Future Orientation: The Key to Healthy Eating and Exercise
By Jeff Joireman
Photo by http://www.localfitness.com.au
It’s 6 am on January 1st. The alarm clock goes off, rousing you from your sleep. You roll over, hit the snooze, and contemplate the first day of your new life. This is the year you will start exercising and eating right. This is the year you will lose a few pounds. This is the year you will get in the best shape ever. But even as your resolutions play on a continual loop in your head, you turn off the alarm, pull up the covers, and fall back into a blissful slumber. A few hours later, you wake up and think, “Ok, tomorrow I will start the first day of my new life.” The next morning comes. The alarm clock goes off at 6 am. You hit the snooze and think, “You know, this bed is pretty comfy…”
If the scenario just described sounds familiar, you’re not alone. Exercise and healthy eating are almost always near the top of people’s New Year’s resolutions. We know we should exercise and eat healthy. The problem is we don’t, at least as much as we should, and we will eventually pay the price for our unhealthy lifestyles. The bill may not come due for some time, but it will come.
Because exercise and health require significant investments now in the hopes of long-term gains they are often viewed as temporal dilemmas. Two of the most common temporal dilemmas include temporal traps and temporal fences. In temporal traps, we are tempted to engage in a behavior that produces short-term rewards but long-term negative consequences (e.g., eating a big burger, fries and a shake is tasty in the here and now, but regularly engaging in unhealthy eating can lead to long-term health problems). In temporal fences, we are not inclined to engage in a behavior that results in short-term costs but would lead to long-term benefits (e.g., waking early to exercise may seem inconvenient, but regular exercise could lead to long-term benefits).
So how can people escape from these temporal dilemmas? Viewing exercise and healthy eating as temporal dilemmas suggests that people should be more likely to engage in these behaviors when they are more concerned with the future consequences of their actions, less concerned with the immediate consequences of their actions, or both.
To test this idea, in a recent series of studies, my colleagues and I (Joireman, Shaffer, Ballliet, & Strathman, 2012) asked college students to complete a personality scale called the “consideration of future consequences scale”(Strathman, Gleicher, Boninger, & Edwards, 1994). Using this scale, we calculated how concerned people were with the future consequences of their actions (e.g., “When I make a decision, I think about how it will affect me in the future”), and how concerned they were with immediate consequences (e.g., “I only act to satisfy immediate concerns, figuring the future will take care of itself.”). We then measured respondents’ attitudes toward, and intentions to engage in, exercise and healthy eating. Results showed that people who scored high on the ‘concern with future consequences’ scale were more likely to exercise and eat healthy, and that concern with immediate consequences was a relatively weak predictor of exercise and healthy eating outcomes.
In addition to linking future orientation with exercise and healthy eating, we were also interested in understanding why future-oriented people exercise and eat healthy. Drawing on regulatory focus theory (Higgins, 1997; Higgins et al., 2001), we predicted that future-oriented people exercise and eat healthy because they approach goals from a promotion orientation (as opposed to a prevention orientation). People who adopt a promotion orientation eagerly and optimistically pursue gains (e.g., “I frequently imagine how I will achieve my hopes and aspirations”), whereas those who adopt a prevention orientation are concerned with avoiding losses (e.g., “In general, I am focused on preventing negative events in my life”; see Lockwood, Jordan & Kunda, 2002).
Results showed that future-oriented people scored high on promotion orientation, and promotion orientation, in turn, predicted more favorable exercise and healthy eating attitudes which, in turn, predicted stronger intentions to exercise and eat healthy.
The results of our studies suggest that people are more likely to exercise and eat healthy when they develop a future-oriented outlook and focus on eagerly pursuing positive outcomes associated with an ideal self. That said, many people are, by nature, more present-oriented. Finding strategies to motivate present-oriented people to exercise and eat healthy is also vitally important. One strategy that has proven effective is to help present-oriented people understand the immediate benefits associated with health behaviors (e.g., Orbell & Hagger, 2006). Thus, for the more present-oriented among us, it may be most effective to stress how exercise and healthy eating can lead to immediate reductions in stress, and corresponding increases in energy and feelings of well-being.
Author information: Dr. Jeff Joireman
is an Associate Professor of Marketing at Washington State University. The majority of his current research focuses on how temporal concerns (e.g., individual differences in consideration of future consequences) predict financial decision-making (e.g., impulsive buying and use of credit cards) and consumer behaviors related to the environment. He is also interested in understanding factors that predict cooperation in social dilemmas (www.socialdilemma.com) and people’s support for charitable organizations.
