Cognitive dissonace, therapy, UFO's wine and how to get loyality

Imagine you are a college student who has agreed to participate in a psychology experiment. When you come to the lab you are asked to perform the most boring task you have ever tried, you are extremely bored but you still complete the experiment so that you do not have to come back another time to do another experiment.

After you are done the experimenter tells you that there is another participant waiting outside and that it would be terrific if you could try to convince him or her that the task is fun and interesting and thereby increase motivation a little bit. Since you are a nice person and don't want to block psychological research you agree to this.

Alternatively, after the experiment you are asked whether you would like to convince the next participant that the experiment is fun and interesting and (crucially), you are offered 20 dollars for agreeing to this...

Now how do you think the average person would think and act in the two situations described above? Would you put in more effort if you were paid than if you were not paid? Interestingly, most participants put in a lot more effort in convincing the next participant that the experiment was fun and interesting if they had been given no money! Why? The reason is "cognitive dissonance" (a term first coined be Leon Festinger forces the participants to actually believe that the experiment was fun and interesting. After all, why would I stand here and convince a stranger that an extremely boring task is actually fun and interesting...? Do I get paid...? No! Well, I guess it is because I did in fact enjoy the tasks a little bit... hmmm... yeah, it was indeed great fun... and very interesting as well... that must be it.

Cognitive dissonance refers to the unpleasant state in which your behavior is in dissonance (does not agree) with your beliefs or thoughts. "This experiment was extremely boring (belief)" and "convincing someone that it is fun and interesting (behavior)" does not go well together. Either you have to change your behavior (which is sometimes impossible if you have already done it), or you change your beliefs (which is what most people does). The third alternative is to live knowing that you acted in a way that contradicted your beliefs - hypocrisy.

Indeed when participants were later asked whether they enjoyed the experiment or not, the ones who did not get paid claimed that it was much more fun that the participants who received payment. After all, the paid participants only tried to convince the next participant because they were paid - no dissonance there...

What does this have to do with loyalty? Here is a lesson. If you are going to start an organization or a political party or whatever, and if you need some people who are loyal and energetic about the business, do not pay them... If you pay them, then in their head they can say to themselves that I am doing it because of the money. If they do not get any money, they can only say to themselves that I am doing this because I like it - and that is the best type of employee or member.

Another example: Say that you are a therapist or some sort of advisor. If you want people to value your service, take high fees! If you do this your patient or client will think to themselves "why am I paying so much money for this", well I guess that it is because it is so damn good, after all, who pays a lot of money for therapy that isn't really working or an advisor who does not give good advice? Some people do of course, but it will be very difficult to admit that to yourself, it is easier to think that the service you got was worth the money, that way you avoid cognitive dissonance.

Leon Festinger, the inventor of the term "cognitive dissonance" in his book "When prophecy fails" used the example of a doomsday cult who was expecting the end of the world. Festinger infiltrated this group lead by Mrs.Keech. The group believed that the earth would end in a great flood before 21st of December, 1954. Everyone on earth was going to die except this little cult of true believer who was going to be picked up by a flying saucer on the 20th of December 1954. Before midnight the group gathered outside, waiting for the flying saucer. When the clock turned 12AM, nothing happened... but wait, there was another clock which was only 11.55. So they wait another 5min, but still nothing happened... Mrs.Keech cries... The groups’ waits outside until 4AM when suddenly Keech receives a message saying that this little group of true believers managed to change God's mind - and that therefore he (or she) would not flood the earth after all... A nice solution to the dissonance that would otherwise make them feel very very stupid. Rather than admitting that they were simply wrong, the group decided to believe in an ad hoc story that would make sense of things

One last example (apparently this is true only for trained wine tasters and not for lay persons):Experiments show that expensive wines taste better than cheap wines, even if the different bottle contains exactly the same wine... Why? Because no one wants to be the person that goes out and buys an expensive bottle of wine that is no better than a cheap bottle, that would be stupid and no one wants to be stupid...

Positive psychology and the hedonic treadmill

How happy are you on a scale from 1-10, with 5 being the average individual? If you are like most people you think that you are happier than most people (7-8 is the average answer you get). But what factors affect your life satisfaction?

This post has been inspired by yet another fantastic professor that everyone with an internet connection can (and should), listen to. His name is Paul Bloom and his course in introductory psychology can be found at Yale's open courses site. In the last lecture of this series Bloom discusses "The Good life: Happiness". The first 15min or so is about therapy and whether it really works, an interesting topic on its own, however, it is with happiness that I will be concerned here.

A few years ago (summer 2004) I went to summer school in Cambridge UK. I attended a wealth of different lectures on everything from astronomy and climate change to genetics and ladybird sexuality. One of the most memorable lectures was one held by Nick Baylis which was on the just born branch of psychology called "positive psychology". The general outline of the lecture was something like the following. Since psychology was born in the 19^th century it has merely been focused on the sick and abnormal. How do we deal with crazy and depressed individuals? Now does that seem a bit skewed to you? Should we also not study happy people and see how they differ. What makes them happy? Or is happiness simply not being abnormal or insane (not to far from the truth perhaps…)? What Nick said was basically that we should investigate happy people to see if there are any lessons to be drawn from them, and that I think seems to make an awful lot of sense.

