Mind Hacks™: Tips & Tools for Using Your Brain (48 page)

Have you ever found yourself in a confrontational mood for no reason? It could come
down to what you’ve been reading.

Puzzles are an excellent way to get people to keep words in mind for a substantial
time. One such puzzle is the scrambled sentence test. Given a scrambled sentence of five
words, such as “he it hides finds instantly,” you have to make as many four-word sentences
as you can, as fast as you can.

John Bargh, Mark Chen, and Lara Burrows used this test style
¹
and incorporated 15 words to do with impolite behavior: “aggressively,”
“intrude,” “brazen,” and so on. They also had polite and neutral versions of the test. The
subjects were unaware there were different forms of the test at this time and also unaware
of the real point of the experiment.

Each subject spent about 5 minutes doing the puzzle, but that (of course) wasn’t the
point of the experiment. The critical point came when a subject stepped out of the room to
say he’d finished, only to see the person running the experiment engaged in conversation.
The question was: would he interrupt? Only just over 15% of those who’d been puzzling over
polite words interrupted within 10 minutes, while of those who’d been using words like
“obnoxious,” more than 60% —
four times as many —
interrupted in that
same 10-minute period.

Participants who did interrupt also did so faster if they’d been using the words about
impoliteness: they took an average of 5½ minutes to intrude versus more than 9 minutes for
everyone else, even when you discounted the 85% of the politely primed group who didn’t
interrupt at all.

You can try a more subjective version of this procedure by using a technique called
the Velten Procedure
²
to automatically induce moods in groups of people, then see if you can spot
the difference. This technique uses, as developed by Velten in the 1960s, sheets of paper
full of either positive or negative statements. So make a bunch of copies of two sets of
statements (there are some samples online at
http://idiolect.org.uk/docs/blog/negative_velten.txt
and
http://idiolect.org.uk/docs/blog/positive_velten.txt
). The positive
page should say things like “I am a worthwhile person,” “I feel good about myself,” and
“People like me.” The negative one should have phrases like “Nothing I do ever turns out
right,” “People feel contempt for me,” and “I am a bad person.”

Choose a sheet and read it to yourself for 5 minutes. By the time you finish, you
really will feel happier or glummer. It’s amazing how strong the effect is.

The effect is stronger still with a roomful of people. So, find such a room, and leave
everybody with a positive Velten and tell them to read it to themselves for 5 minutes.
When you come back, everyone should be jubilant. But try leaving another group the
negative Velten. The atmosphere will be
distinctly cold on your return. It goes to show the importance of social
feedback in creating and amplifying mood.

The experiment goes to show that only 5 minutes of manipulating words — just words, not
personal commentary or difficult situations — has a noticeable effect on behavior. It’s a
variety of concept priming
[
Bring Stuff to the Front of Your Mind
]
, in which reading words
associated with a particular concept subtly brings that concept to mind, from where it
enters your thoughts at some point in the future.

What’s true for words bringing word concepts to mind is also true for face rubbing or
foot jiggling
[
Monkey See, Monkey Do
]
. Merely perceiving someone else performing the action activates the
concept of that action in your brain, and it becomes more likely.

Bargh et al., with the scrambled sentence test influencing politeness, and the Velten
Procedure, both show that there’s a crossover between words and behavior. There’s a
commonality between how the meaning of impoliteness, written down, is represented in the
brain, and the representation of the
behavior
of being impolite.
Precisely how this works, we don’t know, only that the effect can be observed.

Something to be aware of is that negative emotions are contagious (we already know
that emotions are picked up just from observation
[
Make Yourself Happy
]
), so a whole bad-tempered exchange can be
triggered subliminally by something quite irrelevent.

Chen and Bargh
³
did another experiment involving pairs of people playing a guessing game
together. One of the pair had been subliminally shown pictures that would put her in a
hostile mood.

In carefully controlled circumstances, tapes of the guessing game interaction were
listened to, and the participants’ behavior rated. Three things were discovered: people
who had been subliminally activated as hostile (using pictures they couldn’t consciously
see) were indeed judged to be more hostile. The partners in the guessing game,
encountering this hostility, themselves became more hostile. And finally, both
participants judged the other
as more hostile than they would have done if the subliminal exposure had not
taken place.

All of this happens more or less automatically. Our moods are governed by what we
encounter; if we’re not looking out for it, we don’t even get a say on whether to accept
the influence or not.

Let’s say you have a meeting scheduled at which you know you’re going to have to put
your foot down. There’s no reason you shouldn’t have a Make Me Angry application to
subliminally flash angry faces on your monitor for 5 minutes beforehand, if you really
want to step into that encounter in a bad mood. Is this any different from talking
yourself up before a big meeting or game?

