me do it...

James Atlas writes an engaging piece on a topic that has been the subject of many MindBlog posts: how our supposedly rational 'upstairs' decisions are actually nudged or determined by unconscious or implicit 'downstairs' mechanisms. He doesn't include in his list of recent books Jonathan Haidt's "The Righteous Mind", which is beautifully written and one of those few books I actually read through, rather than just reading its reviews. A few clips from the Atlas article:

WHY are we thinking so much about thinking these days?...Jonah Lehrer’s “Imagine: How Creativity Works,” ...Charles Duhigg’s book “The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business,” ...“Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior,” by Leonard Mlodinow...Kahneman's “Thinking, Fast and Slow” goes to the heart of the matter: How aware are we of the invisible forces of brain chemistry, social cues and temperament that determine how we think and act? Has the concept of free will gone out the window?

These books possess a unifying theme: The choices we make in day-to-day life are prompted by impulses lodged deep within the nervous system. Not only are we not masters of our fate; we are captives of biological determinism. Once we enter the portals of the strange neuronal world known as the brain, we discover that — to put the matter plainly — we have no idea what we’re doing.

The 18th-century philosopher David Hume (much quoted by Mr. Lehrer) didn’t have an M.R.I. scanner at his disposal, but he framed the question in much the same way. His major work, “A Treatise of Human Nature,” explored the ways in which habit, or “custom,” rules our lives. Hume’s experiments with perception — how we respond to colors, distance, numerical sets — prefigure the rigorous science of Professor Kahneman. His intent was to show us “the natural infirmity and unsteadiness both of our imagination and senses.” Consciousness, like philosophy itself, stands on a “weak foundation.”

If Hume seems modern, William James reads like a contemporary. Writing toward the end of the 19th century, James addressed the same question that had concerned Hume — how the unconscious operates as a physical process, not just, as Freud would have it, a mental one. In his now-classic essay, “Habit,” he argued that even our most complex acts are reflexive — “concatenated discharges in the nerve-centres.” ...we can train ourselves to change if we work at it hard enough. Self-awareness sets us free. “The great thing, then, in all education,” writes James, “is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy.”

Does this mean we have no “agency,” no capacity to act on our own? Or can autonomy thrive within the prison of self-ignorance? “We have to believe it does,” says Steven Lukes, a professor of sociology at New York University highly admired for his work in moral philosophy. “If we seriously thought that our intentions made no difference to how we behave, we couldn’t go on using the language of ethics. How would we go on living the lives we live?” Or doing what we think is right? “People have free will when they ‘feel’ they have free will,” says Professor Kahneman. “If we didn’t believe in it, we would have no responsibility.”

But of course what one “feels,” as we’ve learned from all these books, could well be — indeed, probably is — an illusion. As Timothy Wilson puts it with haunting simplicity: “We are strangers to ourselves.” Hopefully...Strangers who can learn how to be friends.

The sentiments above are very much in the vein of my "I-Illusion" web lecture.

John Cleese on creativity

For the second time, I've come across some engaging comments by the British actor John Cleese, and I though I would pass them on. Cleese's model for creativity centers on the interplay of two modes of operating – open, where we take a wide-angle, abstract view of the problem and allow the mind to ponder possible solutions, and closed, where we zoom in on implementing a specific solution with narrow precision.  In the 10 minute video, he stresses the role of the unconscious. 

-Space ("You can't become playful, and therefore creative, if you're under your usual pressures.")

-Time ("It's not enough to create space; you have to create your space for a specific period of time.")


-Time ("Giving your mind as long as possible to come up with something original," and learning to tolerate the discomfort of pondering time and indecision.)

-Confidence ("Nothing will stop you being creative so effectively as the fear of making a mistake.")
 -Humor ("The main evolutionary significance of humor is that it gets us from the closed mode to the open mode quicker than anything else.")

Further points:

Creativity is not a talent. It is a way of operating.

We need to be in the open mode when pondering a problem – but! – once we come up with a solution, we must then switch to the closed mode to implement it. Because once we've made a decision, we are efficient only if we go through with it decisively, undistracted by doubts about its correctness.

