Mention of the word "loving" doubles charitable donations

"Love begets love." Proverb

French researchers say that adding the text "donating=loving" to a charitable collection box almost doubled the amount of money they raised.

Nicolas Guéguen and Lubomir Lamy placed opaque collection boxes in 14 bakeries in Brittany for two weeks. All the boxes featured the following text in French: "Women students in business trying to organise a humanitarian action in Togo. We are relying on your support", together with a picture of a young African woman with an infant in her arms. Some boxes had this additional text in French just below the money slot: "DONATING=LOVING"; others had the text "DONATING=HELPING"; whilst others had no further text below the slot. Different box types were placed in different bakeries on different days and the amount of money collected each day was recorded.

The text on the donation boxes made a profound difference. On average, almost twice as much money was raised daily in boxes with the "donating=loving" text, as compared with the "donating=helping" boxes and the boxes with no additional text (€1.04 per day vs. €0.62 and €0.54; the effect size was d=2.09). "Given the high effect-size ... we can conclude that evoking love is a powerful technique to enhance people's altruistic behaviour," the researchers said. In contrast, the difference in the amount of money left in "donating=helping" boxes and boxes without additional text was not statistically significant.

Guéguen and Lamy think that the word "loving" acts as a prime, activating related concepts such as compassion, support and solidarity, and thereby encourages behaviour consistent with those ideas. Such an explanation would fit the wider literature showing how our motivations and attitudes can be influenced by words and objects without us realising it. For example, one previous study showed how exposure to ageing-related words like "retired" led participants to walk away more slowly after an experiment. Other research found a poster of a pair of eyes on a wall led to greater use of an honesty box in a university canteen. Previous research by Guéguen and Lamy has further shown how asking a male passerby for directions to "Saint Valentine Street" as opposed to "Saint Martin Street" makes them subsequently more likely to help a nearby woman who's had her phone stolen, presumably because of the automatic activation of romance-related concepts.

Why should the text "donating=helping" not have had a similar beneficial effect on giving behaviour? Guéguen and Lamy think this might be due to a compensatory counter-reaction against words that are perceived as too much like a command. Indeed, in French, the verb "donner" to donate is also used to order someone to do something. However, why this reactance should have happened with "donating=helping" and not with "donating=loving" isn't entirely clear. Another reason for the impotence of the word "helping", the researchers said, is its redundancy - it was really just repeating the  plea for support in the main text.

The measure of giving was crude, which is a weakness of the study. We don't know if the "donating=loving" text led more people to donate, or to more generous giving among those people who donated.

"Despite the shortcomings of our study, the results will no doubt be of interest to those involved in philanthropic planning and support assessment in the aresas of corporate giving, nonprofit organisations, charitable foundations, and grants," the researchers said. "Conducted in a field setting, the experiment demonstrates how a simple, low-cost intervention can increase charitable giving."
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Guéguen, N., and Lamy, L. (2011). The effect of the word “love” on compliance to a request for humanitarian aid: An evaluation in a field setting. Social Influence, 6 (4), 249-258 DOI: 10.1080/15534510.2011.627771

Previously on the Research Digest: How Michael Jackson's Heal The World really could help heal the world.

Other Digest posts related to altruism.

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Feeling socially excluded? Try touching a teddy bear (seriously)

Feeling as though we belong is important for our mental and physical wellbeing. Social exclusion hurts and it darkens our mood. Unfortunately, this sets up a vicious circle because we're then less likely to engage in friendly, prosocial acts, and so less likely to form new bonds with others. A new study documents an effective way to break this cycle - excluded people should touch a teddy bear. Seriously.

Across two studies Kenneth Tai and his colleagues prompted some of their participants to feel socially excluded, either by giving them false feedback on a personality questionnaire ("You're the type who will end up alone later in life") or by contriving an uncomfortable situation in a group task with other participants ("I hate to tell you this, but no one chose you as someone they wanted to work with"). Other participants were given more heartening feedback (e.g. lots of people chose you to be in their group) and acted as a comparison.

Next, all the participants had to rate a "consumer product" - a 80cm, furry teddy bear. Some of the participants were given the teddy bear to hold; others evaluated him from a distance.

The researchers were interested in how being socially excluded would influence the participants' willingness to volunteer for more experiments in the future, and their willingness to share money with another person in an economic game (both taken to be signs of pro-social behaviour). And most of all, the researchers wanted to know if touching a teddy first would make any difference to these behaviours.

It did. Socially excluded participants who had the chance to touch the teddy bear were more likely to volunteer for future experiments and they shared money more generously with another participant. By contrast, touching the teddy made no difference to the behaviour of participants who weren't socially excluded.

Touching a teddy increased the prosocial behaviour of excluded participants by increasing their experience of positive emotion. The researchers tested this by asking participants to explain their decision about sharing money in the economic game. Excluded participants who touched the teddy were more likely to give answers like this one, featuring mentions of positive emotions: "There is no urgent need for myself to have the money and it is always comforting to be pleasantly surprised by others, even if it's from a stranger. So I just hope the money can be useful for the person who receives it."

Why on earth would touching a teddy bear have these effects on grown adults? Part of it could have to do with the links between emotional and physical warmth. Past research has shown that socially excluded people rated a room's temperature as colder, and people who feel more lonely tend to take more hot baths. There are also obvious links with past research showing the emotional and physical benefits of contact with pets. Finally, it could also be to do with people anthropomorphising the teddy (i.e. seeing it as human). Touch from another human can boost oxytocin levels - a hormone involved in feelings of trust and social closeness - perhaps touching the teddy had a similar effect.

Tai and his colleagues said there are lots of avenues for future research to explore - would touching a soft blanket have the same benefits observed in this study, or what about touching a plastic teddy? Would the results be replicated in a culture that tends not to anthropomorphise teddies?

