have the person write several full-length names, however, this routine requires the participant only to make a series of Xs with a pen. The procedure, then, is to hand someone the card, have them mark their value and then mark all the other ones. Upon taking it back, you look over the list to give the audience an idea of what options were available on the piece of paper, but you are really looking for the mark that identifies the first X the person wrote. PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS AND VALUES _ _ _ Artistic skills/aesthetic appreciation ___ Sense of humor ___ Relations with friends/family ___ Spontaneity/living life in t he moment _ _ _ Social skills ___ Athletics ___ Musical ability/appreciation ___ Creativity ___ Business/managerial skills _ __ Romantic values -150-
Shared Reality Theory Our notion of reality can be deeply influenced by the people around us. That is, what we know to be true can depend on what we think other people know to be true. Shared Reality Theory is a scientific endeavor to understand this connection between social influence and our need to understand "reality:' In general, this theory maintains that people reach a sense of shared reality by experiencing overlap between one's own inner states (thoughts, emotions, beliefs) and other people's inner states (see Echterhoff, 2014; Echterhoff et al., 2009). It's not just that people's beliefs sometimes overlap, but people are motivated to find instances of agreement with others. This motivation takes two forms. One is what's called an "epistemic" motivation, which is a need to establish truth about the world. In other words, people tend to want to have a grasp on what they should believe. The other motivation is a "relational" one in which people want to feel connected with others. It's only when experiencing overlap in one's own inner state and those of others serves these goals that psychologists say produces "shared reality:' Importantly, too, this shared reality is about something. That is, it's when you and I agree that some TV show is terrible that we experience shared reality-we have together become more certain in our sense of truth (i.e., the show is bad). To get a concrete idea of shared reality, consider the experiment al procedure that researchers have used to docu~ent,~his ph~n~menon. They call it the "saying-is-believing. parad1g.m, and it involves providing a participant with some new 1nformat1on ~bout a ~erson or a topic and having that person communicate that mformat10~ ~o an audience (Higgins & Rholes, 1978; Higgins & McCann, 1984). Cnt1cally, the audience apparently already knows about this person or topic and has already formed their own opinion. Not surprisingly, when the communicator knows the. audi;nce's opinion, he adjusts the message and tailors it to the audiences pre- -1 s1 -
existing evaluation. So for example, if I learn a bunch of information about a guy named "Tim;' and my job is to write a description of Tim, based on that information, that will be read by a bunch of people who already think Tim is a bad employee, I'll tailor my message in a way that highlights the negative information about Tim. That part is not too surprising. The interesting part happens when the communicator is called up 2 weeks later. The communicator gets asked to recall the information that he read originally and to report his judgment of the target. In this case, I would be asked to remember what I had learned about Tim, and I'd have to provide my personal judgment of Tim. Reliably, people in this position will show a preference to remember information consistent with the message they delivered (even though they received much more information than what appeared in their messages) and render judgments in line with those messages (e.g., Higgins & Mccann, 1984). Rationally, a person's own judgment should be untied to that of an audience, especially because the person received a lot of relevant information to make a judgment from. Nevertheless, one's sense of truth depends on that moment of shared reality in which a communicator's message overlapped with an audience's belief. In a more impactful domain, these effects can play out in courtrooms as well. Kopietz and colleagues (2009) found that participants tuned their retelling of an event to the audience's evaluation of the suspects involved in that event. Later, participants' own memories and judgments related to this event were biased toward what their earlier audience already thought. This isn't merely a phenomenon of better memory for what people choose to include in a message. Rather, it's only when people have those shared reality motivations that the "saying is believing" effect emerges. For example, if people are given a monetary reward for tailoring messages to a group, their later judgments are not related to the messages the produce (e.g., Echterhoff et al., 2008). That is, even though they tailor the message just as much, their goal is not to achieve shared reality, so the audience's reality doesn't become the communicator's. -152-
Fostering Shared Reality As I've written elsewhere in this book (page 17), in the course of a mentalist's presentation, the audience develops beliefs about what's happening. Think about how you might encourage a shared reality among the audience. Although their experiences may seem out of the ordinary, you can highlight the fact that many of them are having the same "inner states!' You can thus encourage your audience (be it a small group or a large theatre) to want to achieve shared reality by evoking a desire to understand what's happening (i.e., epistemic goals) and to feel connected to one another (i.e., relational goals). If these motivations are in place, then you can foster shared reality by highlighting those overlapping thoughts and feelings between people. "Major" effects, or effects that involve a whole audience (Cassidy) are great for this. They highlight a shared experience of receiving your thought, adding legitimacy to the reality you aim to create. Another important point, as with so many things in social psychology, this shared reality is inherently subjective, and there's no need for there to be actual overlap between individuals' experiences. As Echterhoff (2012) puts it," ... for Person A to experience shared reality with Person B, it is not necessary for B to actually have the same inner state as A" (p. 184). Because of this, all you have to do is create the illusion of overlapping reactions. Derren Brown had a wonderful bit in his International Magic Lecture where he created the illusion of a shared experience by asking if anyone had thought a particular thought, and moved his eyes across the audience, nodding subtly to make it look like he was taking note of everyone giving off signs that they thought the same thing. Of course, this wasn't tied to anyone's actual responses, but it made it seem like there was consensus among the audience. -153-
Social vs. Physical Pain Okay-here's a quickie. It strikes me that there's a presentational ploy in here somewhere, but I'm leaving that up to you. Recent research suggests that when we say someone "hurt" our feelings, it may not just be a metaphor (see "Embodiment" on page 49). Although we use words related to pain when we are in fact feeling socially hurt (e.g., being "heartbroken"), evidence from neuroscience suggests that social pain and physical pain share neural processes. In particular, Naomi Eisenberger has shown that a particular part of the brain- the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex-responds to painful experiences, whether it's the pain of a clamp coming down on your finger or the pain of being socially rejected (see Eisenberger, 2012). In another fascinating demonstration of the social pain/physical pain congruence, Nathan DeWall and his colleagues (201 O) showed that Tylenol, a popular drug taken to ease physical pain symptoms, was also effective in reducing hurt feelings over a three-week span as well. His participants reported how much they had felt socially rejected each day over the 21-day study, and compared to participants who had been taking a placebo each day, the participants who had been taking a dose of Tylenol every day showed a decrease in hurt feelings over those three weeks. In a follow-up study, Dewall et al. (201 O) showed that Tylenol reduced activity in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex- precisely the region that previous researchers had shown to be important for processing both socially and physically painful experiences. -154-
The Science of Subliminal Influence With the recent rise of mentalism performances that lean toward psychology as the (real or perceived) modus operandi, subliminal influence has crept into many presentations. Many prediction performances can be framed as operating via unconscious influence, and psychological forces can either truly rely on a form of unconscious influence (e.g., Derren Brown's "3 of Diamonds" force) or at least give the illusion of relying on such influence. Surely these demonstrations resonate with audiences, but what does the science say about the power of subliminal persuasion? Not surprisingly, this has been a controversial topic of study, and the answer doesn't seem as clear as "it works" or "it's a sham:' Given its prominence as a presentational angle and methodological Holy Grail, in this section I will take some time to discuss the psychological research and what it says about subliminal influence. I am warning you up front that I won't reach a satisfying conclusion; to do so would be to disrespect the science. In reviewing this work, however, I hope that you come away knowing more about this topic in a way that enriches your approach to mentalism. Any review of subliminal persuasion must acknowledge one landmark event that instilled a persistent fear of such influence: James Vicary's "study" of subliminal messages in American movie theatres. In 1957, Vicary claimed that flashing messages like"EAT POPCORN" and "DRINK COKE" in a New Jersey movie theatre increased popcorn and CocaCola sales by 18% and 58%, respectively over six weeks (Pratkanis, 1992). Reports of these results reached far and wide, giving rise to a fear of covert persuasion tactics that has persisted to this day. The problem with this fear, of course, is that it's largely unfounded. Vicary ultimately admitted that the results were fabricated and no such messages had ever actually been embedded in the moviesthe whole thing was a publicity stunt for his advertising company -155-
(Danzig, 1962). Nevertheless, Rogers and Smith (1993) report the results of a public survey in which 74.3% of those polled said they had heard of subliminal advertising, and 27.8% said they thought these techniques were "often" or"always" used. Although Vicary's study turned out to have no merit, the level of public interest and investment in so-called subliminal influence begs the question of whether such techniques could ever be successfully implemented. ls it possible to change people's attitudes and behavior using strategies that they are never consciously aware of? This question has inspired a diverse body of research, some of which I'd like to share in these pages. On the one hand, plenty of researchers have had trouble showing reliable effects of subliminal influence tactics. On the other hand, there is at least some suggestion that people do pick up on subliminally presented stimuli and that these stimuli (e.g., images or words) can affect thoughts and behaviors. Evidence that Subliminal Persuasion is Ineffective In a practical sense, the kinds of subliminal messages that people seem to fear most, like hidden messages on TV or popular music, don't appear to have much of an effect. Meta-analyses that synthesize and test the reliability of statistical relationships across a large collection of studies have generally conclude that although subliminal stimuli affect outcomes of interest, these effects tend to be so small that they aren't practical (Moore, 1982; Trappey, 1970). As one author puts it, "[w]hile subliminal perception is a bona fide phenomenon, the effects obtained are subtle and obtaining them typically requires a carefully structured context" (Moore, 1982, p. 46). The idea seems to be that although subliminally presented stimuli are noticed in the psychological system, so are countless conscious stimuli. At any moment, the psychological system is exposed to stimulation from many sources, many of which are strong enough to overpower any that operate at the subconscious level. Subliminally presented auditory stimuli appear to be particularly -156-
