Behavioral economics as a palliative cop-out

Loewenstein and Ubel make some very simple and compelling points in their article on the use of behavioral economics to guide public policy and nudge people's behavior in desired directions. They note that behavioral economics is being used as a political expedient, allowing policymakers to avoid painful but more effective solutions rooted in traditional economics:

Take, for example, our nation’s obesity epidemic. The fashionable response, based on the belief that better information can lead to better behavior, is to influence consumers through things like calorie labeling — for instance, there’s a mandate in the health care reform act requiring restaurant chains to post the number of calories in their dishes...But studies of New York City’s attempt at calorie posting have found that it has had little impact on dieters’ choices...Obesity isn’t a result of a lack of information; instead, economists argue that rising levels of obesity can be traced to falling food prices, especially for unhealthy processed foods...To combat the epidemic effectively, then, we need to change the relative price of healthful and unhealthful food — for example, we need to stop subsidizing corn, thereby raising the price of high fructose corn syrup used in sodas, and we also need to consider taxes on unhealthful foods. But because we lack the political will to change the price of junk food, we focus on consumer behavior.

A “gallons-per-mile” bill recently passed by the New York State Senate is intended to help drivers think more clearly about the fuel consumption of the vehicles they purchase; research has shown that gallons-per-mile is a more effective means of getting drivers to appreciate the realities of fuel consumption than the traditional miles-per-gallon...But more and better information fails to get at the core of the problem: people drive large, energy-inefficient cars because gas is still relatively cheap. An increase in the gas tax that made the price of gas reflect its true costs would be a far more effective — though much more politically painful — way to reduce fuel consumption.

Thriving on selfishness

I enjoyed Marina Krakovsky's article in the April Scientific American on Omar Tonsi Eldakar's game theoretical take on why it pays for cheaters to punish other cheaters in maintaining the best balance between altruistic cooperators and defectors:

It’s the altruism paradox: If everyone in a group helps fellow members, everyone is better off—yet as more work selflessly for the common good, cheating becomes tempting, because individuals can enjoy more personal gain if they do not chip in. But as freeloaders exploit the do-gooders, everybody’s payoff from altruism shrinks.

All kinds of social creatures, from humans down to insects and germs, must cope with this problem; if they do not, cheaters take over and leech the group to death. So how does altruism flourish? Two answers have predominated over the years: kin selection, which explains altruism toward genetic relatives—and reciprocity—the tendency to help those who have helped us. Adding to these solutions, evolutionary biologist Omar Tonsi Eldakar came up with a clever new one: cheaters help to sustain altruism by punishing other cheaters, a strategy called selfish punishment.

“All the theories addressed how altruists keep the selfish guys out,” explains Eldakar, who described his model with his Ph.D. thesis adviser David Sloan Wilson of Binghamton University in May 2008. Because selfishness undermines altruism, altruists certainly have an incentive to punish cheaters—a widespread behavior pattern known as altruistic punishment. But cheaters, Eldakar realized, also have reason to punish cheaters, only for motives of their own: a group with too many cheaters does not have enough altruists to exploit. As Eldakar puts it, “If you’re a single selfish individual in a group of altruists, the best thing you can do evolutionarily is to make sure nobody else becomes selfish—make sure you’re the only one.” That is why, he points out, some of the harshest critics of sports doping, for example, turn out to be guilty of steroid use themselves: cheating gives athletes an edge only if their competitors aren’t doing it, too.

Although it is hypocritical for cheaters to punish other cheaters, members of the group do not balk as long as they benefit. And when selfish punishment works well, benefit they do. In a colony of tree wasps (where workers care for the queen’s offspring instead of laying their own eggs), a special caste of wasps sting other worker wasps that try to lay eggs, even as the vigilante wasps get away with laying eggs themselves. In a strange but mutually beneficial bargain, punishing other cheaters earns punishers the right to cheat.

