The Effect
When we order a fancy drink at Starbucks (or some fancier coffee house) with funny language, we believe we are sophisticated connoisseurs. But when others do the exact same thing, we just see them as annoying poseurs.

The Problem
But we don’t just believe we are hot stuff when we order at Starbucks, we also believe that other people will think we are hot stuff. This “self-serving” bias can be dangerous.

Across domains, people believe their dates will be won over by their charm, entrepreneurs believe investors will be won over by their ideas, and “connoisseurs” believe everyone will be won over by their “sophistication.”

It’s one thing to believe you are great, but it’s another thing to project your grand self-perceptions on the others’ perceptions of you. This is when biases can start to multiply and problems can go so awry. While this may not lead to tragic results in a Starbucks line, it can in love, politics, business, and academia.

~By M.R. Trower and Troy Campbell~

~Illustration by M.R. Trower~

Cross-cultural research is becoming increasingly popular, but many researchers are failing to understand the unique challenges it poses. Cross cultural psychology explores how culture influences behavior and attitudes, and cultural psychologists aim to study subjects from two or more cultures using equivalent methods of measurements (Triandis & Brislin, 1984).  

This research can often be difficult to conduct, and as someone in the midst of working through these problems in our lab, I’ve noticed some of these difficulties. I’m sharing what I’ve learned here as a quick guide to both help other researchers design better studies and help readers know enough background to better evaluate this research.

Five Challenges of Cross Cultural Research
1. Design:

The research question and design should be very clear before embarking on cross-cultural research. And when I say clear, I mean crystal clear. What are the specific hypotheses? What analysis will you run? Do you have variables that will allow you to run those tests? Do you have proper controls?

Always start with a pilot study with at least one of the target cultures (or a population in your home country), because it’s surprising how many things sometimes just don’t work. For instance, when conducting survey research, it’s important to test your constructs, such as sub-scales. If you’re going to spend thousands of dollars and months working on a project, make sure your scales work with your population, and don’t just assume it’ll work based on past research.

2. Translations:

How can you express the exact same idea in several languages? Or in the same language but to different cultural populations, such as British vs. American, or urban vs. rural? Again, pilot testing is key. Don’t just show it to a few research assistants who speak the language, get it out to the people that you’ll be studying.

How should you actually translate? We recommend the forward-backward method, where the translated document is translated back to the original language for comparison.

3. Consistency:

As a cross-cultural researcher, you must standardize processes, settings, and other factors of your research so that the only difference between your samples is their culture. Prepare documents like protocols and scripts for experimenters, and go over them again and again. Different cultures have different customs and social behaviors, and those social behaviors, even if they’re as small as how to administer a survey in a coffee shop, cannot vary across studies without jeopardizing the data. This is problematic when you have just one culture, one survey, and one research assistant. When you have ten cultures, one survey in different languages, and many research assistants across the globe, things can get very messy, fast. Remember though, if things are messy, then it’s important to be honest about it in the write up. In the modern age of ‘imperfect’ data, reviewers are looking for and respectful of honesty.

4. Cultural Customs:

Try to have a local person or team who is willing to be involved in the implementation of the project; they will contribute greatly with local advice and organization.

There will be many local factors that you won’t be aware of if you’re not familiar with the culture. For example, you may not know where to collect data, how to deal with local businesses while asking permission, or even how to approach subjects in a nice and professional way. Things like these may vary across countries, and locals are the only ones who can fill you in. It’s also important to understand all these differences before collecting data. For instance, a methodology might work well in one cultural but, because of social norms, not in another. Again, pilot test and know as much as you can ahead of time.

5. Paying Participants:

Does your study involve paying participants? If so, make sure to adjust that payment considering the cost of living of each country. Remember $1 in the USA is not the same as $1 in other countries, so you must make payments equivalent! We recommend indexes like the Purchasing Power Parity Index (World Bank) or the Big Mac Index (The Economist). Also consider whether your samples are used to being paid to do experiments and if your payment varies from this normal payment model.