unlikely to have effects, a conclusion that has been reached in several large-scale reviews of relevant research (e.g., Brooks, Savov, Allzen, Benedict, Fredriksson, & Schioth, 2012; Theus, 1994). These kinds of "subliminal influence" tactics, however, are sometimes the most compelling and frightening. When people think of such covert persuasion, they may think of hidden messages in music and messages being spoken below awareness as we go about our days. The truth, however, seems to be that these kinds of messages have little effect. As an example, consider the claims that messages embedded in music can serve to brainwash people. In two studies, Egermann, Kopiez, and Reuter (2006) show no evidence of a subliminal influence effect for suggestions embedded in popular music. As another example, considerthe"self-help"tapes that claim to change behavior by embedding subliminal messages in audio recordings of classical music or nature sounds. A quick internet search turns up a ton of these with claims including smoking cessation, weight loss, pain relief, and boosting one's self-confidence. When submitted to scientific study, however, these methods just don't work. In their test of these claims, Anthony Greenwald and colleagues (1991) were even careful to ensure that their participants followed the instructions on such tapes exactly, and their participants were people who wanted the outcomes promised by the audiotapes. They tested the claims in a sneaky way-by switching the labels on the cassette tapes. Participants were given audiotapes that were either designed to improve memory or to increase self-esteem; however, some were given these tapes with the correct label whereas others were given tapes with the opposite label (e.g., the memory audiotape with a self-esteem label). After a month oflistening to these tapes everyday, all participants filled out self-esteem measures and took memory tests. If the tapes worked as they were designed, then people should show improvement on the abilities that the tapes themselves were designed to improve, regardless of their label. If it's one big audio placebo, then it's the labels (and not the audio content) that should have an effect. Indeed, there was absolutely no evidence in this study that the content of the -1 57-
audiotapes improved either memory or self-esteem. Instead, when the researchers asked people how much they thought their memory and self-esteem had improved over the last month, the labels on the tapes had an effect. That is, people who thought they were listening to a self-esteem tape (regardless of whether they actually were or not) said their self-esteem improved but their memory hadn't. Those who thought they were listening to a memory tape (again, regardless of the reality) said their memory had improved but their self-esteem hadn't. Similar studies employing placebo controls also show no evidence for the efficacy of such self-help tapes (Froufe & Schwartz, 2001; Pratkanis, Eskenazi, & Greenwald, 1994; Merikle & Skanes, 1992; Moore, 1995). In Support of Subliminal Persuasion Although subliminal influence as it is often portrayed has come to be called pure pseudoscience or "Cargo-Cult Science" (Pratkanis, 1992), there is plenty of evidence in the social psychology literature that supports the role that subliminal perception can play in consequential processes. Here I'll review some evidence that subliminally presented stimuli can affect people's attitudes and behavior as well as evidence that such stimuli are registered at the neural level. I'll then turn to some recent work that offers new insight on the controversy. To begin, many of the phenomena of interest to social psychologists have relied on subliminal presentations. As a simple example, consider the phenomenon of "evaluative conditioning:' Evaluative conditioning is when a person's attitude toward something new is influenced by the co-presentation of other things that are already liked or disliked. For example, I will come to like a political candidate much more if there's a puppy on screen every time I see that candidate. The positive attitude I have toward the puppies is eventually transferred to the politician. This effect also occurs when people aren't even aware of the positively-evaluated stimulus (the puppy, in the case of the example). Krosnick and colleagues (1992) attempted to use evaluative conditioning to change people's attitudes toward other people they'd -1 58-
never met. To do so, they showed participants a series of pictures of the person doing everyday tasks. Before each picture came on the screen, however, the researchers quickly flashed another picture that was either positive or negative. The participants didn't notice these other pictures, but they still affected evaluations of the person in the main pictures. More specifically, when pictures of the person were preceded by subliminally presented positive pictures, participants ended up liking the person more than when pictures of that person were preceded by subliminally presented negative pictures. As another example, consider a study that used scent as an agent of unconscious influence (Holland, Hendriks, & Aarts, 2005). In this study, the researchers used the scent of citrus all-purpose cleaner to affect how clean the participants kept their work stations. After spending some time in a room that either contained the scent of the citrus cleaner or not, all participants were taken to another room where they had to eat a crumbly cookie as part of the study. Even though the participants were not aware of the scent in the previous room, those participants who had spent time in the clean-smelling room went on to clean the cookie crumbs off their desk in the second room to a greater extent than the participants who hadn't been subliminally exposed to the "clean" scent. Finally, consider the phenomenon of "mere exposure;' reviewed elsewhere in this book (see "The Mere Exposure Effect" on page 97). According to mere exposure research, simply being exposed to something for a while fosters greater liking for whatever has been presented. When researchers deliberately expose people to a stimulus on a subconscious level, the exposure still fosters greater liking. For instance, when participants were subliminally exposed to a photo a person several times, compared to exposure to another person or a blank screen, they later expressed liking for the person and favored him when he and another person disagreed (Bornstein, Leone, & Galley, 1987). In fact, even when people do not consciously register subliminally presented stimuli, their brains do. Take, for example, an early fMRI study in which participants were subliminally exposed to faces of -159-
other people. These faces were either expressing fear or happ~ness, and they were presented at a rate of 33 milliseconds, immediately followed by a face making a neutral expression, which stayed on the screen for 167 milliseconds. Participants didn't report awareness of the emotional faces-only the neutral faces. In spite of this unawareness, their brain still registered the emotion. When they had been subliminally presented with fearful faces, there was increased activity in the amygdala, compared to when they had been subliminally presented with happy faces (Whalen, Rauch, Etcoff, Mcinerney, Lee, & Jenike, 1998). These results have been reliably replicated in at least nine published studies since then, showing a strong amygdala response to subliminally presented negative emotional faces like fear, sadness, disgust, and anger (see Brooks, Savov, Allzen, Benedict, Fredriksson, & Schioth, 2012). These results are particularly interesting because the very same part of the brain has been consistently shown to react to the same kinds of emotional faces when they are presented with awareness (Costafreda, Brammer, David, & Fu, 2008). This suggests that our brains react to subliminal stimuli in much the same way that they react to stimuli presented with awareness. It seems clear by now that people do indeed react to subliminally presented information and that these reactions affect their opinions and behavior. The key question, however, is when is it most likely that these subliminal influence strategies will actually result in behavioral effects? Recent research has begun to address this question, focusing on the unique contribution of a person's motivational state. That is, the relevance of the subliminal stimulus to the person's goals at the time plays a key role. To illustrate this point, consider the famous "study" that James Vicary claimed to have conducted to increase popcorn sales at the movie theatre. If everyone in a movie theatre had just come to see a film after enjoying a large meal, would flashing the message "Hungry? Eat Popcorn" really drive people to the concession area? Likely not. The problem is thinking that subliminal influence makes people mindlessly comply with any command that is presented. Instead, the truth seems to be that subliminal influence depends on whether the -160-
subliminal information is consistent with what the person already needs or wants. Plenty of research has now converged on this particular point: subliminal influence can exert effects on behavior and opinion change but only when it's particularly relevant to what the person already needs. In one of the first demonstrations of this important consideration, Strahan, Spencer, and Zanna considered how subliminally presented stimuli could affect how much Kool-Aid people drink. They subliminally presented words related to thirst or neutral words like "pirate" and told people that they would engage in a taste test for a consumer products study. The participants were allowed to taste a Kool-Aid product and evaluate it, but the researchers were only interested in how much the participants drank in the course of their evaluation. Critically, when the participants began the study, half were already thirsty and half were not. All of the participants were instructed not to eat or drink anything for three hours before the study, but when they came in, half of the participants were given water to drink, relieving their thirst, but the other half was not given water, further extending their thirst. Overall, you would expect that the people who were subliminally exposed to the "thirst" words would drink more of the Kool-Aid than those who were exposed to the neutral words. That's exactly what happened, but only for the people who were thirsty to begin with. It seems that the subliminal "messages" worked to activate the goal these people already had (i.e., to drink fluid). In the absence of this need to drink, the subliminal stimuli don't drive you to drink more fluid because there is no true need to begin with. Other research has shown the same results by instead just measuring how long it had been since participants had last had something to drink instead of manipulating the level of thirst directly (Veltkamp, Aarts, & Custers, 2008). In a similar vein, when experimenters subliminally flashed the brand "Lipton Ice" (compared to flashing nonsense words), participants were more likely to choose to drink that brand over another brand, but only when they were already relatively thirsty (Karremans, Stroebe, & Claus, 2006). If they were not very thirsty to begin with, the subliminal information was not relevant -161 -
to their needs and thus didn't inform their choices. And lest you think that these results are only useful when it comes to influencing thirst-quenching choices and drinking behavior, other research has shown the same results for products that relieve fatigue (Bermeitinger, Goelz, Johr, Neumann, Ecker, & Doerr, 2009) and for music choices depending on one's need to relieve negative mood (Strahan, Spencer, & Zanna, 2002, Study 3). -162-
