When People Close To Us Behave Immorally, We Are Inclined To Protect Them — Even If Their Crimes Are Particularly Heinous

By Matthew Warren

If you saw a stranger break into someone’s house in the middle of the night, you’d probably call the police. But what if it was a friend or family member who was committing the crime? A new study in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin looks at the tension between wanting to punish people who commit immoral acts and protecting those with whom we have close relationships. And it turns out that if someone close to us behaves immorally, we tend to err on the side of protecting them — even if their crime is especially egregious.

Across a series of ten studies involving a total of almost 3,000 participants, Aaron Weidman and colleagues at the University of Michigan examined how people say they would respond if someone close to them were to commit a crime. In the first study, the team asked participants to name nine people, ranging from distant acquaintances (e.g. a postal worker) to those with whom they had a close relationship (e.g. a romantic partner). Participants imagined they had witnessed each person committing a crime, which varied from low severity, such as illegally downloading a file, to high severity, such as committing a burglary. If they were then approached by a police officer, the participants were asked, would they tell the truth or lie and say they didn’t know anything?

Participants were more likely to respond that they would lie to the police officer when they imagined that someone close to them had committed the crime, compared to when the perpetrator was only a distant acquaintance. And, worryingly, the effect was strongest when the crime was at the severe end of the scale.

Subsequent studies used variations on this design to further explore the effect. The team found, for instance, that participants were also more likely to protect close others who had committed crimes involving sexual harassment, again ranging from low severity (e.g. whistling) to high severity (e.g. groping). Individual differences like gender and political or moral beliefs didn’t seem to affect the pattern of responses. And participants believed that it was in their self-interest to protect a perpetrator who was close to them, and that lying to cover up for a more distant perpetrator would cause more harm to society than protecting someone close.

The team also found that despite a reluctance to punish close family members, participants still seemed to understand that their crimes were morally wrong. In three further studies, participants who imagined crimes being committed by close others generally rated the crimes as just as immoral as those who imagined them being committed by distant acquaintances. And they also seemed to justify their lack of action against close family by saying that they would themselves confront the perpetrator instead. “We suspect that doing so allows a person to simultaneously (a) maintain their self-image as a morally upstanding individual and (b) preserve and even enhance the close relationship,” the authors write.

These findings could explain why, time and again, we hear of high profile figures who have been committing horrific crimes for decades, aided by the silence of their close friends and family. And even more disturbingly, they suggest that as much as we may like to think we are better than that, many of us would also protect those we’re close to if we were in similar situations.

But there is some hope. The researchers also found that when people were encouraged to distance themselves from the situation by thinking of themselves in the third-person, their tendency to protect close others was reduced. “Future work is needed to explore the applied implications of subtle shifts in language for regulating our moral decision making,” the researchers conclude.

Of course, the study relied on participants predicting how they would respond, and further research is also needed to find out whether people act similarly in the real world to cover for those they are close to. If anything, the authors suggest, participants may have underpredicted how willing they would be to lie to the police in order to protect people they love.

– Punish or Protect? How Close Relationships Shape Responses to Moral Violations

Matthew Warren (@MattbWarren) is Editor of BPS Research Digest

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Trump Tweets And Cat Attachment: The Week’s Best Psychology Links

Our weekly round-up of the best psychology coverage from elsewhere on the web

Scientists can predict what country people are from just by looking at how colours make them feel, reports Eva Frederick at Science. Researchers found cultural differences in how people associate colours and emotions: Chinese participants showed the strongest association between red and joy, for example, while Greek participants were the only ones to relate purple to sadness. The team then used machine learning to guess where people were from based on the associations they made.

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We’ve written a lot about the value — and limitations — of using Twitter in psychological research. Now researchers have analysed the language used by one of the world’s most (in)famous tweeters – President Donald Trump. They’ve found that Trump’s “linguistic style” changed depending on his goals at the time, according to this Q&A in Scientific American with the authors of the paper.