To be at our most efficient, we need to be able to switch backwards and forward between the two modes. But – here's the problem – we too often get stuck in the closed mode. Under the pressures which are all too familiar to us, we tend to maintain tunnel vision at times when we really need to step back and contemplate the wider view. This is particularly true, for example, of politicians. The main complaint about them from their nonpolitical colleagues is that they've become so addicted to the adrenaline that they get from reacting to events on an hour-by-hour basis that they almost completely lose the desire or the ability to ponder problems in the open mode. Cleese concludes with a beautiful articulation of the premise and promise of his recipe for creativity:

This is the extraordinary thing about creativity: If just you keep your mind resting against the subject in a friendly but persistent way, sooner or later you will get a reward from your unconscious.

When it's an error to mirror...

Mimicry and imitation can facilitate cultural learning, maintenance of culture, and group cohesion, and individuals must competently select the appropriate models and actions to imitate. Mimicry and imitation also play an important role in dyadic social interactions. People mimic their partners’ mannerisms, which increases rapport and the partners’ liking of the mimickersA collaboration between psychologists and philosophers at the Univ. of California, San Diego asks whether and how mimicry unconsciously influences evaluations made by third-party observers of dyadic interactions. Their results indicate that third-party observers make judgments about individuals’ competence on the basis of their decisions concerning whether and whom to mimic. Contrary to the notion that mimicry is uniformly beneficial to the mimicker, people who mimicked an unfriendly model were rated as less competent than nonmimics. Thus, a positive reputation depends not only on the ability to mimic, but also on the ability to discriminate when not to mimic. Here is their experimental setup (click on figure to enlarge):

Figure: Illustration of the experimental paradigm and experimental results. Subjects watched two videos, in each of which an interviewer (model) interacted with an interviewee. After each video, subjects rated the interviewee’s competence, trustworthiness, and likeability. For each subject, one video showed a mimicking interviewee, and the other showed a nonmimicking interviewee. In Experiment 1, video frames were uncropped, so subjects could see the interviewer; in Experiment 2, video frames were cropped, so subjects could not see the interviewer, and mimicry was obscured. The interviewer’s attitude varied between subjects; some subjects saw videos with a cordial interviewer, and other subjects saw videos with a condescending interviewer. The graph shows the difference in average competence ratings between the cordial- and condescending-model conditions as a function of whether or not the interviewee mimicked the interviewer, separately for Experiments 1 and 2. Error bars represent standard errors of the difference between conditions.

Confabulation

Here is an entry from Fiery Cushman on the Edge.org question "What scientific concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit?," on how we frequently rationalize our behavior, unaware of unconscious factors that actually guided it. Here are some clips:

We are shockingly ignorant of the causes of our own behavior. The explanations that we provide are sometimes wholly fabricated, and certainly never complete. Yet, that is not how it feels. Instead it feels like we know exactly what we're doing and why. This is confabulation: Guessing at plausible explanations for our behavior, and then regarding those guesses as introspective certainties…The problem is that we get all of our explanations partly right, correctly identifying the conscious and deliberate causes of our behavior. Unfortunately, we mistake "party right" for "completely right", and thereby fail to recognize the equal influence of the unconscious, or to guard against it.

People make harsher moral judgments in foul-smelling rooms, reflecting the role of disgust as a moral emotion. Women are less likely to call their fathers (but equally likely to call their mothers) during the fertile phase of their menstrual cycle, reflecting a means of incest avoidance. Students indicate greater political conservatism when polled near a hand-sanitizing station during a flu epidemic, reflecting the influence of a threatening environment on ideology. They also indicate a closer bond to their mother when holding hot coffee versus iced coffee, reflecting the metaphor of a "warm" relationship.

Automatic behaviors can be remarkably organized, and even goal-driven. For example, research shows that people tend to cheat just as much as they can without realizing that they are cheating. This is a remarkable phenomenon: Part of you is deciding how much to cheat, calibrated at just the level that keeps another part of you from realizing it.