In the year since Eldakar and Wilson wrote up their analysis, their insights have remained largely under the radar. But the idea of a division of labor between cooperators and policing defectors appeals to Pete Richerson, who studies the evolution of cooperation at the University of California, Davis. “It’s nothing as complicated as a salary, but allowing the punishers to defect in effect does compensate them for their services in punishing other defectors who don’t punish,” he says. After all, policing often takes effort and personal risk, and not all altruists are willing to bear those costs.

Corrupt policing may evoke images of the mafia, and indeed Eldakar notes that when the mob monopolizes crime in a neighborhood, the community is essentially paying for protection from rival gangs—a deal that, done right, lowers crime and increases prosperity. But mob dynamics are not always so benign, as the history of organized crime reveals. “What starts out as a bunch of goons with guns willing to punish people [for breaching contracts] becomes a protection racket,” Richerson says. The next question, therefore, is, What keeps the selfish punishers themselves from overexploiting the group?

Wilson readily acknowledges this limitation of the selfish punishment model. Although selfish punishers allow cooperators to gain a foothold within a group, thus creating a mix of cheaters and cooperators, “there’s nothing telling us that that mix is an optimal mix,” he explains. The answer to that problem, he says, is competition not between individuals in a group but between groups. That is because whereas selfishness beats altruism within groups, altruistic groups are more likely to survive than selfish groups. So although selfish punishment aids altruism from within a group, the model also bolsters the idea of group selection, a concept that has seen cycles of popularity in evolutionary biology.

What is more, altruism sometimes evolves without selfish punishment. In a software simulation, Eldakar and Wilson have found that as the cost of punishing cheaters falls, so do the number of selfish punishers. “When punishment is cheap, lots of people punish,” Wilson explains. And among humans, there is no shortage of low-cost ways to keep others in line—from outright ostracism to good old-fashioned gossip.

Moral evaluations influence our mental state ascriptions.

Gilbert Chin, in the "Editor's Choice" section of Science, gives a nice summary of work by Uttich and Lombrozo in their Cognition article:

A robust phenomenon established empirically during the past decade is the tendency of observers to regard morally bad consequences (such as harm to the environment) that occur as a secondary effect of actions taken by an agent (such as a corporate CEO) in the course of achieving the primary effect—an increase in revenue—as having been committed intentionally. In contrast, morally good consequences in a similar scenario are judged as being incidental. A number of explanations for this asymmetry (also known as the Knobe effect) have been put forth; most prominent, perhaps, is the proposal that the moral valence of the side effect alters the observer's inference about the agent's mental state; that is, whether the CEO acted with intent. Uttich and Lombrozo bring to bear a series of vignettes in which the type of social norm (moral versus conventional), the kind of behavior (norm-conforming versus norm-violating), and the outcome valence (helpful versus harmful) were varied independently. Their results support a "rational scientist" framework, so that the observer's computation of the agent's state of mind weights actions that flout commonly accepted rules of behavior as being more informative and hence diagnostic of intentionality than conformist ones.

Here is the abstract from the article:

Theory of mind, the capacity to understand and ascribe mental states, has traditionally been conceptualized as analogous to a scientific theory. However, recent work in philosophy and psychology has documented a “side-effect effect” suggesting that moral evaluations influence mental state ascriptions, and in particular whether a behavior is described as having been performed ‘intentionally.’ This evidence challenges the idea that theory of mind is analogous to scientific psychology in serving the function of predicting and explaining, rather than evaluating, behavior. In three experiments, we demonstrate that moral evaluations do inform ascriptions of intentional action, but that this relationship arises because behavior that conforms to norms (moral or otherwise) is less informative about underlying mental states than is behavior that violates norms. This analysis preserves the traditional understanding of theory of mind as a tool for predicting and explaining behavior, but also suggests the importance of normative considerations in social cognition.

How exercise stimulates brain nerve cell growth

Human and animal brains produce new brain cells (neurogenesis), and exercise increases this process. Gretchen Reynolds reviews work of Cage and others suggesting a mechanism for how this works: exercise lowers the levels of a protein (BMP, or bone morphogenetic protein) that suppresses nerve cell division in the hippocampus. 