Web Link for the Published Reportat Sage Publications: Joireman, J., Shaffer, M., Balliet, D., & STrathman, A. (2012). Promotion orientation explains why future-oriented people exercise and eat healthy: Evidence from the two-factor consideration of future consequences 14 scale. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 38(10), 1272–1287. doi: 10.1177/0146167212449362
References
Higgins, E. T. (1997). Beyond pleasure and pain. American Psychologist, 52, 1280-1300. doi:10.1037/0003-066X.52.12.1280
Higgins, E. T., Friedman, R. S., Harlow, R. E., Idson, L. C., Ayduk, O. N., & Taylor, A. (2001). Achievement orientations from subjective histories of success: Promotion pride versus prevention pride. European Journal of Social Psychology, 31, 3-23. doi:10.1002/ejsp.27
Joireman, J., Shaffer, M., Balliet, D., & STrathman, A. (2012). Promotion orientation explains why future-oriented people exercise and eat healthy: Evidence from the two-factor consideration of future consequences 14 scale. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 38(10), 1272–1287. doi: 10.1177/0146167212449362
Lockwood, P., Jordan, C. H., & Kunda, Z. (2002). Motivation by positive or negative role models: Regulatory focus determines who will best inspire us. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 83, 854-864. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.83.4.854
Orbell, S., & Hagger, M. (2006). Temporal framing and the decision to take part in type 2 diabetes screening: Effects of individual differences in consideration of future consequences. Health Psychology, 25, 537-548. doi:10.1037/0278-6133.25.4.537
Strathman, A., Gleicher, F., Boninger, D. S., & Edwards, C. S. (1994). The consideration of future consequences: Weighing immediate and distant outcomes of behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 66, 742-752. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.66.4.74214.00
Joireman, J., Shaffer, M., Balliet, D., & Strathman, A. (2012). Promotion orientation explains why future-oriented people exercise and eat healthy: Evidence from the two-factor consideration of future consequences 14 scale. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 38(10), 1272–1287. doi: 10.1177/0146167212449362
Are Science Faculty Biased against Female Students?
By Corinne A. Moss-Racusin, Yale University
Imagine that you are a science professor at a research university, responsible for conducting cutting-edge research, teaching several classes, and supervising a large group of undergraduate and graduate students. Like many professors, you decide to hire a lab manager to help run your experiments and ensure that you keep track of your busy schedule. When your first applicant arrives for her interview, you glance over her resume. Though she has an impressive record of involvement in research, supportive letters of recommendation from two of your colleagues, and solid GRE scores, her GPA is only slightly above average. The fact and that she withdrew from a class concerns you, and in the end, you suspect that she will not turn out to be a competent lab manager. You decide not to hire her.
Now imagine that the applicant was identical in every way, except male instead of female. Would your responses change at all? Would you view the male applicant as more competent? Do you think you might be willing to take a chance and hire him?
Most of us would probably guess that our reactions to these identical male and female applicants would be just that—identical. But new research suggests that students’ gender actually has a powerful effect on how they are perceived and treated by science faculty members. These results are particularly important in light of the stubborn gender gap in academic science, especially at the faculty level (Handelsman et al., 2005). For example, women comprise only 32.7% of Ph.D.’s employed full time at academic institutions across the U.S. (National Science Foundation, 2008).
Some researchers have argued that gender discrimination does not play a role in the modern-day science gender gap. Rather, these researchers propose that there are fewer women than men in science because women prefer other non-science fields (like the arts or humanities), and/or because women’s choices to have children and care for aging family members do not leave enough time for extremely competitive, demanding careers in science (e.g., Ceci & Williams, 2010; 2011). This argument has received substantial attention and generated significant debate among the scientific community, leading some to conclude that gender discrimination indeed does not exist nor contribute to the gender disparity within academic science (with headlines proclaiming, “Gender Discrimination in Science is a Myth!”).
However, the evidence used to argue against the role of potential gender discrimination is largely correlational, because researchers have yet to conduct controlled experimental tests to determine whether science faculty members may be subtly biased against female students. Simply put, until we know whether faculty perceive and treat a male student differently than an identical female student (whether they do so intentionally or unintentionally), we cannot conclude that gender discrimination is a “myth” that has no impact on women’s representation in academic science.
New research published in in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science by me and colleagues sets out to provide just such an experimental test of faculty gender bias against female students. Following the general format of the thought experiment described at the beginning of this post, a representative nationwide sample of biology, chemistry and physics professors (N = 127) were asked to evaluate the application materials of a student who had ostensibly applied for a lab manager position. All professors received identical applications, but they were randomly attributed to either a male or a female student. Of importance, the gender of the student’s name was the only thing that differed across conditions—otherwise, the student that each faculty participant read about was identical.
Results indicated that when the student was described as male, he was more likely to be hired and offered mentoring, was rated as more competent, and was offered a higher salary than when the identical student was described as female. This bias against the female student was independent of the faculty participants’ gender, scientific discipline, age, and tenure status, suggesting that the faculty members’ bias may be unintentional, stemming from widespread cultural stereotypes about women’s competence in science. Additional analyses indicated that the female student was less likely to be hired because respondents assumed she was less competent relative to the male student. Faculty members’ levels of modern sexism (i.e., subtle bias against women) undermined their perceptions and treatment of the female applicant, but were unrelated (or marginally positively related) to their perceptions and treatment of the male applicant.
