Generally Thinking

Month: June 2009

What is beauty?
Is beauty just a cultural thing, based on whatever the common consensus is at any particular time? Or is there a ‘true beauty’, that we find in all cultures and times? Actually it’s a little of both. Do you want to know which aspects of ‘beauty’ are arbitrary, and which seem to be biological? Or whether stick thin models are truly beautiful, or just an artificial fad? Then keep reading!

A strange event got my mind onto this topic. I was in Primark, a discount clothes store here in Leeds. An interesting peculiarity about this store is that its layout makes it impossible to get to the men’s section without walking through the women’s underwear section. Having no other option, I made my way through this mysterious section of the store.

As I slowly walked towards my destination, I saw someone from the corner of my eye who caught my attention, and my head instinctively moved to her. And there she was, in all her glory.

An industry-standard ‘female’ mannequin.

I’d just walked through a women’s underwear section, which, being a busy Saturday afternoon, was filled not only with lots of women’s underwear, but also lots of women, and a mannequin is what catches my eye.

Maybe that’s an interesting peculiarity about me?

No… don’t open that door…

Sexy?

Why did the mannequin catch my eye? The mannequin’s job is display the clothes in the best possible light. It’s a hard job to get into – the hours are long and employers will only hire you if you’re the epitome of attractiveness; because the same item of clothing worn by two people will generally look better on the more attractive one.

‘Male’ mannequins don’t have sunken chests and pot bellies, do they? The idea is to make you think you’ll look like that, if you’d only purchase the item of clothing.

Fair enough. But, why do they look like they do? Why am I supposed to find this particular shape and size woman attractive? I looked into it, but stuck to female beauty, because (a) it’s a more interesting topic (don’t ask how long I spent “researching” pictures), and (b) it has more relevance to issues like body image concerns, the effect of the media, and so on.

Eye of the Beholder

We can start to answer this question by looking at what different cultures and times have held to be beautiful. If there is wide variety, we can say beauty is mostly cultural. If there’s wide agreement, we can say it’s biological.

The classic comment I got while chatting to people about this, is that although “thin is in” right now, in the past, fat was desirable. Not ‘curvy’, but actually overweight. I wondered if this was actually true.

Here are a couple of adverts. The left one’s from 1885, the right one from roughly 100 years later:

Things have changed since 1885! Though to be fair I did pick both of these specifically to illustrate my point, so they don’t really prove anything.

To find more evidence I searched the web, looking at how different cultures across time had depicted women in their art. I don’t have time or space to give a full rundown, but here’s some stuff I found out:

Women through time
- The oldest known representation is the Venus of Hohle Fels. It’s around 35,000 years old, and is most clearly an overweight woman.
- Of course there’s the work of Flemish artist Paul Peter Rubens in the early 1600s, who influenced the ‘Rubanesque’ movement. Rubens displayed women as pale and plump; this was considered attractive. For example, have a look at his painting, Venus at a Mirror. This is the same Goddess of love and beauty who was depicted more slimly in other times.
- Slim women got their fair share of attention too. The Egyptians consistently portrayed a more slender ideal in their art, similar to the current trends. See the painting here, from the Tomb of Nakht, around 15th c BCE. Also, based on the paintings I found, the Chinese also preferred the slim look.
- Weight wasn’t the only factor. For example in Elizabethan England (1558-1603), beauty was pale skin and a plucked forehead! Yes, the hair was plucked to make the forehead appear larger. Not sure where that one came from, but pale skin was a sign of wealth, partly because the ingredients of the cosmetic of choice to achieve this look were rather expensive, and also health because if your face was clear and pale you probably didn’t have small pox.
I didn’t do an extensive study of all cultures prefer, but it’s pretty clear that there’s been a lot of variation over time. So far, beauty does look like it’s in the eye of the beholder.

Metal necks, ceramic mouths and silicone breasts

Even within the cultures of the world today, there exists massive variation in what is considered beautiful. It’s amazing how creative we are with this; all manner of adornment, tattooing and manipulation of body parts are linked to beauty. Again, not a comprehensive study but just a few points:
- In many parts of Africa, obesity is desirable – it is associated with abundance and fertility. In some areas, girls go to “fattening farms” – much the same in principle to health farms and gyms – a cultural institution aimed at increasing the appearance and charm of its clientele by placing them more in line with the current consensus.
- This preference was also found in a study in 2008; in the US, men preferred a body shape thinner than the average, while men in Ghana preferred a body shape that was heavier than the average. (1)
- Again though, we find that there’s more to beauty than body weight. The Padaung women of Southeast Asia place metal rings around their necks. They start this practice from a young age, and over time, the rings lengthen the appearance of the neck, increasing their desirability. This has lead to an imaginative nickname: “Giraffe Women”.
- In some African tribes, large ceramic and wooden plates are held in the mouth to stretch out the lips. Bigger lips = more desirable. Eventually, the lips have stretched so much that the whole plate can be pushed into the mouth with ease!
- Perhaps strangest of all is the modern West. Many women undergo surgery to alter the size of their breasts, waists and lips. Other surgical procedures are also common, usually based around increasing the appearance of youth.
Imagine if Western culture had evolved to desire mouth-plates instead of silicone breasts. Imagine women on the cover of Vogue holding ceramic plates in their mouths, or Pamela Anderson running down a sandy Californian beach, mouth-plate bouncing up and down as she goes.

