Push and pull
Andrew Geers et al.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
In modern health care, individuals frequently exercise choice over health treatment alternatives. A growing body of research suggests that when individuals choose between treatment options, treatment effectiveness can increase, although little experimental evidence exists clarifying this effect. Four studies were conducted to test the hypothesis that exercising choice over treatment alternatives enhances outcomes by providing greater personal control. Consistent with this possibility, in Study 1 individuals who chronically desired control reported less pain from a laboratory pain task when they were able to select between placebo analgesic treatments. Study 2 replicated this finding with an auditory discomfort paradigm. In Study 3, the desire for control was experimentally induced, and participants with high desire for control benefited more from a placebo treatment when they were able to choose their treatment. Study 4 revealed that the benefit of choice on treatment efficacy was partially mediated by thoughts of personal control. This research suggests that when individuals desire control, choice over treatment alternatives improves treatment effectiveness by enhancing personal control.
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Freedom from constraints: Darkness and dim illumination promote creativity
Anna Steidle & Lioba Werth
Journal of Environmental Psychology, September 2013, Pages 67–80
Abstract:
Employee creativity is critical to organizational competitiveness. However, the potential contribution made by the workspace and the physical environment is not fully taken into account because, up to now, it has been rather unclear how aspects of the physical environment, especially light, can support creativity. Consequently, in six studies, the present research investigated the effect of light and darkness on creative performance. We expected that darkness would offer individuals freedom from constraints, enabling a global and explorative processing style, which in turn facilitates creativity. First, four studies demonstrated that both priming darkness and actual dim illumination improved creative performance. The priming studies revealed that the effect can occur outside of people's awareness and independent of differences in visibility. Second, two additional studies tested the underlying mechanism and showed that darkness elicits a feeling of being free from constraints and triggers a risky, explorative processing style. As expected, perceived freedom from constraints mediated the effect of dim illumination on creativity. Third, moderation analyses demonstrated the effects' boundary conditions: the darkness-related increase in creativity disappeared when using a more informal indirect light instead of direct light or when evaluating ideas instead of generating creative ideas. In sum, these results contribute to the understanding of visual atmospheres (i.e. visual messages), their importance for lighting effects, and their impact via conceptual links and attentional tuning. Limitations as well as practical implications for lighting design are discussed.
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Stereotype Threat and the Student-Athlete
Thomas Dee
Economic Inquiry, forthcoming
Abstract:
Achievement gaps may reflect the cognitive impairment thought to occur in evaluative settings (e.g., classrooms) where a stereotyped identity is salient (i.e., stereotype threat). This study presents an economic model of stereotype threat that reconciles prior evidence on how student effort and performance are influenced by this social-identity phenomenon. This study also presents empirical evidence from a framed field experiment in which students at a selective college were randomly assigned to a treatment that primed their awareness of a negatively stereotyped identity (i.e., student-athlete). This social-identity manipulation reduced the test-score performance of athletes relative to non-athletes by 12%. These negative performance effects were concentrated among male student-athletes who also responded to the social-identity manipulation by attempting to answer more questions.
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Beliefs about willpower determine the impact of glucose on self-control
Veronika Job et al.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 10 September 2013, Pages 14837-14842
Abstract:
Past research found that the ingestion of glucose can enhance self-control. It has been widely assumed that basic physiological processes underlie this effect. We hypothesized that the effect of glucose also depends on people’s theories about willpower. Three experiments, both measuring (experiment 1) and manipulating (experiments 2 and 3) theories about willpower, showed that, following a demanding task, only people who view willpower as limited and easily depleted (a limited resource theory) exhibited improved self-control after sugar consumption. In contrast, people who view willpower as plentiful (a nonlimited resource theory) showed no benefits from glucose — they exhibited high levels of self-control performance with or without sugar boosts. Additionally, creating beliefs about glucose ingestion (experiment 3) did not have the same effect as ingesting glucose for those with a limited resource theory. We suggest that the belief that willpower is limited sensitizes people to cues about their available resources including physiological cues, making them dependent on glucose boosts for high self-control performance.
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Power increases situated creativity
Sarah Gervais et al.
Social Influence, Fall 2013, Pages 294-311
Abstract:
The present paper examined whether power was linked with situated creativity. We proposed that powerful (vs powerless) people engage in creative thought when creativity contributes to contextual goals but avoid creative thought when creativity impedes contextual goals. Extending the Situated Focus Theory of Power (Guinote, 2007a; 2010) to creativity, we suggested that powerful people are better able to achieve situational goals because they can flexibly focus on cues that indicate what is required for success in a given context. Across three experiments, we found that powerful (vs powerless) people engaged in more creative thinking when creativity facilitated contextual goals. This was not the case when creativity hindered contextual goals. Further, neither affect (Experiment 2) nor effort (Experiments 1 and 3) contributed to these effects. However, local processing undermined creativity for powerful people, indicating that processing style may contribute to the link between power and situated creativity. These findings suggest that powerful people flexibly vary creativity in line with the situation.