These experimental findings suggest that, contrary to some assertions, gender discrimination in science is not a myth. Specifically, when presented with identical applicants who differed only by their gender, science faculty members evaluated the male student as superior, were more likely to hire him, paid him more money, and offered him more career mentoring. Keep in mind that this bias was exhibited by actual faculty members, who reported mentoring students on a regular basis. As a result, it is important to consider how faculty’s biased perceptions and treatment could influence female students’ immediate decisions to leave science fields, as well as their persistence in science over time. Indeed, small initial differences in mentoring and rewards could translate into large gaps in success and achievement over the course of a women’s vs. men’s careers.
So, what can we do about faculty gender bias? Our results suggest several avenues for change:
- Educate faculty and students about the existence and impact of bias within academia.
- Modify academic policies and create mentoring interventions designed to reduce faculty member’s gender biases.
- Establish objective, transparent student evaluation and admissions criteria to guard against faculty’s tendency to unintentionally use different standards when assessing women relative to men.
Without these types of actions, faculty members may continue to inadvertently favor male students, potentially contributing to the shortage of women in academic science.
Dr. Moss-Racusin
Author information: Dr. Moss-Racusin is a Postdoctoral Associate at Yale University, working with Dr. John Dovidio in the Yale Intergroup Relations Lab, and Dr. Jo Handelsman in the Center for Scientific Teaching. She completed her Ph.D. in March of 2011 at Rutgers University, working primarily with Dr. Laurie Rudman, and also with Dr. Diana Sanchez. Her work focuses on understanding and ameliorating inequality within institutions.
Web Link for the Published Report at the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences for the United States of America (PNAS): Moss-Racusin, C. A., Dovidio, J. F., Brescoll, V. L., Graham, M., & Handelsman, J. (2012). Science faculty’s subtle gender biases favor male students. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
References
Ceci, S. J., Williams, W. M. (2010). Gender differences in math-intensive fields. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 19, 275–279.
Ceci, S. J., & Williams, W. M. (2011). Understanding current causes of women’s underrepresentation in science. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108, 3157–3162.
Handelsman, J., Cantor, N., Carnes, M., Denton, D., Fine, E., Grosz, B., Hinshaw, V., Marrett, C., Rosser, S., Shalala, D., & Sheridan, J. (2005). More women in science. Science, 309, 1190-1191.
Moss-Racusin, C. A., Dovidio, J. F., Brescoll, V. L., Graham, M., & Handelsman, J. (2012). Science faculty’s subtle gender biases favor male students. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. DOI: http://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1211286109.
National Science Foundation. (2008). Women, minorities, and persons with disabilities in science and engineering: 2009. Arlington, VA: National Science Foundation.
Joe Paterno’s Legacy: Redux
In November of 2011 the news broke. A former coach at Penn State University, Jerry Sandusky, was to be indicted on 40 counts of sex crimes against young boys, following a three-year investigation. In the following months a number of administrators at the University resigned, including head football coach Joe Paterno. Paterno was suffering from advanced stage lung cancer and died of complication of that disease in January of 2012.
Two notable events have occurred since Paterno passed away: First, Sandusky was found guilty, and is now a convicted sex offender. Second, on July 12, 2012, new information surfaced about Paterno’s involvement in the cover-up of Sandusky’s child molestation activities. An investigation headed by former FBI director Louis Freeh revealed that Paterno directly participated in the cover-up. Freeh’s report minces no words. To avoid the consequences of bad publicity, the most powerful leaders at Penn State University – including Joe Paterno – “repeatedly concealed critical facts relating to Sandusky’s child abuse from the authorities, the Board of Trustees, Penn State community, and the public at large.” This additional information requires that I add a post-script to my analysis of the challenges (at that time) of reaching a conclusion about Joe Paterno’s legacy — which I posted earlier this year (The Sense-Making of Joe Paterno’s Legacy).
Most condemning of all was the report’s contention that Paterno was aware of an earlier investigation of Sandusky in 1998. Email records tell the tale. Despite knowledge of this history, Paterno failed to take any action before or after his assistant coach came to him with his eyewitness account in 2002. This failure occurred “even though Sandusky had been a key member of his coaching staff for almost 30 years, and had an office just steps away from Mr. Paterno’s.” Regarding the failed leadership at Penn State, the report revealed that “although concern to treat the child abuser humanely was expressly stated, no such sentiments were ever expressed by university officials,” including Paterno and the university president, for Sandusky’s victims.
Those of us who were reserving judgment until the dust had settled and the facts were known are now in a position to reach a final evaluation of the Joe Paterno era. No doubt those close to Paterno and to the Penn State community will still defend the man and his reputation. Emotion and self-interest can cloud judgment. But for the majority of us who sifted through the complexities of the case and wanted to reach a fair conclusion, the Louis Freeh report is unequivocal. Penn State itself commissioned the report, and the bottom line could not have been more devastating to the keystone state’s flagship school. Joe Paterno was indisputably a legendary football coach, but in the end, he showed a colossal lapse in judgment. His irresponsibility may have permitted Sandusky to spend another decade ruining the lives of untold numbers of children.
