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Why is Smoking Addictive?
“I finally overcame my will power and started smoking again.” – Mark Twain

There’s no better way to start an article than to quote a long-dead writer with a moustache; especially when he (or she – women can have moustaches too) makes a good point in an ironic way. In this case, the point is that once you’ve started smoking, it’s tough to stop. I know that first hand; I was a smoker for many years. Right from the beginning though, I knew it was bad for me and that I’d eventually stop. And eventually I did, on roughly the 378th attempt.

It’s not that it’s just great fun, like going to the cinema – smoking is chemically addictive. It has an effect on the brain that makes you want to keep doing it. Despite the negative health effects being pretty well known by now, smokers seem to either disagree that smoking is harmful, or come up with interesting justifications for smoking.

And for a smoker seeking to rationalise their behaviour, there’s plenty of material: “Some people smoke all their lives and don’t get sick.” “You could get hit by a bus tomorrow.” “It looks cool.” And of course, “I can quit any time I want!” But why do people get addicted to cigarettes, and not, say, apples?

This is your brain on apples

We have a reward mechanism in our brain, which is designed to help us survive by getting us to repeat actions that are beneficial for us. All mammals have this. It fires up when we eat, have sex, socialise; when we do anything that we like doing. The fuel that this system runs on is called dopamine. Some people call it the pleasure chemical, but maybe it’s more accurate to call it the reward chemical.

Why do people become addicted to cocaine, alcohol, and nicotine? It’s because these drugs ‘hack into’ this reward system, and cause dopamine to be released in large amounts. Nothing is necessarily happening to you that your brain would recognise as a beneficial thing; the drugs just get in there and activate the reward system at the same time you are taking them.

When I say ‘at the same time’, that really depends on how quickly the drug gets into your brain and triggers the dopamine release. The quicker this happens (and the bigger the release, of course), the more addictive the drug is. This is because the dopamine release will coincide more closely with the physical act of taking the drug. Smoking is about the quickest method you can get. The chemicals get to your brain quicker than if you had injected them.

So, you take a drag of a cigarette. The reward system quickly activates. Your brain goes “Ah, dopamine, what I am doing is beneficial, I’ll make sure to do this again!” at the same time as you’re smoking. Then you take another drag, “Ah, dopamine, this is beneficial…” etc., 30 or so times in the space of a few minutes. The reward system is getting triggered quickly and repeatedly, and being linked to what you are doing at the time: smoking. This is why it’s so addictive.

Ever get a craving while stood at a bus stop? Waiting for a train? While drinking alcohol? Same thing. If you tend to smoke at a certain time – say you have a cigarette with your morning coffee – then over time smoking gets associated with that situation: if you drink a coffee on a morning, you’ll get a craving for a cigarette. After you quit, and expose yourself to this situation repeatedly without smoking, the association weakens, along with the craving.

This is why the old tactic of leaving empty cigarette packets around to give you the illusion that you are stocked up is bass-ackwards; it only serves as a trigger for a craving. There was an anti-drug campaign a few years ago here in the UK, posters were found all over that displayed pictures of various drug paraphernalia, in a sort of “don’t use these nasty things” sort of way. This was doomed to failure for the same reason.

You can’t really blame anyone for being addicted to smoking. This reward system is there to help us survive, not to be hacked into. We don’t have Norton Anti-Addiction installed in our brains, which runs automatically once a week (and slows down everything else we are doing at the time). If these pathways are activated, the brain has no idea there’s anything unnatural going on, so naturally we come up with rationalisations to explain the behaviour – some people don’t die from smoking, I could quit if I wanted, etc.

There’s not only this reinforcing effect, chemically rewarding us for smoking, but there’s also the experience of withdrawal to deal with too. We’ll look at that next time.