In the end, the most important thing to remember with cross-cultural psychology is to plan ahead. When evaluating cross-cultural research in journals or news articles, the critical reader should consider what factors the researchers might have overlooked.

One final consideration is to remember that all research is only part of the puzzle. There is no definitive cross-cultural psychological paper, and there never will be. So it’s important to keep each finding in perspective.

~Ximena Garcia-Rada~

Further readings about cross-cultural psychology:

– Keith, K. Cross-Cultural Psychology: Contemporary Themes and Perspectives.

– Shiraev, E. B. & Levy, D. A. (2010). Cross-cultural psychology: critical thinking and contemporary applications (4th ed.). Boston: Pearson/Allyn Bacon.

– Triandis, H. C., & Brislin, R. W. (1984). Cross-cultural psychology. American Psychologist, 39(9), 1006-1016. doi: 10.1037/0003-066X.39.9.1006

– Hofstede, G., Culture’s Consequences: Comparing Values, Behaviors, Institutions and Organizations Across Nations

We often get asked what it’s like to work in the Center for Advanced Hindsight. So, we thought we’d give you a peek into our daily lives with our new series called “Working With Advanced Hindsight.” To see more about the nature of our lab, check out the photos and content on our Facebook page.

To begin our series, let’s start with the youngest people in the lab: our wonderful undergraduate research assistants. The lab takes on a few undergraduate students as research assistants each semester, and their responsibilities cover a wide range — from doing background research for new studies to running the actual experiments. To better understand what working at CAH as a research assistant is like, we’ve asked five of our current research assistants a few questions.

Q. Why did you join the lab?

Katie: “I applied because the research was awesome. But I joined because at my interview it was made clear that if I put in the effort, I would really be part of the research experience and that I would be part of creating and carrying out ideas. Today I know that some of the words and graphics I came up with to study a brainstorming session at the age of 19 will be in an academic journal article one day. It’s an amazing way to start off freshman year.”

Tyler:  “Before I learned about the study of behavioral economics, I had never realized that economics was applicable to things other than business. Suddenly, I was able to understand things from what beer people will order in a restaurant to how people derive happiness from work. I wanted to be more involved with and surrounded by these ideas.”

Q. What is it like to work at the lab?

 Shannon: “You oftentimes hear academics talk about their research and publications as if they are the only ones  working on a project. But at the CAH lab, I’ve learned the importance of collaboration and cooperation. We edit  each other’s surveys, help each other’s experiments, and collectively work together as a team.”

Minn Htet: “I see myself as a generalist. The great thing about CAH is that it is truly interdisciplinary and the work we do here is connected to many different things across disciplines. From historians to neuroscientists, CAH is a crossroads of ideas.”

Michael: “Working at CAH brings an interesting dichotomy of intensive yet fun research to each day. It’s fun and frustrating. And I am not just saying that, sometimes everything is just frustration — that’s science.”

Q. What is challenging about being a RA at the lab?

 Katie: “Creating a good experiment can be challenging. For instance you may want to make people “feel calm” in  the lab. Not only does one have to consider how to create “calm”, the researcher also has to worry about how to  measure it and how differently people react to stimuli intended to induce “calmness.”

Minn Htet: “Research is not just about developing a knowledge set, it’s about learning how to ask and answer questions. And answering questions is hard, isolating constructs and truly producing new knowledge is really tricky.”

Tyler: “I had never realized that there were so many variables that needed to be controlled for and that oftentimes an idea needs to be tested in a variety of different ways in order to fully assess whether it is the ‘explanatory variable’ that is causing a certain outcome.”

Q. What have you learnt?

Katie: “It sounds cheesy, but research doesn’t just mean sitting in a lab running numbers or counting cells. Research also requires creativity and innovation.  Ideas are important. Also, as in any aspect of life, the ability to write well is necessary.”