"Often times, it may be hard to renew affiliative bonds with other people when one has been socially excluded by others," the researchers concluded. "During situations that may be hard for people to regain social connection with others after being rejected, one can choose to seek solace in the comfort of a teddy bear."
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Tai, K., Zheng, X., and Narayanan, J. (2011). Touching a Teddy Bear Mitigates Negative Effects of Social Exclusion to Increase Prosocial Behavior. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 2 (6), 618-626 DOI: 10.1177/1948550611404707

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

How listening to an iPod shrinks your sense of personal space

There you stand on the daily commute, so close to the man in front that you can count each strand of his chin stubble. Behind you, the breath of another traveller gently warms your neck. For a species that likes its space, it's amazing how we cope with the claustrophobia of city life.

Anecdotally, one way we manage is by plugging ourselves into an iPod, creating an invisible, audio-fuelled layer of protection. Now Ana Tajadura-Jiménez and her team have tested this idea scientifically. They asked dozens of participants to walk towards an unfamiliar experimenter (a man or woman) until they got so close it felt uncomfortable. In another condition, the experimenter walked towards the participant, and again the participant indicated when it felt too close. Crucially, this procedure was followed in silence, listening to positive music or listening to negative music. The unfamiliar musical clips, composed for an earlier experiment, were in the style of instrumental movie music. Sometimes the music was played over headphones via an iPod, other times it was played over a speaker system in the room. After the experiment, the participants listened to the music clips again and rated how much they affected them emotionally.

Positive music played over headphones (but not speakers) had the effect of shrinking the participants' sense of personal space, so that the approaching experimenter could walk closer to them before they (the participant) felt uncomfortable. On the other hand, negative music played over speakers (but not headphones) expanded the participants' personal space, so they felt uncomfortable when the approaching experimenter was further away. These effects were most pronounced in the participants who afterwards reported that they'd been affected emotionally by the music to a greater degree. Music made no difference to the participants' sense of personal space when they were the ones walking towards the experimenter.

A possible weakness of the study is that the experimenters could hear the music that the participants were listening to, which may have had a subtle influence on their behaviour. The Digest put this to Dr Tajadura-Jiménez. She told us this was unlikely, since the experimenters were careful to maintain the same neutral expression throughout, and another researcher looked on to ensure consistency across conditions.

"Our study might help to understand the benefit that people find in using personal music players in crowded situations, such as when using the public transport in urban settings," the researchers concluded. "In situations in which there are little possibilities for personal mobility and personal space is constantly compromised, a portable device allowing for a change in the perceived space around would be highly desirable."

The findings chime with an earlier qualitative study in which a homeless man described how he used a personal radio to create his own sense of personal space - an "audio cave" - when out on the streets. The idea that music influences sense of personal space via its emotional effects also tallies with a recent study involving a brain-damaged patient. The woman S.M. had suffered damage to both her amygdala - deep brain nuclei involved in emotional processing - and appeared to have lost her sense of personal space as a result.
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Tajadura-Jiménez, A., Pantelidou, G., Rebacz, P., Västfjäll, D., and Tsakiris, M. (2011). I-Space: The Effects of Emotional Valence and Source of Music on Interpersonal Distance. PLoS ONE, 6 (10) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0026083

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Can friendship triumph over prejudice?

"I'm not a racist, many of my best friends are [insert ethnic minority identifier]" ... so goes the contemporary refrain. But how much does friendship really smooth inter-group interactions?

A wealth of research has shown that people typically feel more uncomfortable when dealing with someone from a different social group rather than someone from their own group. This can be for a range of reasons, including negative stereotypes, uncertainty about how they'll be evaluated or even fear that they'll be perceived as prejudiced. But little researched until now is the palliating effect of friendship on these kind of interactions. Now a US study led by Jonathan Cook has found that friendship removes the discomfort associated with interacting with someone of a different ethnicity, but fails to ameliorate all the anxieties associated with interacting with someone who has a different sexual orientation.

Sixty-four university and community participants used a handheld computer to record their social interactions for a week, including answering questions about how they felt, who they had met with and whether or not they were friends.

For White gay and lesbian participants and Black participants of all sexual persuasions, interacting with a person of a different ethnicity was less comfortable and provoked more negative feeling than interacting with someone of the same ethnicity. Unless, that is, the other person was a friend, in which case the discomfort and anxiety evaporated.

White, heterosexual participants actually felt no discomfort interacting with people of other ethnicities (perhaps because, in this study, they were mainly liberal students and always in the majority social group). If the other ethnically different person was a friend, the straight White person actually felt more comfortable than if interacting with a White friend! Perhaps, the researchers surmised, this was because "demonstrating that one is not prejudiced to a historically marginalised out-group ... [is] self-affirming and evidence of one's positive inter-ethnic attitudes."

It wasn't such good news for interactions between straight and gay people. Men (but not women) of either sexual orientation, still felt inhibited interacting with another person of the opposite sexual orientation, even if they were friends. This is consistent with past research showing that heterosexual women are more accepting of homosexuality than heterosexual men. "Heterosexual men who interact with gay men or lesbians may also fear they will be misclassified as gay," the researchers said. "For gay men, awareness that attitudes towards them are negative and that homosexuality is often seen as a violation of gender norms is the most likely explanation for continuing behavioural inhibition, even with friendship controlled," they added.

A more encouraging result in this regard, is that more prior contact with people of the opposite sexual orientation (another of the recorded measures) was associated with less negative feelings during new interactions of that kind.

"Our results offer several hopeful findings about the potential for comfortable social interactions with out-group members," Cook and his colleagues concluded. "When people make friends with others who have a different ethnic identity, friendship appears to largely convey the same interpersonal comfort experienced among in-group friends. Sexual orientation may entail more enduring barriers to comfortable inter-group interactions, particularly for males, but here too we found grounds for optimism."
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Cook, J., Calcagno, J., Arrow, H., and Malle, B. (2011). Friendship trumps ethnicity (but not sexual orientation): Comfort and discomfort in inter-group interactions. British Journal of Social Psychology DOI: 10.1111/j.2044-8309.2011.02051.x

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Money makes mimicry backfire

It's one of the first rules of persuasion: mimic subtly your conversation partner's movements and body language (with a slight delay), and they'll perceive you to be more attractive and trustworthy. Being mimicked, so long as it's not too blatant, apparently leaves us in a better mood and more likely to be helpful to others.

