Thanks! That Was a Blast!

In a few days, I'll be pestering everybody about a forthcoming OpEd I wrote about New Year's resolutions and placebo willpower. First, I want to take a moment to step outside of this blog's theme and look back rather than forward.

In the fall of 2010, this book was, appropriately enough, nothing but expectations. If you're reading this blog, chances are good that at some point in the last two years, I talked your ear off about what the book could be, or what it seemed to be becoming, or where it had ended up, for better or worse. Thanks for asking, listening, offering support, and giving me feedback. All of it mattered and helped shape the book. Most of all, thanks for reading!

Now, the book is done. A friend and fellow book author described the days before publication day as, "the calm before the calm." So it has been. But it's been thrilling nonetheless. With a new year right around the corner, it's time to move on to new challenges. In 2013, this blog will still pay attention to expectations news and research, of course, but it may also start to move in a few different directions, too. Any and all ideas welcome!

Happy Holidays! I wish you a joyful new year!

Placebos and Evolution: A Theory

A few weeks ago, Nicholas Humphrey, the renowned British psychologist, emailed me with some of his thoughts on placebos and self healing.

Humphrey is one of the few researchers who dare to go beyond the IF and the HOW questions of placebo healing and delve into the WHY. Specifically, if humans are endowed with varied and powerful self-healing resources, why are these effects so conditional and reliable for some while nonexistent for others, and why do we seem to need "permission" from some third party (be it a pill, a doctor, or a sign from the heavens) to trigger our endogenous healing potential?

Over the years, Humphrey has put together a theory about all this -- an evolutionary tale, a story of ancient, cognitive reflexes, protective and essential in our cave days but overly-cautious in the modern world, coaxed with a bit of trickery. Along with the neurologist and evolutionary psychologist John Skoyles, Humphrey wrote a concise version of this theory in the September 2012 issue of Current Biology titled, "The Evolutionary Psychology of Healing: A Human Success Story."

It's a fascinating theory that Humphrey also describes in a podcast interview (his bit starts at 15:14). Before I offer my layman's summary, it's worth noting that Humphrey's family tree includes both the economist John Maynard Keynes and, most pertinent for this post, the physiologist A.V. Hill. It was Hill who first postulated the idea that there must be some kind of protective mechanism a "governor" either incorporated in the heart muscle or in the brain that could regulating fatigue in an exercising body to prevent us from exerting ourselves to death. The idea was largely ignored until the 1990s when the South African exercise physiologist Tim Noakes picked up and expanded on the concept, and began giving this "central governor" more empirical support. Accordingly, the central governor protects us by inducing fatigue, slowing us down, conserving our resources, based on an ongoing, forward-looking analysis of how much gas we have left in the tank and how much farther it is to the finish line.

Humphrey first points out that the benefits of our self-healing mechanisms (our immune systems, our natural wound healing, even our protective pain and our toxin-killing fevers) also have costs in terms of consuming energy and nutrients, and the opportunity costs of a day in bed. He proposes that in our cave days, these costs could loom very large indeed, and that a self-healing "governor" would take them into account and possibly hold the self-healing mechanisms back until the coast was clear, the days were warmer, and resources such as food were easier to come by.

The self-healing governor, though hardwired, could learn things, Humphrey says. It could learn about medicine, for instance, and become more generous and optimistic with healing resources under its spell, both the "directly curative" treatments and the "mumbo-jumbo" of rituals and snake oil. Nevertheless, the governor remained essentially conservative, stuck in evolutionary time, unaware that (at least in the developed world) we lived in a context of abundant resources where day-to-day survival was much less of an iffy proposition.

Enter the placebo -- a bit of a ruse that might have been catastrophic in our hardscrabble history but today is what Humphreys and Skoyles dub, "a dose of contrived optimism" that fits the reality of our world and can, "restore confidence in the wisdom of self-cure."

Voting For A Face

Want an election crystal ball? Take a look at the candidates’ faces. Really? Well, a few years ago, Princeton psychologist Alex Todorov and colleagues, had people glance at hundreds of headshots of rival U.S. congressional and Senate candidates (whom they didn’t recognize) from recent elections. The participants rated how “competent” each candidate looked. Matched with actual election outcomes, the more competent-looking candidate won about 70 percent of the time. Not only that, a face’s “competence” advantage correlated positively with the margin of victory.