 Shannon: “Being a researcher can be immensely diverse– from running  a study at a downtown restaurant, to  working alone for hours on a tedious survey, to having animated discussions about what to write for a popular  press article, I have discovered that there are a lot of different facets to this type of life, even as an RA.”

 Michael: “I’ve realized maintaining enthusiasm in the face opposition is paramount to good research. “

A few times a month, I buy a bag of coffee at the supermarket on my street. I enjoy the ritual of standing before the twenty or thirty whole-bean options in the coffee aisle, imagining how the different roasts and origins might taste. This past Sunday, though, I was surprised to see how my coffee choice influenced the actions of a stranger.

I noticed another shopper in the coffee aisle, engrossed in selecting the perfect coffee for the week. Even after I had paused, nabbed a promising-looking bag, and walked off, she was still weighing her options. I don’t blame her – coffee is very important.

As I got ready to leave the store, I almost laughed when I saw her at the register. After all her cost-benefit analysis back in the aisle, she’d selected the exact same coffee that I had! The odds of us choosing the same coffee at random, considering the aisle of options, was pretty low. Instead, it seemed like my coffee choice might have signaled to her that this specific roast was more delicious and well-liked than the others. I could have influenced her choice without even speaking a word.

Although I thought this was funny at the time, I can’t say that I would’ve done differently if I had been in her place. We call this effect “herding,” and it occurs when we act based on how those around us behave. When searching for a place to eat downtown, you might see a long line out the door of a restaurant and think, “That place must be good if everyone else is standing in line, I better check it out.”

Sometimes restaurants really are just more popular because they’re higher quality, but it’s easy to see how it can become a problem. I’m not the world’s greatest coffee expert, so if I ended up leading herds of people at my local grocery store, the other customers might not be better off.

Of course getting worse coffee isn’t the biggest mistake you can make while shopping. Herding can lead to bigger problems in other cases, though (think the stock market),  and it’s worth looking out for. I don’t have as academic a background as some of the researchers in the lab, but working here has taught me more about these biases, and it’s been fun to notice these mistakes in day-to-day life.

~M.R. Trower~

For better or worse, the man Sigmund Freud remains the image of psychology. Though over one hundred years have passed since Sigmund Freud started to unveil his ideas, YouTube’s insanely popular Crash Course YouTube series made Freud the near entire focus and image of their first psychology video to promote their new online psychology “crash course.”

Should modern psychologists be angry about this?

Well maybe. Many modern psychologists have complained, and rightly so, that some of Freud’s ideas (even some of the obviously bad ideas he took back or eased up on) have remained popular amongst many people, academic departments (e.g. many humanities departments), and even therapists. However, we want to take a moment and comment that a lot of the best modern psychology is still rooted in a lot of Freudian ideas. And so maybe Freud as a mascot isn’t the best, but not completely terrible either. Because regardless of the flaws and floweriness of much Freudian psychology, there are many basic ideas that he “invented” and/or popularized that positively shape the current exploration of the human mind.

Here are 4 positive ways Freud’s ideas live on in modern research.

Goals and Goal Conflict

Much of modern psychological research is about goals. In fact, in the eyes of many current psychological theorists a person can be best understood as a creature that pursues and manages goals.

Freud’s id-ego-superego theory was all about different goals and managing such goals. In Freudian theory, the id is our basic desires (food, sex, and video games), the super-ego is “anti-id” and focused on high desires (propriety, education, honor), and the ego is the man in the middle that is both separate from and part of the other parts. Current research on goal hierarchies, multiple goal pursuits, and the information signal model (the latter of which shows people more or less people lying to different parts of themselves) are very Freudian at their core.

Psychic Energies

Though it seems archaic to call the forces in the mind energies, it may not be far from the truth. Roy Baumeister and many other psychologists have discovered that one’s self-control is more or less a type of energy.