It all sounds so easy, but now Jia Liu and her colleagues have thrown a spanner in the works. They've demonstrated that reminders of money reverse the benefits of mimicry - leading mimics to be liked less, and the mimicked to feel threatened. It all has to do with the selfish, egocentric mindset triggered by money. And in that context, the researchers say, being mimicked is uncomfortable because it gives people the sense that "their autonomy is being threatened."

Liu's team had 72 undergrads complete some irrelevant questions on a computer on which the screen background was either filled with shells or currency signs. Next, each participant chatted for ten minutes with a stranger who either did or didn't mimic them. Finally, the participants rated how much they liked that person and they completed an implicit measure of threat. Words were flashed subliminally on a screen and, after each one, participants had to try to guess the word from a subsequent list. Choosing more threat-related words was taken as a sign that they were feeling more threatened.

Without the initial reminder of money on the computer screen, mimicry had its usual beneficial effects - participants in this condition who were mimicked felt less threatened and liked their conversation partner more. By contrast, mimicked participants reminded of money at the outset, liked their partner less and felt more threatened (compared with participants in the money condition who were not mimicked). Feelings of threat were found to mediate the links (positive or negative, depending on the condition) between mimicry and liking.

"Being mimicked typically leaves people with positive feelings," the researchers concluded, "but this experiment showed that mimicry can diminish liking of the mimicker if people have been reminded of money.

"... The findings take the psychology of money in a new direction," they added, "by demonstrating money's ability to stimulate a longing for freedom."
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Liu, J., Vohs, K., and Smeesters, D. (2011). Money and Mimicry: When Being Mimicked Makes People Feel Threatened. Psychological Science DOI: 10.1177/0956797611418348

Further reading: "You remind me of me" (New York Times).
Mind Wide Open (The Psychologist).

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Prolific gossipers are disliked and seen as weak

Gossip might be the social glue that binds us, but prolific proponents of tittle-tattle should beware - gossipers are perceived not just as unlikeable but also as lacking social influence.

Sally Farley made her finding after asking 128 participants (mostly female students) to think of someone they knew, who either did or didn't gossip a lot, and to rate that person for likeability and social influence, plus there were 21 other distracter items. To further conceal the true aims of the study, the actual word "gossip" was never used. Instead, participants were told the research was about "informal communication" and the specific instruction was to think of someone who "spent a lot of time (or little time) talking about other people when they were not around". Among those participants asked to imagine a gossiper, a further detail was to imagine someone who either said negative things or positive things about people in their absence.

Prolific gossipers were liked less than non-gossipers, and negative gossipers were liked least of all. On a 13-item liking scale, with each item scored between 1 and 9, the negative gossipers averaged 37 points, the non-gossipers averaged 47. Moreover, prolific gossipers were perceived as less socially powerful than non-gossipers, especially if they were negative gossipers.

These findings actually contradict some prior research showing, for example, that it is girls with more friends who are more likely to gossip. The anthropologist Robin Dunbar has even likened gossiping to the mutual grooming performed by non-human primates, with both activities serving to enhance social bonds. "Perhaps high gossipers are individuals who we welcome into our social networks for fear of losing the opportunity to learn information, but we tend to keep them at arms length," Farley said, attempting to reconcile her results with this earlier research. Another possibility is that the relationship between gossiping and social power is curvilinear, with low and high levels harming one's social status, but the act of moderate gossiping attracting more favourable judgements.  Unfortunately, the current study only asked participants to imagine high and low gossipers.

Another related line of research has documented a common-sense effect known as "the transfer of attitudes recursively", which simply put has found that people who say nice things about others in their absence are judged as more likeable, whereas those who slag people off behind their backs are judged more harshly. The current study effectively extends this to show that negative gossipers are not only disliked, but also seen as socially weak.

"Despite the shortcomings of the present study, it represents one of a few empirical investigations into how gossipers are perceived by others," Farley concluded. "Future research should consider other important moderators of gossip such as inclusion in the gossip, topic of the gossip, and motivations for gossip (group-serving versus self-serving)."
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Farley, S. (2011). Is gossip power? The inverse relationships between gossip, power, and likability. European Journal of Social Psychology, 41 (5), 574-579 DOI: 10.1002/ejsp.821

Previously on the Digest: How our visual system is guided by gossip radar.

This post was written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Empathy breeds altruism, unless a person feels they have low status. A brain-scan study with a lesson for riot-hit England

In a defining image of the recent English riots, a man helped an injured youngster to his feet while an accomplice stole from the same victim's bag. This sheer lack of empathy on the part of the perpetrators has shaken observers to their core. How could humans display such a lack of altruism toward their fellow man?

A possible clue comes from a new brain imaging study that has examined links between the neural correlates of empathy, an act of altruism, and participants' subjective sense of their social status. Among people who feel they have low status, the study finds, increased neural markers of empathy are actually related to reduced altruism. The researchers surmised this is because any feelings of empathy are quashed by a grudging sense of low status. This could be a kind of defence mechanism whereby self-interest dominates over empathy for others. A possible lesson is that by reversing people's feelings of low status, through educational opportunities and other interventions, we all gain, by reinstating the usual link between empathy and altruism.

Yina Ma and her team at Peking University scanned the brains of 33 student participants while they watched numerous video clips of people being pricked painfully in the face or hand by a needle, or touched on those same parts by a cotton bud (referred to as a Q-tip in the US). Extra activity in the brain, in response to the needle clips versus cotton bud clips, was taken to be a neural marker for empathy (seeing someone else in pain is known to trigger activity in the pain matrix of one's own brain).

The participants also rated their own empathy levels and their subjective sense of their socio-economic status. They were shown a ladder with ten rungs, with the top rung representing people with the best jobs and education and most money; participants then indicated which rung they saw themselves as occupying. Although the participants were students at the same university they varied in their subjective sense of status. Finally, the participants were left alone in a room with an anonymous donation box, labelled as raising money to help impoverished patients with cataracts.