The legacy of Paterno is now forever tarnished. In our research on heroes, we’ve uncovered instances of many great individuals who self-destruct seemingly overnight. People whose status quickly changes from hero to villain, or from villain to hero, are called transposed heroes (Allison & Goethals, 2013). Former U.S. Senator John Edwards is a recent example, as is basketball great LeBron James, who may have transposed twice. As long as human beings achieve great things and then succumb to prideful arrogance, there will never be a shortage of transposed heroes. For Penn State, the daunting task of settling lawsuits and rebuilding a shattered reputation is in progress. For the victims of Sandusky, the lifelong process of healing the unspeakable wounds is now hopefully underway.
References
Allison, S. T., & Goethals, G. R. (2013). Heroic leadership: An influence taxonomy of 100 exceptional individuals. London, England: Routledge.
Leary, M. (2012). John Edwards’ modular mind. Personality and Social Psychology Connections. http://spsptalks.wordpress.com/2012/05/03/john-edwards-modular-mind/
The Data Are In: Experiments in Policy Are Worth It
(cross-posted with permission from the Albert Shanker Institute)
When I was a younger academic, I often taught a class on research methods in the behavioral sciences. On the first day of that class, I took as my mission to teach students only one thing—that conducting research in the behavioral sciences ages a person. I meant that in two ways. First, conducting research is humbling and frustrating. I cannot count the number of pet ideas I have had through the years, all of them beloved, that have gone to die in the laboratory at the hands of data unwilling to verify them.
But, second, there is another, more positive way in which research ages a person. At times, data come back and verify a cherished idea, or even reveal a more provocative or valuable one that no one has never expected. It is a heady experience in those moments for the researcher to know something that perhaps no one else knows, to be wiser—more aged if you will—in a small corner of the human experience that he or she cares about deeply.
Here, I take as my mission to assert that is what true of the individual researcher is also true of policymakers trying to become wiser, or more aged, in the corner they most care about, whether it be education, health, the law, or the workplace. The best way to become wiser in the pursuit of effective policy is to subject one’s ideas to possible empirical verification through research. That research can take on many modes. Many new technologies allow for “data mining,” combing through data (such as student grades or stock market moves), to try to find regular patterns. Or, one can take “found” data to try to determine the causes of important outcomes.
The Worth of Experiments
But I submit that the best way to subject one’s ideas to research verification is through the classic experiment, particularly the traditional random field trial, the history of which is well-told in Jim Manzi’s recent book, Uncontrolled. Nothing, as Manzi suggests, really outperforms auditioning a new idea in an experiment. Would changing the name of a store, for example, produce higher sales? No armchair analysis or argument will settle the issue as fast, or as decisively, as changing the name at a few locations and comparing what happens to similar stores where the name stays the same.
And research in the form of an experiment matters. Although research is meant to lead, sometimes it misleads. However, experiments lead more reliably to the truth than do other forms of empirical study. Ioannidis, in his provocative 2005 JAMA paper examining 49 highly influential intervention studies, found that 90 percent were successfully replicated in full when they were randomized trial experiments, but only 20 percent achieved such success when they were not. Instead, nonrandom studies tended to produce replication attempts that were failures or that generated reduced benefits.
Experiments can be successful in “aging” policymakers in both the ways I cited above. First, experiments can be cheap and quick ways for bad ideas, no matter how attractive, to be disconfirmed. Regrettably, there are many more ideas that are plausible than are correct, and experiments are well positioned to discover the ideas that fail to live up to their reputation. And, sometimes, the best benefit of a small experiment is avoiding the cost and wasted time of full-scale rollout that produces consequences that are unintended and unwanted, or that distracts policymakers from pursuing more effective interventions.
But experiments also reveal those ideas that work. And in education, for example, experiments are revealing the worth of a number of exciting ideas. For example, in a recent NBER paper, Eric Bettinger and Rachel Baker have discovered that “coaching” students through college does a better job at nudging them to complete their degrees than do programs that increase financial aid.
Greg Walton and Geoff Cohen in a Science paper discovered the remarkable value of revealing to college students that their adjustment difficulties were temporary and shared by all. No longer apt to blame their troubles to “not belonging”, African American students presented such insight owned higher GPAs three years afterward that cut the minority achievement gap in half.
And, of course, there are the long-standing benefits resulting from the Perry and Abecedarian pre-school enrichment programs, which produced higher education and job rates, and lower teenage pregnancy rates, among participants at age 21 relative to those not assigned to these programs.
Enhancing the Value of Experiments
However, to involve experimentation in policymaking most effectively, one must be mindful of four basic facts. First, one should not base a policy on only one experiment. Experiments do point to the truth, but they do so with some imperfection, and so continued study and replication is always called for.
Second, replication is necessary because it allows for refinements or extensions of any policy or intervention. If there is any single lesson from my specific sub-field, social psychology, it is that details and nuance matter. Thus, experiments should take care to test for any impact due to nuance.
