How the threat of violence can make us nice to each other

Under threat of violence, we have a natural instinct to stick together. Researchers say this basic urge explains their seemingly odd observation that feeling threatened, rather than making people bristle, can actually increase their agreeableness.

Andrew White and his colleagues conducted five studies in all. First off, they analysed data from 54 nations around the world showing that the higher a country's spend on their military (a proxy for feeling threatened), the higher their citizens' average score on the personality dimension of agreeableness. The association held even after controlling for a host of potential confounds including a nation's wealth and population density.

Second, White's team surveyed 54 undergrads and found that those who generally felt more threatened in life also tended to report being more agreeable and extravert (scores on conscientiousness, openness to experience and neuroticism were not associated with feeling threatened).

Next, the researchers prompted some of a new group of participants to feel threatened by having them read a story about an intruder entering their house. The remaining participants acted as controls and read a story about losing keys. The threatened participants scored higher in agreeableness (not other traits), but only when they thought about their personality in the context of how they act with people they know well. Moreover, this apparent effect of threat on agreeableness was larger for people who'd grown up in a big family.

Taken together these initial findings support the idea that we have an evolved adaptive response to threat of violence that leads us to affiliate to family and friends, especially if we grow up in a context where this would be useful. This idea complements previous research that suggests we have an evolved instinct to avoid other people when we're under threat of contamination.

A fourth study took things further by testing real-world behaviour. Two kinds of poster were pinned up around campus - one was a threatening reminder about the issue of guns on campus and it featured a pistol pointing out at the reader; the other was about construction on campus. Next to these posters were one of two fund-raising requests, either framed as being for local students or for an out-group of Ethiopian students. The fund-raising notices had pull-off tabs for people to take contact details away. The result here - the gun poster increased students' interest in helping their fellow students, but not outsiders.

Finally, the researchers returned to international data and found that countries that spent more on their military tended to have citizens who score more highly in trusting their family and neighbours, and lower in trusting members of other religions.

"These findings help develop a deeper understanding of one of the ways in which humans respond to threats of violence from others," the researchers said. "Although disagreeableness and mistrust may often seem to arise from violence, it is not always the case. Sometimes nasty breeds nice."

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White, A., Kenrick, D., Li, Y., Mortensen, C., Neuberg, S., and Cohen, A. (2012). When nasty breeds nice: Threats of violence amplify agreeableness at national, individual, and situational levels. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 103 (4), 622-634 DOI: 10.1037/a0029140

--Further reading--
Reminder of disease primes the body and mind to repel other people.

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Faces covered by a niqab are seen as less happy and expressing more shame

The wearing of face veils (the niqab) by Muslim women has become a politically sensitive issue in recent years. The practice is banned in France and similar laws are planned, or already in place, in many other Western European countries including Belgium, The Netherlands and Austria. In the UK, in 2006 the then Government Minister Jack Straw caused controversy when he suggested that wearing the niqab interferes with face-to-face communication and he'd prefer it if the practice were dropped. Now for the first time psychologists have tested the effects of the niqab on the facial communication of emotion.

A team led by Agneta Fischer at the University of Amsterdam showed four short videos to 58 Dutch students (23 had previously had contact with a niqab-wearer; 25 had Muslims among their family and friends). The silent videos showed a woman (one of three actresses) telling a story that was either emotionally neutral, happy, made her angry or made her feel shame. Crucially, some of the participants viewed videos in which the woman was wearing a niqab; others viewed a woman with horizontal black bars on the screen concealing the top of her head and her lower face; and others viewed a version in which the woman's head and face were uncovered (see picture). The participants' task was to rate the intensity of emotions expressed by the woman in each clip.

The niqab seemed to change the facial communication of emotion. Participants who viewed the woman wearing a niqab rated her expression of happiness as less intense than participants who viewed the other two videos. Moreover, participants who viewed videos of a woman with her face covered (be that with the niqab or the horizontal bars) rated her expression of shame as more intense, compared with participants who viewed a woman with an uncovered face. The perception of anger in the videos was unaffected by face covering, probably because anger is expressed principally via furrowing of the brow, which was visible regardless of face covering.