Thin Slicing If you read Malcolm Gladwell's popular 2005 book, Blink, then you know about the power of thin slicing. Essentially, people are able to make astonishingly accurate judgments of people and situation based on fleetingly brief exposures to them. The lesson is that first impressions can take mere seconds to form (see Ambady, Bernieri, & Richeson, 2000). A seminal 1992 paper reported the results of a meta-analysis of 44 studies in which people formed impressions based on brief exposures. The results demonstrate a large and reliable pattern; when perceivers have less than 5 minutes of observation to form an impression, the predictions they make are quite accurate (Ambady & Rosenthal, 1992). Interpreting the size of the effect, the authors write that their results mean, "correct classifications can be made using thin slices of behavior nearly 70% of the time, compared with about 30% of the time when no thin slices are available" (Ambady & Rosenthal, 1992, p. 267). What's more, the actual amount of time didn't seem to matter. Impressions formed with less than 30 seconds of information to go on were no less accurate than those formed with a full 5 minutes worth of information. This pattern of data inspired a specific set of follow-up studies to even more rigorously test the power of thin slicing judgments. Nalini Ambady and Robert Rosenthal (1993) acquired 1 O second silent clips of university instructors teaching a class to college students. They showed these brief clips to a sample of participants, who all rated these teachers on a number of dimensions, including warmth, empathy, competence, likability, professionalism, etc. In addition to these subjective ratings, the researchers also acquired data from these instructors' own students who, through a typical university system, provided evaluations of their teachers at the end of each semester. The question was: could people's judgments of these teachers, based only on 30 seconds of footage, predict the evaluations made by actual students who had spent full semesters with these teachers? The answer was yes. -163-
The participants showed strong consistency with one another in their ratings of the teachers, and these ratings, on average, corresponded to their end-of-semester evaluations. These results were found yet again for a new collection of teachers (this time high school teachers). In fact, a final study showed that people were just as accurate in forming first impressions when they only saw three 2-second clips of each teacher. Clearly, not only are first impressions easy to make, but we seem to be very adept at making them. In another example, researchers showed participants 1 O second clips from 1 O different up-and-coming rock bands, and after each clip, the participants rated how cohesive the band seemed. These clips were from full 15 minute videos available on YouTube. As a measure of how objectively successful these new bands were, the researchers recorded the number of views each YouTube video had received. Their results show that individuals' ratings of group cohesivenss, based on 10-second video clips, significantly predicted how popular each band was, as indicated by total number ofYouTube views (Stillman, Gilovich, & Fujita, 2014). Across many domains, thin slices have proven powerful. People's thin slice judgments of telephone operators' voices were correlated with how long these operators were able to keep customers on the line (Hecht & La France, 1995). Personality judgments based on less than 5 minutes of video corresponded to objective personality assessments of the people being judged (Carney, Colvin, & Hall, 2007). Participants who watched 15 second cl ips of opposite-sex college students interacting were accurately able to distinguish between couples who were strangers, platonic friends, or romantically involved (Ambaday, Conroy, Tobia, & Mullins, 2000). For both 1 second and 1 O second video clips of people talking about neutral topics, participants were able to distinguish between heterosexual and homosexual individuals with greater-than-chance accuracy (Ambady, Hallahan, & Conner, 1999). Finally, based only on brief exposures to a courtroom judge's instructions to jurors in actual criminal trials, people were able to detect the judge's expected outcome for the trial as well as the defendant's criminal history (e.g., Blanck, Rosenthal, & Cordell, 1985). -164-
This is only a brief overview of the literature, but this thin slice should give you sense of how strong these results are! A Thin Slice of Min dreading As mentalists, if you present any of your material under the guise of non-verbal behavior, this research offers a compelling premise. The astonishing nature of the real scientific effects means that a simulated version is likely to capture an audience's attention as well. Rather than doing a full reading of someone, you can base your impressions on some fleeting glimpse of that person. Listening to a few seconds of that person describing her day, for example, could open up a world of information about that person. If you perform a Kurotsuke-type effect, or any demonstration in which one person in a handful of volunteers is holding a target object, perhaps you could deduce its location by turning to face the row of volunteers for mere seconds, able to extract all the information you need in those few moments. In essence, thin slicing is the stuff of premonition-taking a small amount of information and being able to extrapolate out into the future. Consider these possibilities. I think they hold a wealth of opportunity. -165-
Thought Suppression and Post-Suppression Rebound If you've ever had an intrusive thought or a bothersome worry, you know how difficult it can be to consciously stop thinking about it. In the classic demonstration of this, Dan Wegner and his colleagues (1987) instructed people to not think about a white bear. We can assume (and there are data to support this) that most people wouldn't normally think about white bears very often; however, when they are specifically instructed not to think of this, people report thinking quite a lot about white bears. This can be indicated by having people ring a bell any time the thought crosses their minds or by providing verbal reports. One piece of evidence, however, that is likely to be of interest to some mentalists suggests that hypnosis can be one route to successful thought suppression. During a normal waking state, Bowers and Woody (1996) found that people generally had difficulty suppressing thoughts on command, but under hypnosis, people who had demonstrated high hypnotizability during a pre-test reported almost no intrusions of the thought being suppressed; relatively less hypnotizable subjects, however, continued to report high levels of thought intrusions even under hypnosis. Perhaps more intriguing than this simple inability to consciously suppress thoughts is what happens after the thought suppression exercise. It turns out that trying to suppress thoughts initially actually makes those thoughts return even more forcefully after the suppression exercise. In the early white bear studies, Wegner et al. (1987) found that people who were told to suppress the thought of a white bear later went on to report more white bear thoughts during a new task than people who were first told to think about white bears. Plenty of other research (e.g., Wenzlaff & Bates, 2000) shows similar patterns for ~ther thoughts: compared to focusing on a particular thought, a:t1ve~y suppressing the thought makes that very thought more accessible in -166-
your mind. This "post-suppression rebound," as it is called, has also been applied to the domain of stereotyped and prejudice thoughts. 18 Essentially, when people actively try not to think in stereotypical ways when encountering someone from a stereotyped group, it can actually backfire and cause increased stereotype-driven thoughts later on. In one study, participants were given an image of someone from a negatively stereotyped group and told to spend five minutes writing an essay about what they thought a typical day in this person's life might be. Critically, the participants were either given the freedom to write this essay in any way they wished or they were warned that people often let stereotypes guide their impressions of others and were explicitly instructed to avoid letting stereotypes influence their essays. After they completed this task, the experimenter took them to another room where they were going to meet the person in the photograph (i.e., who they had written about). When they got to this room, though, the person was not there but instead there were eight chairs along the wall with a jacket and backpack on the leftmost chair, presumably belonging to the person in the photograph. The experimenter explained that the person must have stepped out and so the participant should take a seat and wait for him to arrive. Stereotype-driven prejudice has been shown to influence how close a person chooses to sit to someone from the stereotyped group. The further away someone sits, the more they expect to dislike the person. So would the person who was given the freedom to use stereotypes in the essay task sit closer or further away than the person who was told not to use stereotypes? The results rev ea I that those who initially suppressed stereotype-driven thoughts chose to sit further away from the person in the photo than those who didn't have to suppress any thoughts even though their 18 In general, I have overlooked a lot of social psychological research on this topic when preparing this collection for mentalists because I'm not sure how relevant this research is to mentalism. However, it is a fascinating body of work that is worth looking into if you are interested. A good review for the public is Claude Steele's book Whistling Vivaldi. This example here, however, just seemed too good an illustration of post-suppression rebound not to include. -1 67-
actual essays didn't differ at all in stereotype content. Of course, this is a rather crude (though compelling) indicator of post-suppression rebound, but the researchers also provide evidence that suppressing stereotype-driven thoughts also increases the stereotype content of essays written in a new task (without suppression instructions) and makes stereotypes more accessible in people's minds (Macrae, Bodenhausen, Milne, & Jetten, 1994). Finally, these suppression effects don't just apply to thoughts themselves but also to behaviors. Surely you've caught yourself when you've begun to laugh only to realize that you're in a situation in which laughing is completely inappropriate. The more you try to suppress your laughter, though, the more you find yourself laughing. Similarly, if you are on a diet and a plump piece of pie is staring you in the face, the more you try to avoid it, the more tempting it may become. One recent study demonstrates this phenomenon. Participants were given the task of watching a Coca-Cola ad and talking aloud about it. Some of these participants were able to talk freely about the ad whereas others had to talk about the ad without making reference to thirst or drinking (a tricky task indeed). After this phase of the study, they moved into a separate waiting room where they were offered cold soft drinks during the break. The researchers measured how much the participants consumed and found that the participants who had previously suppressed thoughts about thirst and drinking consumed significantly more during the break than the participants who hadn't needed to ·suppress those thoughts. Before moving on, I want to keep my psychologist hat on for just a few moments longer and describe one theory that accounts for why thoughts become more accessible after suppression attempts. Dan Wegner (1994) proposed the theory of ironic processes to account for these suppression effects and other effects relevant to mental control. The idea is simply that successful mental control depends on a mental monitoring process that keeps an eye out for failures at such control. This process, however, remains vigilant for detecting the occurrence of unwanted thoughts, which ironically draws even more attention to those thoughts. Thus, under the instructions to not think of a white bear, this ironic monitoring process does exactly what we -168-
