Should you tell Facebook about your resolutions?

Now that you’ve set your difficult, specific, and attainable resolutions for 2013, should you tell people about your plans?

Before you update your Facebook status proclaiming your intention to lose 15 pounds, run a marathon, or publish 20 papers, you should think about your reasons for broadcasting your plans to the world. If you’re thinking about this public commitment the wrong way, you might be setting yourself up for disaster.

Did you vote? Wear your sticker! Update your status! Send all the tweets!

Many polls are still open, meaning it’s not too late to encourage your friends and family to get out and rock the vote!

 

Yesterday I mentioned that using channel factors to make voting seem easy and convenient can increase voter turnout.

 

Know what else can? Norms! Especially when you use the right kinds of norms.

 

There are two types of norms – descriptive and prescriptive. Prescriptive norms are what society says you should do (like telling your friends that they should vote, or that voting is the “right thing” to do). Descriptive norms, on the other hand, simply describe what people actually do, like merely saying that the majority of people that you know have voted. 

 

As it turns out, people are remarkably sensitive to descriptive norms – sometimes even moreso than norms that try to provide moral or societal guidance. Simply telling people what other people actually do, even without explicitly saying that the target person should do that thing as well, can be a surprisingly strong motivator.

 

Take hotel rooms, for example. Have you been in a hotel room recently? Have you seen those little cards encouraging you to be green and re-use your towels? In one study looking at norms, Noah Goldstein and colleagues tried out different  towel-reuse-cards to see which one would work the best. Each guest at a certain hotel either saw a “Please Reuse Your Towel” card with no normative information, a card mentioning that the “majority of past guests at this hotel have reused their towels,” or an even more specific card mentioning that “the majority of past guests who stayed in this room have reused their towels.” The researchers found that the more specific the normative information, the more likely the guests were to reuse their towels themselves. Telling people that the majority of past guests who stayed in that room reused their towels had an especially strong effect on their likelihood of reusing the towels themselves.

 

That’s fine and all, but can they really work better than prescriptive norms?

 

Sure they can. In a different study, Robert Cialdini was trying to combat a big problem in the Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona. Many people would visit this park and then take the petrified wood from the forest with them after they visited, as a sort of souvenir…but this small action, multipled by thousands of visitors, had a dramatically negative effect on the local ecosystem. Cialdini had to find a way to get people to stop taking the wood with them.

 

So what did he do? He placed different norm-based signs in the forest. The sign either used prescriptive norms to tell people what they should do (e.g. “Please don’t take the wood from the forest”) or they used descriptive norms to tell people what others actually do, either telling the truth (“Many past visitors have removed the petrified wood from the park, changing the state of the Petrified Forest”) or lying (“The vast majority of past visitors have left the petrified wood in the park, preserving the natural state of the Petrified Forest”). In this situation, prescriptive norms worked the best, but the next-best option was the descriptive norm telling people that most other visitors do not take the wood. When people saw the descriptive norm stating that most people take the wood, even though the point of this message was to show how damaging this is, they were significantly more likely to take the wood themselves — because everyone else was doing it. When they saw the descriptive norm saying that most people don’t take the wood, however, it discouraged from taking the wood because doing so would have made them different. 

 

The researchers conclude that when it comes to getting people not to do something (e.g. “Don’t take the wood!”), prescriptive norms work best. However, when you are trying to get people to act, it’s actually more effective to send out an “Everybody’s doing it!” descriptive norm, which will encourage people to fit themselves into the norm.

 

What does this tell us about voting? Since you are trying to get people to do something (not avoid doing something), set strong, positive descriptive norms! Wear your “I Voted” stickers, tweet that you voted, update your Facebook status, and encourage everyone to broadcast the simple fact that they voted to the world! Setting a strong descriptive norm by making it clear that the majority of people are voting is the most effective way to use norm-based compliance to get people out to the polls – it should be even more effective than prescriptive norms stating that it’s what they should be doing. It also helps if these descriptive norms are as specific as possible – knowing that most other people in your age group, sorority/fraternity, neighborhood, club, school, whatever have voted can make the norm more powerful, just like the hotel room norms with the towels. And whatever you do, do NOT accidentally set a descriptive norm saying that most members of someone’s group do not vote (e.g. by saying something like, “Most young people don’t vote! You should go be a leader and let your voice be heard!”) Even though it sounds inspiring, a descriptive norm like that can backfire — BIG time.