By statistically analyzing the measurements of many faces, Todorov and his team isolated what makes faces look more or less competent. Much of it relates to perceived “facial maturity” and attractiveness, but it’s easier to show than tell how this works. Check out this video from the lab’s website in which a face that is neutral in competence morphs to highly competent and then to utterly incompetent before returning to neutral:

Todorov’s findings have been repeatedly replicated, controlling for gender, age, race, incumbency, and a few other possible explanations. The results hold when the subjects are from a different country or a different culture than the candidates. They hold when the subjects are children from one country judging the faces of candidates from another. These are true snap judgments. Their correlation with election results doesn’t fade even when glances are as brief as one tenth of a second.

What’s going on? Our brains seem to have specialized neural circuits devoted to face perception. Researchers suggest that humans have a well-honed and automatic response to faces, one deeply rooted in our evolution, helping us read each other’s intentions and tell friend from foe, a particularly important skill back in our cave days.

Into this basic neural machinery, we feed our various cultural stereotypes, a process that University of Toronto psychologist Nicholas Rule calls, “cultural tuning.”  In one of Rule’s studies, Japanese and American “voters” saw the same traits in the faces of candidates from each other’s countries. Instead of competence, these subjects judged “warmth” (a mix of likeability and trustworthiness) and “power” (a mix of dominance and facial maturity). Despite agreeing on these traits, however, subjects could only predict the election winners among same-culture candidates. Americans tended to choose the more powerful faces while the Japanese favored those with more warmth.

It’s hard to gauge the accuracy of these competence judgments, of course, because a politician’s actual competence is nearly impossible to objectively measure, especially in the context of a campaign. Ideology is a bit easier to verify. Party affiliation and voting records are good clues. Can we tell whether a candidate will govern to the left or right of the political spectrum just by glancing at his or her face? The answer is debated. Importantly, though, many people think they can, and studies find significant agreement (if not necessarily truth) in face-based guesses about ideology.

In a handful of published studies, subjects are usually just a bit better than chance at guessing party affiliation. Exactly what they are seeing is murky. In Finland and Australia, more attractive candidates were judged to be more conservative. In England, subjects judging the faces of MPs inferred Labor from broad, toothy smiles and round faces, and Conservative from tighter smiles and more angular faces.

One study of American voters found them to be a bit better than chance (averaging 57 percent correct) at guessing the party affiliation of unknown politicians, controlling for gender. To control for age differences, researchers had people look at college yearbook photos of students identified as members of the college Republican or Democrat clubs. In this case, they averaged 62 percent correct. The faces judged as Republican tended to convey more “power” to subjects while those faces identified as Democrats correlated with more “warmth.”

According to a study published in September, looking more Republican than your opponent correlated with a significant increase in the candidate’s vote share in Republican-leaning states (and among Republican voters in hypothetical elections) even if the candidate was actually a Democrat! The researchers, led by Christopher Olivola, a former member of Todorov’s lab and now a research fellow at the University of Warwick (UK), expected to find a similar boost on the Democratic side, but they didn’t. As with previous studies, subjects viewing pairs of photographs were slightly better than chance at guessing political affiliation. Nevertheless, Olivola is skeptical that people really have an ability to accurately read political affiliation in faces beyond the obvious cues  (e.g. minorities are more likely Democrats).

By necessity, study participants don’t recognize the politicians they’re judging. In real elections, of course, most people vote along party lines or based on a passion for certain issues. And once they step into the voting booth, most have at least have an inkling about who’s running, and there are no photographs on the ballots (in America at least). This begs the question: Do these biases matter in real elections?

Absent a string of candidates undergoing plastic surgery, the best that researchers can do is isolate correlations. Last year, for instance, MIT political scientists surveyed people who intended to vote in elections contested by candidates whose faces were rated (by others) on their attractiveness and apparent competence. Woven into the survey were questions about TV habits and a sort-of quiz about the federal government and the basics of major issues. They found that uninformed voters (lowest quartile) who also watch a lot of TV (top quartile) seem to be particularly swayed by a candidate’s appearance. Specifically, candidates gained nearly 5 percent of vote share among these folks for every 10 percent increase in how appealing they looked (a mix of competence and attractiveness). How many of these people are leaving the TV long enough to find their way to polling places?

“I have sad news for you,” says Gabriel Lenz, one of the MIT researchers. “It’s probably more common than this survey suggests.” According to the 2008 American National Election Study, for example, 60 percent of eligible voters didn’t know which party controlled the most seats in Congress.