For example, Robert Cialdini recently found that he could boost the willingness of hotel guests to forgo having their towels and linens washed if they saw a card truthfully stating that most hotel guests preferred it that way. However, this rate was boosted even more if guests were told that most guests who had previously stayed in their exact hotel room had held this preference. And there is the classic finding of Leventhal and colleagues that they could increase vaccination rates nine-fold among college students in an intervention simply by making sure students signed up for an appointment and were given a map to the campus health center.
Third, it is crucial that experiments be conducted by those with the proper training. In recent years, behavioral scientists have been gratified to see colleagues in related fields, such as philosophy and the law, begin to collect their own data and conduct their own experiments. However, behavioral scientists have also seen these smart and motivated colleagues make “rookie” errors in procedure or data analysis that render their results valueless. For example, every behavioral scientist knows that one needs to switch around the order of questions in long surveys, lest questions at the end be influenced by boredom or fatigue. These simple mistakes can be caught and corrected by those with appropriate training, making that training essential to the enterprise.
Fourth, it is important for the behavioral scientist to fashion the research they conduct to best address the questions that policymakers may have. For example, my own research has inspired a few studies in medical education research to see if medical students and physicians hold accurate views of their professional skill. One can ask, for example, if doctors rate their skills too high or too low relative to their impressions of their colleagues. But that is not the most relevant question to ask. The most relevant question to ask is whether doctors know when to turn to a specialist for a consultation, that is, just before they are about to make a mistake.
Concluding Thoughts
In sum, the time is ripe for a new focus on experimentation to inform policymakers. With new technologies, it is just easier to reach people in the real world. All an experimenter needs is a tablet computer with a questionnaire loaded on it or the number of a respondent’s smart phone. With all these newly emerging advantages, it just makes sense to use experiments as a way to inform and shape policy.
That is, aging has its frustrations, but I do not know of anyone who would trade away the wisdom that it brings. And experiments are one of the most effective avenues available for a society to purchase such insight to the benefit of its members.
On May 10 this past month, Jamie Dimon, the head of JPMorgan, the biggest bank in the United States in terms of its assets, hastily assembled a conference call to announce that his company, led by Bruno Iksil, had made a series of badly-timed bets on an upswing in the world economy. As such, it had sold billions of dollars of esoteric financial instruments known as credit derivatives, only to have the world economy stall as uncertainties in Europe grew. The term “credit derivative” may sound familiar. These complex and somewhat synthetic financial securities were at the heart of the economic meltdown of 2008.
What Jamie Dimon had to report was that JPMorgan had been forced to liquidate its position to the tune of at least $2 billion dollars in losses, with some claiming that much higher losses would eventually surface. For a financial economy that had had a near death experience in 2008, this episode had a sudden feeling of déjà-vu associated with it, and economists and politicians alike marveled that anyone could make a mistake of such magnitude after the calamities of 2008 . Were no lessons learned?
Sometimes, mistakes can be a surprise. We can marvel at the hubris of Bruno Iksil, whose financial bets were so big he became known at the London Whale. How could he wander into the quicksand of complex credit derivatives not thinking that he, too, would ultimately be stuck with nowhere to go but nowhere? Further, his mistake was not a single event, but a series of repeated bets that went on for months that only got himself in deeper. Why did he not stop before his potential losses traversed from the millions column into the billions?
One of the most pervasive biases discussed in psychology, yielding unintended outcomes that can range from the costly to catastrophic, is overconfidence. For a variety of reasons, people tend to overbelieve the objective likelihood that their beliefs and judgments are correct. When they reach a conclusion, they are usually much more sure of it than the evidence before them should allow.
Hundreds of studies have demonstrated this phenomenon. In a classic early study, college students were asked the likelihood that they could spell rather difficult words (e.g., fibrous). Their estimates typically exceeded their accuracy. For example, participants thinking they had a 50-50 chance of spelling a particular word correctly proved to be right less than 40% of the time. When they were 80% sure, they were right about 50% of the time. At around 90% confidence, they were right 60% of the time. And when they were absolutely 100% sure, they were still wrong in 1 out of every 5 of their attempts. These data are rather typical of any number of tasks–from trying to answer general knowledge questions to asking doctors to give diagnoses to asking CIA analyses to predict future world events.
Some examples of overconfidence are far more extreme and serious. It permeates planning. In one famous instance, builders in 1956 predicted that they would complete the Sydney Opera House in six years at the cost of $6 million dollars. Final tally when building was completed in 1973: $102 million. Historians have also implicated false confidence as a cause of World War I. Military strategists at the time misread technical innovations as giving advantage to offense over defense, and so rushed into a war each side not only thought it could win, but could do so swiftly, famously by Christmas. However, as the first year of the war ended in each side staring at the other side’s trenches, with over 300,000 soldiers killed and another 600,000 wounded, military planners could not have anticipated that their little war would grow to another four years of blood, mud, and grinding stalemate.