Since this lecture which positive psychology has become a very hyped subject and vast sums of money are being pumped into this field of research with highly variable gains. Some experiments which I will share here are however, highly interesting and also hilarious. In what is perhaps my favorite experiment, random people at work were asked to go to the photocopier and make some copies of whatever. For half of the participants a dime had been planted on the photocopier, as if someone had forgotten it. Now we all know what a great feeling it is to find money on the street but I think that what happens next will surprise you. After having done the photocopies the participants were approached and asked something like the following: "how happy would you say you are with your whole life". What happens? The group that found the dime on the photocopier reported significantly better life satisfaction!!! Conclusion: when we estimate how happy we are we are extremely susceptible to factors in out immediate environment. In a similar experiment participants were asked when the weather was sunny or rainy, and like in the previous experiment, bad weather caused people to say that they were just not particularly happy with their entire life!!!

In fact, the picture that has emerged from research in positive psychology is that our life satisfaction goes up and down. We have some sort of average happiness which we basically stick to, whatever happens, throughout or lives. The nice thing about this is that whatever happens in your life you are not likely to become less satisfied with your life. Even people who have been paralyzed neck down tend to recover, after about a year, in terms of overall life satisfaction.

The more depressing conclusion from this research is that there is nothing you can do to increase your overall life satisfaction. This is where the term "hedonic treadmill" comes from. You can fulfill all your dreams and fantasies, jump from an airplane, win the nobel prize, become a karate champion, become a Mormon and have sex with ten partners simultaneously, buy your dream house, visit exotic places, etc, etc. Whatever you do, your life satisfaction will stay the same. Of course all of the above may give you temporary happiness and some people suggest that this is how to proceed in life, always do new things that make you happy and don't stick to one because the happiness will disappear. The fact of the matter is that we are able to adapt to even the most luxurious lifestyle.

So is there really nothing that will make you happier? There is actually one interesting exception that I want to end with. Individuals who have undergone plastic surgery report that they have greater life satisfaction after the surgery, and amazingly the gain remains. In other words plastic surgeons have done what no-one else in history have ever managed to do, make people happier (I don't know if this statistical conclusion is true for the woman in the picture who want's to become a cat)…

Do we have a soul?

It is easy to get lost in a discussion about the existence or nonexistence of the soul. However, quite frequently conflicts do not arise because people disagree, but rather because they are using different definitions of the soul. Depending on the definition used I either believe or do not believe in the existence of a soul. A common though not very useful definition of "the soul" is what we really are, the core of our selves, or something like that. I would perhaps be inclined to call this "personality" rather than soul, but if that is what is meant by soul then yes, I think I do have one.

If on the other hand the soul is seen as something which is necessarily immaterial, then I do not believe in it. Hypothetically, should someone make an exact replica of me, with the exact same atoms in the exact same places, nothing more would be required. The replica and I would be impossible to distinguish from each other. The replica would react to any stimuli like me, would have the same childhood memories, be attracted to the same things, and just like me the replica would be disgusted by the smell of an orange.

This would not last long though. If me and my replica would continue our lives, then gradually subtle environmental differences would form us in non-identical ways, resulting in some small differences. These differences would ultimately affect the choices of me and my replica and consequently our preference would diverge. This, in turn, would lead to escalating environmental differences and increasingly different personalities or, if you prefer, souls. The resulting differences between me and my replica would be reflected in the way our atoms are put together, so we would no longer contain the exact same atoms. Nevertheless, there would probably be many striking similarities as well. There are examples of genetically identical twins that have grown up in very different environment, and still similarities have been extremely apparent.

What do I base this belief on? My main piece of evidence is that there does not seem to be any part of the personality that cannot be affected by brain injury. In my neuropsychology course I read about many patients with exotic brain injuries. A famous patient called HM, who is still alive, is unable to form any new memories. As a result he still thinks that he is 25 years old and he does not recognize the researchers who have visited him every day for several decades. Another older case is that of Phineas Gage who got a metal stick shot up through the frontal part of the brain. To everyone's amazement Gage did not die from the injury, however, according to his colleagues he was not the same after the injury. Following the injury he started swearing and behaved inappropriately to the extent that he lost his job. However, the most striking case that I can remember only vaguely is that of a responsible normal woman with three kids. Due to a tumor in her brain she suddenly underwent a radical personality change. Her behavior went from normative to completely reckless, and from being a good and faithful wife, she became extremely uninhibited and promiscuous…

One needs merely to take a look at a severe case of Alzheimer disease to see that material changes in the brain can change a person beyond recognition. Some would say that there is always something left, that even though Anna is now eating her own feces and hitting her children when they come to visit, she is still Anna, somewhere inside. I don't think so. Sure, she is still called Anna, and one can still recognize her appearance, but other than that Anna is not Anna anymore. The soul of Anna is very different from the soul Anna used to have before she got Alzheimer.

In sum, due to the fact that there seems to be no sacred part of the personality, nothing which cannot be affected by changes of a material nature. Due to this I do not believe that we have an immaterial soul. Normally I try to avoid the word altogether because of the confusion that arises, but this is my current thoughts on this issue. The discussion here has many important implications, for instance it should affect how to think about free will vs. determinism. I have written about that here.