As it happens, researchers have compared Barack Obama and Mitt Romney’s face-based competence.  At the outset of the 2008 presidential primaries, when both men were relative unknowns to people outside the U.S., a group of researchers asked New Zealand high-school students to rate the competence of every politician vying for the nomination. On a ten-point scale of competence, Hillary Clinton ranked highest among the Democrats while Obama came in third (6.8). That outpaced the highest-rated Republican, John McCain (6.2) and Romney (6.1).

Of course, the number of voters who know next to nothing about candidates in an election as high profile as the contest for President of the United States shrinks considerably. Looking the part is likely to matter a lot more in the 435 elections for the House of Representatives and, to a lesser extent, the 33 Senate races that will be decided on November 6. 

“I think that by the time a candidate gets the presidential nomination from one of the major parties, they must have some basic level of competence,” says Todorov. “There is so much vetting. There are so many gatekeepers. People don’t just get there randomly.”

Listen!

Here are two audio snippets of me reading from Mind Over Mind. The first is from chapter 2 "In The Zone" and lasts about 5 minutes. The second is from chapter 4 "Accounting for Taste" and lasts about 4 minutes.

These audio excerpts were ripped from videos created by multimedia wizard Devin Hahn, who is in the process of creating a video trailer for the book. Thanks, Devin!


Hope you enjoy!

Crowdshifting The Vote

I read a fascinating article today in a blog published by Personal Democracy Media called TechPresident about a new persuasion tactic campaigns are using to turn out the vote. It's not the usual stuff boasting about a candidate's record or scaring voters about the opposition's nefarious plans. It's straight-up peer pressure. The letter contains a list of names, including the recipient and several neighbors, noting who voted and who didn't in the most recent elections.

It's all information drawn from public records, and while some people find it creepy, and Big-Brotherish, it seems to work. As the blog notes:

"The academic literature has shown that voters are more likely to participate in elections when you disclose or threaten to disclose their electoral participation, presumably because voting is a social norm or a socially desirable activity and they don't want to be perceived as violating those norms."

When it comes to changing behavior -- whether that's getting people to vote, getting them to cut back on the junk food, or encouraging more savings for retirement -- the pressure of social expectations seem to work when more targeted  appeals  (be they rational, moral, or emotional) fail. Social psychologists call it "crowdshifting." Everybody else is doing it!  Why aren't you?

For example, one recent study found that hotel guests were far more likely to re-use their towels during multi-day visits when the placard announcing the program noted that 75 percent of hotel guests took part, rather than touting the program's environmental benefits. In another study, university students were far more likely to cheat on a test when another test taker (a confederate of the researchers) obviously cheated -- but only when the cheater wore a t-shirt emblazoned with the name of the university where the study took place, rather than a t-shirt bearing the name of the school's bitter cross-town rival. 

Want more young people to vote? Bemoaning the dismal turnout among the youngest voters is not the way to go. A 2009 study in the Journal of Politics found that this tactic actually made people less likely to vote. With due respect to the contrarians among us, people are usually far more motivated to be part of a trend than to buck one! 

Election Expectations, PollyVote, and the Charismometer

In a previous post, I wrote that undecided voters may be influenced by a less-obvious bit of persuasion - the momentum of a narrative, the apparent shift in a candidate's prospects from one day to the next, the poll-based stories that no news team can resist. Given a choice, all other things apparently being equal, who wouldn't want to back a winner?

I had this in mind when I came across a new study by Andreas Graefe, a German forecasting guru who found that one tool for predicting election outcomes has been largely overlooked in recent decades, despite it's astounding accuracy: the voter expectation survey. Rather than asking people who they intend to vote for, these surveys ask, "Who do you think is going to win?" Graefe looked at 190 of them conducted between 1932 and 2008 and found them to be 91 percent accurate. Looking at the six elections between 1988 to 2008, voter expectation surveys did better at predicting the winner than polls, prediction markets, econometric models, and the judgment of pooled experts).

Despite this record, Graefe doesn't think we should neglect those other forecasting methods. Better to combine them all into one -- thereby canceling out the biases and shortcomings of each. He and some colleagues have done this with an election forecasting model they call PollyVote. In a 2011 study of the model, Graefe and colleagues looked at daily forecasts for 100 days prior to each of the five elections between 1992 and 2008 made by polls, econometric models, the Iowa Electronic Markets (prediction market established at the University of Iowa), and PollyVote. On average, PollyVote reduced the error in forecasts at least 30 percent, except when compared to the 7-day average of the IEM, where it did about 8 percent worse. However, PollyVote did better than IEM in daily predictions of who would win: PollyVote predicted the winner on 96 of the 100 days, on average, compared to 76 by IEM. In case you're wondering, PollyVote has projected Barack Obama winning at least 51 percent of the popular vote every day this year and never gone above 52.5 percent. Try to make a narrative out of that. Boring!

