First Assignment:
Read “The Devil Made Me Do It” The Deification of Consciousness and the Demonization of the Unconscious John A. Bargh
What did you learn form this reading? Describe in one or two paragraphs.
Second Assignment:
Read Powerpoint Slide first: Life Lingers
In the section of “A sunny outlook on Life,” The following studies have been described: David Hirshleifer and Tyler Shumway study and Elke Weber and her colleagues’ study. What have you learned from these studies? How do you apply them in your everyday life?
Life Lingers
Chapter 4
This is what this chapter is about: The carryover effect of one experience into the next-the very, very recent past- and how it can bleed into the occurring present.
Chapter 4
Motorcycles and Misattribution Dolf Zillmann, Jennings Bryant and Joanne Cantor Study
In 1975, the psychologists Dolf Zillmann, Jennings Bryant and Joanne Cantor used Girl on a Motorcycle ( a movie) in a classic experiment to demonstrate how physical activity can affect conscious, rational thoughts.
All the participants in the study watched the film, but only after engaging in a workout – riding a bike of their own, in fact, albeit just an exercise bike with few if any pounding pistons.
The key to the experiment was that each subject took in Marianne Faithfull’s performance while on one of the three different stages of physiological arousal that followed exercising.
In the first phase, right after the physical activity is over, we know that our high level of arousal – heart pumping, maybe shortness of breath – are because of having exercised.
In the second and key phase, we believe we have calmed down and are back to our normal arousal state, yet we are actually still physiologically aroused.
In the third and final phase, arousal is actually returned to normal levels and we correctly believe that we are no longer physiologically aroused.
Motorcycles and Misattribution Dolf Zillmann, Jennings Bryant and Joanne Cantor Study
The question Zillmann and his colleagues asked was how the participant’s state of arousal following the workout would affect how sexually aroused he became by watching the segment of Girl on a Motorcycle.
The subjects in the first phase of the heightened physiological state resulting from the exercise, who were still fully aware of the exercise’s effect on them, didn’t report any greater level of sexual arousal from the movie than did a non-exercising control group.
And participants in the third phase, who were no longer actually aroused from the exercise, also were not that sexually aroused by the movie.
In fact, both the first and the third group reported fairly negative impression of the film. Importantly, those were the groups that has an accurate read on their arousal level.
But then there was a second group. That is where things got interesting. These participants did sense that they were biologically aroused while watching the movie; even though this was really caused by the lingering effects of their exercise. They thought the effect of exercise was over with, so they mistakenly attributed their arousal solely to Marriane Faithfull and her leather-bound adventure. They also reported liking the Girl on a Motorcycle significantly more than did the other two groups.
Road rage We feel road rage at the selfish, reckless and behavior of the other drivers. But we react to the later offenders as if each is the same person annoying us over and over again. William James called it the “summation of stimuli” describing how the first few occurrences of annoyance aren’t enough to provoke the response, but they lead to a “Heightened irritability,” and eventually another such annoyance is enough to “break the camel’s back.”
A sunny outlook of life
A sunny outlook on Life
The current weather is an ever-present prime in our lives, an ongoing, background moderator of our emotional state.
In the late spring of 1983, a female experimenter telephoned participants either on a warm and sunny days, or on rainy days.
She was calling from town, from the university of Illinois campus, and she was calling local numbers randomly taken from the student phone directory. This was back in the day before caller ID or smartphones, which made it possible for the experimenter to say she was calling from the Chicago campus of the university, about 150 miles north.
By telling the participants she was that far away, she could casually ask, early in the conversation, “ By the way, how’s the weather down there?”(She know, of course, what the weather was like, because she was right there herself).
But she only asked half the participants about the weather, calling their attention to it, and did not ask the other half.
A sunny outlook on Life
Next, all respondents were asked four questions about how satisfied they were with their entire lives to that point. The final question of the four had to do with how happy they felt at that moment.
The students whose attention was called to the day’s weather, were in the same positions as the exercise bike riders after getting off the bike in the Zillmann arousal studies. They saw the sunny or rainy day outside and knew how it could be affecting their mood. For these participants then, the weather and the mood it inspired had no effect on their ratings of how well their entire lives had gone. If they felt in a happy or sad mood because of the weather, there were conscious of it, and so didn’t misunderstand those feelings. The carryover was neutralized.
But the students whose attention was not called to the day’s weather closely resembled the participants who, a decade earlier, rode the exercise bike and, after a short delay, watched the girl on a Motorcycle. If it happened to be a sunny day outside, those students reported themselves as more satisfied with their entire lives to that point, compared to students who were called on a rainy day.
A sunny outlook on Life David Hirshleifer and Tyler Shumway study
In 2003, university of Michigan behavioral economists David Hirshleifer and Tyler Shumway assessed the relationship between morning sunshine in the city where country’s major stock exchange was located and the behavior of that stock market that day.