After viewing the video clips, the participants were asked about their attitudes toward the niqab. Those who'd seen clips showing a woman with a covered face (the niqab or the horizontal bars) expressed more negative attitudes toward the niqab, and this was mediated by the amount of negative emotion they perceived in the video clips. In other words, the researchers said, "we may conclude that the attempt to decode emotions in covered faces leads one to perceive more negative emotions, which in turn influences how one feels about covering one's face."

There is a weakness in the study methodology. The clips featuring the horizontal bars were created by using software to overlay the bars on the footage of the women filmed without their heads covered. The niqab videos, by contrast, were filmed separately with the women actually wearing the niqabs, so it's possible the actresses may have behaved differently whilst wearing the veils. However, this doesn't diminish the main point that both forms of face covering affected the communication of emotion.

Fischer and her colleagues concluded that the niqab may have the effect of exaggerating the perceived amount of negative emotion expressed by a wearer, whilst diminishing the perceived amount of positive emotion. "The present research thus supports some of the concerns that have been expressed in political debates concerning the negative effects of wearing niqabs in social settings," they said.

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Fischer, A., Gillebaart, M., Rotteveel, M., Becker, D., and Vliek, M. (2012). Veiled Emotions: The Effect of Covered Faces on Emotion Perception and Attitudes. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 3 (3), 266-273 DOI: 10.1177/1948550611418534

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Think less and become more conservative

The less time or mental effort a person puts into thinking about an issue, the more likely they are to espouse a politically conservative perspective. That's according to a new study by Scott Eidelman and his team, who stress that their point is "not that conservatives rely on low effort thought" but that "low effort thinking promotes political conservatism".

Across four studies, the researchers examined the effects on political attitudes of four different ways of reducing mental effort. This included: surveying drinkers at varying degrees of intoxication at a local bar; allocating some participants to a dual-task condition where they had to keep track of auditory tones at the same time as registering their political attitudes; allocating some participants to a time-pressured situation, in which they had to rate their agreement with different political statements at fast as possible; and finally, giving some participants the simple instruction to respond to political statements without thinking too hard.

The results were consistent across the studies - being more drunk, being distracted by a secondary task, answering under time pressure and answering without thinking, all led participants to agree more strongly with politically conservative beliefs, such as "A first consideration of any society is the protection of property rights" and "Production and trade should be free of government interference." Agreement with liberal beliefs were either reduced or unaffected by the measures. The researchers checked and the effects they observed were not due to differences in the complexity of the statements used to measure political conservatism and liberalism, nor were they due to changes in mood or frustration associated with the interventions.

The finding that reduced mental effort encourages more conservative beliefs fits with prior research suggesting that attributions of personal responsibility (versus recognising the influence of situational factors), acceptance of hierarchy and preference for the status quo - all of which may be considered hallmarks of conservative belief - come naturally and automatically to most people, at least in western societies.

"Our findings suggest that conservative ways of thinking are basic, normal, and perhaps natural," the researchers concluded. "Motivational factors are crucial determinants of ideology, aiding or correcting initial responses depending on one's goals, beliefs, and values. Our perspective suggests that these initial and uncorrected responses lean conservative."
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Eidelman, S., Crandall, C., Goodman, J., and Blanchar, J. (2012). Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin DOI: 10.1177/0146167212439213

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Would you look where Berlusconi is looking?

"You should see what I'm looking at!"

Our attention is pulled in the direction of where we see other people looking. It happens so automatically that experts have assumed it's a reflex response, impervious to conscious factors, such as the particular identity of the gazer whose line of sight we're following. But a recent monkey study challenged this interpretation: high-status macaques were observed following the gaze of other high-status, but not low-status, monkeys. Inspired by this result, a team of Italian psychologists have examined whether our attention is influenced more by the gaze of politicians whose political persuasion matches our own.