If you've slogged this far, here's your video reward, featuring John Antonakis, a psychologist and professor of organizational behavior at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. He is predicting the presidential election with something he calls the charismometer. Simplified, it is the index of "Charismatic Leadership Tactics" (CLTs) used by the presidential candidates in their nomination acceptance speeches. There are 12 CLTs, such as using metaphors, drawing contrasts, asking rhetorical questions, and utilizing gestures. And, according to Antonakis, this is precisely the sort of election -- where the economic picture is muddled and voters aren't sure whether to punish or reward the incumbent party -- when charisma really matters. According to the charismometer, Obama will prevail. I'll let Antonakis explain:

Bragging Season

There's been some nice early coverage of Mind Over Mind, including a stellar review by renowned psychologist Irving Kirsch in New Scientist magazine, and a short feature on the book in O, The Oprah Magazine by Emma Haak. Also, many thanks to Jeff Glor and CBS News Online for the Author Talk Q&A!

Voting for a Narrative

It's not news that campaigns try to win debates by lowering the expectations for their candidate's performance to the point where sentience and continence while on stage counts as victory. Here's The Daily Show's take on the strategy.

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It's such a well-worn ploy, and so easily mocked, that one wonders who remains to be taken in by  pre-debate expectations limbo. Certainly, it's not the more than 90 percent of the electorate who has already made up their minds. They are unlikely to be swayed by the debates. And I don't really think it's the much sought after undecided voters, not directly anyway. They just aren't paying enough attention. They may watch the debates themselves, but most of aren't tuning in for all the pre-debate punditry on the Sunday talk shows.

No, the expectations gambit is aimed squarely at one audience: the media. It's a solipsistic little game with big potential impact on the election. Because the news, particularly political campaign coverage, lives and dies on narratives, especially "horse race" narratives of who's gaining and who's losing. Among the forces that remain for influencing undecided votes in one direction or another, the momentum of a good narrative is among the most powerful, and the most superficial. As New York Times columnist Ross Douthat points out in "The Media Bias That Matters":

"As a presidential candidate part of your job is to be aware of how easily the horse race narrative can overwhelm whatever story you want the country to be hearing, and to do everything in your power to actively shape a narrative that will inevitably be shaped by the press’s zeal for “who’s up/who’s down” reportage as well."

On Needles and Nothing

As reported yesterday by Amanda Gardner at Health.Com (and re-posted on CNN.Com), "Acupuncture Works, One Way or Another." The article reports on a recently published meta-analysis of 29 studies comparing pain relief from real acupuncture to placebo acupuncture (usually needles that are placed outside of known pressure points) to no treatment.

The common measure of efficacy for such studies is a 50 percent reduction in pain, as measured on a 100 point scale (dropping from 80 to 40 for example). Accordingly, real acupuncture achieved this rate of pain reduction 50 percent of the time, placebo acupuncture met this mark 43 percent of the time, and people who weren't needled at all felt this level of pain relief 30 percent of the time.

This is better than acupuncture's usual showing. In many studies, it does no better than placebo. On the other hand, about two thirds of the difference in pain relief between no treatment and acupuncture is accounted for by placebo.

This likely isn't the final word on the efficacy of acupuncture. But I'd like to bring up one other interesting finding about the treatment. A few years ago, the German health authorities (the volks who decide what treatments will be covered under their national healthcare plan) compared acupuncture to sham acupuncture and to several other known (and already covered) treatments for chronic lower back pain, including medication and physical therapy. Acupuncture did no better than sham acupuncture in these trials. But both real and sham acupuncture beat the therapies that were already approved!

Subliminal Placebos!

We don't need a doctor's suggestion to trigger placebo effects. Maybe we don't even need to think, not consciously anyway, according to a just-released study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Alongside studies of verbal-suggestion ("this will dull your pain" etc), much research has looked into conditioned placebos -- in which people learn to associate some inactive stimulus (a medicine smell, for instance, or a sweet taste) paired with active drugs (much in the same way bells were paired with food in Pavlov's dog experiments). Soon enough, the medicine smell or the sweet taste by itself is able to have some of the same effects as the active drug.

