Nicholas Epley and collaborators have shown that loneliness leads us to anthropomorphize - to attribute human qualities where they don’t belong. Does this explain my childhood fascination with Dusty Bin (and my adult one with Henry vacuums)?
Publish or Perish? Found this advert for research tools inside one of my own industry journals. A very dangerous view to take, and one that can lead some researchers (see earlier posts) to take a less than ethical approach to conducting research. At best it can promote the selection of ‘crowd pleasing’ rather than interesting, or useful, research questions.
On a recent trip to South Africa I noticed that a company called Coronation Fund Managers had taken up the entire length of a transit route at Cape Town airport with many posters like the above, each targetting a different socio-cultural group but always in the same vein with the tagline “Meet the Future You”.
This poster campaign is using a type of motivational device whereby people are encouraged to imagine what they want for themselves in the future, and is a technique I use in my own work to help my clients consider taking steps to change.
One of my main areas of interest from both a research and a practice perspective, is how people can be helped to change their behaviour towards a healthier lifestyle by focusing on desirable and/or undesirable images of themselves in the future. Research already shows that spending time imagining ‘hoped for’ or ‘feared’ versions of ourself in the future can help us be more likely to make changes now, in order to reach (or avoid) that future.
In this example of course, they just want us to invest our money, but the premise is the same: the ‘future you’ looks pretty healthy and successful and is thanking you for taking the right steps now, to secure that financial future. The symbol of financial security for the guy above is that he can afford to own a classic car. Other posters appealed to other desires - your kids’ college education, a large house etc.
I write about this in more detail in my other (much neglected) blog using another example from advertising, this time for Niquitin smoking-cessation products.
This is just cute - and there’s a lot more teddy bear research out there than I would have expected! Now in the spirit of the recent Turner Prize, how can I link this to Grayson Perry’s adoration of his own childhood teddy, Alan Measles?
Questionable research begets even more questionable research
Following from my previous post about the Dutch psychologist who made a career out of falsifying his data, new research by Leslie John, George Loewentstein, and Drazen Prelec (in press) shows that many psychologists admit to, and assume others would also admit to, using “questionable” research practices to make their work seem better than it is.
Questionable research practices…threaten research integrity and produce unrealistically elegant results that may be difficult to match without engaging in such practices oneself…This can lead to a ‘race to the bottom’, with questionable research begetting even more questionable research
These practices might include not reporting everything they found (like saying that the effect of an intervention was the same for everyone, when in fact it was only younger males, or older females who experienced the effect), collecting more and more data until they get the result they were hoping for, failing to report findings that didn’t support their original hypotheses, or changing their hypothesis afterwards to match their findings.
This all means that there is a great risk that researchers report “false positives”, leading us to believe their findings are more watertight than they are.
RIP: Smokin’ Joe Frazier (1944-2011)
“Life doesn’t run away from nobody. Life runs at people.”
― Joe Frazier
This news about the Dutch psychologist who appears to have fabricated most of his data and research findings, merely to get more publications in journals, doesn’t helpfully promote the discipline I am so passionate about.
What I find so difficult to stomach is that even purely academic psychologists (i.e. ones who just do research and don’t work therapeutically with individuals) should be aware of human thought, behaviour, motivation and ego (the stuff of psychology!) to avoid falling prey to this kind of deceit, motivated, he claims, by a pressure to perform and succeed.
Psychologists are “scientist-practitioners” and as such we are expected to only use evidence from rigorous peer-reviewed research to inform our hands-on work with our clients. If we can’t trust that research then we are powerless to help others and might as well be healing with crystals.
I was not able to withstand the pressure to score points, to publish, to always have to be better…I wanted too much, too fast…I took the wrong path
What this quote from Diederik Stapel does illustrate however, is that it’s not just the world of competitive elite sport where performers are under pressure to succeed, to focus on numbers/stats/outcomes. Athletes who take the “wrong path” might resort to performance enhancing drugs, or other forms of cheating, to fast-track their own careers, and similarly their cheating may go undetected for several years, if not their entire career.
I am currently preparing for a role as a volunteer sport psychologist at the Toronto Marathon next May, and am doing lots of research about endurance events, and the strategies athletes use to pull out all the stops. The article in the link above talks about how dissociation strategies can help you to avoid thinking about how tired or sore you are, and to keep putting one foot in front of the other.
What the article doesn’t mention explicitly is that, whilst both elite and novice runners use dissociation or distraction techniques, elite athletes are more likely to focus on their own internal state and performance markers (pace, cadence etc) as illustrated by Paula Radcliffe
When I count to 100 three times, it’s a mile,” she said. “It helps me focus on the moment and not think about how many miles I have to go. I concentrate on breathing and striding, and I go within myself
Less experienced athletes, on the other hand, are more likely to try to distract themselves by thinking about something completely unrelated to what they are doing (an example would be the guy in the article who composes imaginary letters to everyone he knows).
I like this post from The Science of Sport blog which talks about rugby’s growing credibility problem, with objections about the performance of the referee taking centre stage, rather than assessment of the relative performances of the players. As this article says
whenever the result on the scoreboard can be dismissed as being the result of someone’s opinion or bias, there is a problem
I help my clients learn to focus on “the controllables”: those parts of their performance that they are able to influence. You can’t control what other people do (ref, opposition,crowd etc), you can only control your reaction to it. Blaming poor results on external factors is also unhelpful, even if it might be true: where do you go from there to work on a better result next time?
This type of irresponsible reporting of scientific research really winds me up. It’s hard enough helping people stay healthy. Sure, if you read the entire article it does say that there is NO evidence that humans can eat chocolate instead of exercising, but the headline is mischevious enough and I think could give sedentary people who are already struggling with eating better and getting off the sofa yet another excuse not to do it today.
His Airness
When Michael Jordan was asked why he majored in geography at North Carolina, his response: “I knew I would be going places, and I just wanted to know where I was when I got there”.
There will never be another like him.
(Source: stevenlebron)
Sometimes getting people to do things for their health is not as simple as it seems partly because we are all motivated to make changes for different reasons. One way these different motivations are exploited is through the use of message framing.
Message framing refers to whether a message about our health emphasises the risks of not doing something (a loss-framed message) or the benefits of doing it (a gain-framed message).
So, are you more likely to use mouthwash when a gain-framed commercial shows bright white healthy straight teeth? Or is this loss-framed Corsodyl commercial more likely to motivate you, that shows a woman who clearly cares about her appearance with a missing tooth?
— Chris Hoy
1. Start very small
2. Do only one change at a time.
3. Be present and enjoy the activity (don’t focus on results)
4. Be grateful for every step you take
I like number 3. It reminds me of something I read about Steve Peters, a psychiatrist who works with GB cycling. He teaches GB cyclists to focus on the process, not the outcome.