That is, one’s self-control can be depleted with too much use over too short of a period. It can be replenished (e.g. through relaxation, food, or positive moods). Furthermore, one’s self-control can expand. If one works at it, one’s self-control machine can gain, in a manner of speaking, a larger energy capacity. Roy Baumesiter even chose to call his theory of self-control depletion “ego-depletion” as a nod to Freud and the “energy” nature of it. One’s ego can get tired when it gets pulled in so many different ways (see title image).

Dual Attitudes

Research finds people have multiple attitudes toward the same thing and this often happens at the same time. Additionally, people can often hold conscious attitudes that differ from their automatic non-conscious attitudes. For instance people can have explicitly positive feelings toward an out-group (e.g. African Americans) but can hold unconscious biases against them. It all is very id versus superego like. And it is very important to recognize how unconscious tendencies influence behavior, especially when a majority of psychology and economics examine the human as always engaged in rational and conscious processing.

Unconscious desires

Let’s be honest, Freud went in some exaggerated and frankly wrong directions with the unconscious—especially when it comes to repression and repressed memories. However, Freud presented us with an important concept: our behavior may be guided by factors outside of conscious thought. Time and time again research has found that we are motivated by unconscious “thoughts” and we even pursue goals and experience emotions without awareness. And simply on a temporal level, neuroscience research shows that actions and decisions often occur before our awareness. The unconscious might not do everything Freud said it did. It might not be as full of repressions and daddy-mother issues, but it is just as powerful and important. And if it weren’t for Freud it would have been much longer before we realized that.

~Troy Campbell~

Here’s my Q&A column from the WSJ this week — and if you have any questions for me, you can tweet them to @danariely with the hashtag #askariely, post a comment on my Ask Ariely Facebook page, or email them to AskAriely@wsj.com.

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Dear Dan,

Some neighbors in our building are trying to get other neighbors to kindly put their garbage in the trash bins and not just leave it on the floor, but to no avail. Polite requests and threats have proven equally unsuccessful. What should we do?

—Ariel

The problem in your building is not just about cleanliness. The problem is more complicated, and has to do with changing a social norm. What you have is a sub-culture where trash bags are left on the floor instead of thrown in the bins. Since this is the established norm, it won’t be easily changed.

Social norms are a powerful motivator, and we are influenced by them all the time. If you go to the trash room and see bags lying around, you are affected to some extent by your own values, and to some extent by the behavior of those around you. You say to yourself, “leaving the garbage bags on the floor is the standard practice and I can do the same and still feel alright with myself”. But if there is no trash around, you would probably tell yourself, “That’s inappropriate, and I shouldn’t mess the place up”. The important thing to remember about social norms is that when it comes to minor violations we criticize the violators, but when the violations become repeated, the norm itself changes and sweeps everyone with it.

And the solution? Given that the New Year just started, and with it comes a symbolic opportunity for change, I would summon a tenants’ meeting to discuss plans for the New Year. In the meeting you need to create a new social understanding of the right behavior by having everyone sign a pledge to take care of the house, including placing your garbage in the right place. As long as you can create such a new social norm, the garbage will seem to clean itself.

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Dear Dan,

I often get the feeling that I am forgetting something and spend too much time trying to remember what it was—sometimes failing entirely, sometimes realizing that it wasn’t very important in the first place. How can I force myself to let minor things go more easily while still making sure I remember the important ones?

—Richard

With the increase in life expectancy, most of us have good chances to suffer some sort of memory loss. This means that dealing with reduced memory is part of the modern human condition. You’re just ahead of your time.

As for what you can do about it: The simple answer is to get a smartphone with a note-taking app and use it as your central memory repository. All your potential tasks will be there waiting for you, and all you’ll have to do is to go over the list. Such recognition is much less demanding than remembering.

The more difficult but deeper answer is that you should just stop worrying so much. You probably already realize that most things aren’t that important to begin with. If you could only get into this “Hakuna matata” mindset, you would be less stressed and much happier. Plus, remember that if something is really important, it is also important to someone else, and that someone will probably remind you about it at least three more times—so why take this pleasure away from them?