Some dissenters, however, dismiss overconfidence as a major problem when it comes to economic or social choice. People are too rational, they say, when money is involved. Or, they concede the existence of overconfidence, but claim that a little training or experience will beat it out of the professional. If not, those professionals still clinging to their overconfident ways will soon find themselves out of the profession.
However, let me argue that overconfidence is inevitable. And let me start that argument in an unusual place: For the moment, let us assume that the critics are right—that overconfidence is not a systematic part of human personality. That, at least when it comes to the stock market, no individual would show a chronic and mistaken tendency to rate stocks as too attractive, or as too unattractive. Over the long haul, each individual’s judgments of a stock’s prospects would prove exactly accurate, as the “invisible hand” of economics eventually removes systematic biases.
Now, if you grant me such a world, in which systematic bias has been banished from human judgment, I can guarantee you that you will have one basic, and pervasive problem. That problem will be…wait for it… overconfidence.
Say what? How can I argue for overconfidence in a world in which people show no bias? Easy. Even if people show no bias toward unwarranted optimism or pessimism over the long haul, they will still will make errors on individual decisions. Sometimes, they will rate a stock too highly; sometimes they will rate a stock too low. Over the long run, such errors will cancel out, but they will still occur. That is something one has to concede: If people showed no error at all in their judgments, there would not be any room for people to disagree in the value they suspect a stock has.
It’s the inevitable presence of judgmental error that leads to the inevitability of overconfidence, for this reason: When stock pickers make an occasional overly optimistic error and rate a stock too highly, they will be prone toward buying that stock. In that action, they will be overconfident and not earn what they anticipate they will earn. Same for those times when stock pickers are too pessimistic about a stock: Their judgment will lead them to take a pass on the stock, thus forgoing profits that they could have had in their grasp. Ultimately, this means that people willing to buy a stock do so, at least in part, out of overconfidence. Their judgment contains good information plus some error that misleads them into overvaluing the stock. Those who refuse to buy it also do so, at least in part, to overconfidence. Their errors on this stock lead them to overbelieve that it is not worth the asking price.
And sometimes, the error they make and the belief they hold onto too much can become quite extreme. This is likely that is what happened with Mr. Iksil and his associated colleagues. They actually had been “winning” for several months—they were temporarily making money—but that belied a global political condition that was bound to deteriorate, bringing economic forecasts down with it.
Thus, overconfidence is inevitable. It is not a function of the person. It is the function of acting on a decision. Good thinking pushes us toward our decisions, but so do errors in information or reasoning, and so—sooner or later—we or someone relevant to us will be caught in a decision that turns out to be folly.
What to do in the face of such inevitability? First, one should not rely on “the market” to correct for inevitable overconfidence. In the JPMorgan case, the market worked perfectly and many players made much money punishing the London Whale—including another unit of JPMorgan—for the outlandish bets he made. This still left a situation blowing an embarrassing and costly hole in JPMorgan’s financial sheet. Just imagine if the position had been larger, or the circumstances much more like 2008. The market may have worked, but the destruction could have been vast. JPMorgan may have possibly failed, or the economy could have been put at risk like it had been in 2008.
Instead, the inevitability of overconfidence—and the issue that it can crop up with anyone and anywhere—suggests that individuals and firms should adopt “repairs” that seek out possible signs of overconfidence and then rush to mend it. For example, architects take great pains to estimate how much concrete to use in a building, and then multiply that number by eight to insure against overconfident judgments that they are likely not to detect until too late.
For myself, it is unclear just how much, how often, and severe of a problem overconfidence is in the financial world. I just believe it is a problem that demands constant vigilance. I can only hope that most financial decisions are made with care and accuracy—but I would hope people not only trust that sentiment, but verify it as well. Now, let me count up my Facebook IPO money to see if I have enough for that trip to Greece.
Reference
Heath, C., Larrick, R.P., & Klayman, J. (1998). Cognitive repairs: How organizational practices can compensate for individual shortcomings. In B.M. Staw & L.L. Cummings (Eds.) Research in Organizational Behavior, 20, 1-37.
The List: The Death of Robert Champion
The list grows ever longer: Names like Harry Lew, Chucky Stenzel, Chad Saucier, Gabe Higgins, Donna Bedinger, J. B. Joynt…and now Robert Champion. Its the list of people killed by hazing. Champion died of “blunt force trauma” that occurred during the FAMU marching band’s “Crossing Bus C” ritual, when his classmates punched and slapped him as he walked down the aisle of the band bus. He suffered so many injuries, inflicted by so many hands, that prosecutors charged 11 members of the band with felony hazing.
Hazing should never happen, but it does. Hank Nuwer’s Wrongs of Passage documents in excruciating detail the way fraternity pledges at some universities are ritually beaten, ridiculed, harassed, and coerced into abusing alcohol and drugs. New members of sports teams are subjected to physical, psychological, and sexual abuse. The recent suicide of Marine Lance Corporal Harry Lew has been linked to hazing. Marching bands, clubs, schools, businesses, even churches: they psychologically and physically harm their newest members.