Among patients who considered themselves privileged in terms of socio-economic status, there was a positive relationship between empathy and altruism. The more neural signs of empathy they displayed in the scanner (based on extra activity in the left somatosensory cortex when viewing needle clips), the more empathy they said they had, and the more money they chose to donate to charity. By contrast, among participants who considered themselves lower in socio-economic status, the opposite pattern was observed. The greater their empathy-related brain activity in the scanner (based on extra right somatosensory cortex and inferior frontal cortex activity in response to needle clips), the less empathy they said they had, and the less money they chose to donate to charity. The researchers said the empathy-related inferior frontal cortex activity observed in these participants could be a sign of inhibitory processes quashing the emotional impact of seeing another person in pain.

Note, there was no absolute difference in the amount of money donated by participants who self-identified as low or high socio-economic status. The finding is more subtle and suggests empathy has a differential effect on our altruistic behaviour depending on how we see our standing in the world.

"Our findings have significant implications to the social domain," the researchers said, "in that, besides improving objective socio-economic status, raising subjective socio-economic status via education may possibly manifold altruistic behaviours in human society."

The findings add to a complex literature that suggests lower socio-economic status is sometimes associated with more empathy and altruism, but sometimes associated with reduced empathy.
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Ma, Y., Wang, C., and Han, S. (2011). Neural responses to perceived pain in others predict real-life monetary donations in different socioeconomic contexts. NeuroImage, 57 (3), 1273-1280 DOI: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2011.05.003

This post was written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Let me help you with that ... How women suffer from benevolent sexism

What could be wrong with a gentleman opening a door for a lady? According to some social psychologists, such acts endorse gender stereotypes: the idea that women are weak and need help; that men are powerful patriarchs. Now a study has looked at how women are perceived when they accept or reject an act of so-called "benevolent sexism"* and it finds that they're caught in a double-bind. Women who accept help from a man are seen as warmer, but less competent. Women who reject help are seen as more competent, but cold.

Across three studies Julia Becker and her colleagues presented dozens of German students with a vignette (either in prose or as a comic strip) in which a male office worker offers to help a female colleague set up a computer server. As he makes his offer, he says: "Oh, the network server, that's so difficult and frustrating for a woman to grapple with. Let me do it for you." Some students read a version in which the woman accepts the offer; others read a version in which she rejected it, saying "I can do it. It's not a problem for a woman".

If the woman rejected the offer she was rated as more competent, but less warm (compared to a story version in which her reply wasn't revealed). If she accepted the offer, she was judged as more warm, but less competent. These effects also influenced the participants' decisions over her job suitability. If she rejected the offer of help she was judged less suitable for a care-home job that depends on emotional skills. If she accepted the offer then she was judged less suitable for a managerial position.

By contrast, men aren't caught in the same double-bind. Other participants read a different version of the story in which a woman offered technical help to a man. In this case, participants judged the man as more competent, but no less warm, if he rejected the offer.

An important caveat was identified once the researchers began measuring the participants' endorsement of benevolent sexism, as revealed by their agreement with statements like "Women should be cherished and protected by men". The perception of an independent woman as competent but cold was only formed by those participants who endorsed benevolent sexism.

Another aspect the researchers looked at was perceptions of the help-giver. Here they found that advocates of benevolent sexism perceived a male help-giver as particularly warm and competent when his offer of help was accepted.

"Nowadays, sexist behaviour has become more subtle because of changing social norms, and patronising offers come in subtle guises," the researchers said. "This exacerbates a woman's dilemma about how to respond and increases the likelihood that she will be viewed as 'cold' if she declines paternalistic help."
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Becker, J., Glick, P., Ilic, M., and Bohner, G. (2011). Damned if she does, damned if she doesn't: Consequences of accepting versus confronting patronizing help for the female target and male actor. European Journal of Social Psychology DOI: 10.1002/ejsp.823

*There's a lot of resistance to the idea of benevolent sexism. Find out what happened when lead author of this research, Julia Becker, appeared on BBC Radio Five (the column originally appeared in The Psychologist, the monthly magazine of the British Psychological Society).

This post was written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

The psychology of gift giving - just give them what they want

By spending days hunting for that special gift for your friend or partner, you'll show them just how much you care, and also what incredible insight you have into their needs and interests. Right? Not exactly. A new study by a pair of researchers at Harvard and Stanford suggests that most people, at least in North American culture, would prefer that you simply buy them something that they've told you they want. They said romance was dead, it is now.

Francesca Gino and Francis Flynn demonstrated this phenomenon across three studies. First off, nearly two hundred participants were asked to recall a time they'd either received or given a wedding gift. Those who were specifically asked to recall receiving a gift from their set list reported being more appreciative than those who recalled receiving a surprise gift that they hadn't asked for. By contrast, participants who recalled giving a gift, thought it was probably appreciated just as much whether it was selected from a list or chosen independently.

A second study required 160 participants to imagine a hypothetical scenario in which they'd either bought a birthday gift for a significant other, or received one. Gift givers didn't think it would make any difference, in terms of appreciation levels, whether they bought a surprise gift or something explicitly asked for. By contrast, those participants who imagined receiving a gift said they'd appreciate more a gift they'd asked for, than a surprise gift. What's more, this extra appreciation for an asked-for gift was mediated by their feeling that the gift-giver had been extra thoughtful.

So far, the results are based on thought experiments or memories. The third study involved 90 participants creating Amazon wish-lists and half of them playing gift-givers and half gift-receivers. Among the gift-givers, half were asked to choose a listed item to give to a recipient; the other half saw the list, but were instructed to choose a surprise item. Consistent with the first two studies, participants in a giving role didn't anticipate that it would make any difference to appreciation levels whether a gift was a surprise or selected from the wish-list. By contrast, participants in a receiving role were more appreciative of gifts selected from their wish-list and they perceived these gifts to be more thoughtful and more personal.

It seems gift-givers and receivers are at odds with each other. Gift-recipients prefer to receive items they've asked for, and they think givers who fulfil this ideal are more thoughtful. Yet when we're the one who is doing the giving, we suffer a temporary blind-spot and fail to realise that people tend to prefer receiving what they told us they want.