Stock marketers do better when it’s sunny, even though there’s no valid economic reason this should be.
This evidence is consistent with sunlight affecting mood, and mood affecting prices.
A sunny outlook on Life Elke Weber and her colleagues’ study
In a 2014 study published in the international science journal Nature, Colombia University decision scientist Elke Weber and her colleagues look at how much a given’s weather – warm or cold – affected the public’s concern over the global warming problem.
In general, what Weber and colleagues found was that when the current weather is hot, public opinion holds that global warming is occurring, and when then current weather is cold , public opinion is less concerned about global warming.
Again, this shows how prone we are to believe that what we are experiencing right now in the present is how things always are, and always will be in the future.
A sunny outlook on Life
Doctors at one mental hospital recently decided to treat sixteen of their patients diagnosed with major depressive disorder with a single two-hour session of “hyperthermia,” in which a set of infrared lamps is used to warm the entire body. These researches measured the depression level of these patients during a standard psychiatric scale both before the treatment and then one week after the single heat lamp treatment.
And they found out a marked reduction in the depression levels, from an average score of 30 before the treatment to under 20 a full week later.
The doctors concluded that this whole-body heat treatment produced rapid and lasting relief from the symptoms of depression in their patients and likely does so by improving the functioning of brain pathways that link physical to social temperature.
Triple crown, triple angry
Availability Heuristic
How easily something comes to mind is called the availability heuristic. It is kind of shortcut we all use when deciding how likely of frequently a type of event is. The availability heuristic was discovered by Daniel Kahneman and his longtime research partner Amos Tversky. These judgments of frequency matter in our daily lives because we make choices based on how often various things happen or are likely to happen.
Recent experience can make some of our memories easier to recall than others. This is another way that our recent past can carry over to unconsciously influence our judgments. It can mislead you when you base your judgements of past frequency on how swiftly something comes to mind. It can even cause someone to become famous overnight.
Availability Heuristic Larry Jacoby and his colleagues’ study
Memory researcher Larry Jacoby and his colleagues had participants come into his lab one day and study a list of nonfamous names.
Then those same participants came back to the lab the next day and he gave them a new list of names.
There were names of famous people on the second list, like Michael Jordan, but there were also some nonfamous name from the list the day before.
The participants were asked which of the names were of famous people, and which were not.
They were more likely than usual to say nonfamous people were famous, too, if they had happened to have seen that name on the list the day before. This happened even when the experimenters told the participants that if they remembered having seen that name on the list from the day before, it was guaranteed to not be a famous name.
So this was an unconscious effect of recent experience on the participants’ judgements of fame.
Attention and memory
Our memory is therefore fallible. It is not the objective video recording of reality we sometimes think it is or want it to be. It can be fooled by our recent experience, but also by the fact that we pay selective attention to some things and not to others, and what we pay attention to is what gets stored in our memories.
If we paid equal and impartial attention to everything that happened then our memories would be a very accurate guide to what happens most frequently around us. But our attention isn’t into equal opportunity. This can (and does) lead to some squabbles at home, like about whose turn it is to do the dishes.
Attention and Memory Richard Eibach, Lisa Libby, and Thomas Gilovich study
Richard Eibach, Lisa Libby, and Thomas Gilovich of Cornell University argued in a 2003 research article, we often unwittingly mistake – or misattribute – changes in ourselves for changes in the world.
When you have a baby, especially your first one, suddenly the very mundane things around you take on dangerous, sinister aspect – the stairs, the window blind cords, electric outlets, household cleansers under sink, prescription medicines on the bathroom countertop – they all seem to be emitting evil laugh and are labeled with skulls and cross bones.
Aware of this tendency, Eibach and colleagues analyzed data from a representative sample of 1800 U.S. citizens over the age of 18, who were asked how they thought crime rates had changes over the past 8 years. If the respondent had not had a child during this period, their most common answer to this question was that crime had declined ( as it in fact had). But if the respondent had a new baby during this period, their most common answer was that crime had increased during this period (as it had not).
These new parents were not aware of how having the baby had changed their attention toward safety issues, which had recast their own recent experiences and thus their body of memories concerning the likelihood of danger out there in the world.
Emotions and attention
Emotions grab hold of our attention and consciousness and don’t let go.
Elizabeth Phelps, an NYU psychologist specializing in emotions and memory, calls attention to the fact that most of our very long-term memories, the things that come to mind when we reminisce about our lives, involve the experience of strong emotion.
These once-recent pasts that become distant but remembered pasts remain in our minds because they so absorbed our attention at the time. They were important in some way, important enough to provoke the strong emotion in the first place.
When we are in the grip of a strong emotion, such as anger, we feel sure we are right, and that we are seeing the world and other people as they really are. That tends to spur us on to act on that belief, not at all recognizing that we are in a temporary emotional state.