Factoids about aging, reaching 70

Studies suggest that aging brings a more settled and calm view of what one is, and what one is not, and a general increase in contentment. They also point to the sobering point that attentional and executive functions of one's brain apparently move (retreat) to more frontal brain structures, perhaps reflecting the increased effort and focus being required to hold things together, leaving behind fading richer and younger limbic and lower brain autopilots that once were more open to, and could juggle with, many novel contexts and feelings.

Just to keep current my list of the general litany of degenerative changes that can be observed on aging (present company excepted, of course), I thought I would point to this article from this past Sunday's NYTimes.   Kate Zernike writes about turning 70, a recent transition for Ringo Starr who gave himself a 70th birthday concert at Radio City Music Hall (it happens to me in two years).   I was most fascinated (and sobered) by what entering the +70 club gets you. I've rearranged part of their graphic to summarize some of the numbers:

A sinister bias in calling football (soccer) fouls

I came across this interesting bit from Kranjec et al. just after watching the football world cup game (Spain vs. the Netherlands) with my family and friends this past sunday.  The authors suggest that a perceptual bias associated with left to right reading might predispose referees to call fouls more frequently for right to left moving events than for right to left moving events.  Thus referees standing across from each other might call a play differently.

Distinguishing between a fair and unfair tackle in soccer can be difficult. For referees, choosing to call a foul often requires a decision despite some level of ambiguity. We were interested in whether a well documented perceptual-motor bias associated with reading direction influenced foul judgments. Prior studies have shown that readers of left-to-right languages tend to think of prototypical events as unfolding concordantly, from left-to-right in space. It follows that events moving from right-to-left should be perceived as atypical and relatively debased. In an experiment using a go/no-go task and photographs taken from real games, participants made more foul calls for pictures depicting left-moving events compared to pictures depicting right-moving events. These data suggest that two referees watching the same play from distinct vantage points may be differentially predisposed to call a foul.

The benefits of 'losing it'

Benedict Carey does an interesting article on the personal and social utility of letting out, expressing, strong spontaneous emotional reactions.   President Obama's failure to do this has led people to question his sincerity or commitment to fixing financial institutions or oil spills. This is line with Pinker's argument that emotions evolved as guarantors or our authenticity.  Such authenticity is the issue in Obama's failure to emote. A few clips:

...people develop a variety of psychological tools to manage what they express in social situations, and those techniques often become subconscious, affecting interactions in unintended ways. The better that people understand their own patterns, the more likely they are to see why some emotionally charged interactions go awry — whether from too little control or, in the president’s case, perhaps too much.

Psychologists divide regulation strategies into two broad categories: pre-emptive, occurring before an emotion is fully felt; and responsive, coming afterward... Suppression, while clearly valuable in some situations (no laughing at funerals, please), has social costs that are all too familiar to those who know its cold touch.

Pre-emptive techniques can work in more subtle ways. One of these is simple diversion, reflexively focusing on the good and ignoring the bad — rereading the praise in an evaluation and ignoring or dismissing any criticism. A 2009 study...found that people over 55 were much more likely than those aged 25 and under to focus on positive images when in a bad mood — thereby buoying their spirits. The younger group was more likely to focus on negative images when feeling angry or down... older people were twice as likely as younger ones to be “rapid regulators” — people whose mood bounced back quickly, sometimes within minutes, after ruminating on depressing memories...older people tend to regulate their emotions faster, and are not as motivated to explore negative information, to engage negative images, as younger people are...And it makes some sense that younger adults would explore the negative side of things, that they need to and maybe want to experience them to experience life as they develop their own strategies to regulate...the ability to shrug off feelings of disgust or outrage may suit an older group but strike younger people as inauthentic, even callous.