wish it wouldn't do: activate the very thoughts we want to suppress. The moral of the story here is that thought suppression is difficult and results in an ironic backfiring effect. In the performance of mental ism, we ask audience members to do many things with their thoughts, manipulate them, make them "big" and "bright;' and so forth. It may be interesting, however, to ask people to suppress certain thoughts because the experience is a powerful one. People are likely to be struck by how difficult it is, and following the suppression task, they will find that these thoughts are now even more accessible. Suppression Subtlety A spectator has thought of the name of a childhood friend, and you are about to divine it. In the spirit of making the task especially difficult, you ask the person to not think about it. Do your best to cast this person from your mind. Don't think of this name, don't picture this person's face, don't remember anything about this person. But try as you might, the more you try not to, the clearer this person becomes. And what was meant to make this hard for me-you not thinking about this person-actually makes it easier for me. Seriously-try not to think of this person, don't think of this person ... you just thought of her didn't, you? You just thought of Rachel, is that right? Then later on in your interaction with this person, after this phase is over and done, you can say: You still keep thinking about Rachel, don't you? You haven't thought of this person in ages, but the minute you actually try not to, you start thinking of her more than ever. Again, this is an example of taking some of what we know from research in psychology and layering it into a fairly typical effect. The chances are that the suppression and post-suppression rebound effects will indeed play out, but even if they don't actually hit for a given person, they contribute to a more nuanced performance, and perhaps the mere suggestion of these thought processes will be enough to trigger the experience itself. Also consider that because -169-
this is a phenomenon that strikes us in our everyday lives-trying to suppress thoughts and noting how difficult it is-when audience members experience this phenomenon themselves, it may just serve as a reminder of you and your performance. -170-
Unconscious Thought Theory Because many mentalists who take a psychological angle in their presentations often make mention of the "unconscious" in one way or another, this body of research struck me as able to add some depth to such performances. Although this particular body of research has grown quite nuanced, the basic gist of unconscious thought theory is that complex decisions, judgments, and predictions are better when they are the result of unconscious thought. Suppose you are looking to move, and you have to decide between two different apartments. Each apartment comes with a list of positive qualities and a list of drawbacks, making your ultimate decision difficult-which of those positives and negatives are most important? You might come to your decision in two different ways. In one, you sit down and really think through your options for a while. In another, you distract yourself for the same amount of time and register your decision after the distraction, without ever giving much conscious thought to it. A study that essentially put participants through this decision under these conditions found that the people who made the decision after a distraction (via unconscious thinking) were more likely to make the objectively better choice than the people who spent time consciously weighing all the options (Dijksterhuis, 2004). What unconscious thought theory ultimately proposes is that for relatively simple decisions and judgments, conscious tho~ght is better. For complex decisions and judgments, however, unconscious thoug~t produces better outcomes (Dijksterhuis & Nordgren'. 2006~. ~his difference is due to a particular strength of the unconscious thinking system: it is better able to weigh the relative importanc~ of sp~ci~c attributes. For the apartment hunting example, the conscious mind IS less able to identify which apartment features are most important to a happy living experience; the unconscious system, however, is better at identifying the most important features that distinguish the two options. To illustrate that the unconscious thought system produces better -171 -
outcomes because of smarter use of all of the available information, one set of studies looked specifically at the judgments of soccer experts, whose experience in their field has given them a complete understanding of teams and their various statistics (Dijksterhuis, Bos, van der Leij, & van Baaren, 2009). Their task was to predict the outcomes of four randomly selected soccer matches from that season. Not surprisingly, soccer experts were much more accurate than nonexperts in their predictions. More interestingly, though, is that it was only the experts that had an added advantage of making their predictions after a period of unconscious (vs. conscious) thought. They also provide evidence that unconscious thinking allowed experts to make better predictions because they were more likely to rely on information that is actually highly predictive of soccer outcomes (i.e., their world ranking). Spectator-as-U nconscious-Mindreader Overall, this is research that you can point to in making the case that a participant should clear his or her mind and allow for responses that come straight from their "subconscious:' I see this as particularly interesting in the context of a prediction method reframed as a "spectator is the mind reader" premise. Imagine telling an audience that you have two numbers, between 1 and 100, written on a piece of paper in an envelope. You choose a volunteer and say that she will guess what those numbers are but that there are a few ways to make such guesses. Before making the guess, you ask the volunteer what her name is, some information about herself, and then suddenly ask her to say a number from 1 -100. "That's the unconscious thinking way of guessing a number. As soon as I said that you'd have to guess the numbers, your unconscious mind got to work and started forming a guess while you were distracted. Now I want you to guess the other number with your conscious mind. Really think about this now ... think through your options. What do you think the other number is?" At this point you talk about the differences between conscious and unconscious thinking as I just reviewed, pointing out that -172-
unconscious thinking tends to produce more accurate predictions than conscious thinking (the soccer matches study would be a good one to note). Sure enough, when you open the envelope, the number that the volunteer guessed through conscious thought is wrong, but the one that she guessed with unconscious thinking is exactly right. This quick demo could then lead into a bigger effect with the same "unconscious thought" theme. The method for this would be up to you, of course, but something as simple as a nail writer and a window envelope would be enough to pull it off. Before putting the paper in the envelope, write a random number on the side that won't be exposed in the window-write this with a nail writer, too, for the sake of consistency. When the participant says her first guess, write it on the paper through the window, and you're set. If you get really lucky and the person guesses the number that's already on the paper, you have the opportunity to make her "conscious thinking" guess close but not quite right. Mentalism premises have often taken advantage of the "power of the unconscious" premise, but now you have some firmer scientific backing to make such claims. It turns out that "sleeping on it" may be an effective strategy after all. -173-
The Power of Ambiguity One recurring concept in social psychology that I have noticed throughout my training and education is that of "disasambiguation:' By that, I mean the process of interpreting information that is objectively ambiguous. Many principles in social psychology are most apparent in conditions where a person is met with objectively ambiguous information. In such a circumstance, people use many different mental shortcuts to figure out what the information means. On page 127, I discuss the concept of "priming. One of the classic studies in that area is the "Donald" study. The description of Donald, objectively speaking, is ambiguous. Without any additional information, this description of a person whom you've never met doesn't give you a clear understanding of who this person is or what he's like. But it's a mental concept that just happens to be more accessible to you that pushes your interpretation in one direction or the other. That is, whether the memory task included words that highlighted the concept of either"recklessness" or"adventurousness" changes the way you interpret the relatively ambiguous information. Here's a mental exercise I often have my students do, and it highlights the simplicity of this concept. Think about the following statement: "His only complaint was that the music wasn't playing at the appropriate volume:' So was it too loud or too quiet? The information alone doesn't tell us. But if I add one single detail, it clears up the whole story: "The librarian's only complaint was that the music wasn't playing at the appropriate volume:' Ah, now we understand; the music was being played too loudly. All of the stereotypes and beliefs we have about "librarians" fills in the gaps and "reveals" the meaning of the sentence. Perhaps the meaning is incorrect, but we at least feel like we understand the story now. Imagine I went the other direction and instead added a different detail: "The rock star's only complaint was that the music wasn't playing at the appropriate volume:' Well now the information has been disambiguated in a different way. Now it would seem that the music wasn't playing loudly enough! Again, the stereotypes and -174-
other thoughts that we associate with "rock stars" help clear up the meaning of the statement. The point here is that we know there are plenty of biases in human psychology, but they only result in correspondingly biased judgments and conclusions when the real answer isn't clear. If the answer is clear as day, then it doesn't matter what biases might be rooted in human psychology; a person is likely to appropriately encode the information. With respect to the above example, if I said, "The librarian, who happens to favor music played at loud volumes, had one complaint: the volume of the music being played at the concert, which was set at 85 decibels:'Well now the "librarian" element doesn't really bias our understanding of the information in the same way it did before. The information is very clear, with or without the stereotypes that would have otherwise come into play. I'll relay a few examples from social psychology to even more directly make this point. First is the concept of motivated perception. Research by Emily Balcetis and her colleagues has shown that people see the world the way they want to see the world. One experiment led participants believe that they would engage in a taste test, and that they would either sample something delicious or something disgusting (Balcetis & Dunning, 2006). What they tasted would be determined by whether the computer randomly selected a letter from its database or whether the computer randomly selected a number. In fact, the computer displayed the same thing to everyone: an image that could either be seen as a "8" or a "13" (see the figure). When people thought a letter would allow them to sample the tasty snack, they saw the image as a B, and when people thought a number would lead to the pleasant outcome, they saw it as a 13. Other studies in this line of research have shown that this wasn't just that people said they -175-