One of the ways that people pull off this trick is with innocent confabulations: When self-grading an exam, students think, "Oh, I was going to circle e, I really knew that answer!" This isn't a lie, any more than it's a lie to say you have always loved your mother (latte in hand), but don't have time to call your dad during this busy time of the month. These are just incomplete explanations, confabulations that reflect our conscious thoughts while ignoring the unconscious ones.

Perhaps you have noticed that people have an easier time sniffing out unseemly motivations for other's behavior than recognizing the same motivations for their own behavior…we jump to the conclusion that others' behaviors reflect their bad motives and poor judgment, attributing conscious choice to behaviors that may have been influenced unconsciously… we assume that our own choices were guided solely by the conscious explanations that we conjure, and reject or ignore the possibility of our own unconscious biases...By understanding confabulation we can begin to remedy both faults.

Conscious attention influences unconscious cognition.

This work by Martens et al. demonstrates that our conscious attention to one task area (such as noting geometric shapes) can sensitize unconscious processes in that area such as subliminal priming (facilitatory effects elicited by masked stimuli that are not consciously perceived.) This shows that unconscious processing is crucially dependent on top-down attention, and contrasts with the classical view that unconscious cognition is characterized by the lack of top-down influences.

Are unconscious processes susceptible to attentional influences? In two subliminal priming experiments, we investigated whether task sets differentially modulate the sensitivity of unconscious processing pathways. We developed a novel procedure for masked semantic priming of words (Experiment 1) and masked visuomotor priming of geometrical shapes (Experiment 2). Before presentation of the masked prime, participants performed an induction task in which they attended to either semantic or perceptual object features designed to activate a semantic or perceptual task set, respectively. Behavioral and electrophysiological effects showed that the induction tasks differentially modulated subliminal priming: Semantic priming, which involves access to conceptual meaning, was found after the semantic induction task but not after the perceptual induction task. Visuomotor priming was observed after the perceptual induction task but not after the semantic induction task. These results demonstrate that unconscious cognition is influenced by attentional control. Unconscious processes in perceptual and semantic processing streams are coordinated congruently with higher-level action goals.

Monetary favors bias judgement in unrelated domains

Work from Read Montague's group at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, that explains how corporate sponsorship (of athletic or artistic events) can bias our judgements in a very general way:

Favors from a sender to a receiver are known to bias decisions made by the recipient, especially when the decision relates to the sender, a feature of social exchange known as reciprocity. Using an art-viewing paradigm possessing no objectively correct answer for preferring one piece of art over another, we show that sponsorship of the experiment by a company endows the logo of the company with the capacity to bias revealed preference for art displayed next to the logo. Merely offering to sponsor the experiment similarly endowed the gesturing logo of the company with the capacity to bias revealed preferences. These effects do not depend upon the size of the displayed art or the proximity of the sponsoring logo to the piece of art. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to show that such monetary favors do not modulate a special collection of brain responses but instead modulate responses in neural networks normally activated by a wide range of preference judgments. The results raise the important possibility that monetary favors bias judgments in domains seemingly unrelated to the favor but nevertheless act in an implicit way through neural networks that underlie normal, ongoing preference judgments.

MRI evidence on how hypnosis works.

I just came across a paper by Cojan et al. on brain activity under hypnosis. While undergoing functional MRI, participants were instructed to prepare to move their hand. After a few seconds they were told whether or not to actually perform the movement. Some of the time, they were hypnotized and believed that their hand was paralyzed. Interestingly, when the volunteers were under hypnosis, the preparatory activity in motor cortex was normal; but there was increased activity in other regions related to attention, mental imagery and self-awareness. Moreover, the connectivity between these regions and motor cortex was enhanced, indicating that hypnosis doesn’t work by directly controlling motor activity, but rather through the effects of internal representations and self-monitoring processes on such activity. Here is the authors' summary of the work:

Brain mechanisms of hypnosis are poorly known. Cognitive accounts proposed that executive attentional systems may cause selective inhibition or disconnection of some mental operations. To assess motor and inhibitory brain circuits during hypnotic paralysis, we designed a go-nogo task while volunteers underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in three conditions: normal state, hypnotic left-hand paralysis, and feigned paralysis. Preparatory activation arose in right motor cortex despite left hypnotic paralysis, indicating preserved motor intentions, but with concomitant increases in precuneus regions that normally mediate imagery and self-awareness. Precuneus also showed enhanced functional connectivity with right motor cortex. Right frontal areas subserving inhibition were activated by nogo trials in normal state and by feigned paralysis, but irrespective of motor blockade or execution during hypnosis. These results suggest that hypnosis may enhance self-monitoring processes to allow internal representations generated by the suggestion to guide behavior but does not act through direct motor inhibition.