Are there any exceptions to this odd state of affairs? Yet another study found that if a recipient only mentions one desired gift, as opposed to a list of desirables, then gift-givers are able to see the value in offering what's asked for. Money also changes the results. A final study with 107 student participants found that gift-givers thought money wouldn't be appreciated as much as an asked-for gift, but recipients expressed the opposite opinion and said they'd actually appreciate money more than items they'd asked for.

Gino and Flynn said their results fit into a larger literature showing people's relative inability to take other people's perspectives into account. For example, in buying and selling it's been shown that we tend to overestimate how much other people will share our own views. The researchers also noted the practical lessons to take from their findings: "Gift givers would be wise to pay attention to gift registries, wish lists, and explicit requests from friends and significant others," they said. "Conversely gift recipients can facilitate the gift-giving process by not only being more direct about making suggestions for gifts, but being more specific as well. Rather than putting together one big 'wish list', they should instead list one big wish."
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Gino, F., and Flynn, F. (2011). Give them what they want: The benefits of explicitness in gift exchange. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 47 (5), 915-922 DOI: 10.1016/j.jesp.2011.03.015

This post was written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

On when it feels good to be under-estimated

Imagine that you're a media mogul and you over-hear people estimating how much of the newspaper market you control. Would it be preferable, do you think, to hear an under-estimate or an over-estimate? Xianchi Dai at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and his colleagues have addressed this very question, producing some findings that they say have practical social lessons for us all.

Based on classic findings in psychology showing that most of us like to see ourselves in a positive light, the researchers said you'd think that on a valued measure, people would always like to hear over-estimates about themselves. Yet the researchers' new studies have demonstrated that the opposite can also be true. In the first, recent graduates in a large Chinese city reported feeling happier after a former class-mate under-estimated their salary. In a second study, business students in the USA said they'd feel happier in a hypothetical scenario in which they heard class-mates under-estimate their GMAT score (a standard admissions test to management school), as oppose to over-estimate it, or guess spot on.

Why should people sometimes like to hear others under-estimate their success? Dai's team propose an explanation based on the precise circumstances. If you don't actually know the answer to whatever valued measure others are estimating about you, then the researchers believe it is always preferable to hear an over-estimate because of the ego-boosting effects this will have. On the other hand, if you do know the precise amount or score about yourself that other people are estimating, then the researchers believe your preference for an over- or under-estimate will depend on whether your priority is (a) creating a good impression or (b) the true answer. For (a) they think an over-estimate will again be preferred because of the advantage for your image, but for (b) they think an under-estimate will be preferred because it has the effect of making the true answer, which is higher, seem more appealing to you.

Dai's team tested these predictions. Over two hundred business students in the USA were asked to imagine that they over-heard colleagues estimating the size of their (i.e. the participant's) annual bonus. As you'd expect, those participants told they didn't yet know the size of their bonus reported feeling happier after hearing colleagues estimate that they were to be awarded a larger amount. For participants told to imagine that they already knew their bonus size ($15,000), their preference for hearing an under-estimate ($3000) or over-estimate ($30,000) depended on whether they'd additionally been told their priority was that they needed extra cash for a property purchase, or that they wanted their colleagues to think they were valued by the boss.

For the participants seeking to impress their colleagues, hearing an over-estimate was preferred. By contrast, for participants saving for a property purchase, hearing an under-estimate was preferred, presumably because it made the true, larger amount seem all the more gratifying.

These findings suggest some rules for the etiquette of guessing, as the researchers explained:

"Imagine that, at a party, you have learned that your friend, Linda, is selling her house, which you believe is worth approximately $500,000. Her friends, including you, are guessing how much she can sell it for. Because Linda does not yet know the truth (the actual sale proceeds), we suggest that you should guess high, if you intend to make her happy. You might say, 'it's such a nice house, I guess you can sell it for $600k.' Now, imagine an alternative scenario, in which Linda has just sold her house, is desperately in need of money, and cares more about the actual proceeeds than others' impressions. In this case you should guess low. Rather than saying, 'It's such a nice house. You must have sold it for $600k,' you should say, 'I'm not sure. Would $400k sound reasonable?' Now Linda can say to herself, 'Wow, I am glad I sold it for $500k ...' and savour the pleasure."

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Shen, L., Hsee, C., Zhang, J., and Dai, X. (2011). The art and science of guessing. Emotion DOI: 10.1037/a0022899

This post was written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

We sit near people who look like us

The next time you're in an audience, turn to the person sat next to you and take a good look. That's what you look like, that is. Scary eh? Sean Mackinnon and his research team have shown that people sit next to people who resemble themselves. The effect is more than just people of the same sex or ethnicity tending to aggregate - a phenomenon well documented by earlier research. The new finding could help explain why it is that people so often resemble physically their friends and romantic partners (known as "homophily") - if physically similar people choose to sit near each other, they will have more opportunities to forge friendships and romances.

Mackinnon's team first noted the seating positions of hundreds of different students in a 31-seat computer lab 21 times over 3 months, and whether or not they were wearing glasses - a simple proxy for physical similarity. The students, it was found, sat next to someone who matched them on glass-wearing status far more often than would be expected if they were randomly distributed (the effect size was .63).

A second study of 18 university classes involving over two thousand students expanded this finding to show people were more likely to sit next to someone who matched them on glass-wearing, hair colour and hair length, than would be expected by chance. This held true even focusing just on females or just on Caucasians, thus showing the physical similarity effect is more than mere aggregation by sex or race.

But what if people sit next to physically similar others simply as a side-effect of tending to sit near to friends or partners who, as prior research has shown, tend to be physically similar? A third study addressed this concern by seeing how close participants sat to a stranger. Seventy-two participants took part in what they thought was a study into non-verbal behaviours, part of which involved pulling a chair up to an unfamiliar co-participant (a role played by an actor) so as to interview each other. As expected, participants who more closely resembled the young lady (a 20-year-old brown-haired Caucasian) tended to choose to sit closer to her.