Music sightreading skill - practice doesn't make perfect

I have an ability to sightread extremely complicated and difficult music, a fact noted by my first piano teacher after my initial lesson when I was six years old. It seems obvious to me that I came wired that way, practice had very little to do with it. This attitude, which conflicts with the general view that expertise is due mainly to diligent and repetitive practice of a skill, is confirmed by recent observations of Meinz and Hambrick:

Deliberate practice—that is, engagement in activities specifically designed to improve performance in a domain—is strongly predictive of performance in domains such as music and sports. It has even been suggested that deliberate practice is sufficient to account for expert performance. Less clear is whether basic abilities, such as working memory capacity (WMC), add to the prediction of expert performance, above and beyond deliberate practice. In evaluating participants having a wide range of piano-playing skill (novice to expert), we found that deliberate practice accounted for nearly half of the total variance in piano sight-reading performance. However, there was an incremental positive effect of WMC, and there was no evidence that deliberate practice reduced this effect. Evidence indicates that WMC is highly general, stable, and heritable, and thus our results call into question the view that expert performance is solely a reflection of deliberate practice.

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.

A smooth botox face inhibits emotion processing

Richie Davidson and collaborators at Wisconsin come up with this interesting gem, on the consequences of a face made more smooth and beautiful by Botulinum toxin injections:

How does language reliably evoke emotion, as it does when people read a favorite novel or listen to a skilled orator? Recent evidence suggests that comprehension involves a mental simulation of sentence content that calls on the same neural systems used in literal action, perception, and emotion. In this study, we demonstrated that involuntary facial expression plays a causal role in the processing of emotional language. Subcutaneous injections of botulinum toxin-A (BTX) were used to temporarily paralyze the facial muscle used in frowning. We found that BTX selectively slowed the reading of sentences that described situations that normally require the paralyzed muscle for expressing the emotions evoked by the sentences. This finding demonstrates that peripheral feedback plays a role in language processing, supports facial-feedback theories of emotional cognition, and raises questions about the effects of BTX on cognition and emotional reactivity. We account for the role of facial feedback in language processing by considering neurophysiological mechanisms and reinforcement-learning theory.

The reading module of our brains.

I’ve been meaning to mention an excellent article by Oliver Sachs in the June 28 issue of The New Yorker “A man of letters”. It describes a class of stroke patients who selectively loose the ability to read letters, frequently seeing them as some kind of foreign gibberish, yet can still write (“alexia sine agraphia”). In this article, unlike some of his others which have frustrated me by not getting down to the brain basics, he give an excellent summary of how it is that our brains come to have a specialized module for a skilled activity that was invented only ~5,000 years ago, less than an eye blink in evolutionary time. Here is my editing of chunks that give the bottom line:

There may be objects that are recognized at birth, such as faces, but beyond this the world of objects must be learned through experience and activity: looking, touching, handling, correlating the feel of objects with their appearance...Visual object recognition depends on the inferotemporal cortex..where neuronal function is very plastic...Mark Changizi and colleagues at Caltech, from examining more than a hundred ancient and modern writing systems, have shown that all of them, while geometrically very different, share certain basic topological similarities...which resemble topological invariants in a range of natural settings, leading them to hypothesize that the shapes of letters "have been selected to resemble the conglomeration of contours found in natural scenes, thereby tapping into our already-existing object recognition mechanisms."

The origin of writing and reading cannot be understood as a direct evolutionary adaptation. It is dependent on the plasticity of the brain, and on the fact that, even within the small span of a human lifetime, experience - experiential selection - is as powerful an agent of change as natural selection... We are literate not by virtue of a divine intervention (which Alfred Russel Wallace proposed, contra Darwin) but through a cultural invention and a cultural selection that make a brilliant and creative new use of a preexisting neural proclivity.

Physical contact and financial risk taking

Interesting observations from Levav and Argo:

We show that minimal physical contact can increase people’s sense of security and consequently lead them to increased risk-taking behavior. In three experiments, with both hypothetical and real payoffs, a female experimenter’s light, comforting pat on the shoulder led participants to greater financial risk taking. Further, this effect was both mediated and moderated by feelings of security in both male and female participants. Finally, we established the boundary conditions for the impact of physical contact on risk-taking behaviors by demonstrating that the effect does not occur when the touching is performed by a male and is attenuated when the touch consists of a handshake. The results suggest that subtle physical contact can be strongly influential in decision making and the willingness to accept risk.