It sounds ridiculous, but is it any more ridiculous than putting lumps of silicone in your breasts? Or something like liposuction, where you save up thousands to literally have the fat sucked out of you? All over the world, people go to incredible lengths to match up to the standards of beauty their culture endorses. At first glance these standards do not appear to be consistent. When a culture changes, its standards of beauty often change with it. So to a certain extent, beauty is ‘democratic’, decided by whatever the people happen to prefer. But there’s more to this story than differences. For example, even though “thin is in” at the moment, it’s not true that every thin woman is considered beautiful, is it? You couldn’t replace a Playboy centrefold with a random girl of equal weight.

So there must be something else going on, other than cultural influences. Perhaps the answer to what this is lies in what the different cultures agree on.

We’re not so different after all

Evolutionary psychologist Devendra Singh discovered that all around the world, men have a preference for women with a low waist-to-hip ratio (WHR) – A waist that is relatively thin and hips that are relatively broad. This is regardless of the actual weight of the woman. The magic ratio is 0.7; here’s an example you might recognise: (2)

Marilyn Monroe – 0.7 waist-to-hip ratio

If you zoom in so that the hips measure 20mm, you’ll find the waist measures 14mm – a perfect 0.7 WHR. This ratio is consistent in beauty icons across time and culture. Audrey Hepburn had it, the average Playboy centrefold is 0.68: even the Venus de Milo has a WHR close to 0.7. And a relatively thin waist has been seen as attractive through time – a study of English and Chinese literature consistently found references to thin waists in descriptions of women considered beautiful at that time. (3)

So what’s the attraction to this particular shape? It’s because a favourable WHR suggests that a woman is young, healthy, and fertile. It’s a signal of genetic fitness and a good choice for a mate. Women whose fertility has been impaired tend to have higher WHRs, and unhealthy, starving women cannot maintain large buttocks and breasts – they need to use this fat as fuel.

Not surprisingly then, the magic 0.7 ratio is a preference shared in almost all cultures studied. WHR provides very important information to a species whose main drives are to survive and reproduce. Although there is some controversy over just how universal the 0.7 WHR preference is, there is reason to believe that even if fads and fashions change, this preference would remain – to so some extent.(4)

Face the Facts

One thing we haven’t looked at yet is facial beauty. This is typically studied by showing photographs of faces (or actual people sometimes) and asking participants to rate their attractiveness on a scale. In a massive meta-analysis of over 900 studies of this kind, psychologists discovered a huge agreement both cross-ethnically and cross-culturally on which faces were attractive. This analysis strongly disagrees with the idea that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder”, and suggests there’s something universal and genetic about facial attractiveness – something we all recognise.

Three important aspects seem to be symmetry, clear skin, and averageness. The more symmetrical a face is, the more attractive it seems to us, and when a group of faces are morphed into one by taking the average of all their proportions, that artificial face is usually seen as more attractive than any of the individual ones.

Researchers did exactly that with photos of entrants to the Miss Germany contest. The average face was rated more attractive even than the eventual winner. Here ‘she’ is on the left. But, it’s not purely averageness that is attractive, because several unattractive faces morphed into one is not seen as more beautiful than a prototypical attractive face. (By the way, check out Beauty Check, where this photo came from – it’s an excellent site).

Don’t forget to indicate!

Looking at the evidence, a certain portion of the beauty pie is taken up by biological preferences inherent in most, if not all, humans – the indicators of health, fertility, and good genes.

The rest is taken up by cultural preferences. Why do societies differ in these ways? Are they just arbitrary? Way back in time, did a group of high-status people in a tribe decide that long necks were sexy, and dictate that preference to their subordinates, eventually spreading the idea through the whole tribe?

Partly, but even cultural preferences are indicators in their own right. They might signal things like health or whether a person has reached breeding age, but the thing about health is that it looks pretty much looks the same wherever you live. Other things might look differently in different areas – for example, wealth. There seems to be a pattern between body weight preference and wealth – although the specific weight that is used as this marker seems to differ across cultures.

Researchers Sobal and Stunkard did a large review of sudies that looked into both body weight and socioeconomic status. They found that in rich countries, the correlation is negative – the richer you are, the thinner you tend to be – and in poor or undeveloped countries the correlation is positive – rich people tend to be overweight. (5)

The reasons for this are unclear, but it’s thought to go something like this: in a poor society you need to be wealthy to become fat, and if you’re a hungry person in a poor society, wealth is very attractive. So overweight people suddenly become appealing. Also, more weight is seen to relate to maturity, and it’s useful to have mature people around in hard times. However, in a society that’s generally rich, these preferences aren’t activated, which allows thinner body ideals to evolve more often in these places.

Another interesting study found that men going in to a canteen reported that they preferred heavier women than men going out of the canteen. Hungry men prefer heavier women. So if you hate the thin ideal and want a way to get rid of it, now you know how – starve all the men in the society! (please don’t, though). (6)

What is beauty?

Combining these findings, we come to a basic formula:

Adherence to social consensus + Genetic Fitness = Physical beauty

Social consensus will be things like the current body size preferences, fashion/adornment preferences, and so on. Genetic Fitness is WHR, facial symmetry, and things like that.

So take a genetically fit (‘biologically attractive’) woman, and throw her in any space and time. Provided she can match up to the status quo of that time, she’ll always be a catch. And even if she didn’t match up, she’d probably be seen as attractive to some extent. Likewise, a woman who isn’t as genetically attractive can ‘trade up’ by adhering to the social consensus.