In pain research, placebos and nocebos (the expectation of more pain), scientists usually condition people with a visual cue -- a specific color or shape paired with more or less pain. In this new pain study, however, both placebo and nocebo effects were triggered with images that flashed by the subjects so fast they could not detect them consciously. The researchers, led by Karin Jensen, a psychiatrist at Massachusetts General Hospital, were affiliated with the new Program in Placebo Studies at Boston's Beth Israel Hospital.

Here's how it worked: At first, subjects' arms were singed repeatedly with high or low heat pain, while viewing one of two faces (shown below).  The subjects were asked to rate each burning pain from 0 to 100. The mean high heat score was 63, while the mean low heat score was 24.

HIGH HEAT

LOW HEAT


[From Jensen et al., (2012) PNAS, "Nonconscious Activation of Placebo and Nocebo Pain Responses"]



In the second round, every heat stimulus was the same, medium intensity, randomly paired with one or another face. As expected, medium heat was felt more keenly (mean 53) when paired with a high heat face compared to a low heat face (mean 19). Finally, subjects sat through one more round of arm singeing paired with faces. This time, however, the faces blinked onto the screen for just 12 milliseconds, well below the threshold for conscious awareness. Still, they got the same results -- a mean pain rating of 44 for subliminal high heat faces and a mean of 25 for subliminal low heat faces.

These findings support the idea that patients' pick up on the subtlest of cues from the context of medical care, and that, in many cases these cues have a medical effect. For instance, consider the possible expectations communicated, without a word being said, by a doctor giving a treatment she is fully confident will work versus one about which she has significant doubts. Whether we're aware of it or not, our brains are constantly learning, and creating links in our minds that can have real effects on our bodies. 

Settle An Argument

Is a positive attitude the key overcoming obstacles and achieving a better life, or is it the sort of magical thinking that leads to burned feet at fire walks and mortgage meltdowns? It can't be both. Can it?

In case you're wavering, here's a recent piece in the Wall Street Journal, "Self Help for Skeptics: Train Your Brain to be Positive, and Feel Happier Every Day: It Only Sounds Corny." And here's one to counter it from a few weeks ago in the New York Times, "The Positive Power of Negative Thinking." 

Admittedly, these two articles aren't really arguing with each other. But, I feel like they are in spirit -- much like articles that talk about digital culture as a boon or a bane to our social lives, education, political discourse, etc. There's legitimate reasons for both, depending on where you look, what your values are, and how you define your terms.

Returning to the question of attitude, among the more interesting studies I've read on optimism was a German study* of positive expectations v. positive fantasies on achieving personal goals (these goals varied from university students aiming for good grades to people desirous of a quick recovery from hip-replacement surgery). The researchers measured the extent to which their subjects had positive expectations or positive fantasies about their goals (way too much to explain in a blog post, but the paper goes into it in depth) and then checked in on their subjects' progress some months later. The results? More positive expectations correlated with more progress and goal attainment. But more positive fantasies correlated with less.

*Link is to an abstract. You can download the full text for free from Google Scholar, but it takes a while.

Feel The Future

That's the title of a forthcoming article in the Journal of Consumer Research that says people who trust their feelings make better predictions than people with a low trust of their feelings about everything from the weather to the winner of American Idol to the stock market's closing numbers a week out to the winner of the BCS (college football) championship bowl game. The high-trust folks also out-predicted control group predictors. The researchers found a similar "emotional oracle effect" across eight experiments, involving about 1,250 participants between 2008 and 2011. Before we get to their theories of why this might be, here's a bit more on the experiments.

In some cases, the researchers simply asked participants to rate how much they trusted their gut feelings when making predictions and then compared the accuracy of the predictions along these lines. Other times, they manipulated that trust with a fairly counter-intuitive little trick. People in the "high trust" condition would be asked to recall two incidences when they made a judgment or decision based on their gut feelings, which turned out to be the right thing to do. People randomized to the "low trust" group were asked to recall ten such situations in which they trusted their gut and it turned out to be right -- a much harder task, which supposedly leads people to infer that feelings aren't super reliable guides.

 
[In the 20 hours between the final performances and the winner's being announced for the 2009 season of American Idol, the researchers asked more than 100 people to predict who would prevail. The degree to which people said they trusted their feelings when making predictions was significantly related to their ability to predict that Kris Allen, featured above, would pull a surprise upset of Adam Lambert.]