Recommended Reading:
- The Easy Way to Stop Smoking: Join the Millions Who Have Become Non-Smokers Using Allen Carr’s Easyway Method
August 25, 2009
How to make people "get with the program"
You know those loyalty stamp cards you get in coffee shops? Ever wondered why you get a few stamps free when you get them? It’s because of something called the endowed progress effect – you’re more likely to keep working towards a goal if you think you’ve already made some progress towards it. So you’re more likely to return and fill the card up if there are nine total boxes to fill, and two get stamped for free, than if there are seven total boxes to fill and none are filled for free – even though the cost and effort is exactly the same for both.

Bob was convinced that milk was a better cleaner than soapy water

This idea was tested, not in coffee shops, but in a car wash. In 2006, researchers devised two loyalty schemes that the car was would use. Customers either got a card that needed ten stamps to earn a free car wash, but the card already had two stamps on it, or they got a card that needed eight stamps to earn a free car wash. Exactly the same number of purchases were needed to get the prize, but half the customers were under the impression they had already made some progress towards the prize. And it worked; the redemption rate was 34% for the card with two free stamps, versus 19% for the card without free stamps.

Not only that, but the customers with free stamps filled up their cards more quickly, and the time between washes got shorter and shorter as they progressed – the closer they got to the prize, the more effort they put in to get it.

How does it work?

Once we accept a goal, for whatever reason, we become strongly motivated to see it out. We don’t complete everything we start, of course, but we’re more likely to finish something that we’ve already put some time and effort into than something that we haven’t started yet. We like to get a return on what we’ve invested into. This is partly the reason it’s hard to stop gambling once on a losing streak – the lure of getting something back on our investment is far more seductive than definitely accepting a loss.

Interestingly, this is true even if we haven’t actually made any progress, or put any effort into the pursuit of a goal – as long as we merely appear to have done so (to ourselves), we’re suddenly under the same psychological pressure to see it though. By creating the illusion of progress, the car wash owners made it seem like the task of getting to ten stamps had already begun, and was incomplete.

Getting with the program

The basic principle is this: people are more likely to stick to the program if you can make it seem that they’ve already made progress towards its end goal. If this basic principle carries over to other domains, the possibilities are endless.

For example, if you run some kind of online course, offer the first two modules for free, and put a page up with a list of all modules, with the first two already ticked off.

If you’re in a role where you have to motivate people, then pointing out the progress that’s already been made should help. You could create a performance-based points system, where the points can be traded for prizes at the end of the month, but each person gets a certain number for free.

If you’re promoting a book, give the first chapter out for free as an ebook. This will not only get your work out there, but will set up an incomplete goal in your readers’ heads; and many will feel the need to complete the goal.

This technique doesn’t have to be used for commercial purposes, of course. As long as it’s used for a task-based goal, it should work. So, say for example you’re trying to raise awareness of an important issue. Frame your information as a course, and give it an official sounding title, such as *your organisation* certificate in *your issue* awareness. Then give out a leaflet which contains the first two ‘modules’ of your course, probably basic stuff like “Introduction to X”, and of course include module list on the final page with the first two modules ticked off already. Then point to your website or other location they can find the rest of the course, and once you can confirm they’ve completed it, post them a certificate or provide one for print out. The idea is, people will think they’ve already completed modules 1 & 2, and they’d better complete the rest or that would be a waste of time.

These are just a few ideas from the top of my head, I’m sure you can think of more for whatever your purposes are. I hope you’ve enjoyed this little series of posts on persuasion, and it’s given you a few useful ideas as well as made you aware of how your mind responds to persuasion techniques and advertising. Please, only use these principles for the forces of good.

Recommended Reading:
- Yes!: 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive
Reference:

Nunes, J. C. & Dreze, X. (2006). The endowed progress effect: how artificial advancement increases effort. Journal of Consumer Research. 32, 504-512.