Hazing is an entrenched group practice, and has been documented in ancient and modern societies and in all parts of the world. It’s a remnant of the modern-day group’s origins in the primal horde, designed to humble newcomers, remind them of their lowly status, and teach them to respect the group’s chain of command and traditions. Hazing legitimizes the abuse of power by group leaders, who claim the practice will unify the group, weed out the weak and uncommitted, and give newcomers a chance to prove their worth (Cimino, 2011).
But hazing is the wrong way to achieve any of these outcomes. Research in social psychology, including the classic study conducted by Eliott Aronson and Jud Mills in the 1950s, suggests that individuals rate positively groups which cause them to suffer, but other research indicates people like groups that support and reward them even more (Lodewijkx, van Zomeren, & Syroit, 2005). When Raalte, Cornelius, Linder, and Brewer (2007) examined the effects of two type of initiations—ones that involved group outings, swearing an oath, performing in skits, and doing community service and ones that involved kidnapping and abandonment, verbal abuse, physical punishment (spankings, whippings, and beatings), degradation and humiliation, sleep deprivation, alcohol abuse, running errands, and exclusion—they discovered the positive forms increased group unity. The negative forms backfired, creating tension and disunity in the group.
Yet hazing marches on, in part because it so psychologically compelling. Most who haze know that intentionally harming others is wrong. But hazing is sanctioned by the traditions of the group, so it is transformed into a sacred duty. If hazing was called by its correct names—torture and bullying—people might be more reluctant to carry on the grand tradition. Those who are hazed are part of the paradox as well, for they seem to be willing victims who embrace their own abuse. But even the participants in Stanley Milgram’s (1963) famous study of obedience misunderstood the cause of their own actions—they did not realize the power of a situation that so few of them could resist. Like Milgram’s subjects, victims of hazing are enmeshed in a group that severely limits their capacity to act of their own free will. A New York Times article discussing the tragic hazing of Robert Champion quoted a former band member as saying “much of the hazing is voluntary.” It is voluntary in the sense that Milgram’s subjects freely agreed to shock another person to death.
Lone individuals are capable of doing great harm to others. People like Timothy McVeigh, Seung Huo Cho, Ted Bundy, James Earl Ray, Ted Kaczynski, David Berkowitz (the “son of Sam”) are the source of much of the world’s evil. But if you discover harm that is truly senseless, inhumane, and massive in scale, you will likely find a group is to blame. Hazing is a violent, aggressive action; a morally repugnant form of torture and extreme bullying. Hazing is unlawful in many jurisdictions; people who have been hazed are victims of a crime. Hazing is dangerous and often lethal; each year young people are killed or seriously injured in hazing incidents. And hazing does not even yield the effects that it was introduced to generate. When groups identify shared goals, find ways to improve their performance, and identify sources of conflict, they become more cohesive. When they victimize their newest members, they irreparably undermine the group’s unity. Hazing is one form of group behavior that we no longer need.
References
Aronson, E., & Mills, J. (1959). The effects of severity of initiation on liking for a group. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 59, 177-181.
Cimino, A. (2011). The evolution of hazing: Motivational mechanisms and the abuse of newcomers. Journal of Cognition and Culture, 11, 241-267.
Milgram, S. (1963). Behavioral study of obedience. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 67, 371-378.
Nuwer, H. (1999). Wrongs of passage: Fraternities, sororities, hazing, and binge drinking. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
Lodewijkx, H. F. M., & Syroit, J. E. M. M. (1997). Severity of initiation revisited: Does severity of initiation increase attractiveness in real groups? European Journal of Social Psychology, 27, 275-300.
Van Raalte, J. L., Cornelius, A. E., Linder, D. E., & Brewer, B. W. (2007). The relationship between hazing and team cohesion. Journal of Sport Behavior, 30, 491-507.
John Edwards’ Modular Mind
The trial of former U. S. Senator and presidential candidate John Edwards began last week in federal court in North Carolina. Edwards is accused of using campaign contributions to cover up an affair with Rielle Hunter during his unsuccessful bid for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008. The prosecution contends that because the money was used to protect Edwards’ campaign against the damage that public knowledge of the affair would inflict, it was subject to federal campaign laws. Who would have guessed that financial support for one’s mistress is now regarded as a campaign expense?
Even in an era in which we are rarely shocked by scandal, Edwards’ tale is particularly sordid. Not only did he have an affair while running for President of the United States, but he fathered a child with Hunter that Edwards repeatedly denied was his. On top of that, Edwards asked his aide, Andrew Young, to claim paternity of the child and convinced Young and his wife to take Hunter in to keep her out of the public eye. And, all of this drama played out while his wife, Elizabeth, was battling breast cancer that would take her life less than two years later.