In every case, subjects were screened to assure they had a basic level of familiarity with the subject matter they were making predictions about (this background knowledge was very important, as we'll see) and weren't obviously biased (e.g. ardent supporters of either team contending for the BCS title were excluded from the football prediction experiment). Importantly, trusting one's feelings was not a proxy for confidence in one's predictions. The researchers had subjects rate the confidence in their predictions, and it bore no relation to how much they trusted their feelings as guides.

The researchers speculate that our emotions encode and summarize vast amounts of information we accumulate "consciously and unconsciously, about the world around us," and that people who trust their emotions are thereby given a "privileged window" into that huge storehouse of information on which to base their predictions. According to this theory, gut feelings aren't airy notions or premonitions -- they are information packed. The researchers bolster this account by including a few conditions in some of their experiments when subjects are likely to have little or no background knowledge of what they're predicting (e.g. American college students asked to predict the weather in Beijing several days from now). In these cases, the "emotional oracle" effect disappears.

Voodoo Sports Science

The current issue of the British Medical Journal is chock full of papers slamming the makers and marketers of sports drinks for a lack of good science backing up their claims. David Tuller over at Mother Jones does an excellent summary of the studies. All I'll add is that many of these off-the-shelf performance boosters for athletes actually do seem to work ... just not due to the advertised mechanisms.

Athletes looking for an edge are extremely susceptible to placebo effects (See the recent $57 million legal settlement against the makers of Power Balance bracelets, for example. They sold millions of the $30 bracelets, and garnered endorsements from a small army of top-flight professional athletes, before some actual science with placebo controls called their bluff).

The All Drug Olympics

As the London Olympics approach, Saturday Night Live will no-doubt air a highlight-reel of their best sports sketches. And this classic from Dennis Miller's Weekend Update tenure had better be among them:



I thought of the All Drug Olympics when reading a feature in the most recent issue of Nature, called "Performance enhancement: Superhuman athletes." The writer sidesteps the ethical debate over the use by athletes of steroids and other performance boosters in order to engage in a speculative, "what if everything was permitted..." exploration of where current and near-future science might take human athletic performance.

For example, researchers have found that anabolic steroids can boost muscle strength by 38 percent in men and "potentially more in women." The advantages of human growth hormone are more nebulous, but the red-blood cell booster hormone EPO can increase stamina in endurance athletes by 34 percent (and apparently also boost their motivation to train).

The writer closes with a nod to performance boosters that aren't ingested, including prosthetic limbs that might leave natural arms and legs choking on their dust. We hear from Hugh Herr, a biomedical engineer at MIT who is working on a "bionic running leg" and is quoted in favor of devising new sports that treat high-performing prosthetic limbs as sports equipment and thereby create a new class of enhanced competitions. "Just like the invention of the bicycle led to the sport of cycling," Herr says, "What we will see is the emergence of all kinds of new sports."

The purist in me wants to object -- if we want to see people go faster around a track with the help of technology, we already have NASCAR. But the realist in me can totally see this happening. Without some help from chemistry, technology, or bio-engineering, the days of Faster, Higher, Stronger are numbered in many of the Olympics' marquee events.

MBA Ethics?

Do Business Schools Incubate Criminals? This is the headline of an op-ed by Luigi Zingales, a professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, published today at Bloomberg.com. Zingales' argument (summarized below) invites some rumination on the expectations of social norms -- how much power do they wield over individual behavior? When and how are these norms established and changed?

Citing the latest round of corporate scandals at JPMorgan, Barclays, and Goldman Sachs, Zingales says the problem is more than too-big-to-fail-firms behaving badly. "We are dealing with a drop in ethical standards throughout the business world and our graduate schools are partly to blame," he writes. Zingales says current ethics courses in MBA programs are too often presented in morally-agnostic frames. After all, he notes, the market is meant to function via the invisible hand of cumulative, rational self-interests,  not via rigid moral commandments.

"Some [MBA ethics instructors] simply illustrate ethical dilemmas without taking a position on how people are expected to act," he writes. "Others hide behind the concept of corporate or social responsibility, suggesting that social obligations rest on firms, not on individuals."

Zingales' solution is to re-infuse business-school ethics with some old-fashioned bright lines of right and wrong and to give every course an ethics component, rather than teaching it separately. I would love to hear from people with more (any) business-school experience on this one. I remember similar opinion pieces popping up in the wake of Enron and WorldCom, etc, and then again in the wake of Bernie Madoff and Raj Rajaratnam, not to mention the fraud exposed in the mortgage industry post-bust. So, another call to revamp the teaching of business ethics seems warranted, but will it be effectual?