Emotions have an even more powerful carryover effect on us than the lingering memories they produce. They put different basic motivation into play, such as aggressiveness, risk-taking, and wanting to make a change in your current circumstances – as we will see in the chapter 8 “ Be Careful What You Wish For”.
Hoarded emotions
Jennifer Lerner and her colleagues were the first to show how emotions experienced in one situation, such as when watching a sad or disgusting movie scene, carried over to affect purchasing decisions in a second situation, without the person’s awareness that the emotion was still influencing them. Specifically, the persistent emotional state in their unconscious changed the price they were willing to pay to buy something.
Lerner employed another of Nobel Laureate Kahneman’s contributions to behavioral economics, called the “endowment effect”. In the simplest terms, we place more value on an object if we own it than we would place on the same object if we didn’t. our ownership “ endows” the project with additional value.
What Lerner and her colleagues showed in their experiments was that this basic endowment effect was changed and even reversed if the person recently had a certain kind of emotional experience.
Translated into economic behavior, then, disgust should compel one to want to sell what one already has at a lower price than usual, because the underlying motivation is to get rid of what you have; it should also cause a decrease in desire to buy or acquire anything new, which would lead to lower buying prices as well. The emotion of disgust should change the otherwise universal endowment effect by lowering both buying and selling prices. In other words, it should make you bad at business.
Hoarded emotions Lerner and associates’ study
Their participants first had to watch an infamous four-minute scene from the movie Trainspotting, in which a man uses an epically filthy toilet.
To make this emotional experience even more powerful, they asked participants to write about how they would personally feel if there were in the same situation.
Then some of them were given highlighter as a gift.
The point of the study was how the participants valued that highlighter.
Without being aware of the effect of the movie clip on their valuations, they took a lower amount of money to sell their gift back, compared to the luckier participants in the control group who did not watch the clip.
Those without the highlighters offered less money than those in the control condition to buy one. Disgust equaled buy low and sell low.
Hoarded emotions Lerner and associates’ study
The effect becomes even more interesting in the case of sadness. Sadness is an emotion that triggers the basic motivation to change one’s state.
It makes good sense that when we are sad, we want to get out of that sad state, and so we become more ready to act and do something.
For Lerner’s experiment, participants were shown a clip taken from the movie The Champ – the scene in which the boy’s mentor dies – and were asked to write empathically about it.
The emotion of sadness was expected to trigger the motivation-to-change emotional state.
In service to the unconscious motivation-to-change state, the participants didn’t require as much money to get rid of the highlighter, but they also wanted to pay more than usual to acquire the highlighter if they didn’t already have it. Buy high and sell low. You won’t stay in business very long doing that.
Clearly the take-home message here is that you shouldn’t go shopping when you are sad. You will be quite willing to pay more to buy the same things compared to when you are not sad. But this is easier said than done, because people often use shopping to help them feel better. It’s fun, like getting yourself a present, and many of us do it to cheer ourselves up.
Anchoring
Another one the basic judgmental biases that Kahneman discovered is a form of priming effect called anchoring, in which using a certain range of numbers in one context carries over to influence the range of numbers you use in a subsequent context. So, if you are first shown a series of photographs of pre-school age children and asked to estimate the age of each child, you would be using numbers in the range, say, of 2 to 5. But if you were shown a series of photos of high school students and asked to estimate the age of each of them instead, you would be using numbers in the rage of 14 to 18.
Conclusion
So life lingers on in the mind well after we’ve moved on to something else and don’t think our recent past is influencing us anymore. This applies to the arousal and emotions we feel, like anger and sadness, and how attracted we are to each other. Moods carry over as well and can bias even our important financial decisions.
The world changes faster than our minds do, and life lingers in our subjective experience more than it does in reality, making us vulnerable to making bad choices. We strongly assume that what we are thinking and feeling is driven by what’s happening right now in front of us and we hardly ever question that assumption.
Dear students, Great job reading! There is one assignment for tonight, due 11:59 pm, that is a proof of your attendance. Looking forward to seeing you all on Wednesday!
.MsftOfcThm_Accent1_Fill { fill:#814DFF; } .MsftOfcThm_Accent1_Stroke { stroke:#814DFF; }
.MsftOfcThm_Accent1_Fill { fill:#814DFF; } .MsftOfcThm_Accent1_Stroke { stroke:#814DFF; }
.MsftOfcThm_Accent1_Fill { fill:#814DFF; } .MsftOfcThm_Accent1_Stroke { stroke:#814DFF; }
What Students Are Saying About Us
.......... Customer ID: 12*** | Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐"Honestly, I was afraid to send my paper to you, but splendidwritings.com proved they are a trustworthy service. My essay was done in less than a day, and I received a brilliant piece. I didn’t even believe it was my essay at first 🙂 Great job, thank you!"
.......... Customer ID: 14***| Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
"The company has some nice prices and good content. I ordered a term paper here and got a very good one. I'll keep ordering from this website."