In other words, take Jessica Alba, and fatten her up, or use brass rings to make her neck seem longer, or pluck her hair line back and make her skin pale – and she’d still be considered beautiful in Ghana, Northern Thailand, or Elizabethan England, respectively. Do all three, of course, and she’d be an absolute smash in a goth club.

I’m being superficial

I’m being superficial on purpose here, because I just wanted to look into beauty. There’s more to attractiveness than physical beauty of course – personality, how you carry yourself, confidence, and all kinds of other things – although I know it doesn’t seem that way, because our culture is very superficial. The only thing is, I don’t know how much of the attractiveness pie is taken up by physical beauty, and how much is taken up by these other things. Maybe that’s a topic for another day.

Is it right or wrong for a society to be as focused on physical beauty as we are? I don’t know, but it’s clear that we’re not alone on this – through time and space, people have altered their bodies to look more attractive. All manner of cosmetics, paintings, decorations, piercing, exercise regimes, scarification and accessories have been used. But all of these practices are essentially arbitrary, and relevant to a specific culture at a specific place and time. They establish connections with the norms of that time, or to a particular group within a society.

But it’s useful to understand that apart from the biological markers of health and fertility, there’s no definition of beauty that isn’t considered ugly in another place or time.
June 24, 2009
Rewards and Motivation
You’ve probably heard the advice “When you’re doing well, give yourself a reward!” – it finds its way into just about every self-help book you’ve ever picked up. But are there any times where this is bad advice? Why, yes there are – when your motivation for a task is intrinsic.

I have explained what intrinsic motivation is and how to get it in “What’s your motivation?”, but briefly, extrinsic motivation is where you perform some task to achieve some benefit at the end of it, and intrinsic motivation is where the reward is the activity itself, rather than from any benefits that may come as a result of it. For example, if you play football for the fun of it you’re intrinsically motivated, but if you playing football to lose some weight you’re extrinsically motivated. And there are shades of grey between the two.

If you’re intrinsically motivated to do a task, you’re in a good place. Say you love writing. You’re more likely to sit down and do it, because you enjoy it for it’s own sake, and you’ll probably be better at it as a result.

But if you start receiving money for writing, something strange happens.

“Intrinsic motivation is hindered by tangible rewards.”

A part of you thinks “I’m doing this for the money”. Intrinsic motivation comes when our needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness are met; anything that provides for these needs will tend to increase intrinsic motivation, anything that undermines them will decrease intrinsic motivation. Receiving money for writing is an external control – it will undermine autonomy to some extent, because you are not doing the task purely for the enjoyment of it.

Intrinsic motivation goes hand-in-hand with enjoyment of the activity, performance, vitality, and self-esteem. If you’re intrinsic motivation takes a hit, these things potentially could too.

Maybe this is why a band’s second album usually isn’t as good as their first?

Effective Rewards

So is there a way to receive a reward without it being seen as controlling? Yes, by making it unexpected. Unexpected rewards have no bearing on intrinsic motivation. Obviously, if you’re using rewards on yourself, you can’t very well give yourself a surprise reward. Even if you set up a clock with a randomised timer, you’re still expecting it to go off at some point.

But if you’re a manager, going up to someone at a random time and saying “Bob, you’ve done well this month. We’re giving you an extra $300!” will not undermine intrinsic motivation, whereas saying “Bob, do well this month and you’ll get an extra $300!” will.

Important note: Remember, this only applies to intrinsic motivation – those times when a task is already interesting. If you look at the previous article on this subject, you’ll see that in the diagram (scroll down a bit), there are a few types of extrinsic motivation. If the motivation for an activity is currently extrinsic, it’s OK to use rewards.

For example, if you really don’t want to go to the gym but know that you must, then it’s OK to get a movie as reward for completing your workout. Or if you’re an employer and there’s a repetitive or more dreaded part of the job, rewards will increase your employees motivation to do it.

Positive Feedback

The above only applies to tangible rewards. Money, gifts, cookies; whatever. If the reward is verbal, different rules apply – positive feedback will actually enhance intrinsic motivation. This seems to be, in part, because a verbal reward tends to be unexpected. It’s not like your boss ever says “Bob, do a good job this month and I’ll give you some positive feedback!”

“Verbal rewards can enhance intrinsic motivation – if they’re seen as informational“

There are several studies that confirm this. They look at times when the participants are told to expect an evaluation of their performance on a task. An anticipated evaluation that includes positive feedback does seem to undermine intrinsic motivation.

But the primary reason that positive feedback is effective is that it provides a feeling of competence to the recipient, one of the three requirements of intrinsic motivation mentioned above.

Because of this, if positive feedback is given in an authoritative and controlling way, it too will undermine intrinsic motivation. So verbal rewards need to be informative, not controlling, and preferably not given solely in expected appraisals.

Again, this is more difficult to apply to self-administered rewards.

Careers

One interesting question raised by this research, is what would happen if you take something you love, and try to make a career out of it? While previously, you only played the violin or wrote poetry for pleasure and relaxation, now part of your motivation is to make money, pay the bills, achieve recognition in your field, and so on.

The data suggests that your intrinsic motivation would be undermined by this, to some extent.

But as mentioned above, intrinsic motivation comes from three sources – autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Entering a career as a violinist might open you to relationships with other like-minded individuals, which could compensate for the extrinsic rewards.

You could always consciously make effort to increase autonomy, competence and relatedness. More on that in this article.