saw what would lead to a good outcome-they truly saw what they wanted to see. Other studies also used different ambiguous stimuli (e.g., an image that could either look like a seal or a horse). The point here is that our motivations and desires affect our perceptions especially when the true answer isn't objectively clear. In the motivated perception studies, the stimulus could reasonably be interpreted in either of two ways; however, in conditions where participants were clearly shown a "B" or a "13;' all participants reported seeing what was shown to them (Balcetis & Dunning, 2006, Study 1 ). Motivation is not enough to create clearly incorrect perceptions, but it will nudge our perception when there is freedom to move it. Our memories are also ambiguous to a degree that makes them open to bias. For most memories of our past, any objective record of the past events is unavailable- especially at the time of recall. As such, our memories of the past can be biased in many directions. One memory bias studied by social psychologists is stereotypes. Interestingly, these stereotypes can apply to ourselves and influence memories of our own past. For example, Chatard and colleagues (2007) asked boys and girls to remember their standardized test scores from two years prior. They were able to access the participants' real test scores to see if gender stereotypes reliably influenced how people remembered their own academic performance. Indeed, girls remembered doing worse on the math section than reality, and boys remembered doing better on the math section than reality. And lest you think this is because men are just likely to overinflate their performance all the time, the stereotypes also applied to memories of art performance; boys remembered doing worse on this section than reality and girls remembered doing better. Similarly, our memories are often guided by our own beliefs about how life should work. That is, we apply our beliefs about change over time to reconstruct our past. For instance, there are some traits about which we have a "theory of increase" or the belief that the traits apply to us more as we age (e.g., intelligence, being willing to stand up for beliefs, and being worried about physical health). When older people are asked to recall how well these traits characterized them when -176-
they were younger, they tend to say that they didn't apply to them very much (i.e., "I was much less willing to stand up for my beliefs than I am now") even if this has no grounding in truth (McFarland Ross & Giltrow, 1992). The same patterns are true for traits with a "theor/of decrease" (e.g., being active, memory abilities, and ruggedness). As another example, Conway and Ross (1984) recruited students to participate in a 3-week "study skills" class. Before beginning, all of the students evaluated their current study skills. At the conclusion of the class, they asked students to again evaluate their current study skills and report what they thought their level of study skills was before the class. Of course, our belief would be that our study skills were worse prior to taking an improvement class. In fact, people in this situation remembered their study skills as having been worse than they originally said they were. Thus, although the experimenters had access to the objectively "right" answer, the memory was ambiguous for the participants themselves, so their memories were free to be pushed in a certain direction, consistent with expectations. Of course, this concept is not news to mentalists. Common perceptions of cold reading involve the ambiguity of statements. Although this perception is not well tied to best practices in cold reading, using ambiguous statements can be quite effective. The key, however, lies in the difference between "ambiguous" and "vague" statements. Bad cold reading involves vague statements, transparently saying almost nothing at all. Rather, ambiguous statements are those that can be confidently interpreted in many ways. -177-
Psychology for Cold Reading The essence of personal readings depends deeply on human psychology. Not only is it helpful to know how people think of themselves in order to more effectively reflect those thoughts back on them, but knowing about the dynamics between individuals is an important consideration as well. Note that the earlier section on "rapport" (page 136) is relevant to readings, so you might benefit from revisiting that section with this new perspective. What follows are bits of wisdom and knowledge from social psychology that could be applied to improving cold reading success. They constitute both subtleties of execution and a broad understanding of what features of individual people might be relevant for highlighting in a reading. The "Frequency Labeling" Principle Experimental psychologists can be a crafty group. Sometimes it is necessary to lead people to think of themselves in certain ways, but figuring out exactly how to do that can be tricky. One elegantly simple method, pioneered by Salancik and Conway (1975) is to merely change the wording of personal questions. Specifically, when asking people whether or not they engage in a particular behavior, you can ask whether they do it on occasion or frequently. People are much more likely to say they do something "on occasion" than to say they do it "frequently:' Importantly, these leading questions can get people to actually think of themselves differently. To put it more concretely, Salancik and Conway wanted to test the effects of religiosity on attitudes toward religion. To do so, they asked people to report their religious behaviors and to indicate their attitudes toward religion, but importantly, half of the people were asked whether they do a set of religious behaviors "on occasion" or "frequently:' For example, one person might be asked to answer whether he "goes to a church or synagogue on occasion" or whether he "goes to a church or synagogue frequently:' Their results show -178-
that when the question is framed as "on occasion," people are more likely to agree that they do those behaviors than when it's framed as "frequently:' This reporting bias is consequential, too; people who responded to whether they do a series of religious behaviors occasionally then reported feeling more positive toward religion than people who responded to whether they do the same behaviors frequently. Others have used this concept to get people to think that they are more or less certain in a bel ief by phrasing the question as either "I am sometimes certain of my opinion on this issue" or "I am always certain of my opinion on this issue" (Rios, DeMarree, & Statzler, 2014). Because people are averse to saying that they always do something, they disagree with the latter question, which can make them start to doubt their opinion. Still others have slightly modified the procedure by manipulating the standard response options in questionnaire items. You're probably used to filling out surveys and marking your responses on a scale of"Strongly Disagree"to"Strongly Agree:' Some researchers have adjusted these labels systematically to get people to respond in certain ways. For instance, I might ask you how much you agree with the statement "I like to take extreme risks;' but I could make you respond on a scale from "agree somewhat" to "agree completely:' On this scale, any response forces you to think of conditions under which you might agree with the statement. Indeed, using exactly this procedure, people who were led to agree with statements about themselves as risk-seekers went on to take more risks in a subsequent gambling task (Petrocelli, Martin, & Li, 2010). This technique can be easily integrated into readings to maximize "hits" in a way that echoes a lot of common wisdom among people who write about such readings. Although extreme revelations are likely to pay off, they also run the risk of not being as accepted as true. Instead, framing readings in terms of "sometimes" or "on occasion" can maximize the likelihood that the sitter agrees with the statement and can then lead him or her to search for times that validate the occasional nature of the behavior rather than lead him or her to think of times that disconfirm your reading. For example, "/get the sense -179-
that you at least occasionally respond poorly to criticism. Would you say that's mostly the case or only sometimes?" Also, beyond the language of your statements themselves, you might apply this frequency labelling principle when seeking affirmation from the sitter. This would take the form of the latter example in which the response labels are manipulated to boost agreement. For instance, in the context of a handwriting analysis reading, you could say, "The way you cross your 't' suggests that you can be very ambitious when starting new projects. Would you say that's sometimes the case or often the case?" By constraining the response options, you essentially force the person to agree with the reading because either answer is a hit. Also, because neither "sometimes" or "often" are extreme in themselves, you also increase the odds of having the person agree with the answer that's relatively more extreme because that answer itself isn't absolutely extreme. Situation Dependency This isn't any news to cold readers, but I wanted to shed just a little bit of light from psychology on this idea. There has been a debate between personality theorists who believe either that personality represents stable traits and those who believe the personality is more fluid than that. ls someone an extravertthrough and through in every situation? The traditional model says yes, but an alternative approach wouldn't be so sure. Walter Mischel was a key player in arguing this position. In his 2004 review of the literature, he proposed that rather than thinking of people as having a stable personality across situations, we can instead think of them as having stable "behavioral signatures:' By this he means that people do have stable personalities, but they are specific to different situations. For instance, the same person may be reliably gregarious at parties but also consistently introverted on weeknights. How could this person's personality be classified? As an introvert or extravert? According to Mischel, this "either/or" classification is not as helpful as identifying a person's reliable behavior depending on particular -180-
situations. It's as though we all have our own scripts that we can pull out in.an ".if, then" format. For example, "If I'm at my job, then I play my consc1ent1ous character" or "If I'm home for Thanksgiving, then 1 play my rebellious character:' Through a similar logic, Anderson and Chen (2002) proposed the notion of "relational selves:' According to their analysis, our sense of self can change dramatically by which of our significant relational partners are most accessible to us at the moment. My sense of self in relation to my father can be different than my sense of self in relation to my best friend. Depending on which of these people is most accessible in my mind (such as when I'm actually on the phone with my father or I'm out to lunch with my friend), I engage in somewhat different behavior, dependent on the sense of self that's most accessible. Therefore, similar to Mischel's (2004) analysis of personality, Anderson and Chen (2002) maintain that we don't have a singular self-concept but rather that we have several relational selves that come to the surface during the course of different interactions. Various Barnum statements have been great at picking up on these potential dualities, and cold reading experts have long offered similar advice. By saying, "You are at times very extraverted but other times prefer to keep to yourself;' you describe people who are predominantly extraverted or predominantly introverted, but because few people are exclusively one or the other, the statement is met with little resistance. If you had instead made the bold move to say, "I get the sense that you are an extravert;' it can invite the opportunity to counterargue the statement, searching for times that prove otherwise. Understanding the situation-dependency of "personality" can help make a reading more nuanced and more specifically tailored to one individual and his or her unique behavioral signatures. Giving Negative Information The common wisdom in cold reading is to give the sitter only glowing wonderful information about him or her. In general, this seems like sound advice and puts you in the best light. After all, you don't want to be the psychic who just picks up on everybody's faults. In general, this -181 -
