Take the initiative
Power Gets You High: The Powerful Are More Inspired by Themselves Than by Others
Gerben Van Kleef et al.
Social Psychological and Personality Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Inspiration is a source of admirable creation — but where do people get it from? We propose that power allows individuals to draw inspiration from the self. Four studies involving different social settings and operationalizations support this idea. Study 1 revealed that greater power is associated with more self-derived inspiration and less other-derived inspiration. In Study 2, participants with a higher sense of power were more inspired by their own than by their partners’ stories in face-to-face conversations, whereas lower power participants were not. In Study 3, higher power people spontaneously generated more inspiring stories involving themselves than did lower power people. Finally, participants in Study 4 felt more inspired after writing about their own experiences than after writing about someone else’s, especially after having been primed with high rather than low power. These findings suggest that powerful people prioritize themselves over others in social interaction because this is emotionally rewarding for them.
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Harnessing Optimism: How Eliciting Goals Improves Performance
Aaron Sackett et al.
University of Chicago Working Paper, December 2014
Abstract:
We describe a field experiment in which merely asking people about their goals prior to performance improved performance among experienced but not novice individuals. Whereas most previously-studied goal interventions involve externally-induced goals, our intervention targeted self-set goals. 1,758 marathoners were either asked or not asked to provide a time goal prior to their race. Although our manipulation did not influence the proportion of marathoners who established time goals, experienced marathoners who were asked about their goal in a pre-marathon survey ran 6.75 minutes faster than those who were not asked about their goal. The effect of our goal-asking manipulation on performance was mediated by the ambitiousness of marathoners’ time goals. We suggest that our manipulation increases goal ambitiousness by interrupting the typical decline in optimism as performance approaches.
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How Backup Plans Can Harm Goal Pursuit: The Unexpected Downside of Being Prepared for Failure
Jihae Shin & Katherine Milkman
University of Wisconsin Working Paper, December 2014
Abstract:
When pursuing a goal, making a backup plan has many benefits including reducing the psychological discomfort associated with uncertainty. However, we suggest that making a backup plan can also have negative effects. Specifically, we propose that the mere act of thinking through a backup plan can reduce performance on your primary goal by decreasing your desire for goal achievement. In a correlational field study (Study 1), we find that having a backup plan is associated with lower performance on the primary goal. In two experimental studies (Studies 2 and 3), we find that individuals randomly assigned to think through a backup plan subsequently perform worse on their primary goal. We further show that this effect is partially mediated by a decreased desire to attain the primary goal (Study 3). This research provides a fresh perspective on plan-making, highlighting an important yet previously unexplored negative consequence of formulating plans.
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Expectations as Reference Points: Field Evidence from Professional Soccer
Björn Bartling, Leif Brandes & Daniel Schunk
Management Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
We show that professional soccer players and their coaches exhibit reference-dependent behavior during matches. Controlling for the state of the match and for unobserved heterogeneity, we show on a minute-by-minute basis that players breach the rules of the game, measured by the referee’s assignment of cards, significantly more often if their teams are behind the expected match outcome, measured by preplay betting odds of large professional bookmakers. We further show that coaches implement significantly more offensive substitutions if their teams are behind expectations. Both types of behaviors impair the expected ultimate match outcome of the team, which shows that our findings do not simply reflect fully rational responses to reference-dependent incentive schemes of favorite teams to falling behind. We derive these results in a data set that contains more than 8,200 matches from 12 seasons of the German Bundesliga and 12 seasons of the English Premier League.
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Jennifer Hammer & Abigail Marsh
Emotion, forthcoming
Abstract:
Despite communicating a “negative” emotion, fearful facial expressions predominantly elicit behavioral approach from perceivers. It has been hypothesized that this seemingly paradoxical effect may occur due to fearful expressions’ resemblance to vulnerable, infantile faces. However, this hypothesis has not yet been tested. We used a combined approach-avoidance/implicit association test (IAT) to test this hypothesis. Participants completed an approach-avoidance lever task during which they responded to fearful and angry facial expressions as well as neutral infant and adult faces presented in an IAT format. Results demonstrated an implicit association between fearful facial expressions and infant faces and showed that both fearful expressions and infant faces primarily elicit behavioral approach. The dominance of approach responses to both fearful expressions and infant faces decreased as a function of psychopathic personality traits. Results suggest that the prosocial responses to fearful expressions observed in most individuals may stem from their associations with infantile faces.