Children

When it comes to children, just throw the whole rule book out of the window. With a predictable awkwardness so typical of their kind, children respond differently to rewards than adults do.

Firstly, in terms of tangible rewards, children are more detrimentally affected. So tangible rewards must be used carefully with kids, so as not to negatively affect their intrinsic motivation.

Secondly, verbal rewards appear to have no effect on intrinsic motivation in children. See. I knew they didn’t listen!

Whatever you do, don’t take the above two paragraphs as advice. I’m just putting this information in the article in case any parents reading this were planning to use their child as a guinea pig – things work differently for kids, so don’t bother trying!

Now, I’m not saying you shouldn’t turn the apple of your eye into a psychology experiment, for the good of science; only that you should seek the advice of a professional or find a proper source of information first!

Abstinence

Just a final note based on my experiences with quitting smoking and other things. If you need motivation to abstain from a particular thing, many sources recommend rewarding yourself with that thing.

Example – you’re trying to quit junk food, so if you’ve managed to refrain from eating burgers all week, the advice goes, go ahead and chomp down on the weekend, to get the craving out of your system.

Mileage may vary, but I would advice you NOT to reward yourself with the thing you’re abstaining from! I think it’s a rationalisation, an excuse to hop off the wagon. For me personally, it also seems to increase cravings, not reduce them. There might be some neurological explanation for this; I know there is for smoking, but it might be the case when quitting other things too.

So if you’re quitting junk food, reward yourself with a night at the theatre, a new hair cut, an item of clothing etc – not a cheeseburger.

Recommended Reading:
- Why We Do What We Do: Understanding Self-Motivation
References:

Deci, E., Koestner, R. & Ryan, R.M. (1999). A Meta-Analytic Review of Experiments Examining the Effects of Extrinsic Rewards on Intrinsic Motivation. Psychological Bulletin. 125:6, 627-668
June 19, 2009
The Happiest Country

“When I am abroad, I always make it a rule never to criticise or attack the government of my own country. I make up for lost time when I come home.”

– Winston Churchill

It’s not easy running a country – governments have a difficult job. They have to take care of the health, wealth and security of millions of people, and unfortunately for them, the better they are at it, the more people seem to expect from them. They’re also the first people to take the blame when things go wrong.

But, it is certainly true that some governments aren’t quite up to scratch. Some are better at governing than others. But which? What yardstick would you use to determine this? GDP? Lack of corruption? Health of the citizens?

Or would all of this be irrelevant in comparison to the happiness of the people?

The Kingdom of Bhutan in South Asia has placed Gross National Happiness as its chief concern, over financial issues. They avoid environmental destruction, and try to preserve the culture and traditions of their country, to foster a strong national identity.

That’s a pretty interesting stance to take, compared with the the money-focused west. I wondered whether the people of Bhutan are happier than westerners are, so I tried to find out. The first data I found looking happiness and nation was in Daniel Nettle’s book, Happiness: The Science Behind your Smile. By the way, that book is well worth getting – it’s cheap and a quick read (you’ll probably get through it in an evening), yet it manages to cover the happiness research comprehensively without being too technical.

Here’s the average happiness scores on a 1-10 scale. Find your country!

Note that the original data is from reference (1). Looking at the table, Switzerland came out top, and Bulgaria lowest in this sample of countries. The lower scoring countries are the poorer ones and the former communist ones – all the events and changes that took place in these countries seem to have given the people some understandable discomfort.

I expected Japan to be higher as I’d heard many good things about the quality and ease of life there. The UK are high in the list, which is good to know since I live here, although we might be helped out by the Irish, as I recall another study which said Northern Ireland was the happiest country within the UK. The US, along with its constitutional right to pursue happiness, is up near the top too.

Why are these countries happier?

So what is it about how these countries that makes the differences in happiness? The most obvious difference is wealth; countries in poverty are far less happy overall than the wealthier ones. But the correlation isn’t completely linear, because once countries are out of poverty, the benefits of wealth level off.

This is a problem with the western ‘pursuit of property’ culture, which involves getting as rich as possible and using the money to make better homes, sanitation, central heating, and other comforts. It works, until the basic needs are met. Then the benefits tail off – it seems like money can only get a country to a certain happiness point, after which we adapt to further luxuries.

What about our friends in Bhutan? Well, this study did not collect data there, but another one by Adrian White includes some data that was collected there. White took the happiness data from another study, the Happy Planet Index (HPI), and put it into a mapping program. (2)

According to this study, Bhutan ranked 8th out of 178. If this is correct, it’s impressive, considering Bhutan has one of the lowest GDP’s (on the map, Bhutan is the tiny dark red country, bordering with China to the north and Bangladesh to the south).

However, there is some controversy over this paper. Apparently, in the original study from which the map was made, data did not exist for 80 of the 178 countries, and the happiness levels were simple estimates. This complicates things, because it isn’t clear whether Bhutan was one of the countries that was estimated.

So, I dropped an email to the HPI team – the people who actually collected the data. Nic Marks himself gave me an ultra-fast reply. He’s a good person to speak to about this, because he actually advises Bhutan on their gross national happiness work. He had this to say:

“Yes the bhutan data for HPI 2006 was estimated but not as per all the other estimations as we had access to one survey within the country … however in retrospect not a reliable estimate really … we have new better estimate but it is still an estimate … what i can say is that it is much lower than the 2006 one and basically would suggest that Bhutan suffers from rural deprivation like other developing countries … however it is not as low as its GDP would suggest it should be … “

So the money-focused west appears to be happier than the GDH-focused Bhutan; but Bhutan does better than other countries of a similar wealth.