Why do we choose to sit near people who look like ourselves? Clues come from Mackinnon's final study. One hundred and seventy-four participants looked at photos of eight individuals and rated how much they liked them, how much they perceived them to have similar attitudes, and thought they would be accepted by them. They also said how close they would choose to sit near each person. Consistent with the earlier studies, participants said they'd sit nearer those individuals who resembled them (based on similarity ratings provided by independent judges). They also thought these physically similar individuals would share their attitudes, they liked them more, and they expected to be accepted by them, as compared with their judgments about physically dissimilar others. The shared attitudes factor was the strongest. A further possibility is that seeking proximity to physically similar others is an evolutionary hang-over - an instinct for staying close to genetically similar kin.

"Though perhaps appearing innocuous on the surface, the simple process of choosing to sit beside people who are similar to us can have broad implications at the macro level," the researchers said. " ... [S]egregation may occur, which can result in myriad prejudices and misunderstandings. Of course, this tendency is merely one portion of the overall processes that contribute to segregation and homophily more generally, but given the implications for racial and ethnic segregation, it is certainly a phenomenon with profound implications worthy of further pursuit."
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Mackinnon, S., Jordan, C., and Wilson, A. (2011). Birds of a Feather Sit Together: Physical Similarity Predicts Seating Choice. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 37 (7), 879-892 DOI: 10.1177/0146167211402094

This post was written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Why is a touch on the arm so persuasive?

A gentle touch on the arm can be surprisingly persuasive. Consider these research findings. Library users who are touched while registering, rate the library and its personnel more favourably than the non-touched; diners are more satisfied and give larger tips when waiting staff touch them casually; people touched by a stranger are more willing to perform a mundane favour; and women touched by a man on the arm are more willing to share their phone number or agree to a dance. Why should this be? Up until now research in this area has been exclusively behavioural: these effects have been observed, but we don't really know why. Now a study has made a start at understanding the neuroscience of how touch exerts its psychological effects.

Annett Schirmer and her colleagues used EEG to record the surface electrical activity of the brains of dozens of female participants who were tasked with looking at neutral or negative pictures (e.g. a basket or a gun to the head). Before each picture appeared, the participants were sometimes touched on the arm by a female friend; touched by a mechanical device (a pressure cuff); or they received no touch. The idea was to see whether and how being touched changed the way the brain responded to emotional and neutral pictures.

A further detail is that the mechanical touch was described as either under the friend's control, with the friend located elsewhere, or under computer control. This was to see if physical proximity matters and whether it matters who does the touching. For comparison, a final experiment also tested the effect of an auditory tone, which preceded some pictures but not others.

The most important finding is that a touch on the arm enhanced the brain's response to emotional pictures, as revealed by the size of what's known as the late positive component (LPC) of electrical brain activity. The LPC is thought to be associated with evaluative mental processes and a touch led to a greater LPC for emotional pictures compared with neutral ones.

Touch had this effect regardless of how it was administered and who did the administering (friend or machine). This suggests the reported effects of touch are largely "bottom up" - that is, based mainly on the incoming stimulation - rather than "top down", to do with beliefs about the meaning of the touch. Unlike touch, the auditory tone didn't increase the brain's sensitivity to emotional pictures.

"Emotional information presented concurrently with touch may be more motivating such that more processing resources are allocated to them than to emotional information presented without touch," the researchers said.

One consequence of this, Schirmer's team speculated, could be that the touched person is primed to be more altruistic, consistent with previous behavioural results. "Based on the present findings," they explained, "we propose that such behaviour occurs because the tactile signal alerts its recipient and enhances the processing of concurrent events, particularly if they are emotional. Such enhanced processing may then, among others, boost empathy and increase the likelihood that the touch recipient acts in favour of the toucher."
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Schirmer, A., Teh, K., Wang, S., Vijayakumar, R., Ching, A., Nithianantham, D., Escoffier, N., and Cheok, A. (2011). Squeeze me, but don't tease me: Human and mechanical touch enhance visual attention and emotion discrimination. Social Neuroscience, 6 (3), 219-230 DOI: 10.1080/17470919.2010.507958

This post was written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

This picture will make it more likely that you'll seek help

Prompts in the environment make their way beneath your conscious radar and into your mind, affecting your mood and behaviour. Past research has shown that a briefcase, as opposed to a rucksack, on a table, leads people to behave more competitively. A wall poster featuring a pair of staring eyes increases people's use of an honesty box. And a 2009 study found that pictures of companionable dolls increased the likelihood that toddlers would help a stranger pick up sticks they'd dropped. Now Mark Rubin at the University of Newcastle has added to this literature with an adult study showing that pictures of companionship don't just increase the giving of help, they also increase the intention to seek help.

Actual pictures used in the study

Over a hundred students answered questions online about their general proclivity for seeking help or doing things on their own. Next they were shown a photograph of two people standing side-by-side in the corridor - either a man and woman, or woman and child - and asked to imagine for a minute that they were the woman, in the first case, or a child if they saw the second picture. Crucially, half the participants saw a version in which the two people were holding hands whilst the remaining participants saw a version in which the two people were not holding hands.

This subtle difference had a significant effect on the answers participants gave to the next eight questions they were asked, all of which pertained to whether they would seek help from other people in a lab report they had to complete later in the semester. Participants who'd seen the photo in which the two people were holding hands were far more likely to say that they would seek help than were the participants who'd seen the other picture. The difference according to Cohen's measure of effect size was small to medium, which is impressive given the subtlety of the intervention. Moreover, Rubin found this main effect held regardless of how prone people were to seeking help in general, and it held regardless of how suspicious participants were about the aims of the study. It also didn't make any difference if the hand-holding cue was seen in a romantic or parental context.

Obviously future research is needed to see if this effect applies with a non-student sample, with a non-academic helping context and with actual help-seeking behaviour rather than merely help-seeking intentions. "These findings are consistent with [the] suggestion that affiliation cues activate a broad prosocial orientation," Rubin concluded. "In particular, it appears that this prosocial orientation applies not only to others (i.e. help giving) but also to the self (i.e. help seeking)."
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Rubin, M. (2011). Social affiliation cues prime help-seeking intentions. Canadian Journal of Behavioural Science/Revue canadienne des sciences du comportement, 43 (2), 138-141 DOI: 10.1037/a0022246

Further reading: Mind Wide Open, the psychology of non-conscious influences.