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See the original article in the Wall Street Journal here.

The Center for Advanced Hindsight has a hydroponic vegetable garden. This has never been explained to me, other than the fact that our lab just tends to have strange things and, to be honest, it’s not necessarily out of place given our lab coats, hanging basket chairs, and the DVD collection of Nina Hartley’s Guide of instructional erotic videos that appeared one day on my desk.

When I joined the lab, I saw that the plants were overgrown, underfed, and hadn’t grown any flower buds, let alone vegetables. After some office space opened up and our desks were rearranged, I ended up at the desk closest to the tomatoes and peppers, and de facto put in charge of keeping them alive. From then on I spent 15 minutes here and there watering the plants, adding nutrients, and heavily pruning.

Earlier this week, the first cherry tomato—a yellow one—popped off the plant, and I tried it. We were all so excited that we filmed the occasion. (Watch it here!)

It was a fun little experience (and a decent tomato). Though it didn’t taste very special, given what we know about the IKEA effect, it almost definitely tasted better than it would have had I bought it from the store. Like I said in the video, “It tastes like gardening.”

~Vlad Chituc~

Read more about the IKEA effect:

Norton, Michael I., Daniel Mochon, and Dan Ariely. “The IKEA Effect: When Labor Leads to Love.” Journal of Consumer Psychology 22, no. 3 (July 2012): 453–460.

Here’s my Q&A column from the WSJ this week — and if you have any questions for me, you can tweet them to @danariely with the hashtag #askariely, post a comment on my Ask Ariely Facebook page, or email them to AskAriely@wsj.com.

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Dear Dan,

My neighborhood recently suffered a horrible tragedy: A house fire, started by a faulty appliance, broke out in the middle of the night and killed two young children. I don’t know the parents, but their family has many parallels with mine: the parents’ jobs, the kids’ ages, the friends we have in common and, most importantly, the fact that we also don’t have smoke alarms in our house. I haven’t bought one for the usual list of reasons: I’m so busy, no one said I have to get one, I don’t know what kind to get, I never see them in shops anyway and so on. So how can I get myself—and everyone I’ve ever met—to buy a smoke detector?

—Tanya 

It would be nice to think that everyone will realize the important steps they need to take for basic safety and just take them. But it’s also extremely unlikely. For example, we already know that texting and driving is terribly dangerous and that overeating is bad for us, but we still let our eyes drift to our phones when we’re in traffic and we still order that burger with fries.

I also suspect that something as seemingly simple as installing a smoke detector is more difficult and confusing than we might think: There are many options, they need batteries, they may need to be installed in a tricky spot, we are not sure which brand will fit the bracket we have at home, and so on. And while none of these concerns are particularly substantial, they do increase our procrastination and indecision—leaving us in homes without functioning smoke alarms.

This is why I think that cases such as this call for some type of government regulation— something that will not assume that we’ll act in our best long-term interest and instead will make us do the right thing.

In the meantime, I suspect that many people reading this right now are realizing that they need to get smoke alarms of their own or change the batteries—and I also suspect that this feeling will last about 20 minutes and then be replaced by other urgent thoughts. So if you (yes, you) are one of these people, stop now (yes, now), go online, order that smoke detector, get those batteries and tell your household that you promise to install it by the end of the week.

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Dear Dan,

I recently attended a lecture by a well-known academic, and I was amazed and baffled by his inability to communicate even the most basic concepts in his field of expertise. How can experts be so bad at explaining ideas to others? Is this a requirement of academia?

—Rachel 

Here’s a game I sometimes play with my students: I ask them to think about a song, not to tell anyone what it is and tap its beat on a table. Next I ask them to predict how many other students in the room will correctly guess the song’s name. They usually think that about half will get it. Then I ask the rest of the students for their predictions—and no one ever gets it right.