Happiness + Ecological Efficiency

Marks also mentioned that there’s a new Happy Planet Index coming out next month. I’ll probably get that, because the HPI is such an interesting concept. They combine life-satisfacion measurements with ecological efficiency.

Their aim is to discover whether it’s possible to use a country’s resources in an efficient way, to bring happiness to the people without damaging the environment. The rich west may have happier people generally, and better health, but these countries also have a far larger impact on our planet’s environment. So in the HPI, these countries would be penalised. Presumably this is why it’s called Happy Planet Index – it measures how ‘happy’ the planet is as well as the people on it.

The global HPI map can be seen here. Comparing this to the previous map, you can see that the golden bubble of north America, western Europe and Australia take a hard hit when environmental impact is added in. (it’s confusing but the colour scheme changes – red is bad in the HPI graph but good in White’s happiness one).

Who comes out best in the HPI? Vanatu is first, with Columbia second and Costa Rica third. Switzerland, our leaders in happiness, fall to 65th place, while the US falls to 150th. The UK is at 108th place.

The implication is interesting. Happiness, for many people, is life’s ultimate goal. Particularly materialists, who do not believe in anything other than matter. Ayn Rand would be happy with that reasoning – if there’s nothing else to existence but the physical world, then your own happiness may be the highest goal – along with a sense of morals that involves not interfering with another’s happiness.

Many people have belief systems that transcend normal human experiences (religion, spiritual beliefs, and so on), and they have their own reasons for believing in a higher goal than happiness. But if a materialist agrees that pursuing happiness should include the clause of not interfering with another person’s happiness, this logic has to include people who don’t yet exist. What’s the point of having a happy nation if the next generation are unhappy because of it?

If it’s not right to go up to someone and knowingly make them unhappy today, it must also be wrong to knowingly make someone unhappy who doesn’t yet exist. So finding ways to increase happiness that will not have a negative impact on the happiness of future generations is a higher goal than pure, immediate happiness. This might seem obvious, but I think it’s true that “what’s measured improves”, so I find it interesting and encouraging that there’s a measure of well-being that takes ecological efficiency into account.

Keep your eye on http://www.happyplanetindex.org/ next month; the new index is released then!

References:

(1) Deiner, E., & Suh, E. M. (1999). National differences in subjective well-being. In Kahnemann, D., Deiner, E., and Schwartz, N. (1999). Well-being: Foundations of hedonic psychology. Russell Sage Foundation: NY.

(2) White, A. (2007). A Global Projection of Subjective Well-being: A Challenge To Positive Psychology? Psychtalk, 56, 17-20.

June 17, 2009
Is time management important for students?

In the first half of my degree, my focus was not entirely on my studies. Like many students I spent a lot of time socialising and drinking. So naturally, I failed to complete a few essays here and there. In atonement for this, I had to do extra work over the summer break, including some rather humorous makeup assignments. One was a 600 word essay on “The importance of time management skills for students in higher education”; which appears to be the higher education equivalent of writing lines (I found this hilarious).

Anyway I came across this essay recently on my computer, and had a read through. It’s actually quite interesting, even if I do say so myself! The theme is university study, of course, but it should be pretty universal in terms of procrastination-related stress. Have a look.

Students in higher education may have other activities and tasks to balance. In addition to academic responsibilities, there may also be paid or volunteer work, and other commitments to consider.

If these demands are not managed effectively, the result will be inadequate time to complete projects, missed deadlines and the quality of the work may also suffer as a result. Time management relates to techniques or methods of scheduling time, which result in the efficient organisation of outstanding tasks in order to meet deadlines.

“Procrastination is associated with increased susceptibility to cold and flu”

Time management strategies can begin with breaking the outstanding projects into smaller tasks. Each task is then listed in order of priority, giving a list of smaller goals in place of a large task. These goals are then given deadlines for them to be achieved by. The result of this will be a plan covering the entire process of completing the project. When this plan is complete, the tasks should be completed sequentially and without skipping or leaving tasks partially completed.

If time is not managed properly, it can become too simple to put off tasks and projects in favour of other activities; procrastination becomes most likely when there is the least time management.

A study conducted in 2002 by Sirois and Pychyl found that students who procrastinate on the completion of academic work are prone to unhealthy diet, sleep and exercise patterns, digestive ailments, and higher susceptibility to cold and flu. Additionally, the study also reports that students who procrastinate are less likely to seek medical treatment for health problems (Glenn, 2002).

Britton and Tesser completed a study in 1991 in which they intended to discover whether students who actively applied time management techniques in their education would achieve higher grades than those students who did not. Their results not only showed a relationship between effective time management and higher grades, but also other benefits.

They found that students who applied time management techniques were more likely to say ‘no’ to unprofitable activities, feel they are in control of their time, and set goals for longer time periods than students who do not (Britton and Tesser, 1991)

“Students who use more time management techniques tend to have higher GPA.”

Macan et al. Conducted a similar study, they created a questionnaire which had a list of time management techniques such as setting goals, to-do lists etc. This data was correlated with their grade point average, and a self-reported assessment of how well they believed their studies to be progressing. The results of the research indicated that the students who scored higher on the list of time management techniques, were more likely to have a higher perception of their performance as a student and also have a higher Grade Point Average.

