Barry Schwartz: The Paradox of Choice

Psychologist Barry Schwartz takes aim at a central tenet of western societies: freedom of choice. In Schwartz's estimation, choice has made us not freer but more paralyzed, not happier but more dissatisfied.

In The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less, he debunks one of the great myths of modern civilization: That abundance makes us happier and greater choice equals greater good.

Through solid behavioural economics, cognitive psychology and neuroscience, Schwartz makes a compelling case that abundance exhausts the human psyche, sprouts unreasonable expectations and ultimately makes us feel unfulfilled.

Alongside the research, he offers simple yet effective strategies for curbing the disappointment consumerism has set us up for and living lives that feel more complete.

Problem Solving: Generic Parts Technique (GPT)

Stuck solving a problem? Seek the obscure, says Tony McCaffrey, a psychology PhD from the University of Massachusetts.

“There’s a classic obstacle to innovation called ‘functional fixedness,’ which is the tendency to fixate on the common use of an object or its parts. It hinders people from solving problems.”

McCaffrey has developed a systematic way of overcoming that obstacle: the “generic parts technique” (GPT), which he describes in the latest issue of Psychological Science, a journal published by the Association for Psychological Science.

The article also reports on McCaffrey’s test of GPT’s effectiveness. Its results: People trained in GPT solved eight problems 67 percent more often than those who weren’t trained, and the first group solved them more than 8 times out of 10.

Here’s how GPT works: “For each object in your problem, you break it into parts and ask two questions,” explains McCaffrey, who is now a post-doctoral fellow in UMass’s engineering department.

”1. Can it be broken down further? and 2. (this is the one that’s been overlooked) Does my description of the part imply a use?”

So you’re given two steel rings and told to make a figure-8 out of them. Your tools? A candle and a match.

Melted wax is sticky, but the wax isn’t strong enough to hold the rings together. What about the other part of the candle?

The wick. The word implies a use: Wicks are set afire to give light. “That tends to hinder people’s ability to think of alternative uses for this part,” says McCaffrey.

Think of the wick more generically as a piece of string and the string as strands of cotton and you’re liberated.

Now you can remove the wick and tie the two rings together. Or, if you like, shred the string and make a wig for your hamster.

McCaffrey has drawn his insights by analyzing 1,001 historically innovative inventions. In every one, he found, the innovator discovered an obscure feature or an obscure function.

McCaffrey cites a recent invention to solve a modern problem. “In this very poor section of the Philippines, people living in shanties were using electric lights inside while it was sunny outside,” he says.

How to save money on electricity? “Take a 2-litre Coke bottle, stick it through a hole in the roof, fill it with water.

The water reflects the light around the inside the house.” A simple idea, using an overlooked feature of water: “It refracts light 360 degrees.”

GPT is one of a “palette” of techniques McCaffrey is developing into what he calls “innovation assistance software,” which itself can be put to novel uses.

His undergraduate student, a comedy writer, is applying the technique to build obscure situations that can make people laugh.

More information: http://www.psychol … ical_science

Daniel Goldstein: The battle between your present and future self - Video

Every day, we make decisions that have good or bad consequences for our future selves. (Can I skip flossing just this one time?) Daniel Goldstein makes tools that help us imagine ourselves over time, so that we make smart choices for Future Us.

Politicians Peddling Fear and Terror

Why did the approval ratings of President George W. Bush, who was perceived as indecisive before September 11, 2001 soar over 90 percent after the terrorist attacks?

Because Americans were acutely aware of their own deaths. That is one lesson from the psychological literature on “mortality salience” reviewed in a new article called “The Politics of Mortal Terror.”

The paper, by psychologists Florette Cohen of the City University of New York’s College of Staten Island and Sheldon Solomon of Skidmore College, appears in October’s Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal published by the Association for Psychological Science.

The fear people felt after 9/11 was real, but it also made them ripe for psychological manipulation, experts say. “We all know that fear tactics have been used by politicians for years to sway votes,” says Cohen. Now psychological research offers insight into the chillingly named “terror management.”

The authors cite studies showing that awareness of mortality tends to make people feel more positive toward heroic, charismatic figures and more punitive toward wrongdoers.