One specific detail of Chen and Bargh’s experiment on contagious hostility should give
us serious pause. To invoke the hostile mood, the experimenters used faces that activated
a racial stereotype in the participants. Given we walk slower having considered the
stereotype of the elderly
[
You Are What You Think
]
, the fact that a stereotype can affect us deeply isn’t a surprise, but
that it’s a racial stereotype is saddening. Chen and Bargh performed this experiment to
show that this kind of racial stereotyping is a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you
anticipate someone is going to be hostile, you become so yourself, and you infect the
other person with that mood. Your stereotype is thus reinforced, without having any
necessary basis in truth to begin with. It’s alarmingly easy to push people into roles
without realizing it and to find our own prejudices confirmed.

Thinking about how certain stereotypes behave can make you walk slower or get
a higher score in a general knowledge quiz.

Here’s what John Bargh, Mark Chen, and Lara Burrows did
¹
: they gave 30 psychology undergraduates word puzzles to do (undergraduates
are the raw material for most psychology studies). In half of the experiments, the puzzles
included words associated with the elderly, like “careful,” “wise,” “ancient,” and
“retired.” In the other half, all the puzzle words were neutral and not deliberately
associated with any single concept. Immediately after individual students had completed
the puzzle, they were free to go.

Bargh and team timed, using a hidden stopwatch, how long it took each undergraduate to
walk down the corridor to the elevator. Students who had been given the puzzle featuring
elderly related words took, on average, a whole second longer to make the walk — an increase
from 7.3 to 8.3 seconds. They had picked up one of the perceived traits of the elderly:
slower walking speed.

The specifics of how exemplar activation works is still an open question, but the
basic mechanism is the same as how we pick up mannerisms
[
Monkey See, Monkey Do
]
. It’s a feature of the brain that
perceiving something requires activating some kind of physical representation of the thing
being perceived: simply making that representation primes that behavior, making us more
likely to do what we see. Exemplar activation takes this a little further than we’re used
to, because it’s the reading of words — in an apparently unrelated task to walking along the
corridor — that primes the concept of “the elderly,” which then goes on to influence
behavior. But the principle is the same.

Slow walking is only the half the story, though. Ap Dijskerhuis and Ad van Knippenberg
²
performed similar experiments. Instead of influencing their subjects with
an “elderly” stereotype, they set up an experiment in which participants had to spend 5
minutes describing either professors or secretaries. (The subjects, again, were
undergraduates.)

This time the experiment measured general knowledge, so the next stage of the
experiment had the subjects answering Trivial Pursuit questions. They weren’t aware the
two stages were connected.

What happened is almost unbelievable: subjects who had previously described
professors — known for their perceived intelligence — attained, on average, 60% correct
answers, against 46% for the people who had to describe secretaries.

It could be that people who have been considering the professor stereotype are more
likely to trust their own judgment; the particular attribute of this stereotype that is
causing the response isn’t really known. The people exposed to the secretary stereotype
didn’t do any worse than they should have done: compared to people who hadn’t been primed
at all, they got about the same number of questions correct and worked their way through
the questionnaire in only 6 minutes (compared to an 8-minute average). So in this case it
turns out that both stereotypes have good qualities going for them. Secretaries are
efficient. But it isn’t always the case that stereotypes are positive.

People who identify with groups commonly stereotyped to be poor at math tend to do
worse at math tests when their membership in that group is made relevant immediately
before the test, as with a checkbox at the top of the test that asks them to indicate
their ethnic identity or gender.
³

Fortunately, it is possible to counteract this kind of exemplar activation. If you
were in this situation, the activation can be overridden by reasserting yourself against
the stereotype. Women who have been explicitly told that the math test they are about to
do shows no gender bias
don’t
underperform — it’s the subtle,
nonconscious stereotyping that has a real effect (like having to tick a box at the top of
the page), causing people who identify with a commonly stereotyped group to take on the
stereotype assumption, even if incorrect. Once thinking about the stereotype and the
effects it might have is made conscious, the bias disappears.

These exemplar activation experiments are as challenging as any you’ll find in
psychology. Word puzzles about the elderly slow your walking speed (and actually your
reaction time too); just focusing on the stereotype of a professor for 5 minutes makes you
better at general knowledge. But it also reinforces the stereotype: people who already
hold that identity are pushed into their pigeonholes. Our need to conform runs deep, even
when it’s against our best interests. But in those cases, concentrating on your
individuality is all you need to push back.