Goal pursuit outside our conscious awareness

Custer and Aarts expand on a favorite topic of mine (see the "I-Illusion" podcast in the left column): how our sense of authorship and agency is an illusion. They review research demonstrating that goals and the motivation to pursue them can arise unconsciously, and propose a mechanism for how this may happen. Here is a mix of their abstract, text clips, and a proposed mechanism:

People often act in order to realize desired outcomes, or goals. Although behavioral science recognizes that people can skillfully pursue goals without consciously attending to their behavior once these goals are set, conscious will is considered to be the starting point of goal pursuit. Indeed, when we decide to work hard on a task, it feels as if that conscious decision is the first and foremost cause of our behavior. That is, we are likely to say, if asked, that the decision to act produced the actions themselves. Recent discoveries, however, challenge this causal status of conscious will. They demonstrate that goals themselves can arise and operate unconsciously - actions are initiated even though we are unconscious of the goals to be attained or their motivating effect on our behavior. Social situations and stimuli in the surroundings activate or prime goals in our minds outside of our awareness, thereby motivating and guiding us.

Figure - The proposed mechanism for unconscious goal pursuit.

Experiments compatible with this model:

Neuroimaging research has discovered that reward cues are processed by limbic structures such as the nucleus accumbens and the ventral striatum. These subcortical areas play a central role in determining the rewarding value of outcomes and are connected to frontal areas in the cortex that facilitate goal pursuit. These reward centers in the brain respond to evolutionarily relevant rewards such as food and sexual stimuli, but also to learned rewards (such as money or status), or words (such as good or nice) that are associated with praise or rewards. This demonstrates that regardless of their shape or form, such positive stimuli induce a reward signal that is readily picked up by the brain.

Other recent research has demonstrated that subliminal primes that are specifically related to rewards can motivate people to increase the effort they invest in behaviors. In one study, participants could earn money by squeezing a handgrip. Before each squeeze, the money that could be earned was indicated by a 1-pound or 1-penny coin on the screen. Whereas on some trials the coin was clearly visible, on others it was presented subliminally. Thus, effects of conscious and unconscious reward cues could be compared within one experiment. It was found that people squeezed harder on high than on low reward trials, regardless of whether the reward was consciously visible or not. Moreover, this effect was accompanied by activation in the brain areas that play a role in reward processing and the recruitment of effort for action…These findings indicate that conscious and unconscious reward cues have similar effects on effort and flexible cognitive processing, which suggests that conscious awareness of rewards is not needed for goal pursuit to occur.

The Wayward Mind

Continuing my review of old posts that have popped into my head over the past few days during mulling over this and that, I am reproducing my March 6, 2006 post in its entirety: 

I want to mention the excellent book by Guy Claxton - THE WAYWARD MIND, an intimate history of the unconscious (2005, Little, Brown, and Co., available from amazon.com). 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.

Unconscious control of 'conscious' prefrontal cognitive control.

Unconscious information has been shown to influence motivation, reward value and decision making, emotional processing, object recognition, semantic processing, and action planning/execution. Van Gaal et al. now look for evidence of unconscious cognitive control. From their text and the abstract:

Cognitive control becomes necessary when routine behavior (e.g., driving a car) is interrupted unexpectedly by information (e.g., a 'no-go' stimulus such as a pedestrian crossing the street) that calls for behavioral adaptations (e.g., braking fiercely). Generally speaking, it is thought that one should be conscious of the control-initiating stimulus to implement control and to overcome or to inhibit automatized ongoing behavior ("to regain control"). The recruitment and implementation of such control processes depend strongly on the prefrontal cortex (PFC), which is, of all brain regions, also the one most often associated with conscious experience. Therefore, it seems likely that consciousness and cognitive control are intimately related and this belief is so strong that many authors naturally refer to the concept of "conscious cognitive control" as if "unconscious cognitive control" is inconceivable.