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Much like human babies with their parents, cats show different patterns of attachment to their owners, Ed Cara at Gizmodo reports. Kittens were left in an unfamiliar room for a while, and the researchers observed the felines’ behaviour when their owners returned. Some showed “secure” behaviour and happily explored the area once their owner was back, while others were insecure, clinging to their owner or avoiding them altogether.

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Excessive athletic training doesn’t just tire our bodies out – it can also have unwanted effects on cognition, writes Leslie Nemo at Discover’s D-brief blog. Elite athletes who increased their training regime were more likely to make impulsive decisions and showed dampened activity in a brain area involved in decision-making, researchers found. The result points to another way that “overtraining” could be detrimental.

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“If we get fixated on screen time instead of asking much more careful questions about what kinds of experiments are being run on us by these companies, who owns our data, we’re going to miss out on a chance to hold these companies to account”. So concluded Professor Andrew Przybylski in a talk at Latitude Festival earlier this year, in which he busted some of the myths about screen time and its effects on young people. Read the full transcript over at The Psychologist.

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Finally, in last week’s newsletter (sign up here!) we noted that Fritz Strack had won this year’s Ig Nobel psychology prize, for “discovering that holding a pen in one’s mouth makes one smile, which makes one happier — and for then discovering that it does not”. We also linked to our 2016 report on the failed replication that cast doubt on the original findings. Professor Strack sent us a link to his Ig Nobel lecture, below, in which he outlines some recent evidence that “facial feedback” can still influence our emotions — as long as the conditions are right (we also covered one of those studies last year).

Strack’s presentation, from about 1:16, is worth watching — as are the lectures from other winners, who study everything from how bacteria survives on different countries’ bank notes to why wombat poo is cube-shaped.

Compiled by Matthew Warren (@MattbWarren), Editor of BPS Research Digest

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Acting Dishonestly Impairs Our Ability to Read Other People’s Emotions

By guest blogger Rhi Willmot

Can a lie still be harmful if it’s never found out? New research on the relationship between dishonesty and social understanding may unsettle the fibbers amongst us. In a multi-study investigation with a total of 2,588 participants, scientists have found Pinocchio isn’t the only one to experience a few personal problems after telling lies.

In the recent paper, published by the Journal of Experimental Psychology, Julia Lee from the University of Michigan and colleagues examined whether acts of dishonesty impair our “empathic accuracy,” the ability to detect the emotions of others. Behaving untruthfully, the authors theorised, may cause us to withdraw from other people, and in turn make social interaction more difficult. If this is the case, dishonesty could have significant implications for how we maintain relationships, resolve conflict, and collaborate at work.

In an initial pair of studies, the researchers asked 259 adults how often they committed dishonest acts in the workplace, and gave another group of 150 individuals the opportunity to cheat on a computer game. All participants then completed the “Reading the Eyes in the Mind” task, to measure their empathic accuracy. This involved viewing video clips of the region surrounding actors’ eyes, and selecting one of four possible emotions to best describe the actor’s mental state. In both studies, greater dishonesty was associated with a greater number of inaccurate selections.

But correlation doesn’t necessarily mean causation. So to find out whether dishonesty actively reduces empathic accuracy, the research team then offered a sample of university students the chance to win real money in a die-throwing game. Participants were asked to predict which side of the die would show a higher number, with correct guesses exchangeable for more cash. However, while control participants gave their predictions at the start of the game, a second group did so once the die had been rolled — offering them the chance to cheat.

Compared to control participants, the second group, or “likely-cheating condition”, reported more correct guesses, suggesting they capitalised on the opportunity for deceit. They also performed worse on the Reading the Eyes in the Mind task, indicating that this dishonesty made it more difficult for them to read others’ emotions. In a subsequent game, where participants could earn $2 for sending an untruthful message to an anonymous partner or $0.50 for telling the truth, those in the likely-cheating condition were also more likely to lie, which suggests their original dishonesty prompted a further unscrupulous act.