Marco Tullio Liuzza and his colleagues recorded the eye movements of 28 participants sat at a computer screen. Approximately half were right-wing and half were left-wing. The task was to make a fast leftward saccade if a central square turned blue, or a fast rightward saccade if it turned orange. The interesting twist was that this central square was located in the middle of the eyes of a politician, who was shown staring straight ahead. Just before the central square changed colour, the politician's eyes shifted direction either in the same direction indicated by the square (potentially facilitating the participants' own eye movement) or in the opposite direction. The faces that were used belonged to Silvio Berlusconi, the right-wing Italian Prime Minister; Bruno Vespa (right-wing commentator); Antonio Di Pietro (current left-wing leader); and Romano Prodi (former left-wing Prime Minister).

The gaze shift by the political faces made no difference to the speed of the participants' own eye movements, but did affect their accuracy. For right-wing participants, their accuracy was influenced far more by the gaze shifts of Berlusconi and Vespa (the right-wingers) than by Pietro or Prodi. The influence of Berlusconi's and Vespa's eyes was similar in magnitude. By contrast, the left-wing participants were not influenced by the gaze direction of the political faces, left-wing or right-wing. Another detail was that Berlusconi's gaze direction had a stronger influence on those participants who considered their own personality to be similar to his.

A potential confound is that Berlusconi wasn't just a right-wing character, he was also Prime Minister at the time of the study, and his party was the leading party. His influence (and perhaps Vespa's, by association) on right-wing participants might therefore have been related to his position of authority, not just his political leanings. Certainly past research has shown that conservatives are more sensitive to authority than liberals.

Specifically on the reason why left-wingers weren't influenced by Berlusconi's gaze - Liuzza and his team said this was consistent with "studies showing that Italian left-wing voters detest the right-wing leader."

The researchers concluded that their study shows how: "... a sophisticated blend of situational and dispositional factors underlies the capture of reflexive gaze-following exerted on voters by the gaze of politicians. Future studies on the plasticity of this effect may provide new insights in the fundamental aspect of the human tendency to coalesce in large groups and complex societies."
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Liuzza, M., Cazzato, V., Vecchione, M., Crostella, F., Caprara, G., and Aglioti, S. (2011). Follow My Eyes: The Gaze of Politicians Reflexively Captures the Gaze of Ingroup Voters. PLoS ONE, 6 (9) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0025117

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How a simple point of grammar could affect our voting decisions

A simple tweak in the tense of a verb could make the difference between electoral victory and defeat, according to a study by US researchers.

Imagine you encountered the following text: "Timmy Tucker is a senior politician. Last year Timmy championed human rights, and was fiddling his expenses."

Now compare with this version: "Timmy Tucker is a senior politician. Last year Timmy was championing human rights, and fiddled his expenses."

How does each version affect your view of Timmy Tucker? New findings from Caitlin Fausey and Teenie Matlock suggest that the first version is more likely to damage Timmy's re-election prospects.

The researchers found that the imperfect tense (e.g. "was fiddling") exacerbates the effect of a negative claim about a politician, compared with the perfect tense (e.g. "fiddled"). Fausey and Matlock aren't certain why this is, but they think the imperfect tense gives the sense that an action is ongoing, whereas the perfect tense brings closure.

For an initial study, 354 participants were split into four groups, with each reading one of four versions of a description of a politician who was up for re-election. Participants who read a version in which the man was described as last year "taking hush money" were more confident that he wouldn't be re-elected and estimated that he'd taken more money, as compared with participants who read a version in which it was written that last year "he took hush money". This subtle change in verb tense made no difference to the verdict of participants who read a positive account of the politician ("was collecting donations" vs. "collected donations").

A second study with a further 127 participants was similar except this time they all read a version that featured both a positive and negative claim about the politician. Those participants who read the description featuring a negative claim in the imperfect tense with the positive claim in the perfect tense ("was removing homes and extended roads") were less likely to say he would be re-elected (40 per cent vs. 56 per cent), compared with those who read the same claims with the tenses the other way around ("removed homes and extending roads")*.