In his book, Why Everyone (else) is a Hypocrite, Robert Kurzban offers a new perspective on instances in which people behave in such unethical, hypocritical, and self-defeating ways. As an evolutionary social psychologist, Kurzban begins with evolutionary psychology’s assumption that the mind consists of many individual mental processes that can be compared to cell phone applications or software subroutines. Each of these modules handles a specific processing task and operates according to its own goals and logic. So, for example, we may have modules that calculate risks, react to toxic substances, manage our sexual urges, make ethical judgments, respond to instances in which we are treated unfairly, and so on.
People are not consciously aware of most of the processes that occur in these cognitive modules. Although we are attuned to some of what goes on in our brains, most of the brain’s activities influence our motives, emotions, thoughts, and behavior without us being conscious of them at all. As a result, we do many things without really knowing why (although we can usually generate a plausible story) and even while adamantly claiming that we are not being driven by motives that are obvious to everyone else. We simply do not have conscious access to the workings of most of our processing modules.
Although some of these processing modules are interconnected in ways that allow them to communicate with and influence one another, many of them operate independently. According to Kurzban, the fact that the human mind is composed of many separate modules makes people naturally inconsistent. To give just one example, the module that maintains our ethical principles may assert moral judgments that other people have rewarded in the past, while the module that manages our reactions to sexual temptations may operate according to quite different principles with little or no input from the ethics module. Each module has a job to do, which it carries out without much regard for what other modules are doing.
And, although modules sometimes coordinate their activities, there is no master process that oversees all of them. Most of us feel that there is a central manager inside us somewhere – a little “me” who controls our behavior – but there’s not one “person” inside of us who is in charge of coordinating all of our actions. Instead, Kurzban argues that our thoughts, motives, emotions, and behaviors reflect the outputs of a loose confederacy of modules, and there’s no final arbiter when modules operate at cross purposes. Instead, which module dominates on a particular occasion is determined by a broad array of factors both inside and outside the individual. Today, our behavior may be controlled easily by our ethical beliefs, whereas tomorrow our sexual modules may hold sway. To an outsider, our behavior would appear inconsistent and perhaps hypocritical, but these responses simply reflect the influence of different modules.
So, let’s look inside John Edwards’ modular mind. To oversimplify greatly, the modules that manage his ethical beliefs are functionally distinct from those that control his sexual urges, and those are distinct from those that control his ambition, which are distinct from those that manage his feelings toward Elizabeth, his relationships with Rielle Hunter and Andrew Young, and his public impression management strategies. Each module operates according to principles that have been influenced by evolutionary processes, his unique genetic make-up, his personal experiences, and the situations in which he finds himself. And, clearly, the various modules are not working in concert, leading to a series of inconsistent, hypocritical, and self-defeating actions.
Popular explanations of unethical misbehaviors sometimes suggest that the person was fooling him- or herself about the morality of the behavior, the likelihood of getting caught, or his or her ability to escape punishment. The assumption is that no one would engage in such self-defeating actions without a good deal of self-deception. Yet, self-deception has been very difficult to explain because it implies that one part of a person actively hides the truth from some other part. But no one has been able to explain what these separate parts could possibly be, or how one part of someone’s mind can deceive another part. Kurzban hypothesizes that what appears to be self-deception occurs because some modules conceal their activities from other modules. If we assume that a module of which a person is consciously aware is itself not in communication with another module of which the person is not aware, two parts of a single brain could both know and not-know something at the same time without any deception at play. Clearly, various parts of Edwards’ modular mind were not talking to each other.
John Edwards’ actions were particularly staggering in their level of irresponsibility, indulgence, callousness, duplicity, and downright stupidity. But, at their psychological core, they are not fundamentally different from what all of us do. We each occasionally behave in ways that violate our moral beliefs, say things that we know are not true, present images of ourselves that differ from how we really are, and behave in ways that we know are unwise. From an evolutionary standpoint, there’s no reason that the operation of a particular module should necessarily be consistent with other modules. We may try to impose consistency on ourselves or on other people, but consistency is not inherent in the mind’s design. Human beings are, in Kurzban’s words, “consistently inconsistent.”
Taking a modular view of the human mind does not explain why Edwards behaved precisely as he did, and offering a scientific explanation certainly doesn’t excuse his actions (Miller, Gordon, & Buddie, 1999). But, it does help us understand that inconsistency – between ethical beliefs and behavior, between what one says and what one does, and between different actions at different times – is to be expected.
Smooth, effective, and satisfying social relationships may require people to insist that others act in accordance with their stated beliefs and intentions and to display a reasonable degree of consistency across situations and time. And, because we realize that being viewed as principled and consistent is important in social relations, each of us tries to avoid appearances of inconsistency. But these are social mandates, not biological ones. Because the modular mind is inherently inconsistent, managing the brain’s natural hypocrisy is an ongoing challenge for all of us.
References
Kurzban, R. (2010). Why everyone (else) is a hypocrite. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Miller, A. G., Gordon, A. K., & Buddie, A. M. (1999). Accounting for evil and cruelty: Is to explain to condone? Personality and Social Psychology Review, 3, 254-268.
