Dutton and Aron’s paper went on to describe a series of other experiments getting at the same phenomenon, including one in which they told male research subjects in the presence of an attractive women that they were going to be given either strong or weak electric shocks. They asked the men about how attracted they were to the woman and, sure enough, the men who thought they were going to be given the strong shocks described themselves as more sexually attracted.

The basic finding was that when men became excited — either because they thought they were going to be shocked or because they were dangling over a cavern — they confused their physiologically aroused state for one that was brought on by sexual attraction. The experiment’s subjects “misattributed” part of their their arousal to sexual attraction.

In the recent bestseller Blink, Malcolm Gladwell argues that “thin-slicing”, or our instantaneous decisions — often based on physiological reactions — are often as good as or even better than carefully planned and considered ones. The concept has been given a huge amount of attention recently due to the popularity of Gladwell’s book.

Dutton and Aron’s work, and a host of work that came both before and after, provides a useful set of counter examples. While our basic reactions can be useful, our minds are not always very good at understanding why we feel what we feel. Feelings as basic as who we find attractive are influenced, often heavily, by our environment in ways we do not and perhaps cannot easily understand. Gladwell focuses on the way we make correct decisions quickly but there’s another side to that coin. Actions influenced by misattribution of arousal and of other physiological states are much more common than we know.

In their study, the researchers would top up a bowl of an M&Ms in the hallway of an apartment building each day. Next to the bowl was a scoop and a sign that said, “Eat Your Fill: please use the spoon to serve yourself.” Some days, they left it with a tablespoon sized spoon. Other days, they provided a quarter-cup sized spoon (quadruple the size). The result? An average of 1.67 times more M&Ms were taken on the days that the big scoop was there than on the days when it was the spoon.

The researchers did similar experiments with large and small tootsie rolls and with halved and unbroken pretzels. The results were similar in each case: when the “unit” of food was larger, people took more. While the amount taken did not vary in proportion to size of the unit (i.e., people did not take 4 times as many M&Ms), the effect was clear. The researchers concluded that, “consumption norms promote both the tendency to complete eating a unit and the idea that a single unit is the proper portion.”

Dan Lockton of the Architectures of Control blog has ruminated on the implications of this research and described the way that it played into more expensive foods with larger portion sizes (versus two-for-one deals) at fast food changes like McDonald’s.

• Review/summary on the British Pyschological Society research digest blog
• Read the article in Psychological Science (sub. req.)

The largest branch of consequentialism is utilitarianism. Utilitarians hold that the “best” outcomes are those which are the best for people collectively: “the greatest good for the greatest number”, as Bentham put it.

Utilitarianism calls for two things: altruism and calculation. It tells us, “if you know that the benefit that you would get from this hundred dollar note is less than the benefit that your impoverished friend Susan would get from a second-hand bicycle, you should buy her the bicycle.” And it tells us, “if you know your $100 could save a life in Darfur, you should send it to an humanitarian organisation there instead”. In fact, if lives can be saved for such small amounts, maybe we should be sending more than $100.

A recent study by Deborah Small, George Lowenstein and Paul Slovic demonstrates that, although human beings are capable of altruism, our altruism is in some sense psychologically incompatible with the kind of rational calculation we’d need to perform to be good act-utilitarians.

The experiment by Small et al. shows clearly that human beings² donate significantly more money to help the victims of catastrophes when two conditions hold: (a) the victim is an identifiable individual, rather than an undetermined individual or a large group in need; and (b) the donor is reasoning emotionally.³

When the experimental subjects were told about the human tendency to donate to indentified individuals in need (rather than large groups in need), they stopped reasoning emotionally. That change halved donations to identified individuals, but did not affect the alread-low donations to groups!

When the authors “primed” some experimental subjects with emotion-based tasks (`how does the word “baby” make you feel?’), and others with mathematical tasks, they observed that the emotionally-primed subjects gave twice as much to identified individuals. Both groups gave similar, low amounts to groups in need.

There are some powerful logical arguments in favour of act-utilitarianism and similar ethical positions. But until we find a way to train, trick, or teach ourselves to live by them, these philosophies will remain incomplete.

• Read the article
• Read more about consequentialism and utilitarianism in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Thanks to Toby Ord for suggesting this paper.