Why might dishonesty impair our emotion-reading powers? One explanation is that it reduces our “relational self-construal” — the extent to which we think of ourselves in terms of social connections (e.g. “I am a sister”). Such social distancing could help us to justify immoral acts, because it reduces the degree of attention and concern we devote to others — a literal form of avoiding “looking someone in the eye”. Indeed, a fifth experiment using the same die-throwing and empathic accuracy tasks demonstrated that “likely-cheaters” described themselves using fewer social phrases than the control group, which accounted for the relationship between dishonesty and emotional-reading.

It also seems some people may be more susceptible to these effects than others. In a final experiment, Lee and colleagues looked at “vagal reactivity”— a measure of heart rate associated with self-regulation and social sensitivity. Those with high vagal reactivity didn’t display reduced empathic accuracy after lying, whilst those with low reactivity did experience the impairing effect. The authors suggest that people who are more socially sensitive to begin with are still able to read the emotions of others even after dishonest behaviour, while those with less reactivity, and therefore less social sensitivity, are more vulnerable to the damaging effects of dishonesty.

It remains unclear how long the effects of dishonesty on empathic accuracy last, and it would also be interesting to explore whether dishonesty makes it harder to detect emotion when we can’t see other people, but can hear their voice, or see words they write online. This might shed light on dishonest actions which touch many of us, such as the spreading of fake news.

Regardless of whether dishonesty is detected by others, the evidence is clear. Cheating can have significant personal costs by reducing our general understanding of the feelings of others, and these are particularly severe for those who already find interpersonal interaction more difficult. So, socially-insensitive con artists – beware!

– The interpersonal costs of dishonesty: How dishonest behavior reduces individuals’ ability to read others’ emotions.

Post written by Rhi Willmot (@rhi_willmot) for BPS Research Digest. Rhi is a psychologist with an interest in wellbeing, and has explored how topics from positive psychology influence healthy lifestyle behaviour. As a keen runner, Rhi is also interested in the relationship between psychology and optimal performance. She has published internationally, and worked on a number of transdisciplinary programmes, including an initiative to reduce food waste via altering perceptions of “ugly” fruit and vegetables, and a project to enhance quality of life in deprived areas of Mexico.

At Research Digest we’re proud to showcase the expertise and writing talent of our community. Click here for more about our guest posts.

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Our Brains Represent The Meaning Of Words the Same Way Whether We Read Them Or Hear Them

By Emma Young

In an era of TED talks, podcasts, and audiobooks, it’s easy to choose to listen to factual information or fiction, rather than to read it. But is that a good thing? Are there any differences in the way the brain processes the meaning of words that are heard rather than read? According to the researchers behind a thorough new study, published in the Journal of Neuroscience, the answer to this last question is “no”. But it may still be too soon to conclude that listening to an audiobook is effectively the same as reading it.

Fatma Deniz at the University of California, Berkeley, and colleagues recruited six men and three women, all aged in their twenties and thirties. Their brains were scanned using fMRI while they listened to stories from a popular podcast, The Moth Radio Hour, and, separately, while they read those same stories.

The researchers then looked at detailed maps of activity in parts of the brain’s cortex that processed the semantic information — the meaning — as participants read or listened to each word. They found that it didn’t matter which way the words were presented: both reading and listening produced virtually identical patterns. In addition, the locations of the discrete cortical regions that processed the meaning of different categories of word (for example “animals” or “emotional” words)  were similar from person to person.

Based on previous findings, the team had expected some differences in how the participants handled the meaning of words that were heard rather than read, so this was a surprise. “We knew that a few brain regions were activated similarly when you hear a word and read the same word, but I was not expecting such strong similarities in the meaning representation across a large network of brain regions in both these sensory modalities,” Deniz commented.

In terms of understanding the brain’s process for making sense of either speech sounds or letter squiggles, it’s an important finding. But the “natural reading stimuli” weren’t entirely naturalistic. So that the team would know when, precisely, a participant was either reading or listening to a given word, they used what’s known as “rapid serial visual presentation”. Each word was presented on a screen, one at a time, at the same rate and for the same duration as they occurred during listening. This isn’t a problem for the key results. But it doesn’t necessarily imply that reading a print novel or listening to it is the same.