We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to investigate to what extent unconscious "no-go" stimuli are capable of reaching cortical areas involved in inhibitory control, particularly the inferior frontal cortex (IFC) and the pre-supplementary motor area (pre-SMA). Participants performed a go/no-go task that included conscious (weakly masked) no-go trials, unconscious (strongly masked) no-go trials, as well as go trials. Replicating typical neuroimaging findings, response inhibition on conscious no-go stimuli was associated with a (mostly right-lateralized) frontoparietal "inhibition network." Here, we demonstrate, however, that an unconscious no-go stimulus also can activate prefrontal control networks, most prominently the IFC and the pre-SMA. Moreover, if it does so, it brings about a substantial slowdown in the speed of responding, as if participants attempted to inhibit their response but just failed to withhold it completely. Interestingly, overall activation in this "unconscious inhibition network" correlated positively with the amount of slowdown triggered by unconscious no-go stimuli. In addition, neural differences between conscious and unconscious control are revealed. These results expand our understanding of the limits and depths of unconscious information processing in the human brain and demonstrate that prefrontal cognitive control functions are not exclusively influenced by conscious information.

Figure - Neural activation associated with unconsciously triggered no-go inhibition. The contrast between responded, strongly masked no-go trials and responded, strongly masked go trials revealed significant activation in three a priori hypothesized regions of interest (pre-SMA and left/right IFC).

Unconscious strategic recruitment of resources measured with pupil diameter.

Recent research suggests that reward cues, in the absence of awareness, can enhance people's investment of physical resources (for an example, see this previous post). Bijleveld et al. make the interesting observation that pupil dilation can reveal strategic recruitment of resources when subliminal reward cues are presented. They make use of the fact that our pupils dilate with sympathetic activity and constrict with parasympathetic activity so that their size can be an unobtrusive measure of the resources invested in a task. Their rationale:

If subliminal reward cues input into the strategic processes involved in resource recruitment, the effects of rewards on pupil dilation should occur when the task is demanding (here, recall of five digits), but not when the task is undemanding (recall of three digits), as undemanding tasks can be completed routinely and do not require many resources. It is important to note that this interactive effect of reward and demand on recruitment of resources is expected to occur regardless of whether the reward is processed consciously or nonconsciously.

Their results:

Pupil-dilation data indicated that valuable (compared with nonvaluable) rewards led to recruitment of more resources, but only when obtaining the reward required considerable mental effort. This pattern was identical for supraliminal and subliminal reward cues. This indicates that awareness of a reward is not a necessary condition for strategic resource recruitment to take place. These findings are in line with recent research suggesting that the unconscious has flexible and adaptive capabilities (Hassin, Uleman, & Bargh, 2005; Wilson, 2002). More generally, whereas analyses of costs (required effort) and benefits (value of rewards) are usually thought to require consciousness, our findings suggest that such strategic processes can occur outside of awareness—and these processes show in the eyes.

How nonsense sharpens our intellect

Benedict Carey points to an article in Psychological Science that I scanned past without realizing its interest. Proulx and Heine show that a threat to our sense of coherence or meaning in one area (such as reading an absurd short story by Kafka) enhances our ability to unconsciously detect patterns within letter strings (an artificial grammar task). Encountering incoherence apparently primes our brains to detect patterns they might otherwise miss. The idea is that the brain evolved to predict, and it does so by identifying patterns. The process is enhanced by a threat to meaning. (It is also important to evaluate the possibility that nervousness, not a search for meaning, leads to heightened vigilance.)