advice is in line with what social psychologists call a self-enhancement motive. According to self-enhancement, people generally want to hear good things about themselves and bolster their positive feelings toward themselves (Leary, 2007; Taylor & Brown, 1988). A commonly cited example of the self-enhancement motive is the "better-than-average effect:' That is, when asked to judge where they stand on any number of attributes, people tend to see themselves as "above average" for positive qualities. For instance, most college students claim that they are better than average drivers (Svenson, 1981 ). Of course, any time most people claim to be above average, we're dealing with a pretty strong bias to view oneself favorably. Amusingly, when people are told about such biases, they tend to say that they are less susceptible to them than most people (Pronin, Gilovich, & Ross, 2004). However, despite the apparent pervasiveness of self-enhancement goals, there may be another way to explain the data. That is, people generally view themselves positively-people's self-esteem is routinely rather high (on average), especially among college student samples. Therefore, even though it seems like everyone wants to hear nice things about themselves, it may actually be the case that people want to confirm the beliefs they already have about themselves (even if it's negative). This is to say that people who desire positive feedback may do so not because of a need to feel better about themselves but rather because of a need to maintain a coherent sense of themselves. Such a motivation has been called the self-verification motive. If true, however, it would mean that people who already have negative selfviews would actually prefer negative feedback about themselves. I'll turn to the words of William Swann, the originator of this research, to describe the fundamental concept in self-verification: "Selfverification theory assumes that, out of a desire for social worlds that are coherent and predictable, people want others to see them as they see themselves" (Swann & Bosson, 2010, p. 608). 1 9The implication 19 In fact, this strikes me as a compelling statement to make during a reading. One thing you might intuit about a person is that she might hope that others see her as she sees herself- sometimes that means she wants others to take note of the positive qualities she -182-
~ere is that when people view themselves positively, what you see ~s what ~ou'd expect_ from "self-enhancement"-a desire for positive information an~ a bias toward viewing the self positively. However, wh:n people view themselves negatively already, there is in fact a desire for confirmatory social feedback. A few examples of how this plays out might be in order. Much of the early research from this perspective looked at people's preferences for social partners who either provided positive or negative feedback about the other person. People tend to gravitate toward others who provide self-consistent (rather than purely positive) feedback (e.g., Swann, Wenzlaff, Krull, & Pelham, 1992). When given the option to read favorable vs. unfavorable information, 64% of the low self-esteem participants in one study preferred the unfavorable information whereas only 25% of the high self-esteem participants preferred the unfavorable information. In a striking illustration of self-verification, however, 82% of the participants who were clinically depressed preferred the unfavorable information (Giesler, Josephs, & Swann, 1996). People also tend to behave in ways that are meant to elicit self-verifying feedback from others (Swann & Hill, 1982; Swann & Read, 1981 ). Of most interest to mentalists and readers, however, is that people can interpret feedback so that it fits how they see themselves already and show biased memory for self-consistent social feedback compared to self-inconsistent information (Swann & Read, 1981 ). Two things are worth noting here, especially because self-verification can seem counterintuitive. Can it really be that people want to hear the negative things they already believe about themselves? One thing to note is that this preference is especially the case when people hold their self-views with confidence (Swann & Pelham, 2002) and when they hold particularly extreme positive or negative self-views (Giesler, Joesphs, & Swann, 1996). It also seems to be the case that this preference is especially likely when people are fully mentally capable of processing the information knows she has but other times that can mean that she wants others to acknowledge her faults instead of pretending they don't exist. -183-
(Hixon & Swann, 1993). The second thing to note is that there's a difference between appreciating self-consistent information because it's factually accurate vs. because of the way it makes you feel. In fact, even though people show a cognitive preference for self-consistent feedback (i.e., they believe it more), they don't particularly enjoy getting negative feedback even when it matches their existing selfviews (Swann, Griffin, Predmore, & Gaines, 1987). So what can psychic (or otherwise intuitive and bright) readers learn from the research on self-verification? Hopefully something! The real reason I review this research is to offer some justification for when and why you might want to highlight negative information about someone during the course of a reading. It would seem that this may be effective when your sitter already holds negative self-views and does so with confidence. However, know that such self-confirming feedback is likely to be met with cognitive belief and agreement but not necessarily lift the person's spirits. That said, following from some of the experimental results (Swann & Read, 1981), by using ambiguous revelations or a mix of positive and negative readings, the person is relatively likely to preferentially remember the information that's consistent with his or her existing self-concept and to interpret the reading as confirming whatever their existing self-view is. Individual Difference Variables As a reader-psychic or otherwise- you have plenty to talk about with a sitter. It would be hard for me to offer new fodder for the conversation since countless cold reading books have been written over the years. These authors often highlight several dimensions (e.g., finances, romance, travel, etc.) that can be touched upon during the course of a reading. Similarly, when a reading moves into the arena of a "personality" reading, many other authors in the mentalism world have covered this. In years past, readers might have looked to the MyersBriggs personality test (or the "MBTI"), which put forward various combinations of letters (ESTP, ENTJ, ISFJ, and so on) that encapsulate -184-
personality, for an understanding of personality. This test, however, rs now largely out of fashion. Instead, personality measurement now tends to center on the "Big 5" dimensions of personality (extraversion openness to experience, agreeableness, conscientiousness and neuroticism; Costa & Mccrae, 1992) although even this approa~h has its faults. These common "personality" dimensions, however, are only a subset of the vast array of "individual differences" that social psychologists measure, so I offer a selection of those here as further inspiration for thinking about other things that you might read in a person that reflect actual characteristics on which people vary. By way of quickly clarifying what I'm talking about, an "individual difference" measure is simply any characteristic on which people reliably differ from one another. In this way, the personality types you are probably already familiar with are examples of "individual differences:'They are stable reflections of how a person is likely to react across situations. These measures are helpful in research because many effects in the psychology can depend on the person. When this is the case, we sometimes call it a "person-by-situation interaction;' which just means that environmental pressures can influence a person's behavior differently depending on that person's own characteristics. The simplest individual difference to consider is gender. Even though all people, on average, react in a certain way when they're in a certain situation, men may react more strongly than women or women might react totally differently than men, etc. There are plenty of ways, however, in which people diff~r be~ond j~st their gender and their broad personality types. My goal rn th rs sectron is to review a handful of these individual differences that you may not already have heard of. They likely match your intuitions as. t~ how people can differ, but 1 offer you names for these charactenst1~s as well as a quick review of what kinds of outcomes can be pred.1c~ed when you know how well a person is defined by these c~ara~ten~t1cs. They cover a lot of conceptual ground, so let's just get rrght rnto 1t. -185-
The Big 5 Hopefully many readers are already familiar with various dimensions of personality as they are understood by psychologists. I just alluded to new developments where the classic "Myers-Briggs" assessment of personality has fallen out of fashion, replaced by the so-called "Big s:' Although there are critics of the Big 5 approach, the criticisms are beyond the scope of this treatise. A lot of the criticism centers around the psychometric properties of the personality questionnaires- both the questions used to assess the traits as well as the data analytic methods applied to the question responses (Brock, 201 O). A larger criticism takes issue with the proposition that all of personality can be boiled down to these five factors (e.g., De Young, Quilty, & Peterson, 2007; Paunonen & Jackson, 2000). Nevertheless, the Big 5 can be a useful way of thinking about personality and can give you, the reader, an opportunity to organize your mental repertoire of human personality traits. The Big 5 are commonly remembered using the acronym "OCEAN:' OCEAN stands for: Openness to Experience, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism. I'll review a bit of the research on each of these traits, in the order that they appear in this helpful mnemonic device. Interestingly, though, despite a lot empricial scientific convergence within the data, there's a less clear understanding of what each personality type actually means, even though their effects are so consistent (see also Digman, 1990). Openness to Experience. There seem to be a few things going on that characterize people as high or low in openness. Overall, this dimension of personality has been defined as "cognitive exploration:' which relates to learning about both the world and one's own experience in it. People with a high openness to experience often look for and understand more information than people with low openness. On the one hand, openness is related to intellect, and people high in openness to experience might use words like "intellectual" or "clever" to define themselves. On the other hand, openness is relevant to -186-
creativity, and words like "artistic;' "imaginative;' and "curious" might be used as descriptors. Higher openness to experience is strongly related to vocational preferences for artistic pursuits, including writing, drama, and music (Larson, Rottinghaus, & Borgen, 2002). People who are relatively high in openness to experience tend to express themselves well, using humor and expressive verbal content. They also express their creativity by decorating their living and working spaces in unique ways, displaying various books and other reading material (Gosling, Ko, Mannarelli, & Morris, 2002). In the domain of relationships, finding someone who matches you on openness is the most important personality match for people, on average (Figueredo, Sefcek, & Jones, 2006). That is, when it comes to thinking of their ideal romantic partners, most people say that they would prefer someone with a level of openness that matches their own (even more so than matches in traits like agreeableness or extraversion). Note, though, that this is just preferences for an ideal romantic partner- this doesn't play out as reliably in predicting the traits of someone's actual romantic partner. Of interest to a psychic reader, people higher in openness are more likely to report mystical, transcendental, and transpersonal experiences (MacDonald, 2000). In addition, openness maps onto social and political attitudes; people higher in openness to experience tend to be less politically conservative (e.g., Van Hiel et al., 2004). So who's open? Early studies failed to find any gender differences in openness to experience, but gender differences do emerge when you consider two separate components of openness. That is, women tend to be more open than men in the sense of creativity and aesthetics, but men tend to be more open than women in the sense of intellectual curiosity and puzzle solving (Weisberg, DeYoung, & Hirsh, 2011 ). Not surprisingly, people who have had more education demonstrate greater openness in the sense of intellectual openness (Goldberg, Sweeney, Merend, & Hughes, 1998). One cross-cultural analysis found that people in French-speaking Switzerland, Serbia, Austria, Germany, and German-speaking Switzerland were highest in Openness to Experience. By contrast, people from Spain, Hong Kong, Malaysia, and India scored lowest in openness (McCrae et al., 2005). -187-