Image: Bob Dobbs opens a car wash by Radio Rover
August 20, 2009
6 simple ways to get more tips as a server
Being a waiter or waitress is hard work! You’re on your feet all day, watching other people eat, laugh and have fun, and often the pay isn’t all that great; particularly in the US. But, you have one ace in the hole – tips. It is pretty much the norm these days to tip, even in places where service is included. I always tip in a restaurant. Usually I don’t fuss or worry about how much, I just stick some money onto the tray.

This reminds me of the huge debate in Reservoir Dogs, where one of the characters, Mr Pink, tells the group he doesn’t tip. His point is that you don’t tip people at MacDonalds, even though it might be an equally hard job. You can watch a great version of this scene, performed by none other than the muppets, here (Note: Lots of swearing in this scene, definitely NOT safe for work!)

Anyway, I digress. It’s a fact that a server’s wage can bring much joy or sadness, depending on the tips (not to mention the effect your tips have when filing receipts on your income tax software at tax time). So how would you get more? Most websites will tell you to be efficient, polite, keep a check of what needs to be done so you don’t forget, and so on. But scientific studies of persuasion have found other ways to increase your tips! These include:
- Give mints or chocolate at the end of the meal
- Kiss some ass (compliment customers on their menu choice)
- Introduce yourself by name
- Touch customers
- Draw a smiley face on the back of the cheque (waitresses only)
- Write “Thank You” on the back of the cheque
1) Give mints or chocolate at the end of the meal

It’s common practice to give diners a mint or some chocolate at the end of a meal. Sometimes, there’s a basket of mints that you can take from on your way out, other times, the server will give them to you at your table. Dave Strohmetz, of Monmouth University, lead a team of researchers to see whether actually giving customers the gift would result in more tips.

First, they went to a restaurant in New York. Half of the time, when customers asked for the bill, the servers would simply bring the cheque over. The other half of the time, they gave a foil-wrapped piece of chocolate to each person, before giving the cheque. At the end of the experiment the tips were added up, and indeed, patrons receiving the chocolate did tip more; they tipped roughly 18% of the bill, on average, while patrons who didn’t get the chocolate tipped 15%. Not a huge amount, you might be thinking, but don’t worry; Strohmetz and his team had a few more tricks up their sleeve.

They made a few changes to their study and travelled to New Jersey, for round 2. They wanted to find out what was causing this small but measurable effect, and in doing so, they found ways to enhance it!

This time, they compared four different methods:
- Control Condition – Not giving patrons a piece of candy
- 1-Piece Condition – Giving them one piece of candy
- 2-Piece Condition – Giving them two pieces of candy
- 1+1 condition – Giving them one piece of candy, then as the server was leaving the table, she stopped, turned back, and offered the patrons another piece
Here are the results:

As you can see, 2 chocolates are better than one! Not only that, but giving them separately, almost as if the second gift is a spontaneous gesture, is better than both together.

How does it work?

Why would giving the chocolates separately have a bigger effect on tips? Could it be because the server makes a more positive impression? Possibly, but it does not really explain the increased tips from giving 2 pieces rather than 1. Could it be because the gift put the patrons in a good mood? That’s possible too, but why would giving two the pieces of chocolate separately bring better moods than both at once? It’s the same size gift, after all. The explanation that makes the most sense is the norm of reciprocity, which we came across briefly in Randy Garner’s study using Post-it notes.

Very often when people are on the receiving end of generosity, they feel the need to reciprocate. This seems to work even when the act was not requested or expected. In this case, the server seemed to be doing the patrons an extra favour. It’s as if she was only supposed to give one chocolate, but then thought, “Hey, these are nice people, I’ll give them another!” This type of generosity can influence our motivation to return the favour, which the patrons did by tipping more. (1)

2) Kiss some ass

Ingratiation has proven to be another useful method of increasing the tips you can get as a server. A study by John Seiter looked into this, again in a real-life restaurant.

“Ah! An excellent choice, sir!”