The study also noted other benefits, participants perceiving themselves as having less ambiguity concerning their role, tension, were more satisfied with their lives and jobs where applicable (Macan et al. 1990). In cases where students do not apply any time management strategies, additional negative side effects can result. The quality of the work produced may suffer where less time is spent on it, and poor use of time is a major contributing factor to stress.

The capacity to manage time in an efficient way is a skill, which is not only applicable in an academic environment but also in future careers or situations after graduation. Time management is employed deliberately by managers in many fields, and learning this skill before employment is useful in complying with strategies in use in future workplaces and if in management careers themselves. As such time management skills give a legitimate advantage when seeking employment.

Unlike in studies, in these environments deadlines are often set daily and as such the environment is structured and suitable for time management methods. Students that can effectively manage time in a more unstructured environment will find time management much simpler in the workplace.

References:

Britton and Tesser (1991) Effects of Time-Management Practices on College Grades. Journal of Educational Psychology. Vol. 83 (3) pp. 405-410

Glenn, D (2002) Procrastination in College Students Is a Marker for?Unhealthy Behaviors. Retrieved 12/01/06 from: http://www.physics.ohio-state.edu/~wilkins/writing/Resources/essays/procrastinate.html

Macan et al (1990) College Students’ Time Management: Correlations With Academic Performance and Stress. Journal of Educational Psychology. Vol. 82 (4) pp. 760-768

Image Credit: StuartPilbrow

June 16, 2009
Practical Priming
I recently described the concept of priming, along with some research that has been done to demonstrate this effect. This article follows directly from that one, so if I mention something that I ‘discussed earlier’, it’s in there. The priming studies are all very interesting, but the question now becomes, how are we going to use priming to our advantage? Here are some suggestions.

1) Figure out what you want to be primed for (duh)

Priming activates certain traits and behaviours, which are usually associated with a certain stereotype. For this reason, this isn’t an exercise you can do without direction, like meditation for instance. With meditation, you just do it, then various benefits come. With priming, you need to know what benefit you want first, and then work out how to prime yourself for it.

2) Out with the old

The next step should be awareness of what we are currently being primed for. In your mind, go over the locations you frequent, try to work out what what stereotypes are associated with the things you perceive. What traits belong to these stereotypes?

If you identify something that might prime you for a behaviour you don’t want, try remove that thing for week or so, and see what happens (please use your head when doing this; don’t throw your dog out because you think it will prime you to pee on lamp posts).

What do you regularly read, and what is that priming you for? What about the TV shows you watch (including the adverts). One other piece of advice is to stop reading newspapers! Apart from the sports section, that is. Given what you now know about priming, read the next newspaper you buy with a careful eye. Notice:
- What you’re being primed for
- Whether any of the information is really worth knowing.
- What purpose headlines like “Terror” “Stabbing” “Crime” and “Recession” serve.
3) In with the new

The third step is to work out what you can add to your environment to prime the goal or behaviour you want. Many self-help authors recommend putting your goals and targets up on the wall, in written form. For example, Steve Pavlina and his Belief Board. We saw in the last article that exposure to written words can prime behaviours associated with those words, and also that the longer the longer the exposure to a prime, the bigger the effect; so this technique should work well. The only problem I can think of, is that we tend to get a bit blind to things after a while, so maybe move them around, change the colours, or reword them fairly regularly.

The basic premise is to douse your environment with words, images, and anything else you can think of that relate to the target you’re aiming for.

If you’re planning to bulk up, then maybe put pictures of gym equipment and Arnold Schwarzenegger around your house. If you’re a student, words and pictures related to professors and intellectuals.

It’s probably best to put some time aside and really think about what primes would work for you, and come up with many of them. Remember the immersion study by Ellen Langer, which made the elderly men younger? This was a full immersion into life 20 years earlier. The carpet, appliances, everything. And this study had a great effect on the participants. It seems like the more primes, the better.

4) Other activities

In Langer’s experiment, it wasn’t just the environment that was manipulated, it was the behaviour of the participants. How they acted, how they spoke, what they spoke about; everything was done in the present tense, as though it was 1959. This might well have played a part too – we know that changing self-talk can influence behaviour and emotions, so it’s not such a large stretch of the imagination that this would work as a prime too.

So self-talk in the present tense about the goal you want to reach (ie, how you would self-talk as if it were already reached) is worth trying, as is changing your actions to be in line with the goal, though there will be obvious limitations to how and where you can do this.

What about the writing exercise from the professors/hooligans study? People spent 5 minutes listing the behaviours, lifestyle and appearance of professors and hooligans, which made the better and worse at general knowledge tests, respectively. In another study. people were asked to write about themselves as they would like to be, which had the result of making them happier. (1) This seems like another exercise worth doing, then, especially when done right before a task related to your goal (eg writing about professors before an exam, writing about an Olympic sprinter before a race. What stereotype is most conducive to the goal you are aiming for, or the task ahead of you?

Remember that the more time people spent on this task, the stronger the effect.

I should also mention visualisation. There’s potentially a cross-over between this line of research and the popular self-help technique, the “Law of Attraction” (eg., The Secret). Could mentally visualising a certain goal serve to prime us to adopt behaviours favourable to that goal? I’m currently working on a separate article on the evidence behind visualisation, but for now, based on what I’ve read so far, I’d say yes; it’s definitely worth a try.