MindBlog's third Podcast - Mindstuff: A user's guide

This podcast (here is the mp3, 30 min., 13.8 MB download) builds on the description of the nature and evolutionary history of our "I" that is developed in the first two Podcasts, "The I-Illusion" and "The Beast Within." In this podcast, which I am calling Mindstuff: A user's guide, I address a not-so-hidden agenda for many of us trying to understand our minds and brains: wanting to find insights or tools that bring more ease to the living of our daily lives, tools that might also enhance our effectiveness in tasks we wish to accomplish. I am adding some material to, and abstracting from, writing on my website, dericbownds.net. This is as close as I will get to offering my own version of a self-help manual that is based on our limited knowledge of how our minds actually work.

The unconscious psychology of color.

When I first started the vision research laboratory I ran for 30 years at the University of Wisconsin, I experimented with the color spectrum of the fluorescent lights used over the laboratory benches. Those that had more blue and green, more like natural sunlight, clearly made my students feel more relaxed and creative. This was consonant with psychological studies that had shown reds to have more arousing and blue more calming effects humans as well as other animals. Mehta and Zhu have made some fascinating further observations reported in Science and noted in a NY Times article by Belluck which gives examples of similar studies. Work done against the background color red is relatively more accurate, while with blue it is more creative. Here is a clip from the Mehta and Zhu abstract, followed by a graphic from the NY Times article.

We demonstrate that red (versus blue) color induces primarily an avoidance (versus approach) motivation and that red enhances performance on a detail-oriented task, whereas blue enhances performance on a creative task. Further, we replicate these results in domains of product design and persuasive message evaluation, and illustrate that these effects occur outside of individuals’ consciousness . We also provide process evidence suggesting that the activation of alternative motivations mediates the effect of color on cognitive task performances.

Unconscious threats increase moral affirmations

Proulx and Heine probe the "meaning-maintenance model," that proposes that whenever an individual's mental representations of expected associations (e.g., scripts, schemas, paradigms) are violated by unexpected experiences, this provokes an effort to regain a sense of meaning. The abstract, followed by a bit of explanation:

The meaning-maintenance model posits that threats to schemas lead people to affirm unrelated schemas. In two studies testing this hypothesis, participants who were presented with a perceptual anomaly (viz., the experimenter was switched without participants consciously noticing) demonstrated greater affirmation of moral beliefs compared with participants in a control condition. Another study investigated whether the schema affirmation was prompted by unconscious arousal. Participants witnessed the changing experimenter and then consumed a placebo. Those who were informed that the placebo caused side effects of arousal did not show the moral-belief affirmation observed in the previous studies, as they misattributed their arousal to the placebo. In contrast, those who were not informed of such side effects demonstrated moral-belief affirmation. The results demonstrate the functional interchangeability of different meaning frameworks, and highlight the role of unconscious arousal in prompting people to seek alternative schemas in the face of a meaning threat.

A bit more explanation:

In the changing-experimenter condition, while participants answered questions about entertainment, the female research assistant conducting the experiment was surreptitiously switched with another, identically dressed female experimenter. The first experimenter went to a filing cabinet to retrieve the next questionnaire, and after opening the filing cabinet, she stepped back and was replaced by the second experimenter, who shut the cabinet and continued the experiment (a video of the change can be viewed on the Web at http://www.psych.ubc.ca/~heine/MMMSwitch.wmv). In the mortality-salience condition, participants completed a standard mortality-salience manipulation by answering two questions about their own death. Previous studies have demonstrated that reminding participants of their eventual death provokes compensatory affirmation of alternative meaning frameworks. The mortality-salience condition was included to compare its results with those of our changing-experimenter condition.

To test affirmation of moral beliefs, subjects read a hypothetical report about the arrest of a prostitute and were asked to set a bond for the prostitute as if they were a judge reviewing the case. The rationale for this latter measure is that people are motivated to maintain their cultural worldview and will seek to punish individuals who act in ways that are inconsistent with that worldview. Participants in the changing-experimenter and mortality-salience conditions set a higher bond than did participants in the control condition

Cleanliness reduces the severity of moral judgements.