In one study, Cohen and her colleagues asked participants to think of death and then gave them statements from three fictional political figures.

One was charismatic: he appealed to the specialness of the person and the group to which she belonged. One was a technocrat, offering practical solutions to problems.

The third stressed the value of participation in democracy. After thinking about death, support for the charismatic leader shot up eightfold.

Even subliminal suggestions of mortality have similar effects. Subjects who saw the numbers 911 or the letters WTC had higher opinions of a Bush statement about the necessity of invading Iraq. This was true of both liberals and conservatives.

Awareness of danger and death can bias even peaceful people toward war or aggression. Iranian students in a control condition preferred the statement of a person preaching understanding and the value of human life over a jihadist call to suicide bombing.

But primed to think about death, they grew more positive toward the bomber. Some even said that they might consider becoming a martyr.

As time goes by and the memory of danger and death grows fainter, however, “morality salience” tends to polarize people politically, leading them to cling to their own beliefs and demonize others who hold opposing beliefs—seeing in them the cause of their own endangerment.

The psychological research should make voters wary of emotional political appeals and even of their own emotions in response, Cohen says.

“We encourage all citizens to vote with their heads rather than their hearts. Become an educated voter. Look at the candidate’s positions and platforms. Look at who you are voting for and what they stand for.”

Why is your boss more like a baboon?

Research shows that whether human or baboon, your social or professional rank—your place on the torment or be tormented scale—influences your level of stress and your health, for better or for worse.

Robert Sapolsky is a Stanford University neurobiologist who's spent 30 years studying stress and illness in baboons to better understand the effects of stress in humans.

Sapolsky studies baboons because they experience the same kind of social and psychological stress that humans experience. Everything that stresses us—traffic, work, bad relationships—is socially constructed. The same is true for baboons.

We all live with stress—so much, in fact, that we accept chronic stress in our lives as a given, an inescapable force to which we're powerless. We feel we have no control over our stress, and indeed, our stress controls us—our behaviour, our emotions, our health. Some people go so far as to wear stress as a badge of honour. Their stress level, they believe, testifies to their importance, their valour and their work ethic.

By accepting chronic stress as a fact of life, we fail to realise that our resigned attitude toward this biological response will kill us. Chronic stress is an epidemic in American and European society, one that takes a devastating—even deadly—toll on our minds and bodies.

Chronic stress impairs our memory and brain function:

We can't think straight when we're stressed out. It debilitates our immune system and makes us more susceptible to illness. It elevates our blood pressure, causes our arteries to harden and leads to belly fat—all of which increase our risk of heart attack.

It can lead to ulcers, and it hinders our reproductive functions and then there are the headaches and backaches, the insomnia and impotence that stress causes.

Sapolsky notes that we seem to have lost our innate ability to shut off our stress response. We're stressed out all the time. Everything from deadlines to awkward social situations causes our bodies to produce elevated levels of stress hormones that never seem to abate. Even after we've met the deadline, we allow new stressful tasks or situations to enter our lives and replace it.

Our rank at work and in society also impacts our stress level, perhaps not surprisingly. Sapolsky's research suggests that the amount of stress we experience is directly related to our social status.

What was observed in the baboons:

By taking blood samples from them and screening them for stress hormones, Sapolsky found high levels of stress in submissive baboons and low levels of stress in dominant baboons. The reason the dominant baboons had low levels of stress was because they had a lot of leisure time.

The reason the low-ranked baboons had high levels of stress was because the dominant baboons spent their leisure time tormenting them.

Does that sound familiar? I'm sure you've observed similar behaviour —and its consequences—where you work. Ever feel like your boss's primary role is to make your life miserable? Perhaps he has too much time on his hands.

UK Civil Servants
Sapolsky's findings on stress and rank corroborated an earlier study of British civil servants. The British study, which examined the health of British civil service workers, found that low-level civil servants had higher stress levels and were more prone to illness than high-ranking civil servants despite the fact that they all had access to the same healthcare.

Extrapolating from this research we can conclude that lower-level IT workers experience more stress and illness than IT executives, while IT executives are more stressed and sickly than the chief executives. What goes around comes around!