Mind reading - How to seem telepathic

Here I attempt to summarize  an article by Eyai and Epley (on enabling mind reading by matching construal levels) by patching together bits of abstract and body text.  The results make the point that accurately reading other minds to know how one is evaluated by others—or how others evaluate themselves—requires focusing one’s evaluative lens at the right level of detail:

People can have difficulty intuiting what others think about them at least partly because people evaluate themselves in more fine-grained detail than observers do. This mismatch in the level of detail at which people construe themselves versus others diminishes accuracy in social judgment. Being a more accurate mind reader requires thinking of oneself at a higher level of construal that matches the observer’s construal (Experiments 1 and 2)*, and this strategy is shown in a further experiment (experiment 4**) to be more effective in this context than perspective taking (putting oneself in other people's shoes).

*Experiment 1 involved predicting judgements of attractiveness. This experiment found subjects to be more accurate in intuiting how attractive they will be judged (by others viewing a recent photo of themselves) in the distant future than in the near future. Experiment 2 involved predicting overall impression of oneself that observers would gain from listening (in the near versus distant future) to a recording they made on various topics. Again, predictions were more accurate for the imagined distant future. Thus altering construal level (near versus distant future) can increase accuracy in two very common and important instances of mind reading in everyday life—intuiting how attractively one will be evaluated by others and intuiting others’ overall impressions of oneself.

Accurately intuiting how others evaluate themselves requires the opposite strategy—thinking about others in a lower level of construal that matches the way people evaluate themselves. **In Experiment 4, University of Chicago undergraduates (N = 62) participated in a procedure similar to that of Experiment 1, except that targets rated how attractive they found themselves, using a scale ranging from 1 (not at all) to 9 (very), and observers received the construal manipulation. Observers were told that the pictures were taken earlier in the day (near condition) or a few months earlier (distant condition), and rated how attractive they thought the targets found themselves to be, using the same scale. Observers were more accurate in the near than in the distant condition.

How our brains resolve competing social signals

Zaki et al. suggest that that two systems that have been the subject of numerous MindBlog posts — the mirror neuron system (MNS) and mental state attribution system (MSAS)— are specialized for processing nonverbal and contextual social cues, respectively, and support the resolution of incongruent social cues (such as facial expression conflicting with verbal content of a message).

...we predicted that these control systems would help resolve conflict by "biasing" processing toward domain-specific neural systems involved in responding to social cues deemed to be task relevant, as reflected in perceivers' behavioral reliance on a given cue type when rating target affect. On the one hand, to the extent that perceivers behaviorally rely on nonverbal cues, biasing could increase activity in regions responsible for processing such cues, including premotor and parietal regions comprising the putative mirror neuron system (MNS). On the other hand, to the extent that perceivers deem contextual cues more relevant, processing could be biased toward systems implicated in drawing inferences about non-observable mental states such as beliefs, including the medial prefrontal, posterior cingulate, temporopolar, and temporoparietal regions comprising the mental state attribution system (MSAS). Because these systems are functionally dissociable and may in some cases inhibit each other, they are strong candidate targets for the effects of social cognitive conflict resolution.

From their abstract:

Cognitive control mechanisms allow individuals to behave adaptively in the face of complex and sometimes conflicting information. Although the neural bases of these control mechanisms have been examined in many contexts, almost no attention has been paid to their role in resolving conflicts between competing social cues, which is surprising given that cognitive conflicts are part of many social interactions. Evidence about the neural processing of social information suggests that two systems—the mirror neuron system (MNS) and mental state attribution system (MSAS)—are specialized for processing nonverbal and contextual social cues, respectively. This could support a model of social cognitive conflict resolution in which competition between social cues would recruit domain-general cognitive control mechanisms, which in turn would bias processing toward the MNS or MSAS. Such biasing could also alter social behaviors, such as inferences made about the internal states of others. We tested this model by scanning participants using functional magnetic resonance imaging while they drew inferences about the social targets' emotional states based on congruent or incongruent nonverbal and contextual social cues. Conflicts between social cues recruited the anterior cingulate and lateral prefrontal cortex, brain areas associated with domain-general control processes. This activation was accompanied by biasing of neural activity toward areas in the MNS or MSAS, which tracked, respectively, with perceivers' behavioral reliance on nonverbal or contextual cues when drawing inferences about targets' emotions. Together, these data provide evidence about both domain-general and domain-specific mechanisms involved in resolving social cognitive conflicts.

Figure: The presence of social cognitive response conflict (i.e., the comparison of incongruent vs congruent trials) recruited activity in several regions associated with domain-general conflict monitoring and control, including the anterior cingulate cortex, right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, right middle frontal gyrus, and posterior dorsomedial prefrontal cortex

The virtues of a wandering mind.

John Tierney's article on possible uses of mind wandering is worth reading. During our waking hours our minds seem to wander about 30% of the time.  One suggestion is that:

...There’s an evolutionary advantage to the brain’s system of mind wandering...While a person is occupied with one task, this system keeps the individual’s larger agenda fresher in mind...It thus serves as a kind of reminder mechanism, thereby increasing the likelihood that the other goal pursuits will remain intact and not get lost in the shuffle of pursuing many goals.
...Where exactly does the mind go during those moments? By observing people at rest during brain scans, a “default network” that is active when people’s minds are especially free to wander has been identified. When people do take up a task, the brain’s executive network lights up to issue commands, and the default network is often suppressed....But during some episodes of mind wandering, both networks are firing simultaneously...Why both networks are active is up for debate. One school theorizes that the executive network is working to control the stray thoughts and put the mind back on task...Another school of psychologists..theorizes that both networks are working on agendas beyond the immediate task. That theory could help explain why studies have found that people prone to mind wandering also score higher on tests of creativity.

Smilek et al., by the way, note that mind wandering can be assayed by observing blinking: during an extended period of reading, episodes of mind wandering, compared with on-task periods, contain more eye closures (blinks) and fewer fixations on the text ― even as subjects continue to scan the text.

Brain correlates of behavioral traits

A nice study from DeYoung et al. finds, among other things, that extraverts tend to have a larger-than-average orbitofrontal cortex, the region that sits behind the eyes and is especially active when the brain registers rewards. The 'new theory...'  described in their article is no big deal, it involves some reasonable arguments about what brain regions could reasonably be expected to be associated with fundamental behavioral traits such as extraversion, neuroticism, etc :

We used a new theory of the biological basis of the Big Five personality traits to generate hypotheses about the association of each trait with the volume of different brain regions. Controlling for age, sex, and whole-brain volume, results from structural magnetic resonance imaging of 116 healthy adults supported our hypotheses for four of the five traits: Extraversion, Neuroticism, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness. Extraversion covaried with volume of medial orbitofrontal cortex, a brain region involved in processing reward information. Neuroticism covaried with volume of brain regions associated with threat, punishment, and negative affect. Agreeableness covaried with volume in regions that process information about the intentions and mental states of other individuals. Conscientiousness covaried with volume in lateral prefrontal cortex, a region involved in planning and the voluntary control of behavior. These findings support our biologically based, explanatory model of the Big Five and demonstrate the potential of personality neuroscience (i.e., the systematic study of individual differences in personality using neuroscience methods) as a discipline.

Being calmed by a machine.

I was initially repelled by the prospect, noted in this article, of a future in which robotic animals are routinely used to sooth disoriented and distressed patients - but then thought “Hey, if there is not another human around to do the job, why object if an machine can provide neotenous (cute baby like) stimuli that dampen amygdala and sympathetic nervous system arousal.