Conscientiousness. This personality trait has been defined as the tendency to exercise self-control, to follow the rules of society, and to plan for meeting goals and desired outcomes. In general, Roberts et al. (2009) write that "a conscientious individual will be likely to show up to appointments early, follow society's rules, keep a clean and tidy room, work hard, and cut him- or herself off before he or she has one too many cocktails" (p. 371 ). In fact, because conscientious people conform to social norms, they are likely to live longer due to a decreased risk of alcohol use, obesity, drug use, lack of physical exercise, risky sexual behavior, risky driving, tobacco use, suicide, and violence (Bogg & Roberts, 2004). Conscientious people are also those who are most likely to find job success because they have leadership skills (Judge, Bono, llies, & Gerhardt, 2002), they don't come skip work very often (Ones, Viswesvaran, & Schmidt, 2003), and because they apply for more appropriate jobs in the first place (Mount, Barrick, Scullen, & Rounds, 2005). Although men and women don't seem to differ in conscientiousness overall, they do differ on the specific aspect of conscientiousness that represents "orderliness;' in which case women score higher on orderliness than men (Weisberg et al., 2011 ). That is, women are more likely to put importance on maintaining order and organization (including perfectionism). This gender difference, though, isn't present at older ages. That said, however, conscientiousness does appear to increase with age-older people score higher on measures of conscientiousness than younger people (Goldberg et al., 1998). Extroversion. Of all the personality variables that exist in the literature, extraversion seems to be the one that people are most familiar with. We talk about people as being "extraverted" or "introverted" more than we characterize others as agreeable or open to experience, for instance. Extraversion, of course, refers to how much someone enjoys being with people and experiences high social energy. One of the best established extraversion effects is that extraverts, compared to introverts, experience high degrees of positive emotion and see things in a positive light (e.g., Costa & McCrae, 1980; Uziel, 2006). More extraverted people show more optimism and are less responsive -188-
to negative feedback (DeNeve & Cooper, 1998). This seems to happen because of extraversion's relationship with "relational esteem." That is, more extraverted people tend to be happier with their friend and family relationships, and as a result, they experience greater overall subjective well-being (Benet-Martinez & Karakitapoglu-AygOn, 2003). More extraverted people not only demonstrate greater helpfulness in altruistic volunteering initiatives, but they also are more likely to assume a leadership role (Carlo, Okun, Knight, & de Guzman, 2005; Judge & Bono, 2000). Also, in relation to vocational preferences and ideal career matches, extraversion tends to relate to enterprising activities like sales, leadership, or politics and to social jobs like teaching or nursing (Larson et al., 2002). Agreeableness. At an abstract level, agreeableness refers to how much someone is "likeable, pleasant, and harmonious with others" (Graziano & Tobin, 2009, p. 46). In general, more agreeable people are more motivated to have positive relationships with other people (Graziano & Eisenberg, 1997). Women tend to score higher on agreeableness than men, both at relatively young and relatively old ages (Chapman, Duberstein, Sorensen, & Lyness, 2007; Weisberg et al., 2011 ). Those who are more agreeable are generally more easily persuaded (Habashi & Wegener, 2008), but they also tend to engage in more constructive ways of resolving conflict in everyday interactions (Jensen-Campbell & Graziano, 2001) and tend to be less competitive overall (Graziano et al., 1997). More agreeable people also tend to feel greater empathy and also tend to offer help in a variety of settings (Graziano, et al., 2007). Neuroticism. This trait reflects the tendency to "experience negative emotional states" (Widiger, 2009, p. 129). These feelings include anger, guilt, anxiety, and depression. Often self-conscious and shy, neurotic people don't respond adaptively to stress. Overall, neuroticism has been linked to feelings of well-being (Steel, Schmidt, & Schultz, 2008), job satisfaction (Judge, Heller, & Mount, 2002), leadership (Judge, Bono, llies, & Gerhardt, 2002), and depency (Bornstein & Cecero, 2000). In each case, greater neuroticism corresponds to more negative outcomes. Similarly, neuroticism has been linked a number -189-
of psychopathologies (see Widimer, 2009). As with agreeableness, women tend to score higher on neuroticism than men, both at relatively young and relatively old ages (Chapman, Duberstein, Sorensen, & Lyness, 2007; Weisberg et al., 2011 ). It seems, though, that this gender difference is specific to neuroticism in the sense of anxiety and self-consciousness and less relevant to neuroticism in the sense of emotional volatility. Preference for Consistency People who have a relative preference for consistency"value personal consistency and strive to respond to most situations in a manner consistent with prior attitudes, behaviors, and commitments" whereas people with a low preference for consistency "demonstrate a preference for change, spontaneity, and unpredictability in the way they respond to social stimuli" and don't necessarily care if their current behavior corresponds with what they've done in the past (Guadagno & Cialdini, 2010, p. 153). To get a sense of where people are on this variable, psychologists ask them how much they agree with statements like "I prefer to be around people whose reactions I can anticipate" and "I want to be described by others as a stable, predictable person:' In general, the data have shown that preference for consistency tends to be higher for older people, and younger people show lower average scores on this individual difference (Brown, Asher, & Cialdini, 2005). People who have a greater preference for consistency have been shown to more often follow through on commitments, to be more affected by the "foot-in-the-door" effect (see "Compliance" on page 32), and are more uncomfortable when thinking about topics that they are ambivalent about (Guadagno & Cialdini, 2010). Need for Cognition Need for cognition is an indication of how much people enjoy effortful thinking (Cacioppo & Petty, 1982). Those who have a relatively high -190-
need for cognition are much more likely to think deeply about information than people who are lower in need for cognition. To measure this variable, psychologists ask people to rate how well they think a series of statements describes them, including ones like "I really enjoy a task that involves coming up with new solutions to problems" and "It's enough for me that something gets the job done; I don't care how or why it works." In their review of the large body of research that has considered this variable, Richard Petty and his colleagues (2009) offer a concise summary: as need for cognition increases, "people are more likely to think about a wide variety of things, including their own thoughts. This enhanced thinking often produces more consequential (e.g., enduring) judgments and can sometimes provide protection from common judgmental biases. At other times, however, enhanced thinking can exacerbate a bias or even reverse it" (p. 318). At its inception, however, need for cognition was developed as a way to measure how much people were likely to think about persuasive messages specifically because the amount of thought people attack such a method with determines whether and how they are persuaded (Cacioppo, Petty, & Morris, 1983). Since then, it has been shown to affect amount of thinking across many domains, including personal relationships, legal proceedings, and person judgments. Independent vs. Interdependent Self-Construals This individual difference comes from research on cross-cultural differences in how people define themselves. Although its origin is in cultural psychology, know that this distinction can apply just as well to different people within a culture. In essence, people with independent self-construals see themselves as individuals whose set of behaviors and attributes reflect their own internal thoughts and feelings (Markus & Kitayama, 1991 ). Indeed, these are people who view the self as autonomous and independent of others. Those with interdependent self-construals, however, emphasize the connectedness of people and see themselves "as part of an encompassing social relationship" and recognize that -191-
their behavior "is determined, contingent on, and, to a large extent organized by what the person perceives to be the thoughts, feelings, and actions of others in the relationship" (Markus & Kitayama, 1991, p. 227). Although it's true that people from East Asian cultures tend to have more interdependent self-construals and people from Western cultures tend to have more independent self-construals, there is also variance within those cultures. That is, even within Western cultures, some people have more interdependent self-construals whereas other have more independent self-construals. For more information about this variable and the demographics that reflect it, Hazel Markus and Alana Conner (2013) have written a great book for a public audience. In it, they discuss eight "culture clashes" that reflect eight different instantiations of a difference between independent and interdependent self-construals. Each of the following pairs reflects this distinction, the first in each pair being a group that tends to view the self as independent and the second being a group that tends to view the self as interdependent: Western vs. East Asian cultures, men vs. women, Black vs. White Americans, middle vs. working class, American west coast/northeast vs. south/ Mid west, profit vs. nonprofit sectors, northern vs. southern hemisphere populations, and various religious groups. Of course, these categories are not perfectly overlapping with the two self-construals, but in the context of a reading, they might be reliable cues as to how the sitter views him or herself and the independent vs. collective values he or she might endorse. Singelis (1994) developed a measurement tool to assess the degree of independence vs. interdependence within a population. For instance, a question that's used to assess independence is "I enjoy being unique and different from others in many respects. Questions used to assess interdependence, however, are"My happiness depends on the happiness of those around me" and "I should take into consideration my parents' advice when making education/career plans:' -192-