A 2016 study did find that participants who had listened to sections of a non-fiction book showed the same levels of comprehension as those who’d read it on an e-reader. But perhaps the readers would have done better if they’d been given print. Anne Mangen at the University of Stavanger, Norway, has led various studies on comprehension and memory for texts read in a booklet or book form compared to on a screen. In one study, 16-year-old participants who read texts in print scored significantly better on comprehension tests than those who read the texts in a digital form. In another, adult participants were almost twice as good at ordering key plot developments in a mystery story if they’d read it in print rather than on a Kindle. It’s thought that this is because a physical book provides more cues about how far through it, and where on a page spread, you read about a given fact or event.

I’d suspect that whether people find that listening to a book is better or worse than reading it will also depend on various individual factors (not least, do you actually like reading?). Personally, perhaps because my education was print-based, I know I remember words and information far better if I’ve read them than if I’ve heard them. And for me, reading a text gives me instant control over it, allowing me to skip or pause with ease. But for some people — perhaps people with dyslexia, for example — audio may lead to richer meaning-maps in the brain than text. Deniz would now like to see studies to investigate this.

– The representation of semantic information across human cerebral cortex during listening versus reading is invariant to stimulus modality

Emma Young (@EmmaELYoung) is Staff Writer at BPS Research Digest

 

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Your Level Of “Planfulness” Could Determine How Often You Visit The Gym

By Matthew Warren

When a gym recently opened up near my house, I was determined to go regularly and make the most of the facilities. And I did — for about a month. But gradually, my visits became fewer and further between, until I realised I was paying for a bunch of machines and slabs of metal that I hadn’t touched in weeks. Guiltily, I cancelled my membership.

But perhaps I have my personality to blame. A new study tracking gym users has honed in one key factor that is related to how often they visit: their “planfulness”. This aspect of our personality, say the researchers, could be “uniquely useful” for predicting a range of goal-directed behaviours.

Planfulness refers to the extent to which people’s behaviour and way of thinking is “goal-promoting”. Highly planful people are adept at translating the abstract idea of a goal into actual decision-making, for instance, and are better at long-term planning. It’s unsurprising, then, that planful people report making greater progress towards their goals.

However, that research has relied on people reporting their own progress, rather than measuring their behaviour directly. So in their new paper, published in Psychological Science, Rita Ludwig and colleagues at the University of Oregon decided to see whether planfulness was associated with one particular goal-directed behaviour in the real world: how often people hit the gym.

The researchers recruited 282 people who visited the university gym, and asked them to complete scales measuring various personality traits, including the Planfulness Scale, for which they rated their agreement with questions like “Developing a clear plan when I have a goal is important to me”. Participants also wrote descriptions of any personal projects they had that involved using the facility. Then, over the course of a 10-week term, the researchers tracked how often they swiped into the gym.

The team found that participants who scored higher on planfulness visited the gym more often: a one point increase in the planfulness scores (out of a maximum of five points) was associated with 8.5 more gym visits over the course of the term. That association also held when the researchers looked back at the number of visits participants had made over the previous term. And overall, regardless of planfulness levels, participants visited the gym less often later in the term — perhaps because of end-of-term exam pressure.

Planfulness is part of the broader personality factor of conscientiousness, which has long been known to be associated with healthier, goal-driven behaviours. But in a subsequent analysis, the researchers found that participants’ scores on other aspects of conscientiousness, like self-control and grit, weren’t related to the number of times they visited the gym, while planfulness still predicted the number of gym visits even when the researchers controlled for those additional measures. That suggests that planfulness is the key to the relationship between conscientiousness and goal achievement, the authors write.

“While further testing is necessary, the accrued evidence to date suggests that measuring planfulness may be uniquely useful for researchers investigating a variety of goal-directed behaviors, including the pursuit of health and lifestyle goals,” the team concludes.