Some things to keep in mind

The experiments measured the effect of the primes directly after the participants were primed. I can’t imagine people who had been primed with ‘elderly’ stereotypes walking slowly all day and all night after that point: so maybe the best time to apply a prime is right before a specific task. I always find I work harder if I spend 30-60 minutes reading Atlas Shrugged, a book where the main characters love their work and do it all day long.

A limitation here is that we can’t really generalise beyond what the research actually says. There’s evidence you can become younger, ruder, smarter, more physically persistent, and so on, but we can’t just take these findings and generalise them to any particular goal. The things people did as a result of their primes were all things they had done before; knowledge structures they already possessed becoming active. However, I do think it’s worth trying these techniques on just about any goal.

A final point to make is that the effect of priming might be cumulative. As we discovered earlier with the basketball video, priming reduces our input. Therefore the range of things we can potentially be primed by is reduced also. It is possible that you could get into an upward or downward spiral, by receiving a prime and then being more likely to be primed by something similar again in the future.

So perhaps a key to positive priming is regular and consistent priming, until you reach such a critical mass as the majority of the primes you receive on a daily basis are conducive to your goals. This is just a guess though; don’t quote me on it.

To conclude, I hesitate to say you “will” get a certain response from the priming. All I can say for sure is what the evidence has shown. But I think there’s enough evidence to recommend the use of this technique, at the very least, just as a personal experiment.

References

(1) Lyubomirsky, S., Sousa, L., & Dickerhoof, R. (2006). The costs and benefits of writing, talking and thinking about life’s triumphs and defeats. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 90(4), 692-708.

Gold’s Gym image credit: d_vdm
June 15, 2009
Positive Priming
Practically nothing you can measure about a person is completely fixed. Some days you don’t concentrate as well, some days your more sociable, some days you have more energy. Even your height varies subtly throughout the day. If we’re interested in positive psychology and self-improvement, a constructive line of inquiry would be working out what causes these variations, and seeing if we can manipulate that cause to give us more of a particular behaviour, emotion, or whatever.

One of these causes is ‘Priming’. Priming is a phenomenon where being exposed to a certain stimuli makes a particular response to a second stimuli more likely to happen. For example, smelling the freshly baked bread when you walk into a store makes you more likely to buy some bread. That’s a simple example, but incredibly, priming also applies to motor skills, physical exertion, intellectual capacity, social graces; even our mental and biological age. Some portion of our performance in these and many more areas is dictated by how we’ve recently been primed.

“Affirmations are not the most effective way to prime.”

‘Positive Priming’, in this context, simply means to use this phenomenon to our advantage.

This is going to be a fairly long article. I did a lot of background reading, and doing that really helped drill the main points into my head, so I wouldn’t be giving you the same benefit if I didn’t cover the topic in depth.

I recommend reading from the top down, rather than scanning, as the points build upon one-another as you go along. Feel free to bookmark and return later.

“Every day in every way….”

Originally, this piece was going to be called “Affirmations: Self-Help Scam or Useful Technique?”. I was researching affirmations; the common practice of saying or writing your goals regularly, which is supposed to program the goal into your subconscious. But affirmations fall into the larger group of priming techniques, and as we’ll see, they’re not the most effective way to prime.

A pretty blonde

I mentioned above some examples of how priming can effect behaviour, but it can also alter your perceptions – being primed for a certain thing seems to filter out other things – a goal reduces input.

When you’re walking around the world, you get bombarded by stimuli from all directions. How does your mind know which ones to pay attention to, and which to ignore? Human nature plays a role; some things are just hardwired into us. If I walk past a pretty blonde on the high street, you can be pretty sure I won’t be looking in the shop windows.

Sex and danger are probably the two main things we’re hardwired to look out for. But our brain also has the function to adopt other “rules” on the fly; presumably this helped our nomadic ancestors adapt to the new and varied environments they were so fond of wandering into.

Watch the team in white!

Here’s an example. In the video below, you’ll see two basketball teams, each with three members, one team wearing black, the other wearing white. They each have a ball, and will pass it between their team mates. All you have to do is count how times the white team pass the ball. The black team will try to confuse you by weaving around and making passes of their own. See how effective you are at filtering the black team out so as to only count the white team passes. Come back when you’re done and see if you counted correctly (don’t cheat and skip ahead!). By the way, one particular gender is better at this task than the other. Which do you think it is?

Video (opens in a new window)

Did you do it? I’ll tell you the correct answer in a moment. You can only be successful at this task by setting up that goal in your mind, in other words, to be primed for it, and have that goal reduce the other input so you can focus on your goal.

Filters

A prime is like a filter, then. It blinds you from other things that are irrelevant to your goal, and focuses you on things that are relevant. The classic example is buying a new car of a certain colour, and then suddenly seeing that colour car everywhere.

That’s just like your previous goal of counting the ball bounces. Watch that video again. This time, don’t have the goal of counting. Just watch it. What happens about half way through? You’d think you would have noticed a huge gorilla walk through the middle and beat his chest, wouldn’t you? And maybe you did – some people see it, but a substantial amount (over half) don’t. Your prime filtered out everything that isn’t to do with counting the passes – everything that’s irrelevant to your goal.

(Note: the comment about one gender being better was a lie to make you focus more, I must give credit to Michael Kolster for that idea)

The Effect of Primes

Ignoring gorillas might be a good way to make a point, but it’s a pretty useless skill, if you think about it. If we’re going to find a practical application for this phenomenon, we need to answer two questions:

1) How exactly do we prime someone (or ourselves?).
2) What exactly can we do with this technique? How far we can take it?