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The Allometry of Metabolism and Stature: Worker Fatigue and Height In The Tanzanian Labor Market
Gregory Price
Economics & Human Biology, forthcoming
Abstract:
If the positive wage-height correlation is at least partially biological in origin, one plausible pathway is the effect of stature on energy expenditure in individuals. If metabolism scales proportionately with stature, then relative to short individuals, taller individuals can produce more energy for a given work task. This also suggests that end-of-the-workday fatigue, or lack of energy, varies inversely with stature. We test this hypothesis with data from the 2004 Tanzanian Household Worker Survey in which workers report the extent of their fatigue at the end-of-the-workday. Ordinal latent variable parameter estimates reveal that relative to short workers, taller workers are less likely to report being tired at the end-of-the-workday. This suggests that the positive wage-height relationship also has a biological foundation whereby the energy requirements and metabolic costs associated with work effort/tasks are inversely related to stature.
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Response to restrictive policies: Reconciling system justification and psychological reactance
Kristin Laurin et al.
Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, November 2013, Pages 152–162
Abstract:
Here we propose a dual process model to reconcile two contradictory predictions about how people respond to restrictive policies imposed upon them by organizations and systems within which they operate. When participants’ attention was not drawn to the restrictive nature of the policy, or when it was, but their cognitive resources were restricted, we found evidence supporting a prediction based on System Justification Theory: Participants reacted favorably to restrictive policies, endorsing them and downplaying the importance of the restricted freedom. Only when we cued participants to focus their undivided attention on the restrictive nature of the policy did we find evidence supporting a prediction based on psychological reactance: Only then did participants display reactance and respond negatively to the policies.
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Stereotype threat can enhance, as well as impair, older adults’ memory
Sarah Barber & Mara Mather
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Negative stereotypes about aging can impair older adults’ memory; however, the mechanisms underlying this are unclear. In two experiments we tested competing predictions derived from two theoretical accounts: executive control interference and regulatory fit. Older adults completed a working memory test either under stereotype threat about their memory or not. Monetary incentives were manipulated such that recall either led to gains or forgetting led to losses. The executive control interference account predicts that threat decreases the availability of executive control resources and hence should impair working memory performance. The regulatory fit account predicts that threat induces a prevention focus. Because of this threat should impair performance when gains are emphasized but improve performance when losses are emphasized. Results were only consistent with the regulatory fit account. Although stereotype threat significantly impaired older adults’ working memory performance when remembering led to gains, it significantly improved performance when forgetting led to losses.
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Marking Time: Selective Use of Temporal Landmarks as Barriers Between Current and Future Selves
Johanna Peetz & Anne Wilson
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, forthcoming
Abstract:
Temporal landmarks such as birthdays and significant calendar dates structure our perception of time. People might highlight temporal landmarks spontaneously in an effort to regulate connections between temporal selves. Five studies demonstrated that landmarks are used spontaneously to induce psychological separation from undesirable temporal selves. Participants were more likely to think of events that fell in between the current and the future self if an imagined future self was negative than if it was positive (Studies 1a, 1b, and 2). Furthermore, when a self-enhancement mindset was activated, participants were more likely to call to mind intervening temporal landmarks to protect themselves from a negative future self than when this mindset was not activated (Study 3). Finally, when psychological separations between the current self and a negative future self were introduced through alternate means, participants no longer selectively used landmarks to separate themselves from this future self (Study 4).
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To Do It or to Let an Automatic Tool Do It?: The Priority of Control Over Effort
François Osiurak et al.
Experimental Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
The aim of the present study is to provide experimental data relevant to the issue of what leads humans to use automatic tools. Two answers can be offered. The first is that humans strive to minimize physical and/or cognitive effort (principle of least effort). The second is that humans tend to keep their perceived control over the environment (principle of more control). These two factors certainly play a role, but the question raised here is to what do people give priority in situations wherein both manual and automatic actions take the same time – minimizing effort or keeping perceived control? To answer that question, we built four experiments in which participants were confronted with a recurring choice between performing a task manually (physical effort) or in a semi-automatic way (cognitive effort) versus using an automatic tool that completes the task for them (no effort). In this latter condition, participants were required to follow the progression of the automatic tool step by step. Our results showed that participants favored the manual or semi-automatic condition over the automatic condition. However, when they were offered the opportunity to perform recreational tasks in parallel, the shift toward manual condition disappeared. The findings give support to the idea that people give priority to keeping control over minimizing effort.