The point is that when we know something and know it well, it is hard for us to appreciate what other people understand. This problem is sometimes called “the curse of knowledge.” We all suffer from this affliction, but it’s particularly severe for my fellow academics. We study things until they seem entirely natural to us and then assume that everyone else easily understands them too. So maybe the type of clumsiness you heard is indeed something of a professional requirement.

See the original article in the Wall Street Journal here.

With the holiday season upon us, it’s a good time to reflect on the things we have that we truly need and the rest that is just superfluous. How greedy are you?

In line with this thought, our very own Dan Ariely and Aline Grüneisen published an article in the November/December Scientific American Mind on the price of greed.

For a juicy excerpt, read on:

Ferocious competition may occasionally lead to optimal market outcomes, but it can also have harmful side effects. Think about competition in sports. At first glance, the drive to be the best appears to propel human achievements to new heights. World records are surpassed, and yesterday’s Olympic medalists pale in comparison with today’s champions. Yet extreme dedication has costs. Athletes may not spend enough time with their friends and families, or they may sacrifice their long-term health to perform better in the short term — by overexerting their body or taking performance-enhancing drugs such as steroids.

The consequences of unchecked greed can also spill over into society. In his 2011 book The Darwin Economy, economist Robert H. Frank of Cornell University outlines some of the disastrous effects of allowing competition to run free. Take, for example, neighbors gunning for social status. Each tries to outdo the others, purchasing a slightly flashier car, bigger pool or more expensive grill. When Joe Jones down the block builds a home theater and Jane Smith across the street installs a 3-D amphitheater, you will no longer be satisfied with your meager widescreen television. We don’t simply try to keep up with the Joneses, we try to surpass them…

See the full article here (or buy a copy from your closest magazine retailer)!

Let me set the scene: It’s midway through the annual Society for Judgment and Decision Making conference in Toronto. Inside a conference room, behavioral and health scientists passionately discuss how to help people make healthier decisions while the event staff set up a snack table with coffee and huge cookies outside.

The session ends and the scientists start to exit, and I wonder what will happen next—will these scientists who are so interested in promoting health eat the cookies?

The answer is a resounding “Yes!” Every cookie is gone within minutes (even the raisin ones).

How should we make sense of these scientists’ apparent hypocrisy? It may be hard to imagine, but scientists can have difficulty following their own goals, just like everyone else. Behavioral scientists don’t just study irrationality, but live with it, too. Despite our own efforts to live rational lives, we find ourselves choosing irrationally and failing like everyone else—and this can become a large inspiration for our research.

As researchers, we understand that we have troubles with email addiction, procrastination, and blind optimism.  We look at our own lives and say, “What could have helped me be more rational or what could have helped me exert more self-control?” At others times we ask ourselves, “What could have helped me relax more?”

Behavioral scientists should arguably be the most motivated to make healthy and rational choices, because we know the consequences of our actions all too well and are aware of the mistakes we make in pursuing our goals. Yet, we still do things like reach for the cookies we know we shouldn’t eat and constantly check our email, even though we know that such cognitive switching can greatly impair our work performance.

If all this education is not enough, then we need more than just lessons. That’s why we need research to develop technologies that aid us in self-control such as choice architecture, decision aids, better public policies, and general environmental design that enables better decisions.

At the Center for Advanced Hindsight, we make efforts to create a healthy and productive environment that can protect ourselves from ourselves. We try to keep the cupboards full of easily accessible health foods to protect us from our junk food temptations. We make public social pacts to protect us from our lazy temptations. We make the lab fun and even have the peace and simplicity of the Thinking & Dreaming room to keep us protected from our inefficient overworking temptations.

Today, there are way too many cookies outside of conference rooms. We must eliminate and reduce these cookies from our environments. Rather than act as individuals and fight with our current environments, we must work to create environments that help us be great individuals together.

~Troy Campbell~

Relevant Topical Readings.

Self-Control
Depletion
Cognitive Load
Public Policy and Behavioral Economics