Exhibit A: One common (and characteristically offensive) claim among evopsychers is that your mother’s mother will spend more time caring for you than your father’s mother because — naturally enough — your father’s mother isn’t evolutionarily certain that you have her DNA, since your mother could have been impregnated by any one of tons of guys. The data does indeed seem to bear this out, but sadly this is no win for the evopsychers, since there are some perfectly competent alternative explanations: kids are usually primarily raised by their mothers and its not surprising that those mothers will look to their mothers for help. (via Jeremy Freese)

Exhibit B: In 1995, Christenfeld and Hill argued that since fathers were so unsure if kids were really theirs, evolution would ensure that kids looked more like their fathers than their mothers, so that they wouldn’t be abandoned by deadbeat dads. And, sure enough, they had some students rate whether kids looked more like their father or mother and found that they looked more like their father. Robert French later redid the study, only to find that he couldn’t replicate the results. Oops. (via Mark-Jason Dominus)

Exhibit C: In 1993, Devendra Singh spent months pouring over old copies of Playboy — for science, of course. He set about measuring the waist-to-hip ratios of Playboy models and Miss America winners, concluding that they had maintained relatively constant — approximately .70 — even as the models had gotten thinner over the years. He argued that men were evolutionarily wired to find this “hourglass shape” attractive. The result was quoted in just about every evopsych textbook and news article since. Well, Jeremy Freese and Sheri Meland checked the numbers and found — once again — that none of it was true. There have actually been statistically significant changes in waist-to-hip ratios over time. (original article)

The result was called the “Pygmalion effect”: teachers who expected their students to do better actually caused their students to do better. It was a classic self-fulfilling prophecy. The study (published as Pygmalion in the Classroom) was widely hailed. It made the front page of the Times, The Today Show, the New Yorker, and Time, among others. Teacher workshops in avoiding the effect spread from Puerto Rico to Saudi Arabia. LA banned IQ tests in its elementary schools. Presidents, textbooks, and Wikipedia articles repeat the notions to this day, over 30 years later.

Except none of it was true. The original study was conducted in first through sixth grades. The results were only statistically significant in grades one and two (where the alleged bloomers started with a 4-point advantage). The study was repeated in two Midwestern schools, where as statistically significant advantage was found in favor of the kids who weren’t expected to bloom. Psychologists who reviewed the analysis of the IQ test results found something was badly wrong. Some kids got lower IQ scores than they would have had they just filled out the test randomly. (It turned out the kids just didn’t fill out the test.)

All of this data was available before the Pygmalion book was ever published or promoted. Yet it was glossed over or otherwise ignored by the authors. And even when critics published articles spelling out the details, their critiques have been largely ignored by the public. Harvard’s Robert Rosenthal, the author of the original study, tried four more times to reproduce the effect, failing each time. A handful of studies did reproduce the effect, but they had incredibly small sample sizes. A meta-analysis found no overall effect when sample size was taken into account and showed that nearly half the replications had results that went in the opposite direction.

It might be nice if this Pygmalion effect were real, if students could do better on IQ tests simply by having their teachers think more highly of them. But, as best as we can tell, wishing doesn’t make it so.

• Samuel Wineburg’s critique
• Robert Rosenthal’s response
• Wineburg’s rebuttal

There was, however, a more serious problem. “Dr. Myron L. Fox” was actually an actor trained to give a speech consisting largely of “double talk, neologisms, non sequiturs, and contradictory statements … interspersed with parenthetical humor and meaningless references to unrelated topics.” The speech was actually an experiment conducted by a group of professors of medical education. They summarized the results by noting that “no respondents saw through the hoax of the lecture, [] all respondents had significantly more favorable than unfavorable responses, and [] one even believed he read Dr. Fox’s publications.”

“Given a sufficiently impressive lecture paradigm,” they concluded, “an experienced group of educators participating in a new learning situation can feel satisfied that they have learned despite irrelevant, conflicting, and meaningless content conveyed by the lecturer.”

• Read the study

• The study (sub. req.)
• Write-up in AAAS’s ScienceNOW
• The study: Metacognition in the Rat [PDF]

• A description of the study (from UIScape, a sort of Science That Matters for CHI research)
• The Aesthetics of Reading [PDF paper]
• Proceedings containing the full paper

Brad J. Bushman, a psychologist who studies the effects of TV and video game violence, recently joined Robert D. Ridge, Enny Das, Colin W. Key, and Gregory M. Busath in testing the question. They took some Godful students at Brigham Young University and some atheist students at a university in Amsterdam and split them into two groups. Half heard a story about how an Israelite couple visited the town of Gibeah, where the townspeople raped and beat the woman to death. The Israelites retaliated by attacking the town. The other half heard the same story, but with an additional paragraph noting that God endorsed the retaliation.

Then the students were placed in a competitive game where they could blast noises into the ears of their opponents of variable volume. For students who believed in God, those who heard the passage in which God endorsed the retaliation made the noises as loud as possible twice as often as those who only heard the violent story. For students who did not believe in God, the increase was 40%.

• Read the paper
• Read the write-up in Nature
• More Brad Bushman studies