Is this really a worsening trend, or just a continuing one with more interconnectivity and higher stakes? Research shows that people often adjust their own moral standards based on their perceptions of how much these standards are valued and maintained by others. Can business school ethics courses, no matter how they're taught, make headway against certain corporate cultures or the anything-goes attitudes that often prevail in boom times? Shouldn't a person's moral compass be fairly well set before he or she enrolls in business school? 

On Goals and Temptations

You're at a restaurant looking over the dessert menu. What does it take to pass and pay your check rather than indulge? Willpower? Self denial? Or maybe your brain just needs a subtle reminder of some other rewards, such as the reward of reaching a goal of losing 5 pounds or the pleasure of feeling fit enough to join your friends on a long mountain hike? The shift in framing the choice is subtle, but powerful: rather than wanting versus denial, it's wanting versus other wanting.

This week, at the annual meeting of (wait for it) the Society for the Study of Ingestive Behavior, a Dutch social psychologist named Esther Papies presented the results of three studies in which people prompted by subtle "goal reminders" focused on diet and fitness at restaurants and grocery stores and restaurants made healthier choices than customers who encountered no such cues. In one field study, for example, the researchers set up shop at a local butcher on alternate days when a placard offering a low-calorie recipe was, or was not, displayed by the counter. Also on the counter, every day, was a tray of tempting "bite-sized meat snacks." One of the researchers surreptitiously observed how many snacks customers ate and another later asked each customer to fill out a quick survey indicating, among other things, whether they were trying to lose weight or get in shape. On days when the recipe poster was displayed, people with diet and fitness goals ate fewer snacks. You can read the particulars here. 

Bargaining with the Universe

If you've ever muttered, "what goes around comes around," or made a deal with God to get you out of a jam or to curry some personal good fortune, the latest research into "investing in karma" published in the new issue of Psychological Science is for you.

In a series of experiments,  the researchers led by University of Virginia psychologist Benjamin Converse, found that people are more likely to volunteer or donate to charity when prompted to think about something they really, really want that they also perceive to be largely out of their personal control (e.g. high school seniors awaiting the decision letters of their first-choice colleges).

What's more, subjects entered into a lottery for $100 were much more optimistic about their chances when they took the opportunity to complete a short survey that would add $50 to their prize to be donated to the charity of their choice. They'd made a karmic deposit and, if only implicitly, expected some dividends.

"We find that, rather than increasing selfishness, wanting can increase helping," the researchers conclude. "These karmic-investment behaviors suggest that people may not only pursue reciprocal exchanges interpersonally, but may also attempt to bargain with the universe."

The Experts Strike Back

This past weekend, David Leonhardt, Washington bureau chief of the New York Times, had a smart essay about who makes better predictions -- informed experts versus the collective wisdom of a market? As is often the case, the answer is: it depends on what you're trying to predict.

LIke That Tune? You'll Love What's Next.

Is there really no accounting for taste? A group of British researchers just published a paper in PNAS proposing that popular music is a product of evolution -- the survival of the fittest melodies, harmonies and rhythms according to natural selection by thousands upon thousands of music consumers stating their preferences.


To make their point, they computer-generated 100 musical loops, each 8 seconds long, that were posted online at Darwin Tunes. Thousands of people then logged in to rate them on a five-point scale from "I can't stand it" to "I love it." The most popular loops were, in the words of one researcher, then allowed to "have sex and make baby loops" (i.e. new loops with bits from each parent loop mingled together). The new "generation" of loops replaced the old ones, and then visitors rated these, and so on.

You can listen to one of the researchers explain it, here:



The paper covered the evolution of this music over more than 2,500 generations (during which time more than 50,000 new musical loops were generated). In a separate experiment, they asked people to rate loops randomly selected from different generation, and people consistently preferred more recently "born" musical loops). What starts off as audio chaos does turn into something more melodious via this "natural" selection. Give it a listen. Remind you of anything?

Here's to You, New Jersey

The following arrived in my inbox today from the American Association of Wine Economists, announcing the results of a blind wine taste test they set up at their annual conference in Princeton, NJ pitting the best French reds and whites against Jersey wines. I've highlighted the summary of their results below:

Think Young!

Today, at the first International Conference on Social Identity and Health, researchers from the University of Exeter (UK) presented a study showing that the way older adults think about their age can ward off (or invite) cognitive cobwebs.