"Because scandals involving political candidates are a hot topic in media coverage and campaign ads, insight into the power of the grammar used to communicate negative information will likely improve our understanding about how linguistic media shapes voting patterns," the researchers said.
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Fausey, C., and Matlock, T. (2011). Can Grammar Win Elections? Political Psychology, 32 (4), 563-574 DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9221.2010.00802.x

*In this example, extending roads is assumed by the researchers to be a positive activity - environmentally minded readers might not agree with that assumption!

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Is God always on the right?

This former Republican President claims to read the bible daily 

Holding conservative values tends to go hand in hand with being more religious, at least in the United States. Indeed, the idea that the US is divided between liberal atheists versus religious conservatives is at the heart of the country's so-called 'Culture Wars'. This has led some psychologists to suggest that there's a deep-seated link between conservatism and religiosity, such that the same innate attitudes and motivations that drive one also drive the other. A new study challenges this claim, providing evidence instead that the conservative/religiosity overlap is created largely by the contemporary political discourse, as peddled in the media. Among people who don't follow political news and commentary, Ariel Malka and his colleagues found that the typical conservative/religiosity link was largely absent.

Malka's team analysed data collected from 7,056 US citizens between 1996 and 2008. The participants answered questions about their degree and denomination of religiosity, their favoured political party (Democrat or Republican), their position on various political issues such as gun control and immigration, and their level of political engagement - for example whether they read the newspaper or followed political news.

The usual link between religiosity and conservatism was found. But crucially, this association was strongly moderated by political engagement. So, for those who were highly politically engaged, religiosity tended to go hand in hand with nearly every conservative characteristic that was measured, including party identification and views on gender roles, gun control and homosexuality. The only exceptions were immigration and the death penalty, for which religiosity predicted a more liberal view. In contrast, for people who weren't politically engaged, the religiosity/conservatism link was profoundly diminished, to just four of the twelve conservative characteristics that were measured.

Malka and his colleagues conceded that the remaining conservatism/religiosity link, even among those low in political engagement, suggests that there may be some truth in the idea of an organic link between the two belief systems. 'However,' they added, 'when considering the full range of preferences and values associated with "conservatism" nowadays, engagement with political communication seems to be the predominant factor that drives the alignment of religiosity and political orientation.'

What this suggests in simple terms is that politically engaged, religious Americans watch the news and listen to political commentaries and this leads them to shift towards more conservative values. Or, alternatively, it means politically engaged, conservative folk watch the news and listen to the commentaries, and this encourages them towards religion. Either way, or both ways, it seems these people are being swayed by the contemporary political discourse in the United States.

One final, alternative interpretation is that political engagement is affected by people's religiosity/political match-up, rather than affecting it. By this account, when people's politics and religion don't match, they choose to disengage from politics. Longitudinal research is needed to test this. 'We hope that the present analyses are supplemented with cross-national, time series, longitudinal, and experimental analyses to enhance understanding of how context of information influences the relation between these two socially significant constructs,' the researchers said.
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Ariel Malka, Yphtach Lelkes, Sanjay Srivastava, Adam Cohen, and Dale Miller (2011). Religiosity, political engagement, and political conservatism. Political Psychology. In Press. pdf via author website.

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Do political scandals really distract us from important issues?

Barely a day goes by without some political scandal or other splashed across the papers. Critics argue this obsession with tittle-tattle distracts the electorate from more important policy issues. '...a fiercely independent media is the guarantor of democracy,' Will Hutton wrote in 2000, before warning that the British media's obsession with scandal 'paradoxically, may be beginning to endanger it [democracy]'.

A new study by Beth Miller at the University of Missouri-Kansas City challenges the assumption that scandal is a distraction. Every two days, she presented 413 undergrads with a newspaper article containing information about a policy position held by a mayoral candidate. Then, 1 to 14 days later, she tested the students' memory for the candidate's policies. The important twist was that for half the participants, the fourth of five newspaper articles, rather than being about a policy, was about a scandal involving the candidate - in particular, his confession to an extra-marital affair.