The servers in the study would treat all customers exactly the same, except for one thing; after taking their order, they would either compliment the customer on their menu choice, or they wouldn’t. What specifically did they say? After taking the first order, the server said “You made a good choice!” and after taking the second order, they said “You did good too!”

A concern that Seiter had was the size of the party. If there are 14 guests, the server would have to either guess who the bill payer was, and compliment that person, or if they expected the party to ‘go dutch’, they’d have to compliment all 14 people in turn; which might be seen as just a little bit insincere! So he restricted the experiment to parties of two – keep this in mind when you’re applying this information – it’s untested on larger groups!

As in Strohmetz’s study, tip size was worked out as a percentage of the overall bill. Overall, customers who received a compliment about their menu choice tipped 19% of their bill, while customers who weren’t complimented tipped only 16% of the bill! This is a simple method, taking about 2 seconds per table, and again it results in a measurable increase in the amount of tips! (2)

The other studies in this field follow a similar pattern: they are done in a real-live restaurant, where the servers are told to do or not do the thing that is being studied. So rather than describe the studies in detail from now on, I’ll just give the results. Just know that they were all tested in real situations.

3) Introduce yourself by name

To test whether servers could increase tips by introducing themselves by name, researchers headed to a buffet brunch, taking their clipboards with them (presumably). These researchers might be early paragons of multi-tasking! I can imagine the thought process: “Hmmm. I like research. But I also like lunch. How can I combine the two?”

In this study, a buffet was a really good way to test the effect of the introduction, because customers pretty much fend for themselves after the first introduction, so there’s less chance that other factors could interfere with the results. When the server introduced herself by name, there was a far higher tipping rate when the servers introduced themselves – 23%, compared to 15% when they didn’t! (3)

4) Touch customers

In a study entitled “The Midas Touch”, April Crusco and Christopher Wetzel discovered what happens when waitresses touch their customers; either on the shoulder, the palm, or not at all, when returning change. They found that the customers who were touched left the highest tips on average, that the palm was the most profitable place, and also that the customers largely weren’t aware they’d been touched. (4)

A follow up study found that when a man and a woman are dining alone, it is more profitable to touch the female customer than the male. The reason might be that the servers in this study were all female, and touching the man might have brought out some jealousy. So if you’re a male server, it’s unclear whether this would work for you or not. (5)

5) Draw on the back of the cheque

I’ve never had this happen to me, but apparently some servers like to draw little pictures, like smiley faces, on the back of the cheques. There are several reasons this might improve the tips; it might show that the server was pleased to have served the party, it might put the party in a better mood, or it might just be seen as a nice friendly gesture. It does seem to work – but only for women. Here are the results for the waitresses: (6)

And here are the results for the waiters:

Waitresses seem to get more tips than waiters in general, and it also seems that drawing a smiley face had a slight negative effect on the waiters tips! Perhaps it is seen as too feminine for men to do this. if you’re a waiter, it might be best not to try this. If you’re feeling brave, try drawing a monster truck, or a football, or even…

6) Write “Thank You” on the Cheque

When a server expresses their gratitude to the party, in the form of a little “Thank You” and signature on the back of the cheque, this has also proven to bring higher tips. Although it wasn’t as effective as the smiley face, at least it should work for waitresses and waiters!

As you can see, the signature isn’t strictly necessary – a friendly “thank you” message on the back of the cheque is enough to improve your tips. (7)

All at once or one at a time?

In all these studies, only one technique was tested at a time. It might not be the case that doing all of them at once would have a better effect. Then again, they might have an even stronger effect when they’re all combined. You’ll have to do some experiments of your own to find that out.

As I mentioned earlier, these techniques have been proven in real-life restaurant situations. They aren’t based on laboratory studies or armchair theorising – they actually work. I’m sure you can see that these ideas are worth trying – you should be able to increase your income by a fair amount by practising the methods here, and they are all very simple to do. I’d be grateful if you would test some of these out for a few weeks, and leave a comment to let me know how you got on. Thanks for reading!