Of course, the number of swipe-ins to the gym is a fairly crude measure of goal progression, and it would be interesting to know how planfulness related to participants’ progress with their specific goals — lifting a certain weight, say, or reaching a specific running pace. That’s a task for future research, say the authors.

And, personally, I would like to know whether I can become more planful. When the researchers first reported on their Planfulness Scale last year, they wrote that although their studies show that individuals have inherent differences in the way they think about goals, “those patterns of thought are not so entrenched that they cannot be influenced by brief manipulations.” Perhaps it’s time to rejoin the gym.

– Predicting Exercise With a Personality Facet: Planfulness and Goal Achievement

Matthew Warren (@MattbWarren) is Editor of BPS Research Digest

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How Personal Experience Of Adversity Influences Our Feelings Of Compassion Towards Others

Simply Changing The Order Of Fast Food Menus Nudges Customers Towards Healthier Soft Drink Choices

By guest blogger Freddy Parker

Fast food chains are not exactly renowned for encouraging healthy eating. But in a new study a team of psychologists, eager to turn that assumption on its head, chose McDonald’s as their target for a somewhat unconventional, psychologically-informed health intervention. Writing in Psychology & Marketing, the researchers report successfully “nudging” a group of Coca-Cola-guzzling customers into opting for its sugar-free counterpart, Coke Zero — simply by changing the order of options on the menu.

We like to think that our choices as consumers are completely under our own control — but researchers have shown that the location of a product on a list or display can subtly influence whether we decide to buy it. To examine this phenomenon in a real-world setting, Kelly Ann Schmidtke from Manchester Metropolitan University and colleagues sought to manipulate soft drink positions within the McDonald’s digital menu and see whether this could “nudge” people into making healthier choices (for those wondering, a nudge is any way that alters behaviour without forbidding options or using economic incentives).

Before the intervention, soft drinks were presented on the kiosk touchscreens in the following : Coca-Cola, Diet Coke, Coke Zero, Sprite Zero, Oasis and Fanta. The team theorised that presenting Coke Zero in first place would cause customers to choose this healthier offering. Normally, their logic went, customers expect the first location to hold the most popular drink, formerly Coca-Cola. But even when this turns out to be Coke Zero, they would still opt for this choice without considering additional items (psychologists term this kind of behaviour “satisficing”). So, for 12 weeks across 622 stores, the team swapped Coke Zero from the third location to the first, and put Coca-Cola in the last position.

Of the 511 stores with sufficient sales to be included in the analyses — those that had sold at least one of each type of soft drink each week — purchases of Coca-Cola fell by 9% on average in the first week of the intervention (translating to about 34 fewer sales per store), while sales of Coke Zero increased by 21%. The menu change continued to bear fruit for the entire 12 weeks, with sales of Coke Zero increasing by 30% and sales of Coca-Cola falling by 7% compared to the 12 weeks before the study, representing a reduction of about 345 sales of Coca-Cola per store. A back-of-the-envelope calculation puts the total calories removed from customers’ diets at just below 25 million.

It is not difficult to envisage how, when extrapolated to greater timescales and store numbers, this intervention could potentially have a huge impact on cola-eyed consumers’ health.

Notably, however, information was not collected from consumers about their feelings towards the intervention — indeed, it was not even clear if consumers were consciously aware of the manipulation at all. That’s important because although some research suggests that nudges to promote healthy food choices are generally considered acceptable, other studies have documented “reactance” wherein individuals feel an urge to defy the system once aware of nudges in place. Psychologists are still trying to understand the conditions that might initiate reactance to any particular intervention, so policymakers and fast-food-chain managers alike must be careful when implementing nudge designs to avoid provoking unintended negative reactions. Nevertheless, McDonald’s did not receive many complaints and continue to use the new item positioning to this day, the authors report.