The assumption of many would be that this story would distract participants from the drier, but arguably more important, detail of the politician's policies. Similarly, in psychological terms, it might be argued that the scandalous information would displace the earlier memory traces associated with policies, especially since negative information is known to be particularly memorable and attention-grabbing.

An alternative prediction, however, is that the salience of the scandal would actually benefit all other memories associated with the politician. This is consistent with the idea that memory is an 'associative network' made up of interconnected nodes. By this account, activation of one node - the one representing scandal - will spill over and raise the activation in all related nodes, thus benefiting participants' memory for the mayoral candidate's policies.

Miller found that more policy-related information was recalled by participants who read about the scandal, consistent with the associative-memory account. Moreover, compared with participants in the scandal condition who forgot about it (the scandal), those who remembered it were also more likely to remember policy information - reinforcing the idea that the scandal memory had benefited policy memories. As you might expect, although the scandal benefited participants' memory for policies, it also negatively affected the participants' evaluation of the candidate.

'While these results do not suggest that candidates can engage in scandalous activities without consequence, they do suggest that the depiction of the public as blind to anything but scandalous information seems to be an exaggeration,' Miller said. 'The results ... suggest that exposure to scandalous information ... may have beneficial side-effects not previously explored.'
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Miller, B. (2010). The Effects of Scandalous Information on Recall of Policy-Related Information. Political Psychology, 31 (6), 887-914 DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9221.2010.00786.x

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Higher intelligence associated with "thinking like an economist"

As the world economy dusts itself down and edges towards recovery, a provocative new paper claims that people with higher intelligence are more likely to think like economists. That is, they're more likely to be optimistic about the economy; to recognise the economic advantages of markets free from government interference, and the advantages of foreign trade and foreign workers; and to appreciate the economic benefits of achieving greater productivity with less man-power. The lead author is Bryan Caplan, an economics professor at George Mason University. Past essays by him include 'The 4 Boneheaded Biases of Stupid Voters (And we're all stupid voters.)'

Prior research has established that the more time a person spends in education, the more likely their broad economic views are to match that of the typical economist (pdf). Caplan and his colleague Stephen Miller point out that these studies failed to take into account the influence of intelligence. After all, it's known that people with higher IQ tend to spend longer in education and intelligence itself may also directly influence economic beliefs.

To overcome this problem, Caplan and Miller have focused on answers to the General Social Survey, a massive US poll of national opinions performed every two years. Crucially, it includes questions about the economy and a small test of verbal IQ.

Caplan and Miller's finding is that the link between educational background and 'thinking like an economist' is weakened when IQ is taken into account because IQ is the more important factor associated with economic beliefs. It's a complicated picture because IQ and education may be mutually influential. However, if one assumes that education is unable to raise IQ, but that IQ affects time spent in education, then the researchers said 'the net effect on economic beliefs of intelligence is more than double the net effect of education.' Even if one assumes that education can also affect IQ, 'intelligence still has a larger estimated effect [on economic beliefs],' they said.

Does the link between higher intelligence and 'thinking like an economist' mean that economists are generally right and the public wrong? In answer to this question, Caplan and Miller cite Shane Frederick, a decision-making scholar at Yale's School of Management, who's previously argued that it depends on the type of question. For financial issues, he argued, it pays to emulate those 'with higher cognitive abilities'. However, Frederick noted that 'if one were deciding between an apple or an orange, Einstein's preference for apples seems irrelevant.'

Caplan and Miller say they agree with Frederick about this, before concluding boldly: 'The fact that the beliefs of economists and intelligent non-economists dovetail is another reason to accept the "economists are right, the public is wrong" interpretation of lay-expert belief gaps.'
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Caplan, B., and Miller, S. (2010). Intelligence makes people think like economists: Evidence from the General Social Survey. Intelligence, 38 (6), 636-647 DOI: 10.1016/j.intell.2010.09.005

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