 

So slap on that sticker, be a loudmouth, and set some good, strong descriptive norms! You have a few hours left to let people know that everyone’s doin’ it!

 

---

Goldstein, N., Cialdini, R., & Griskevicius, V. (2008). A Room with a Viewpoint: Using Social Norms to Motivate Environmental Conservation in Hotels Journal of Consumer Research, 35 (3), 472-482 DOI: 10.1086/586910
Cialdini, R., Demaine, L., Sagarin, B., Barrett, D., Rhoads, K., & Winter, P. (2006). Managing social norms for persuasive impact Social Influence, 1 (1), 3-15 DOI: 10.1080/15534510500181459

Where will you be voting? Figure it out now!

With everyone talking about the importance of “voter turnout,” how do you make sure potential voters make it to the polls?

Simple – make them figure out ahead of time how and when they’ll get there.

Can we predict the “undecided voters”?

Now that Election Day is upon us, can you remember way back (a whole few weeks ago!) when there were still those mystical Undecided Voters? Even aside from the sketch comedy skits that mocked their very existence, many people were still wondering how voters could possibly have been “undecided” so close to the election.

However, according to research from Silvia Galdi, Luciano Arcuri, and Bertram Gawronski, those voters might have been “decided” after all – even if they didn’t realize it at the time.

Mirror, Mirror on the Wall, How Does Psych Reflect Us All?

“Our environment, the world in which we live and work, is a mirror of our attitudes and expectations.” – Earl Nightingale, American motivational speaker

In 1898, Norman Triplett stumbled upon an interesting observation as he watched a group of cyclists competing in a race: He noticed that the athletes tended to ride faster when they were around other people than when they were alone. He successfully replicated this phenomenon in the laboratory by asking groups of children to reel in spools of fishing line, noting that the children working in pairs reeled the line in faster than those who worked alone. Triplett published the findings, labeled the phenomenon “social facilitation,” and kicked off the entire field of experimental social psychology as we know it with (arguably) the first-ever published social psychology paper.*

The fact that the first paper in social psychology derived its hypotheses from a real-life experience is not surprising. After all, social psychology itself is supposed to be the “scientific study of how thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of others.”¹ If people in a field that revolves around interpersonal interactions don’t draw our examples and scientific questions from real life, from where exactly are we supposed to get them?

Yet it’s not only casual anecdotes, observations, or everyday happenings that have influenced the trajectory of our field. Social psychology has actually served a truly interesting historical function: Throughout the years, the field has managed to become a cultural mirror, consistently reflecting society’s standards, norms, and cultural traditions in its zeitgeists and trends. Going back through the annals of social psychological science can almost feel like reading a history textbook; as you parse through the findings, you see how the current events, pop culture, societal phenomena, and core values of each era shifted and grew along with the research trends.

Seeing psychology everywhere: The case of Gangnam Style

This semester, I’m teaching Intro to Social Psychology — which I pretty much see as an excuse to share my joint obsessions with social psychology and pop culture with a group of one hundred 18-to-21-year-olds who essentially have to be my captive audience.

Last week, I asked my students to watch the viral video “Gangnam Style” by Korean pop sensation Psy and come up with ways to use anything we’ve learned in the course so far to explain any aspect of the video. Because I have an awesome group of students, I got some really interesting and creative answers! So, below is a sampling of some of the social psych phenomena that my students found in the video, though there were many more great responses that I didn’t touch on in this post. Like I always say, once you know about the concepts, you really can find psychology in everything around you!

Are your 9/11 memories really your own?