These findings support calls for managers and policymakers to consider how physical layouts of food joints can influence expectations, and how knowledge of these expectations might be used to improve public health. Despite the role habits often play when making food choices, this study shows that nudges can be used to intervene where appropriate. The appetite for behavioural economics continues to grow.

– Menu positions influence soft drink selection at touchscreen kiosks

Post written by Freddy Parker for the BPS Research Digest. Freddy is a long-standing reader of the Research Digest and student at the University of Bath, studying for his final undergraduate year in Psychology.

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Taking A Placebo Can Reduce Anxiety Before An Exam — Even When You Know The Pills Are Inert

By Matthew Warren

The placebo effect is a curious phenomenon. A wealth of literature has shown that inert treatments can not only produce medical benefits like pain relief, but also have cognitive effects like boosting creativity and learning. And while many of those studies involve misleading people into thinking that they are receiving an effective intervention, a new study in Scientific Reports shows that this deception is not always necessary. Researchers have found that taking a placebo can reduce people’s anxiety before a test — even when they know they are taking an inactive pill. 

As many as 2 in 5 people experience test anxiety, which can involve physical symptoms like high heart rate and sweating, negative thinking, and even impaired performance or avoidance of the test in the first place. Some sufferers take medications or have psychotherapy — but Michael Schaefer from Medical School Berlin and colleagues wondered whether just taking a placebo could help.

The team recruited 58 university students who were approaching their end of term exams. Half of the participants were given no treatment, while the other half were asked to take two placebo pills per day for two weeks. Importantly, there was no deception involved: the researchers told participants in the placebo condition that their pills were inactive. Before starting the course of treatment, and again at the end, the participants completed questionnaires that measured their level of test anxiety, physical and mental well-being, and self-management skills (for example, coping mechanisms and belief in one’s own ability to succeed).

The control group didn’t show any difference in the measures before and after the treatment period. But the story was different for the placebo group: after “treatment” with the placebo, their anxiety had significantly reduced, and they also showed improved self-management abilities. It wasn’t clear, however, whether these changes had any knock-on effect on exam grades (within the placebo group, participants who showed a greater improvement in their self-management skills tended to achieve higher grades, but this correlation didn’t reach significance).

It’s a mystery how placebos decrease anxiety even when people are aware that they are taking an inert substance, the researchers write. One possibility is that the positive way in which the researchers discussed the intervention with participants may have played a role: participants were told that placebo effects could be “powerful” and that the body may respond automatically. But while the results might seem surprising, they are consistent with previous research that has found “open label” placebos can be effective for conditions like irritable bowel syndrome.

Still, the results are very preliminary. The sample size was pretty small, and it’s unclear whether what seems to be a fairly modest drop in anxiety scores has practical relevance. It would be interesting to see more detailed evidence of exactly how the placebo intervention affected participants — did it alter their negative thinking, for instance, or have more of an effect on physical symptoms of test anxiety?

And even if placebos reduce the kind of anxiety people experience before a test, that doesn’t necessarily mean they work for more chronic anxiety or in other stressful situations. There are, of course, many other ways for dealing with high pressure situations — for more on those, see this week’s feature from Emma Young.

– Open-label placebos reduce test anxiety and improve self-management skills: A randomized-controlled trial

Matthew Warren (@MattbWarren) is Editor of BPS Research Digest

 

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SACAP’s online honours degree in Psychology offers complete flexibility

SACAP graduate Melonie Gobel studied for her honours degree online and says SACAP’s convenient flexibility was a key factor to her success.

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How To Cope Under Pressure, According To Psychology

By Emma Young

You’re preparing for an important meeting, and the pressure’s on. If it’s bad now, how will you cope when you actually have to perform? Will you fly? Or will you sink? 

Psychologists have a lot to say about how to cope under pressure… both the chronic kind, which might involve ongoing high expectations at work, for example; and the acute, single-event variety such as a vital meeting, a make-or-break presentation, or a sports match.