In answer to question 1, a prime doesn’t have to be an elaborate stimuli. In fact, you don’t even need to see it consciously. Take the emotions ‘like’ and ‘dislike’, or approach and withdraw. Most, if not all creatures seem to have these – or a system that does a similar job. Jonathan Haidt explains that these emotions run along a scale, a “like-o-meter”. If the like-o-meter is currently set to ‘like’, it will take a while longer to get over to the other side when something you dislike comes along.

Imagine you’re shown a word on screen, and asked to press a button to rate it as good or bad. Pretty easy. “Flower”; Good. “Play”; Good. “Evil”; Bad. No problems. But if, just before you saw the word, the screen flashed up another one, so quickly that only your subconscious picks it up, interesting things start to happen. If the word “Death” is flashed just before “Garden”, it takes you longer to evaluate “Garden” as good, because your like-o-meter takes a while to swing back over. (1)

So even a very short exposure to a written word can work as a prime, but again, it’s pretty useless. We may need stronger primes to get a stronger effect.

They Comments Leave see Usually

Maybe a word scrambling puzzle could provide a stronger prime – something a person has to get involved in, put effort into. One study took participants into a room, and gave them a simple puzzle to do – put some jumbled sentences into the right order. After they were done, they were told to fetch the experimenter, who would be waiting in the next room. Some participants were given ‘rude’ words to unscramble, such as “they her bother see usually”, others were given ‘polite’ words like “they her respect see usually”.

After completing the puzzles, the participants went to the next room, but found the experimenter in the hallway; apparently talking to another participant who was having trouble with the task. In fact, he was a confederate, and the conversation was faked to see whether the rude and polite words would prime the participants to interrupt. Over 60% of the participants primed with ‘rude’ words interrupted their conversation. Less than 20% of people primed with polite words interrupted. (2)

Now we’re getting to some more tangible results. By mere exposure to a few words for about 5 minutes, we can influence how likely someone is to interrupt a conversation.

But it gets better.

Dumb hooligans and slow walkers

That’s a pretty impressive result, but there have been many priming experiments, with more powerful effects. How about intelligence? In another study, participants sat at a a computer and spent a few minutes listing the behaviours, lifestyle and appearance of either professors, or soccer hooligans. Afterwards, a multiple-choice general knowledge test was given. The participants receiving the ‘professor’ prime did better than a group that had no prime, and those primed with ‘hooligan’ did worse. Priming these stereotypes actually seemed to make people more or less intelligent.

Also, the strength of the effect could be altered by changing the priming time – the longer the better – people primed for 9 minutes showed a stronger effect than people primed for 2 minutes.

The research base on priming is massive. Here’s a rundown of just some of the other impressive findings:
- When the participants were primed with words related to elderly stereotypes, they would walk more slowly down the hall after finishing the experiment. (2)
- Voters are more likely to support tax raises to support education when the polling location is a school. (3)
- In a game of Prisoner’s Dilemma, players play more aggressively if there is a briefcase in the room, and more cooperatively if there is a backpack in the room (executives compete; rock climbers cooperate). (4)
- Visual exposure to a sports drink led to more persistence on a physically demanding task. Not drinking the sports drink: looking at it! (5)
It appears that by being primed for a certain stereotype, the behaviours and traits we associate with that stereotype become active in ourselves. We start to play that role.

At this point things are looking promising. We can alter the results of knowledge tests, change competitive behaviours, make people rude; just by exposure to a few words in a lab. Can we take this further?

I’m a big reader of fitness and nutrition literature. I love the subject and could easily have followed that path instead of psychology (although there’s plenty of time for both). I have also noticed that the times I exercise the most and eat the healthiest are the times I’m spending a lot of time reading about the subject.

Could this be priming at work? Maybe the deeper I immerse myself into fitness primes, the stronger I play the fitness role? If so, what would happen if we threw ourselves into a world where everything around us was intended to prime us for a particular response? The next study I’ll describe is incredible!

The Fountain of Youth

In 1979, famous psychologist Ellen Langer and colleagues took a group of participants – all men over 70 – to a five-day retreat in search of the fountain of youth – and found it.

The retreat was a mock up of life some 20 years previous. No modern conveniences were present, participants had to talk in the present tense about the 50s, and before going, they wrote an autobiography as though it were 1959. A week’s worth of activities were devised, all based around daily life in 1959.

How would you measure age? Interestingly, there’s no biological marker of age. Without knowing your birthdate, there is no scientific way to tell you how old you definitely are. To make up for this, a massive group of related variables were measured instead: weight, dexterity, flexibility, vision, taste, intelligence, memory – all things that deteriorate with age. Photographs were also taken, and participants were asked to fill out a self-evaluation test.

The participants spent only five days in the faux 1950’s environment, and on leaving, the same tests were given again. The results were incredible. They performed better on the cognitive tests. Their memory had improved. Even their eyesight and hearing had improved! As far as science was able to tell, the clock had turned back – they got younger!

Maybe the phrase “you’re only as old as you feel” should be “you’re only as old as you’re primed to feel”.

At this point I was going to add a section called “Practical Priming”, with suggestions on how to put this information to use. It’s 90% done, but I have to go away for a couple of days, so I’ll finish it off and put it up separately when I get back.
June 13, 2009