Recommended Reading:
- Yes!: 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive
References:

(1) Strohmetz D. B., Rind B., Fisher R. & Lynn M. (2002). Sweetening the till: The use of candy to increase restaurant tipping. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 32(2), 300-309.

(2) Seiter, J. S. (2009). Ingratiation and Gratuity: The Effect of Complimenting Customers on Tipping Behavior in Restaurants. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Communication Association, Sheraton New York, New York City, NY Online

(3) Garrity, K., & Degelman, D. (1990). Effect of server introduction on restaurant tipping. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 20,168-172.

(4) Crusco, A. H., & Wetzel, C. G. (1984). The Midas touch: The effects of interpersonal touch on restaurant tipping. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 10,512-517.

(5) Stephen, R., & Zweigenhaft, R. L. (1986). The effect of tipping of a waitress touching male and female customers. Journal of Social Psychology, 126,141-142.

See also:

Hornik, J. (1992). Tactile stimulation and consumer response. Journal of Consumer Research, 19,449-458.

Hubbard, A. S. E., Tsuji, A., Williams, C., & Seatriz, V. (2003). Effects of touch on gratuities received in same-gender and cross-gender dyads. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 33(11), 2427-2438.

(6) Rind, B., Bordia, P. (1996), “Effect on restaurant tipping of male and female servers drawing a happy smiling face on the backs of customers checks”, Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 26(3), 218-25.

(7) Rind, R., & Bordia, P. (1995). Effect of server’s “thank you” and personalization on restaurant tipping. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 25,745-751.

See also:

Rind, B., & Strohmetz, D. (1999). Effect on restaurant tipping of a helpful mesage written on the back of customers’ checks. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 29,139-144.

Images: BarCampParis#7 by Franck Mahon. Waiter by Alana Elliot
August 17, 2009
Mindless behaviour: How to skip to the front of a queue
If there’s one thing us Brits are good at, it’s queuing. We love it. One day I want to get a few people and form a fake queue, leading directly to a brick wall, and see how many people we can get to join the queue. I predict that this would work, and we could actually get a load of random people lining up to a wall. I think they’d assume it was a queue to an ATM, and would not think to check whether there actually is one there or not. It’s mindless faith that since a line of people leading to a wall has been for an ATM in the past, it probably will now. And it’s this mindless faith that you can exploit to skip the line.

Ellen Langer, Arthur Blank and Benzion Chanowitz carried out a famous study in 1978 to see if they could get people to let them go first to use a photocopier. You might recognise Ellen Langer‘s name, I mentioned another of her studies in the priming article, where she found a way to reduce the biological age of a group of elderly participants. In this study, the researchers tried three different approaches to getting people to let them go first. They also told people they had either 5 or 20 copies to make, to help them discover which method was most effective. Here are the methods they tried:
1. Request Only “Excuse me, I have 5 (20) pages. May I use the xerox machine?”
2. Placebo Information “Excuse me, I have 5 (20) pages. May I use the xerox machine, because I have to make copies?”
3. Real Information “Excuse me, I have 5 (20) pages. May I use the xerox machine, because I’m in a rush?”
So a third of the time they just asked to skip the line, a third of the time they gave an irrelevant reason (of course they had to make copies. What else do you use a xerox machine for?), and a third of the time they actually gave a good reason. And they tried all three methods while asking to make five copies, and again when asking to make 20 copies.

Here are the results:

When you’re only asking a small favour, it doesn’t seem to matter whether you give a good reason or an arbitrary one – compliance is the same either way! When you’re asking a big favour though, you do need to give a valid reason – if you give an arbitrary one, people don’t just mindlessly go along with it anymore.

What’s going on?

