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.