Several dozen research participants between 60 and 70 years old were put in one of two groups -- the "older" group was primed to think of themselves as older by being told that the study enrolled people aged 40 to 70, while the "younger" group was told that the participants ranged in age from 60 to 90. Then, subjects read one of two articles, either one focusing on aging and memory loss or one on aging and general cognitive ability. Finally, everybody took a series of standard clinical tests, including one used to screen for dementia. The scores of 70 percent of the "older" subjects who read that aging was associated with general cognitive decline indicated likely dementia, compared to an average of just 14 percent in the other groups. 

No Cash Only?

The cover story in IEEE Spectrum magazine is about the demise of cash money. It's a measured piece -- the end of cash is nigh, but not too nigh. Rather than a cashless society, the article envisions a "less-cash society." OK. What's most interesting to me is that the idea of a cashless society seems momentous and even fantastical -- like a world without walls or laws (cue John Lennon).  It's just trading in one abstraction (currency) for another (or several others), right? Maybe. Maybe not.

Bogus Brain Boosters

There's a big, front-page story in the New York Times today about how high school students are increasingly following college kids into the risky practice of taking drugs off-label as cognitive enhancers. The headline drug in this class is Adderall, an amphetamine that's meant for treating attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. It's a real problem, but unmentioned in the lengthy story is the fact that studies have repeatedly shown that placebo cognitive enhancers also give students an edge in memory and attention, including R273, a dummy performance booster that was just lime-flavored baking soda. Other examples are here and here.

Gaydar

     In the early 1960s, the Canadian government tried to purge gays and lesbians from government service. At a time when far fewer people were openly gay, the task of outing civil servants fell to a special unit of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and a contraption developed by psychologists at Carleton University in Ottawa that was known in top-secret Canadian code as, “The Special Pro-ject.” The Mounties had a less cryptic name for the device. They called it “the fruit machine.” 

(Below is a 2005 short documentary on it by the CBC):





The "fruit machine" could supposedly detected homosexuality by measuring patterns of pupil dilation when people looked at pictures of naked men and women. The fruit machine was never actually used, mainly because it didn’t work.

However, more recent “gaydar” studies led by psychologists Nicholas Rule and Nalini Ambady show that people are quite good at guessing sexual orientation based solely on a face. Even when a still photo of the face flashes by for just 33 milliseconds, these judgments are significantly more accurate than chance, and accuracy doesn’t diminish when the hair is cropped out, or when the photos shown nothing but the eyes (not even any eyebrows).

“People don’t think they’ll be able to do this,” says Rule. “They have no idea how they’re making these judgments, but we go and look at their data, and they’re doing great.”

The latest gaydar study, which gets into what exactly it is about a face that leads to these judgments, was published in PLoS ONE in May, 2012, and was described briefly last week in the New York Times by the study's co-authors.

Oreo Expectations

Japanese researcher's have designed special goggles that can make our snacks look bigger, so we eat less. It's a techno-take on the idea of "expected satiety." Here's the Colbert Report send-up on the story:

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Cyberchondria: Are you infected?

Wondering what that rash is? Anxious about that persistent pain or sudden fatigue? Increasingly, our first visit is to Dr. Google. The wealth of medical information online can be extremely helpful, but it can also induce Web-based hypochondria, or cyberchondria. A study in the April 12 issue of Psychological Science gives some insights into the causes.

Two New Takes on Placebo Ethics

The latest Hastings Center Report has two interesting commentaries on the American Medical Association's Code of Ethics regarding use of placebos by clinicians. Unfortunately, you need a subscription to read the commentaries in full. But, here's a sneak peek:

I might call it a placebo workout...

....but that's just me (from "32 Innovations That Will Change Your Tomorrow," NYT Magazine 6/1/12).

What’s the new psychological trick for improving performance? Strategic lying. When amateur golfers were told, falsely, that a club belonged to the professional golfer Ben Curtis, they putted better than other golfers using the same club. For a study published in March, human cyclists were pitted against a computer-generated opponent moving at, supposedly, the exact speed the cyclist had achieved in an earlier time trial. In fact, the avatars were moving 2 percent faster, and the human cyclists matched them, reaching new levels of speed. Lying is obviously not a long-term strategy — once you realize what’s going on, the effects may evaporate. It works as long as your trainer can keep the secret. Gretchen Reynolds

OK, let's get started.

For a journalist, having too much to write about is a good problem to have. But, it's still a problem. When I began the reporting for Mind Over Mind two years ago, it didn't take long to realize that the science of expectations would be hard to corral into a book. I gave it my best shot, but that meant sacrificing some great material. That was my dilemma. This blog is my remedy.