Over the years, many people have asked us for favours. So many, in fact, that we’re very familiar with the general structure of a request; people ask for a favour, and then give a reason. Countless repetition of this structure has made a rule in our minds, it goes something like this:

Favour X + Reason Y = Comply

But it’s not quite this simple – there are extra rules. For example, when X is small, we can ignore Y – we’ve done so many small favours for good reasons that haven’t inconvenienced us too much in the past, that we probably won’t be inconvenienced now. So why spend time and energy firing up our thinking processes? Why bother with the confrontation? Overall it serves us better just to comply.

In other words, when the stakes are low, the mind will take the mental shortcut.

“Sometimes people don’t pay attention to the information they are receiving; only the the structure of it”

When X is large, however – when someone wants a big favour – this changes the game a little. Perhaps now, doing the favour will be a bigger burden than not doing it. So the brain kick-starts our deliberate thinking processes: “Consciousness, wake up! We need some help here!” Now you need to pay attention to the incoming information, now you care what Y is, and if someone’s asking for a big favour without a good reason, you’re likely to turn them down.

Two other studies are described in the paper, which show a similar effect happening with written communication. People respond to short questionnaires, even when they are sent to random people, with no letterhead and no justification, just a request for people to fill out the form and send it back. People just do it – and they are more likely to do it if they have more experience with correspondence, (for example if they work in institutions where this sort of communication is common) because they have created compliance rules for written communication.

Because

The point to take from this study is that when making a request, remember to back up it up with a reason (“Can you do X because Y”). If it’s a small request, it doesn’t necessarily have to be a good reason “Come to the table because it’s time for dinner” should work as well as “Come to the table because this food looks delicious”; unless it would be seen as a big request (everyone is glued to the TV, for example).

To skip a queue, just politely ask if you can, and give a reason. Bear in mind that this study was done with a queue of one, so it may not work with larger queues where there’s social pressure from the people behind your ‘persuadee’ not to let you in. But at the cash point you could try “Excuse me, can I use the ATM because I’m in a rush?”, at the nightclub you could try “Excuse me, can I go in first, because I need to find my friends”, and you already know how to skip the photocopier queue. Play around with this and see what happens. Don’t get carried away though or you’ll get in trouble (eg., “give me all your money because I have a gun!”).

Sometimes people don’t pay attention to the information they are receiving; only the the structure of it. If you can fit your request inside a structure that people are used to complying with, there’s a good chance that they’ll mindlessly comply with your request too. Remember also to be more mindful yourself, and become aware of when you are habitually going through the motions. I’m not saying to think every little thing through in full detail, that sounds exhausting. But at the very least, make sure the ATM queue leads to a real machine and not just a brick wall. 🙂

Recommended Reading:
- Yes!: 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive
Reference:

Langer, E., Blank, A., & Chanowitz, B. (1978). The mindlessness of Ostensibly Thoughtful Action: The Role of “Placebic” Information in Interpersonal Interaction. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 36(6), 635-642.

Chart made with http://onlinecharttool.com/
August 13, 2009
What happens when we label people?
Ever been labelled? Ever labelled someone yourself? Everyone’s done both, sometimes it’s benign, sometimes it’s a good thing and sometimes it’s a bad thing. It starts from an early age and continues through life – he’s a jock, he’s conscientious, she’s a troublemaker. Assigning labels to things seems to be part of how our brain makes sense of the world. But what happens to a person when you give them a particular label?

Researchers Alice Tybout and Richard Yalch devised an ingenious way to test this. A week or so before an election, they went door-to-door, surveying people about their attitudes towards the different candidates and some current issues. Then, while still in front of the participant, they compared the survey answers to a voter profile for an “average” citizen, and told the participant that, based on their answers, the likelihood they would vote was either average, or above-average. In reality, however, the voter profile was fake and this label was given randomly.

Here’s how the labels were specifically given:

Above average label:

“That’s interesting, your proftle indicates that, relative to others in this community, you are an above-average citizen. Our research shows that people like you are very likely to vote in elections and participate in political events.”