Dialectical Self-Concept Here's another individual difference that has its origin in cultural research. In the late 1990s, some evidence emerged, suggesting that people in East Asian cultures report lower self-esteem than people in Western cultures (Heine, 1999). Although this was taken as evidence for the fact that such cultures view themselves more negatively, newer research offers a different perspective. In particular, this evidence showed that it isn't a difference in overall self-esteem but rather a difference in how mixed people's self-evaluations are. In other words, people from East Asian cultures are more likely than people from Western cultures to view themselves both positively and negatively, which can look like more negative self-esteem on average even though the two groups actually see themselves just as positively as one another (Spencer-Rodgers, Peng, Wang, & Hou, 2004). The lesson here is that some people demonstrate what's called a "dialectical self:' Those with a dialectical self are those whose selfconcept is not very clearly or confidently defined, isn't very consistent from one situation to the other nor from one time to another. Nondialectical self-concepts, then, are those that are internally consistent, stable over time, and stable over various situations and relationships. Generally, people from East Asian cultures demonstrate greater dialectical selves than people from Western cultures, but as with independence and interdependence, people can also vary within a culture in the extent to which they view themselves dialectically. Questions that are used to measure dialectical self include: "I am the same around my family as I am around my friends:"'There are always two sides to everything, depending on how you look at it;' and "I believe my personality will stay the same all of my life:' In their review of the research on dialectical self, Julie SpencerRodgers and her colleagues (201 O) identify many outcomes of seeing the self dialectically or not. For instance, as reviewed already, people who view the self dialectically tend to endorse both positive and negative qualities of themselves. People with dialectical selves are also relatively more able to bounce back from negative life events and show a greater tolerance for experiencing mixed emotions. -193-
Need for Cognitive Closure The need for cognitive closure is the extent to which a person desires clear answers and demonstrates an aversion to ambiguity (Kruglanski & Webster, 1996). Originally, this motivation was studied by manipulating it in a lab. Researchers did this by putting people under time pressure (Kruglanski & Freund, 1983), creating environmental noise that renders information processing difficult (Kruglanski, Webster, & Klem, 1993), and making people experience mental fatigue (Webster, Richter, & Kruglanski, 1996). All of these were intended to motivate people to reach quick conclusions. More often, though, the need for closure has been studied by measuring it as an individual differences variable. The measurement instrument that's frequently used asks people to rate their agreement with statements like "In case of uncertainty, I prefer to make an immediate decision, whatever it may be" and "I find that establishing a consistent routine enables me to enjoy life more Whether studied as a manipulation or as an individual difference, need for closure is often described as being associated with two primary tendencies: an urgency tendency and a permanence tendency (Kruglanski & Webster, 1996). These tendencies are often also referred to as "seizing" and "freezing;' respectively. Seizing is the tendency to jump to a conclusion quickly, and freezing is the tendency to hold onto attained closure so as not to return to a state of uncertainty. In social psychology, this variable has been used as a lens through which to study a number of topics. Applied to attitudes and persuasion, people with a relatively high need for closure have demonstrated greater confidence in their judgments, (Mayseless & Kruglanski, 1987), greater striving for a group consensus (Kruglanski, Webster, & Klem, 1993), and greater persuasion via superficial characteristics of a message like the mere number of arguments (Klein & Webster, 2000). So who are these high or low need for closure people? Well, the literature seems pretty mute on this point. What's clear is that this is an individual difference that makes a difference for many outcomes, but exactly how to predict a person's place on the continuum is still unclear. -1 94-
There are a couple hints, though. One is that in a study comparing accounting majors and studio-art majors atthe University of Maryland, the art students had a lower need for closure than the accounting majors (Webster & Kruglanski, 1994). The need for closure scale also tends to be negatively correlated with the need for cognition (i.e., higher need for cognition is associated with lower need for closure) and positively correlated with characteristics like dogmatism (Webster & Kruglanski, 1994). Maximizers and Satisficers Similar to the need for closure is an individual difference in decision strategies known as "maximizing" and "satisficing:' To maximize is to compare and analyze every available option whereas to satisfice is to aim at choosing an option that is merely good enough (Schwartz et al., 2002). Maximizing represents an ideal of rational choice, but satisficing is the more common strategy. Iyengar and Lepper (2000) report that people are more likely to avoid making a choice when confronted with many (vs. few) options. Such a finding suggests that, in the context of simple choice situations, too many choices requires the relatively involved maximizing strategy that seems too time- and energy-consuming to pursue. Taking the distinction between decision strategies further, Schwartz et al. (2002) developed an individual differences scale to assess peoples' tendency to engage in either maximizing behavior or satisficing behavior. This scale includes items like "No matter how satisfied I am with my job, it's only right for me to be on the lookout for better opportunities" and "I never settle for second best:' Two consistent findings emerge from research on maximizing and satisficing. First, maximizing strategies, unsurprisingly, result in the consideration of more units of information before making a choice (Iyengar, Wells, & Schwartz, 2006). Second, maximizing strategies are often accompanied by negative feelings of regret and unhappiness (Iyengar & Lepper, 2000; Iyengar et al., 2006; Parker, de Bruin, & Fischhoff, 2007; Schwartz et al., 2002). -195-
Self-Compassion I've avoided a discussion of "self-esteem" here because it's become such a common variable, and you are no doubt familiar with it and how to work it into a reading if you were so inclined. You can also see the section on self-verification elsewhere in this book for a brief discussion (page 181 ). You may be Jess familiar, though, with research on what psychologists call "self-compassion:' There are three components of self-compassion (Neff, 2003). The first is "self-kindness;' which is the tendency to be caring and understanding with oneself instead of resorting to harsh critical judgment. Even though people tend to think they are kinder to others than they are to themselves, those who are self-compassionate report being just as kind to themselves. The second element is the "sense of common humanity;' which is the understanding that all humans are fallible, make mistakes, and so on. Although some people can feel isolated when thinking about their individual flaws, those who are self-compassionate see their personal struggles as reflective of a common human experience. Finally, self-compassion is associated with "mindfulness;' which in this context reflects a focus on the present moment and a sense of non-judgment. By keeping a distant perspective on oneself, a self-compassionate person can not only identify times of personal hardship but can do so without being "swept up in and carried away by the story line of one's own pain" (Neff, 2009). On the one hand, self-compassion is a powerful predictor of anxiety and depression, whereby reduced self-compassion predicts a greater likelihood of anxiety and depression (Neff, Hseih, & Dejitthirat, 2005). On the other hand, self-compassion is associated with positive outcomes like feelings of social connectedness and life satisfaction (see Neff, 2009). Similarly, relatively self-compassionate women are more comfortable with their bodies and have less anxiety about how their bodies would be evaluated than less self-compassionate women (Magnus, 2007). Indeed, programs exist to increase self-compassion (e.g., -196-
compassionate mind training; Gilbert & Procter, 2006). These programs have been effective in increasing self-compassion (resulting in reduced depression, feelings of inferiority, etc.) by teaching people about what it means to have self-compassion (discussed above), facilitating discussions of fears people have of being too self-compassionate, and helping them to non-judgmentally understand their own tendencies to be self-critical. Self-Monitoring Self-monitoring refers to the "regulation of expressive and selfpresentational behaviors in social situations" (Fuglestad & Snyder, 2009). Basically, some people are pretty interested in monitoring and controlling their public behavior whereas other people aren't as interested. People who are categorized as "high self-monitors" are those who are very aware of social norms and cues and who respond accordingly. Their behavior is thus strongly informed by the social situation. By contrast, people who are categorized as "low self-monitors" are those who pay less attention to such norms and social pressures and instead behave in a manner consistent with their unique, individual point of view. When it comes to predicting people's behavior from their unique set of attitudes and opinions, low self-monitors display much greater consistency between how much they like or dislike something and how likely they are to engage in relevant behavior (Ajzen, Timko, & White, 1982). That is, people's attitudes may or may not correspond to their behavior. I might have very favorable attitudes toward high-quality clothing, but I may not actually purchase that clothing. Whereas a high self-monitor might show that disconnect, the research would predict that low self-monitors in that situation would actually purchase the clothing that they like. Other research has shown that high self-monitors are more likely to adjust their behavior in group discussions, depending on whether the group norms encouraged individuality or conformity; low selfmonitors, however, were not affected by the group norm (Snyder & Monson, 1975). This individual difference also highlights a difference -197-
in consumer behavior. Low self-monitors seem to care more about the quality of a product, whereas high self-monitors attend more to the image or status of the brand, its packaging, and its popularity (e.g., Snyder & DeBono, 1985) -198-
Population Stereotypes: Updated In their popular reference book, Psychology of the Psychic, the authors present an appendix of "population stereotypes:' By this they just meant the responses people are likely to give to a particular question. Such data are instrumental in constructing popular psychological forces like the number 7 or 37, and a triangle in a circle (although they aren't quite forces per se and rather questions to which people generally provide the same responses). Although the aforementioned psychological forces are evident in the data provided in that appendix, I wondered if there might be more to gain using their very simple polling strategy. To establish these population stereotypes, David Marks and Richard Kamman surveyed hundreds of people merely to ascertain their responses to things like generating a number between 1 - 10. Jon Thomspon, in his first Naked Mentalism book, provides a similar data-driven strategy to construct propless mentalism demonstrations. Surely others have attempted similar projects. The following is my own contribution to the available literature. Using Amazon.corn's Mechanical Turk program, I conducted brief online surveys for people across the United States. Three pre-written questions were displayed at random, and people merely entered their responses. Importantly, these were free responses and they weren't given options to pick from. They freely wrote the thoughts that came to mind in text boxes. Below you will see the exact questions these participants saw along with the number of people who responded with a particular answer. 300 people (48.7% men, 50.7% women) responded to the survey, and through random presentation, about 100 people responded to each question, which provides a decent sense of what people tend to say in response to these questions. Some of the questions resulted in clear patterns of responsesbut others did not reveal clear patterns, but I present those data as well in case you find some meaning that I did not find. -199-