This post was written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Feeling lonely? Have a bath

Wallowing in the bath, immersed in soothing warm water, the benefits are more than sensuous, they're social too. That's according to John Bargh and Idit Shalev, researchers at Yale University, whose new research shows that physical warmth can compensate for social isolation. Indeed, their study suggests that people subconsciously self-comfort against loneliness through the use of warm baths and showers.

Among 51 undergrads, those who reported being more lonely also tended to bath or shower more often, to do so for longer and with warmer water. Overall, 33.5 per cent of the variation in these measures was accounted for by loneliness. A similar result was found for a community sample of 16 women and 25 men. Perhaps lonely people simply have more time to take baths because they go out less, but the association with preferring warmer water is harder to explain away.

A second study confirmed the causal role that physical temperature can play in people's sense of social warmth. Students conducted what they thought was a product test of a small therapeutic pack, which was either warm or cold. Those who evaluated the cold pack, holding it in their palm, subsequently reported feeling more lonely than those who tested a warm version of the pack.

What about a direct test of the therapeutic benefit of physical warmth? Another study had students recall a time they'd felt socially excluded, then they went on to perform the same product test of a warm or cold pack used before. Recalling being excluded had the expected effect of making students desire friendly company and comforting activities like shopping. But this effect was eradicated if they'd product tested the warm pack. "...Warm physical experiences were found to significantly reduce the distress of social exclusion," the researchers said.

Our recognition of the link between physical and social warmth is reflected in our language - "a warm smile", "a cold shoulder" - and has been for centuries: Dante in the Inferno links the betrayal of trust with the punishment of being physically frozen. Yet Bargh and Shalev think this understanding remains largely unconscious. To test this they had participants rate the loneliness of a protagonist after reading one of two near-identical versions of a short story. Participants who read the version in which she took a bath and shower in the same day didn't perceive her to be any more lonely than those who read the version without the extra bathing.

These findings build on the broader literature on embodied cognition, which has shown the effects of physical states on our thoughts and behaviour, and vice versa (e.g. heavier books are considered more important; washing alleviates guilt). And they add to past research suggesting a specific link between physical and social/emotional warmth. One earlier study found that participants felt socially closer to a researcher when they were tested in a warm room. Other research has linked physical and social warmth to activity in the same brain region - the anterior insular.

But this new study is the first to suggest we subconsciously administer our own tonic of physical warmth to compensate for social rejection. And it's the first to provide causal evidence that physical warmth can ameliorate feelings of exclusion. Bargh and Shalev speculated their findings could even have practical applications ... "the physical-social warmth association may be a boon to the therapeutic treatment of syndromes that are mainly disorders of emotion regulation, such as Borderline Personality Disorder," they said.
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J Bargh, and I Shalev (2011). The substitutability of physical and social warmth in daily life. Emotion DOI: 10.1037/a0023527

This post was written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

How our visual system is guided by gossip radar

The kind of negative tittle-tattle that appears daily in the tabloids seems to bear little merit. But experts believe that historically, paying attention to such gossip played an important role in our survival chances, such that today negative hearsay continues to bias our visual system.

Eric Anderson at Northeastern University in Boston and his colleagues have shown this in a new study that paired photos of neutral faces with lines of positive, negative or neutral gossip, and presented these to 61 participants on-screen. Typical lines of gossip were ‘threw a chair at his classmate’, ‘helped an elderly woman with her groceries’ and ‘passed a man on the street’. Each face was paired four times with its designated nugget of social information.

These faces were then presented in a binocular rivalry paradigm with pictures of houses. This means that using a piece of a equipment called a stereoscope, a face was presented exclusively to one eye and a house exclusively to the other, which would have led the two images to compete for access to the participant’s conscious awareness. For the participants, a fluctuating perceptual experience would then have ensued, first one image seen, then the other, and back again until the trial finished after ten seconds.

Participants were asked to press a keyboard key to indicate which image they could see at any given time and Anderson’s finding is that faces previously paired with negative gossip tended to dominate and be seen for longer, by more than half a second, than faces paired previously with positive or neutral gossip, or entirely new faces.

In case negative gossip was simply learned more effectively than the other gossip types, a second study controlled for how well participants learned the initial face-gossip associations and the main finding was replicated. This follow-up study also showed that neutral faces paired with negative gossip dominated in consciousness longer than neutral faces paired with non-social negative information, such as ‘had a root canal performed.’

Anderson’s team said it was easy to see the survival value in the brain prioritising the visual perception of people tagged with negative gossip, thereby allowing them to be seen for longer and for more information about them to be garnered. ‘Our results … [show] that top-down affective information acquired through gossip influences vision,’ the researchers said, ‘so that what we know about someone influences not only how we feel and think about them, but also whether or not we see them in the first place.’ The finding lends scientific credence to the established PR wisdom that for entertainers vying for the spotlight, there's no such thing as bad press.
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Eric Anderson, Erika Siegel, Eliza Bliss-Moreau, and Lisa Feldman Barrett (2011). The visual impact of gossip. Science DOI: 10.1126/science.1201574

This post was written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Could lessons in genetic variation help reduce racial prejudice?

Richard Dawkins called it "the curse of the discontinuous mind" - our tendency to lump things into discrete categories. Nowhere is this more apparent than in our perception of ethnic races, which we tend to see as reflecting absolute dividing lines in the human population. Do mistaken folk beliefs about genetics play a role in this? A new study by Jason Plaks and his team suggests so. What's more, their findings have interesting implications for an anti-prejudice intervention based around genetics lessons.

The background to this work is that people often mistakenly assume that superficial ethnic characteristics are a reliable sign of significant genetic difference. In fact, each of us is about 99.9 per cent similar genetically to the next person. And the genetic variability that does exist in the human race tends to be greater within ethnic groups than between them.