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Nonconscious priming of communication
Martin Pickering, Janet McLean & Marina Kraeva
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, May 2015, Pages 77–81
Abstract:
This study investigated whether nonconscious priming can affect the communicative quality of narratives. In two experiments, narrators were primed with words associated with helpfulness or unhelpfulness, and then, in an apparently unrelated task, read and retold a short story to addressees. In Experiment 1, the narrator provided a spoken description, and we also manipulated whether the narrator retold the story to the addressee or to a microphone. In Experiment 2, the narrator provided a written description. In both experiments, narrators primed with helpful words took longer to read the story and provided retellings that were rated to be higher quality than narrators primed with unhelpful words. We propose that priming the concept of helpfulness influences the processes involved in message construction.
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Can't finish what you started? The effect of climactic interruption on behavior
Daniella Kupor, Taly Reich & Baba Shiv
Journal of Consumer Psychology, January 2015, Pages 113–119
Abstract:
Individuals experience a greater frequency of interruptions than ever before. Interruptions by e-mails, phone calls, text messages and other sources of disruption are ubiquitous. We examine the important unanswered question of whether interruptions can increase the likelihood that individuals will choose closure-associated behaviors. Specifically, we explore the possibility that interruptions that occur during the climactic moments of a task or activity can produce a heightened need for psychological closure. When an interruption prevents individuals from achieving closure in the interrupted domain, we show that the resulting unsatisfied need for psychological closure can cause individuals to seek closure in totally unrelated domains. These findings have important implications for understanding how consumer decisions may be influenced by the dynamic — and often interrupted — course of daily events.
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The power of the mind: The cortex as a critical determinant of muscle strength/weakness
Brian Clark et al.
Journal of Neurophysiology, 15 December 2014, Pages 3219-3226
Abstract:
We tested the hypothesis that the nervous system, and the cortex in particular, is a critical determinant of muscle strength/weakness and that a high level of corticospinal inhibition is an important neurophysiological factor regulating force generation. A group of healthy individuals underwent 4 wk of wrist-hand immobilization to induce weakness. Another group also underwent 4 wk of immobilization, but they also performed mental imagery of strong muscle contractions 5 days/wk. Mental imagery has been shown to activate several cortical areas that are involved with actual motor behaviors, including premotor and M1 regions. A control group, who underwent no interventions, also participated in this study. Before, immediately after, and 1 wk following immobilization, we measured wrist flexor strength, voluntary activation (VA), and the cortical silent period (SP; a measure that reflect corticospinal inhibition quantified via transcranial magnetic stimulation). Immobilization decreased strength 45.1 ± 5.0%, impaired VA 23.2 ± 5.8%, and prolonged the SP 13.5 ± 2.6%. Mental imagery training, however, attenuated the loss of strength and VA by ∼50% (23.8 ± 5.6% and 12.9 ± 3.2% reductions, respectively) and eliminated prolongation of the SP (4.8 ± 2.8% reduction). Significant associations were observed between the changes in muscle strength and VA (r = 0.56) and SP (r = −0.39). These findings suggest neurological mechanisms, most likely at the cortical level, contribute significantly to disuse-induced weakness, and that regular activation of the cortical regions via imagery attenuates weakness and VA by maintaining normal levels of inhibition.