Average label:

“That’s interesting, your profile indicates that, relative to others in this community, you are an average citizen. Our research shows that people like you have an average likelihood of voting in elections and participating in poitical events.”

As you can see, the label seemed to come from a place of authority, and they made sure that the participants knew what was expected of people with this particular label. So how did these labels affect voter turnout? As you might have guessed, labelling people as likely to vote did increase turnout – 86.5% of this group voted, versus 75.3% of the ‘average’ group. But have a look at the chart below:

The label had the strongest effect on people who already thought of themselves as voters; who had what psychologists call a “self-schema” for voting. A ‘self-schema’ (pronounced skeema) is a generalisation you make about yourself based on your previous behaviour and experiences. A self-schema will tend to affect how you interpret and respond to other information you receive about yourself.

In this case, for example, people were more likely to vote when their self-scheema and the label they received were congruent. Make sense? Assuming this is true for every self-schema, you can see some practical application. Labelling your workforce as a hard workers will have a bigger effect on productivity if they already see themselves as hard workers; though it will still have some effect if they don’t.

You can see that when people already have a self-schema as being the voting type, telling them they are an average voter will make them more likely to vote than telling people who don’t have this self-scheema, that they are above-average citizens. This might be because we don’t pay as strong attention to things when they don’t match our self-schema. Or maybe, simply talking about political issues was enough to get these eager voters fired up.

How long does a label last?

Less than eight months, apparently. In a following election, eight months later voter turnout overall had dropped to 54% for the group labelled above average, and 53% for the average group. Labelling only seems to work in the short-run, probably because many other different labels, cues and primes will come along over time, and they might override a label that was only given once.

Practical Applications

This is another example of how a something deceptively simple can affect peoples’ behaviour. There are plenty of ways that labelling can be ethically applied. Teachers could tell students that they seem able and competent, managers can tell their staff they are up to the task, and you can tell your date that she definitely seems like the type of girl who’d come home with you (OK, maybe not the last one!).

What I’d want to know it how authority affects labels. For example, if you really like and respect your teacher, and she tells you that she’s been keeping an eye on you and she really sees potential in you, you could go a long way, would that have a bigger effect than if one of your classmates said it, for instance? You also have to wonder, if a police officer tells you that you’re worthless criminal scum, what effect does that have on you?

I wonder what would happen if the police went around acting genuinely surprised whenever someone committed a crime, and absolutely insisted, to the full extent of their authority, that the perpetrator was a law-abiding, upstanding citizen, and the couldn’t understand why they did it. Maybe some people would just bow down to the authority “I am? Oh. Didn’t realise officer, my bad!”

Another application is you can become more aware of attempts to label you, particularly by advertisers. This is definitely something you should do, I mean, after all, you’re worth it. And if you can figure out your self-schema, you’ll be able to see what types of labels are more likely to affect you.

Oh, by the way, I was analysing my web traffic statistics yesterday, and I suddenly realised that readers of Generally Thinking are a loyal, intelligent and open-minded bunch, who like to visit this site regularly!

Recommended Reading:
- Yes!: 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive
Reference:

Tybout, A. M., Yalch, R. F. (1980). The Effect of Experience: A Matter of Salience? Journal of Consumer Research, 6, 406-413.
August 10, 2009
How to increase survey response rates using Post-It notes
I love Post-its. I use them everyday, to leave myself reminders, as bookmarks, and sometimes to make little stick-man animations; just a small part of my productive and fulfilling private life! And this youtube video showing creative uses of Post-its, is pretty cool.

But Post-its are not merely a tool of convenience and fun; they are also a powerful method of persuasion. Randy Garner, at Sam Houston State University, wanted to find better ways of increasing survey response rates. I sympathise; one of the hardest things in my psychology degree was getting people to take part in my dissertation project. I tried everything; face-to-face solicitation, internet marketing, interpretive dance; I even advertised on Craigslist, of all places.