The stress mindset

A concept that’s increasingly recognised as important in relation to pressure is your “stress mindset”. If you recognise that stressful challenges can sharpen your focus, strengthen your motivation, and offer learning and achievement opportunities, then you have a “positive” stress mindset. In contrast, viewing stress as unpleasant, debilitating and negative constitutes a “negative” stress mindset. And there’s evidence that this is harmful. A 2017 study led by Anne Casper found that when faced with a day that they know is going to be challenging, people with a positive stress mindset come up with coping strategies, boost their performance, and end the day feeling more energised. For people with a negative stress mindset, the opposite happens. 

Alia Crum at Stanford University is one of the best-known advocates of the positive stress mindset. She’s found that it’s not just adults who benefit. In a study of adolescents, Crum and her colleagues found that those who believed in the potential benefits of stress were less prone to feeling stressed in the wake of difficult life events. “These findings suggest that changing the way adolescents think about stress may help protect them from acting impulsively when confronted with adversity,” the researchers concluded. 

If you do have a negative stress mindset, there are ways to turn it around. In another study, Crum’s team found that adult participants who’d watched a film clip that focused on the “enhancing” nature of stress, and were then put into a stressful social situation, afterwards felt more positive and showed greater cognitive flexibility than participants who’d first watched a “stress is bad” clip.  

If you’re feeling anxious because you’re under increased pressure at work, or there’s a particularly challenging opportunity/stressful event (you now know which adjective you should pick…) coming up, one short-term fix might be to go and watch a horror movie. Deliberately scaring ourselves can calm the brain, leading to a “recalibration of our emotions,” according to a US study led by Margee Kerr which involved visitors to an immersive theatre attraction at the ScareHouse in Pittsburgh. Those volunteers who were more stressed or tired beforehand showed the biggest emotional benefits afterwards. 

There is also some tentative evidence from Heidi Fritz and others that taking a cheerful perspective on life is associated with less stress over time, while self-defeating humour — the sort that involves disparaging yourself — is associated with more distress. 

The evidence from this particular study is not strong. But some support for the idea that trying to big yourself up, rather than to put yourself down, can help in high pressure situations comes from a study in which Sonia Kang at the University of Toronto and her team studied a group of MBA students. The researchers put some into positions of low power in a negotiating situation, and found that these participants performed worse under pressure than those who’d been given more power over the outcome. However, when “low power” students first spent five minutes writing about their most important negotiating skill, this neutralised the power differential effect on performance. “Anytime you have low expectations for performance, you tend to sink down and meet those low expectations,” Kang observed. “Self-affirmation is a way to neutralize that threat.”

Time

However, if you are going into a negotiating situation, you may also want to bear this in mind: when put under time pressure, people tend to act more like themselves, according to a recent paper in Nature Communications. Researchers Fandong Chen and Ian Krajbich, based in China and the US, found that when there was little time available to make a decision about how to divide a pot of money, selfish people tended to act more selfishly than usual, while pro-social people behaved even more pro-socially. In theory, either could be useful — depending on what you want out of an interaction. 

However, time pressure can also improve decision-making, according to a simulation of a realistic disaster event overseen by Liverpool’s Centre for Critical and Major Incident Psychology. It’s thought that this is because it forces people to make tough decisions — and when these people are experts, they’re more likely to be the right ones. 

A helping hand

Whether you’re a hospital manager awaiting an influx of injured patients, or a lecturer or a student about to go into a vital meeting or exam, you’re likely approaching the point of maximum pressure. What can help? 

You might hope for a text message from a friend or romantic partner. Recent research from Emily Hooker and colleagues confirms that sending a text to a partner confronted with a difficult task really can make them feel more supported. This particular study involved 75 women who were asked to do a set of stressful tasks, including mental maths and public speaking, while their blood pressure and heart rate were recorded. While they were waiting to perform, some received text messages from their romantic partner, who was waiting in another room. These scripted texts were either explicitly supportive (for example, “Don’t worry. It’s just a psych study. You’ll be fine”), whereas others were more mundane (“It’s cold in here”). 