I can remember exactly where I was eleven years ago when I learned why the sky was starting to fill with smoke about 30 miles to the west.

Though I live in Illinois now, I’m originally from Long Island. In September 2001, I was just beginning the 9th grade at Friends Academy, my new high school in Locust Valley. I had just started getting to know the people who would become my closest friends over the next four years. I was on my way to Computer Programming when I ran into Molly, a girl on my bus.

“Hey, did you hear?” Molly asked, somewhat casually.

“No, what’s up? Oh, is Maggie taking the bus today?!” I asked excitedly. Maggie was Molly’s adorable baby sister, whose expeditions onto our bus were rare (but exciting) events.

“No…apparently something really big just happened in the city. They’re canceling class right now and calling an all-school assembly in the Dolan Center. You didn’t hear?”

“Oh, no, but thank God. I didn’t finish my math homework last night and I didn’t have time to do it on the bus, this is awesome,” I said with a smile. “Do you have any idea why they’re canceling class, though?!”

I had no idea at the time how much I would cringe for the rest of my life whenever I looked back and thought about my first reaction to hearing that “something big” was going on in the city.

Why do swimmers hate Lane 8?

Jon Scheyer | Duke Blue Devils, 2009

Before I went to college, I was never a big basketball fan (for those who know me now, I’m aware that this is probably surprising). As a result, when I arrived for my freshman year at Duke and began attending a ton of basketball games, I had the opportunity to learn an entire dictionary’s worth of terms for the first time.

One of the phrases that I quickly heard was “playing down.” Even though we were highly ranked and expected to do well later in the season against big-ticket teams like the #2 Texas Longhorns (who we eventually beat by 31 points), I was somewhat surprised by the fact that our margins of victories over early opponents were, quite frankly, not as impressive as I had expected them to be.

“Ugh, we’re playing down again. We always do this,” my friend Leah would say.

It wasn’t intentional. The players probably didn’t want to run up the score, but they also probably didn’t want to make every game against a low-ranked opponent a too-close-for-comfort nail-biter. You would think that, given the large difference in rankings (and presumably in ability levels), the better team should be able to maintain a respectable 15-20 point lead — wide enough that no one had to worry about the outcome, but close enough that it wasn’t rubbing the score in the other team’s faces.

Yet…they didn’t. Most of the time they made sloppy mistakes, missing easy 3-point shots or turning over the ball more times than we could count. The looks of frustration on their faces let us know for sure that this wasn’t anything they were doing on purpose. They weren’t thinking, “OK, this is a no-name team…let’s just not play as well as usual.” They were certainly putting in effort, but they simply couldn’t break past a ceiling that seemed to be hanging far lower than usual, even though their skills were demonstrably better when they played higher-ranked teams. In short, as Leah noted, they were “playing down.”

Blind athletes provide clues about the nature of our emotions.

‘Expressions of Joy’ from ‘The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals.’

One of the most important ways that we learn how to interact with the world around us is through observational learning. By watching how our friends and family members behave, we learn at a very young age how to do things like turn on a lightbulb, open a door, or play with a doll, without the tedious trial-by-error reinforcement process that would be required if we only learned things through classic behaviorism. With this in mind, it’s only natural to assume that we have learned when to smile politely, wrinkle our noses in disgust, or furrow our brows in anger by watching the people around us react in those ways when presented with similar situations.

‘Expressions of Suffering – Weeping’ from ‘The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals.’

But what if observational learning isn’t the only way in which we figure out how to express our emotions? What if those emotional expressions — or at least, some of those expressions — actually come “pre-programmed” into our very nature, and we would make those grimaces, brow-furrows, and polite smiles of thinly-veiled contempt without ever seeing other people make these expressions first?

The psychology of doping accusations: Which athletes raise the most suspicion?

Why do we immediately feel that “ping” of suspicion when some athletes achieve great Olympic feats? And why would certain athletes make us feel that way, while other record-breaking winners don’t inspire the same level of disbelief?