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Stress Increases Cue-Triggered “Wanting” for Sweet Reward in Humans
Eva Pool et al.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Learning and Cognition, forthcoming
Abstract:
Stress can increase reward pursuits: This has traditionally been seen as an attempt to relieve negative affect through the hedonic properties of a reward. However, reward pursuit is not always proportional to the pleasure experienced, because reward processing involves distinct components, including the motivation to obtain a reward (i.e., wanting) and the hedonic pleasure during the reward consumption (i.e., liking). Research conducted on rodents demonstrates that stress might directly amplify the cue-triggered wanting, suggesting that under stress wanting can be independent from liking. Here, we aimed to test whether a similar mechanism exists in humans. We used analog of a Pavlovian-Instrumental Transfer test (PIT) with an olfactory reward to measure the cue triggered wanting for a reward but also the sensory hedonic liking felt during the consumption of the same reward. The analog of a PIT procedure, in which participants learned to associate a neutral image and an instrumental action with a chocolate odor, was combined with either a stress-inducing or stress-free behavioral procedure. Results showed that compared with participants in the stress-free condition, those in the stress condition mobilized more effort in instrumental action when the reward-associated cue was displayed, even though they did not report the reward as being more pleasurable. These findings suggest that, in humans, stress selectively increases cue-triggered wanting, independently of the hedonic properties of the reward. Such a mechanism supports the novel explanation proposed by animal research as to why stress often produces cue-triggered bursts of binge eating, relapses in drug addiction, or gambling.
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Reliance on Luck: Identifying Which Achievement Goals Elicit Superstitious Behavior
Eric Hamerman & Carey Morewedge
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, forthcoming
Abstract:
People often resort to superstitious behavior to facilitate goal achievement. We examined whether the specific type of achievement goal pursued influences the propensity to engage in superstitious behavior. Across six studies, we found that performance goals were more likely than learning goals to elicit superstitious behavior. Participants were more likely to engage in superstitious behavior at high than at low levels of chronic performance orientation, but superstitious behavior was not influenced by chronic learning orientation (Studies 1 and 2). Similarly, participants exhibited stronger preferences for lucky items when primed to pursue performance goals rather than learning goals (Studies 3 and 4). As uncertainty of goal achievement increased, superstitious behavior increased when participants pursued performance goals but not learning goals (Study 5). Finally, assignment to use a lucky (vs. unlucky) item resulted in greater confidence of achieving performance goals but not learning goals (Study 6).
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Enjoying the possibility of defeat: Outcome uncertainty, suspense, and intrinsic motivation
Sami Abuhamdeh, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi & Baland Jalal
Motivation and Emotion, February 2015, Pages 1-10
Abstract:
In two studies, the relevance of outcome uncertainty and suspense for intrinsic motivation was examined. In Study 1, participants played a competitive zero-sum video game in which outcome uncertainty during the game (operationalized as the degree of parity between player–opponent scores) was manipulated. Greater outcome uncertainty led to greater enjoyment, and this effect was mediated by suspense. Although outperforming one’s opponent by a wide margin maximized perceived competence, these games were less enjoyable than closer games with higher outcome uncertainty. These findings were extended in Study 2, which incorporated a behavioral measure of intrinsic motivation. Participants chose to play games they previously rated as relatively high in suspense but relatively low in perceived competence over games which provided higher perceptions of competence but less suspense. Performance concern moderated this effect. Implications of the findings for theories of intrinsic motivation, and possible avenues for future research, are discussed.
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Young Flames: The Effects of Childhood Exposure to Fire on Adult Attitudes
Damian Murray, Daniel Fessler & Gwen Lupfer
Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences, forthcoming
Abstract:
Successful use of fire has been essential to survival throughout the majority of human history — an environmental pressure that may have led to cognitive mechanisms dedicated to attaining mastery of fire manipulation and control. Concordant with this hypothesis is the fact that, despite its inherent danger, the frivolous use of fire remains firmly embedded within modern societies; conversely, in societies where fire is used for utilitarian purposes, ethnographic reports suggest that fire is considered mundane. The exposure hypothesis holds that the attraction to fire in modern societies is due to the lack of adequate exposure to fire throughout childhood. Two studies — comprising North American samples that have had significantly different levels of exposure to fire — investigated the relationship between frequency of exposure to fire throughout childhood and psychological associations with fire. Psychological associations with fire were overwhelmingly positive in both samples. Study 1 found no significant association between childhood fire exposure and positive affective associations with fire. Using a more sophisticated measurement tool and in a more rural sample, Study 2 found that, contrary to the exposure hypothesis, more frequent exposure to fire in childhood was associated with more positive psychological associations with fire. Potential reasons for the discrepancies between these results and earlier ethnographic reports, and their potential implications, are discussed.