From Schnall et al. at the Univ. of Plymouth. Here is their abstract, followed by a bit of explanation:

Theories of moral judgment have long emphasized reasoning and conscious thought while downplaying the role of intuitive and contextual influences. However, recent research has demonstrated that incidental feelings of disgust can influence moral judgments and make them more severe. This study involved two experiments demonstrating that the reverse effect can occur when the notion of physical purity is made salient, thus making moral judgments less severe. After having the cognitive concept of cleanliness activated (Experiment 1) or after physically cleansing themselves after experiencing disgust (Experiment 2), participants found certain moral actions to be less wrong than did participants who had not been exposed to a cleanliness manipulation. The findings support the idea that moral judgment can be driven by intuitive processes, rather than deliberate reasoning. One of those intuitions appears to be physical purity, because it has a strong connection to moral purity.

[In experiment 1 two different groups of participants look at lists of scrambled words before being asked to rate the wrongness of six different moral dilemmas. Half of the words in one of the lists related to the theme of cleanliness and purity (e.g., pure, washed, clean, immaculate, pristine), while the other list contained neutral words. In experiment 2 participants were given an opportunity to physically cleanse themselves after experiencing disgust (a physically disgusting scene from a film).]

Subliminal Neuroeconomics

It turns out that we can learn to assess risks on the basis of visual hints we are not aware of seeing. In other words, without conscious processing of contextual cues, our brains can learn their reward value and use them to provide a bias on decision making. Functional neuroimaging reveals a correlation of cue values and prediction errors with activity in ventral striatum during conditioning. From the summary in Nature:

Mathias Pessiglione et al. repeatedly showed 20 subjects abstract symbols as they played a gambling game. Each symbol presentation involved one of three choices and was followed by a 'masking image' in a series that flickered so fast that the subjects could not consciously perceive the symbol shapes. The subjects were told that the symbols were associated with winning or losing, and then allowed to gamble.

The subjects won more than they lost, indicating that their brains recognized the unperceived symbols and learned to associate them with reward or punishment. Functional neuroimaging showed that the mechanism involves the ventral striatum (see figure), a brain area associated with assessing reward value.

Predicting the choices of undecided voters - the unseen mind

Not to much of a surprise, but voters who declare themselves to be undecided may be fooling themselves, and are actually unconsciously biased towards one of the choices presented. As Wilson and Bar-Anan point out in their review of the work of Galdi et al.

Social psychologists have discovered an adaptive unconscious that allows people to size up the world extremely quickly, make decisions, and set goals--all while their conscious minds are otherwise occupied. The human mind operates largely out of view of its owners, possibly because that's the way it evolved to work initially, and because that's the way it works best, under many circumstances. Without such an efficient, powerful, and fast means of understanding and acting on the world, it would be difficult to survive. We would be stuck pondering every little decision, such as whether to put our left or right foot forward first, as the world sped by (2-7). But as a result, we are often strangers to ourselves, unable to observe directly the workings of our own minds.

Confabulation. As in this drawing by Saul Steinberg, people construct images of themselves. In real life, people do not realize that their self-knowledge is a construction, and fail to recognize that they possess a vast adaptive unconscious that operates out of their conscious awareness.

Here is the abstract of Galdi et al. that supports this picture using computer-based measures that assess implicit attitudes and traits:

Common wisdom holds that choice decisions are based on conscious deliberations of the available information about choice options. On the basis of recent insights about unconscious influences on information processing, we tested whether automatic mental associations of undecided individuals bias future choices in a manner such that these choices reflect the evaluations implied by earlier automatic associations. With the use of a computer-based, speeded categorization task to assess automatic mental associations (i.e., associations that are activated unintentionally, difficult to control, and not necessarily endorsed at a conscious level) and self-report measures to assess consciously endorsed beliefs and choice preferences, automatic associations of undecided participants predicted changes in consciously reported beliefs and future choices over a period of 1 week. Conversely, for decided participants, consciously reported beliefs predicted changes in automatic associations and future choices over the same period. These results indicate that decision-makers sometimes have already made up their mind at an unconscious level, even when they consciously indicate that they are still undecided.

A 'training of the conscious by the unconscious' is suggested by the observation that the conscious beliefs of the decided voters, which, at the first question period, showed no correlation with their automatic or implicit preferences, did, in fact, predict their implicit preferences during the second session. This suggests that the interaction between unconscious and conscious cognition is a two-way street.