I wish I’d read Garner’s study first! He mailed out surveys to 150 participants. Some received a survey with a Post-it (Post-It group), requesting that the survey be completed, some received a survey with the same message on the survey itself (written-only group), and some just got the survey with no message (no-message group).

The results? Look below:

The persuasive power of the Post-it is quite apparent! People were more likely to return the survey if there was a Post-it message stuck onto it. The same message written on the survey itself did not have the same effect, so it’s not simply the written request that is causing the higher response rates; the Post-it is essential. But what would happen if you didn’t put a message on the Post-it? Maybe the Post-it is just novel or attention grabbing, and that’s enough by itself?

Garner tested this too, making a couple of changes to his study. Again, he used three groups, but this time one received a Post-it with a message, one with a blank Post-it, and the final group got a survey with no Post-it.

Here are the response rates for the second survey:

Similar results. Clearly, you need both the message and the medium for this to work; although a blank Post-it did increase the response rate slightly.

In a third study, Garner found that the humble Post-it meant people responded to the surveys sooner, and also left more comments in the open-ended questions sections!

How far can you take this?

It makes you wonder. If a simple Post-it note with a message can increase survey response rates, what else can it do? If I write a love letter to a hundred women, and put a Post-it note on requesting that they send one back, would I get more replies? If I write a letter of complaint to a company, with a Post-it note asking for a quick response, will I get one? And also, how can the Post-it message be improved?

Garner thought of this (this guy thinks of everything, doesn’t he?), and did a final study, this time with six groups. Half of the participants got a similar survey to the one before, half got a monster-sized survey, 24 pages and 150 questions in length, mostly open-ended questions too. The kind of survey that makes you think “Oh good! I needed something to put under that table leg!”

Within these two groups, people either got:
1. A normal Post-it message as before (saying “please take a few minutes to complete this survey for us”)
2. A personalised Post-it message with the recipients name, the standard message, and “Thank you, RG” at the end as a signature
3. Neither a Post-it nor a message (the control group)
A bit more complicated this time! Here are the results:

The red bar is the simple survey, and as you can see, the results increased slightly because of the personalised message. But look at the purple bar, showing the complex, long-winded survey. The standard Post-it message used previously performed quite poorly. But when the message was personalised, the response rate was only 10% less than the easy survey!

So if you’re trying to get people to do a complex task, you need to personalise the request. Find out the name of the person you’re sending your survey (or whatever) to, and put it on the Post-it note, along with a thank you and your initials.

How is this working?

The idea behind this is that a Post-it with a message is viewed as a personal request, a favour. It activates the principle of social reciprocity, more commonly known as ‘you scratch my back I’ll scratch yours’. Someone’s gone to the trouble to write you out a message on a Post-it and stick it to the survey – it’s not just a machine, printing out letters from a mail merge and some person stuffing them in an envelope – there’s a human being reaching out and making contact with you. The least you can do is respond! Polite, reciprocal compliance is one of our cultural norms, and the Post-it activates this.

Taking a wider view, we can see that the norm to return a favour is activated even when a the initial favour wasn’t even requested in the first place. You might have seen this tactic used by salespeople, offering you a free toaster or pen.

These findings will be useful to keep in mind, not only to tell when you’re being influenced, but also to help you out if you have a survey or project of your own that you need a good response rate to. Spending a little time writing out a personalised Post-it request will be well worth the time and effort.

To conclude, I’ll quote Randy Garner’s last sentence in his paper:

“These findings suggest that the use of something as seemingly insignificant as a Post-it can indeed possess the potential for eliciting a sticky influence”

(uuuhhhhhhh….)

Recommended Reading:
- Yes!: 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive
Reference:

Garner, R. (2005). Post-It Note Persuasion: A Sticky Influence. Journal of Consumer Psychology. 15(3), 230-237.

Note: I made the graphs using http://onlinecharttool.com – completely free and recommended if you’re bored with the Excel graphs!
August 3, 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