Plaks and his colleagues devised an ingenious memory test to expose the tendency of their 84 student participants to see black and white races as clear-cut categories (the students were from various ethnic backgrounds, but the majority were white). The stimuli were faces morphed from real photos of black and white people to consist of seven degrees of prototypical blackness and whiteness (including: all black, all white, 50/50, 16.67 per cent black, 16.67 per cent white, 33.33 per cent black and 33.3 per cent white).

These faces appeared in sequence on-screen interspersed with numbers. The participants' task for each number and each face was to say whether it was the same as the last seen number or face. For people who see ethnic races as distinct categories, the racial profile of the faces ought to have interfered with their memory performance. That's exactly what was found.

After the task, the participants were asked how much genetic overlap two random people on earth would be expected to have (the average answer was 56 per cent). Those participants who said there would be less overlap tended to be the same ones who were affected by the racial profile of the faces. That is, they were more likely to say mistakenly that the current face was the same as the last face, if the two faces had a similar racial profile. This suggests they were using racial cues to remember the faces. By contrast, participants who believed there is more genetic overlap between strangers tended to be unaffected by the racial profile of the faces. Presumably they used more idiosyncratic features of the faces to remember them by.

If belief in genetic variation is correlated with people's tendency to categorise faces according to race, then what if people are educated about human genetic variation - might that change their proclivity for prejudice? The next stage of the Plaks' study suggested so.

Half of 95 participants read a passage of text (adapted from a real American Psychologist article) that correctly stated the 99.9 per cent genetic overlap between random individuals, and drew an analogy between ethnic groups and social clubs. The other half of the participants read a version that said genetic overlap between individuals is low (21.4 per cent) and drew an analogy between ethnic groups and families. Again, the participants were from various ethnic backgrounds, but most were white.

Afterwards the participants had to rate words (e.g. "disgusting", "delightful") as either positive or negative as fast as they could. A crucial twist was that the words were preceded by a face prime with varying degrees of racial black or whiteness. For the participants who read the low genetic overlap text, the racial profile of the face prime made a difference - they were quicker to categorise negative words after a face that was 25 per cent black or more. By contrast, the racial profile of the face primes made no difference to the performance of the participants who read the text explaining the high genetic overlap between humans. In other words, being educated about the genetic overlap between humans seemed to reduce participants' sensitivity to, and discrete categorisation of, racial colour, thereby reducing their implicit prejudice in the word recognition task.

Plaks and his colleagues said this result suggests people's beliefs about genetic variation are malleable and could therefore be a useful target for anti-prejudice interventions. "People without a strong motivation for prejudice - and even those with professed egalitarian ideals - frequently display signs of racial stereotyping," the researchers concluded. "We suggest that people with egalitarian ideals may still exhibit stereotyping at least partly because they harbour particular assumptions about genetic variation."
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Plaks, J., Malahy, L., Sedlins, M., and Shoda, Y. (2011). Folk Beliefs About Human Genetic Variation Predict Discrete Versus Continuous Racial Categorization and Evaluative Bias. Social Psychological and Personality Science DOI: 10.1177/1948550611408118

This post was written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Could the Olympics be a catalyst for inter-cultural discord?

One World, One Dream - that was the official slogan of the Beijing Olympics of 2008. The words encapsulate an aspiration of the Olympic movement, to bring about global harmony through the medium of elite sport. But onto that sweeping canvas of rosy idealism, a team of researchers led by Shirley Cheng have just cast a bucket-full of reality. Their new study shows that the 2008 Olympics deepened people's perception of inter-cultural differences and entrenched their in-group loyalty, at least through the eyes of the Chinese.

Cheng and her colleagues surveyed dozens of undergrads about "social and economic behaviours" - a thin disguise for their real aim of having them rate ten values, half of them typically seen as Western (e.g. autonomy, uniqueness), half as Chinese (e.g. obedience, modesty). These values were presented in random order and the participants' task was to rate them for how typically Western or Chinese they considered them to be. A further key detail was that for some of the participants, the survey featured the Olympic logo on each page. Also, half the participants were quizzed before the Olympics and half were quizzed a few months afterwards.

The main finding here was that participants who completed the survey after the Olympics, with the logo on each page, tended to rate the values far more in accordance with cultural stereotypes. The presence of the logo had no such influence before the Games. In other words, the experience of the Olympics (and being reminded of that experience by the logo) appeared to deepen participants' perception of the contrast in values between China and the West.

A follow-up study was similar but this time Chinese participants rated their emotional response to and perception of classic Chinese (e.g. Lenovo computers) and American brands (e.g. McDonalds). Some participants were quizzed before the Games, some towards the end. This time the Olympics seemed to have strengthened in-group bias. Chinese participants surveyed towards the end of the Games showed far more favouritism and positive emotional bias towards Chinese brands, and this was true even among those who had low levels of identification with Chinese culture according to a standard measure.

The same result wasn't found with a sample of Hong Kong Chinese, who tend not to view mainland Chinese competitors as part of their in-group. The researchers took this as evidence that inter-group competition can heighten in-group bias, but only if it's your in-group that did the competing.

These new findings chime with classic work in social psychology by Muzafer Sherif in the 1960s, in which competitive games played by boys on summer camp helped to catalyse conflict between recently formed groups.

Cheng and her team said their results revealed an irony: "Despite the deliberate effort to promote the ideal of 'One World, One Dream,' the Olympic experience has, at least for those in Mainland China, widened the perceived cultural gap between Chinese and Western cultures, and produced a uniform tendency to favour Mainland (vs. American) brands, irrespective of the level of in-group identification."
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Cheng, S., Rosner, J., Chao, M., Peng, S., Chen, X., Li, Y., Kwong, J., Hong, Y., and Chiu, C. (2011). One world, One dream? Intergroup consequences of the 2008 Beijing Olympics. International Journal of Intercultural Relations DOI: 10.1016/j.ijintrel.2010.07.005

Previously on the Digest: Hosting a major sporting event - economic gains are unlikely, but will it bring happiness?

This post was written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.