Analysis of the physiological data revealed that the mundane texts, though not the “supportive” ones, reduced the women’s blood pressure during both preparation and the task itself. When you’re under psychological pressure, being reminded that there’s someone out there who really cares for you seems to be more helpful than receiving targeted advice. In fact, the potential risks of offering “helpful” advice have been highlighted in other work. A recent meta-analysis of 142 studies looking at how to help struggling employees concluded that simply making job-related support available — for example, new equipment or career counselling — is often helpful, but overtly discussing a problem can backfire. “That finding might be because not all support is good support,” said Michael Mathieu at San Francisco State University, who led the study. For example, reaching out to try to help a co-worker might be taken as an insult, he suggests. 

If your partner somehow neglects to send a simple reminder of their implicit support before you go into your important meeting, or stand up to give that paper, they may still be able to help you. Just visualising your partner can moderate your body’s physiological response to stress, according to research at the University of Arizona led by Kyle Bourassa. (In this study, the stressor was physical – volunteers had to submerge their feet into cold water – but in theory, the same effect could hold for other forms of stress.) In some trials, participants actually had their partner in the same room. These people reported less pain than those who just imagined that their partner was there, but the blood pressure data for the two groups were statistically equivalent. “The results suggest that accessing the mental representation of a romantic partner and a partner’s presence each buffer against exaggerated acute stress responses to a similar degree,” the researchers write. 

Choking and clutch

It’s possible that, in modulating physiological arousal, this kind of technique may reduce the risk of choking under pressure. This phenomenon is familiar to many of us. When the pressure gets “too much”, our skills suddenly deteriorate, and we perform more poorly than we, or anyone else, expected. Unsurprisingly, this phenomenon has been extensively studied in sport. One analysis of the performance of elite tennis players, led by Danny Cohen-Zada, concluded that the male players were about twice as adversely affected by high pressure as the female players, perhaps because men typically show a bigger spike in levels of the stress hormone cortisol when under pressure than women do. (“Our robust evidence that women can respond better than men to competitive pressure is compelling,” the researchers noted.)

The opposite to choking under pressure is sometimes called “clutch performance”. A group led by Christian Swann at the University of Wollongong, Australia interviewed 16 top athletes and asked them to describe what they were thinking and feeling during a recent outstanding “clutch” performance. This led them to identify 12 characteristics associated with excelling under pressure. Six were similar to the state of flow (they became so involved in their task they became unaware of the crowd, for example). But six were different. They included being deliberately focused on the task in hand, maintaining intense effort over a period of time, feeling high arousal levels, and not thinking about what would happen if they failed. The athletes talked about making a big effort to monitor their own performance as they played, to raise their game. (It’s worth noting that though the athletes talked about feeling high levels of arousal, their actual physiological arousal was not monitored. There’s certainly work finding that arousal helps with performance — only to a point.) 

It’s interesting that the athletes mentioned not thinking about the negative consequences of failure. Because this brings us back to mindsets. Work published earlier this year (led by Vikram Chib) found that simply altering how you view what’s at stake in a high-pressure situation can dramatically reduce the risk of choking. 

The participants in this study were asked to play a computer-based game in which they could win money. But when they were instructed to imagine that they already had the high prize money on offer, and were playing for the chance to keep it, rather than to gain it, they were much less likely to choke. (The researchers tied this to altered levels of activity in a region of the brain called the ventral striatum.) A skin conductance measure also showed that this reappraisal prevented heightened stress when they failed. Playing make-believe had, it seems, taken the pressure out of the situation. 

More work needs to be done to explore the potential benefits of this approach, as well as the positive stress mindset, in real-world situations. But next time you’re under pressure to perform, why not try embracing the opportunity to achieve — and imagine that you’ve already succeeded? 

This feature was written for The Psychologist’s ‘Under…’ special, which you’ll find tomorrow at http://thepsychologist.bps.org.uk.

Emma Young (@EmmaELYoung) is Staff Writer at BPS Research Digest

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