Wealth diminishes our ability to savor the ordinary

Quoidbach et al. test

...what Gilbert has termed the experience-stretching hypothesis, that experiencing the best things in life — such as surfing Oahu’s famous North Shore or dining at Manhattan’s four-star restaurant Daniel — may actually mitigate the delight one experiences in response to the more mundane joys of life, such as sunny days, cold beers, and chocolate bars.

Their abstract:

This study provides the first evidence that money impairs people’s ability to savor everyday positive emotions and experiences. In a sample of working adults, wealthier individuals reported lower savoring ability (the ability to enhance and prolong positive emotional experience). Moreover, the negative impact of wealth on individuals’ ability to savor undermined the positive effects of money on their happiness. We experimentally exposed participants to a reminder of wealth and produced the same deleterious effect on their ability to savor as that produced by actual individual differences in wealth, a result supporting the theory that money has a causal effect on savoring. Moving beyond self-reports, we found that participants exposed to a reminder of wealth spent less time savoring a piece of chocolate and exhibited reduced enjoyment of it compared with participants not exposed to wealth. This article presents evidence supporting the widely held but previously untested belief that having access to the best things in life may actually undercut people’s ability to reap enjoyment from life’s small pleasures.

Brain imaging can predict behavior days in advance.

Falk et al. find a brain region that seems to make a more reliable report of people's intentions than their self-reported attitudes and intentions. (It does seems a bit spooky when a machine reports what we are going to do more accurately than we can.)  The medial prefrontal regions which were predictive of behavior are ones I've mentioned in a previous post that predict spontaneous motor behavior several seconds before reportable motor intentions form.  The authors measured neural activity while people were exposed to persuasive messages regarding the value of regular sunscreen use, and then used those values to predict future behavior change in the same individuals (i.e., increased sunscreen use. Successful persuasion-induced behavior change had been observed in this domain in several previous studies.)  The relevant medial prefrontal regions:

..are reliably coactivated across a host of "self" processes.....[and]  have been previously observed in multiple studies of persuasion and attitude change.. .indicating that these regions may be involved in the formation of behavioral intentions that are not accessible to conscious self-report.

Here is a figure and their abstract:

Regions associated with behavior change in a whole brain analysis. These regions have been observed as predictors of spontaneous motor behavior, before and independent of consciously reportable behavioral intentions.

Although persuasive messages often alter people's self-reported attitudes and intentions to perform behaviors, these self-reports do not necessarily predict behavior change. We demonstrate that neural responses to persuasive messages can predict variability in behavior change in the subsequent week. Specifically...a ..region of interest..in medial prefrontal cortex .. was reliably associated with behavior change...activity in this region predicted an average 23% of the variance in behavior change beyond the variance predicted by self-reported attitudes and intentions. Thus, neural signals can predict behavioral changes that are not predicted from self-reported attitudes and intentions alone. Additionally, this is the first functional magnetic resonance imaging study to demonstrate that a neural signal can predict complex real world behavior days in advance.

What we touch influences social judgements.

Here is another example of "embodied cognition"- how our physical environment can influence our thinking. In a previous post I mentioned studies showing that simply holding a warm cup of coffee prompts us to view others as emotionally warmer. And, in another post, I pointed to a study that found that holding a heavy clipboard makes us perceive social-justice issues as more important. Now Ackerman et al. ..(reviewed in ScienceNow).. expand on these studies to note that simply running your hand over sandpaper may make you view social interactions as more hostile and competitive.

Touch is both the first sense to develop and a critical means of information acquisition and environmental manipulation. Physical touch experiences may create an ontological scaffold for the development of intrapersonal and interpersonal conceptual and metaphorical knowledge, as well as a springboard for the application of this knowledge. In six experiments, holding heavy or light clipboards, solving rough or smooth puzzles, and touching hard or soft objects nonconsciously influenced impressions and decisions formed about unrelated people and situations. Among other effects, heavy objects made job candidates appear more important, rough objects made social interactions appear more difficult, and hard objects increased rigidity in negotiations. Basic tactile sensations are thus shown to influence higher social cognitive processing in dimension-specific and metaphor-specific ways.