Social Engineering Blogs

An Aggregator for Blogs About Social Engineering and Related Fields

Staying Jolly for the Holidays

christmas-1909456_1280The Christmas season is certainly a happy time for many people, but it’s often hectic nature can cause a great deal of stress.

Thankfully, there are easy ways to manage this stress without distracting from the necessary shopping, cooking, and family time. The psychologist, Dr. Tara Brach, claims that this is a perfect time to see how meditation can help relieve stress and boost overall happiness.

Meditation, Dr. Brach contends, promotes the idea of mindfulness, encouraging us to simply sit in the present moment. This helps stop our mind from dwelling on past interactions or from stressing about future events. This allows us to relax and regain a level of focus and perspective.

If you are experiencing holiday stress, you are not alone. The American Psychological Association offers a few recommendations to help you relax. They encourage each of you to “take time for yourself” and “be mindful and focus on the present,” connecting to the idea of meditation.

Many readers may instantly roll their eyes and dismiss these notions of mindfulness and meditation as fully of trendy, New Age buzzwords, but Dr. Brach points to the scientific evidence for an actual neurological effect from meditation. This research suggests that meditation can have a positive effect on the emotional sectors of your brain.

This is just one example of the evidence showing that mediation has a beneficial impact on your brain. A 2011 study at Yale University found that meditation helps prevent the mind from wandering, promoting happiness by maintaining mindfulness. Similarly, numerous studies have shown that meditation can reduce depression, anxiety, and even help treat addiction.

The practice of meditation may call to mind a multiple hour Zen retreat or stories of practitioners sitting for days on end, but that sort of time commitment is unreasonable for beginners, especially beginners overwhelmed by the Holiday season! Instead, Dr. Brach explains that meditation does not have to take longer than a few minutes.

Even devoting just a couple minutes can be enough to help you relax. If you do not have the physical space to sit in peace, taking deep breathes and focusing on the feeling of those breathes can help you realize benefits even amidst the hustle and bustle of holiday preparation.

Finally, it is important to remember that the holiday season is not a happy time for everyone, and the Mayo Clinic has released some tips for dealing with this phenomenon. Remember to reach out to others and acknowledge that it is acceptable, and common, to feel stressed and depressed around this time.

For more information on mindfulness and meditation, see our past blogs here and here.

Really Experiencing the Holidays

pexels-photo-190931While Christmas is often visualized with a heap of neatly wrapped presents under a tree, a growing body of research suggests that true happiness comes from a very different sort of gift giving.

A team of psychological researchers, including Dr. Amit Kumar and Dr. Thomas Gilovich, have worked to distinguish between the happiness gained from buying material possessions and that derived from pursuing memorable experiences, arguing that material purchases fail to create the same lasting happiness.

Drs. Kumar and Gilovich have spent years examining this problem, establishing a multitude of advantages for what they call “experiential purchases” over “material purchases.” The former include vacations, concerts, and other passing events, as opposed to objects like a new laptop or jacket.

In a 2014 study, they found that “experiential purchases” make consumers happier for longer by promoting social relationships and self-affirmation. Consumers are also more likely to regret extravagant “material purchases,” as anyone who has impulsively splurged can appreciate.

In another study, Drs. Kumar and Gilovich, joined by Dr. Matthew Killingsworth, concluded that “experiential purchases” lead to greater happiness even before the event. While the experience itself cannot be discounted, they found that the anticipation contributed significantly to overall happiness.

This anticipation of an exciting event leads consumers to think, not just about the experience, but also about what it means in an abstract way and how it will connect them to like-minded people.

Moreover, while it is exciting to imagine a new laptop, such a purchase is predictable. There are only so many novel uses for material possessions, making them that much less exciting. Experiences like vacations, on the other hand, are less predictable, enhancing this anticipatory pleasure.

Dr. Killingsworth has also explained that these differences are deeply tied into human psychology. Material possessions certainly last much longer, so shouldn’t they result in more pleasure over time? He explains that our brains are inclined to “wander,” dwelling on past events or future anxieties, and often our brains wander into unpleasant territory.

Instead, pleasurable experiences can give the mind something uplifting to contemplate. Rather than thinking about upcoming job stress, we can think about how great last night’s concert was or daydream about next weekend’s trip to the beach.

Moreover, exciting activities, he explains, help bind people together. While studying the behavior of people waiting in long lines, Dr. Killingsworth found that those waiting outside of concerts engaged in social behavior with strangers, such as starting friendly discussions about the band. This sort of behavior stood in stark contrast to the riots that so prominently mark consumer frenzies.

This is an increasingly influential train of thought, as even government agencies and retailers have joined them in calling for people to go out and experience the world rather than indulging in commercial purchases.

In 2015, REI urged customers to “opt outside,” exploring nature instead of buying products on Black Friday. Similarly, California, joined by several other states, has offered free passes to state parks in an effort to dispel post-Thanksgiving commercialism.

For more information on gift-giving and gratitude, check out our blogs here and here.

Don’t Make Decisions When You’re Hungry

Don’t Make Decisions When You’re HungryI was recently listening to a freakonomics podcast called ‘How to Make a Bad Decision’, that suggested decisions made be judges in asylum courts aren’t as objective as we might hope. The podcast focusses on a study by Chen, Moskowitz, and Shue (2016), which argues that cognitive biases such as ‘the law of small numbers’ and the ‘gambler’s fallacy’ can affect judges’ decisions on whether to approve or deny asylum to a petitioner by as much as a 10% difference. For those seeking asylum, this is a pretty big number when the decision made could greatly affect, and even possibly save theirs and their family’s lives. It’s therefore important to understand these cognitive biases and seek to prevent their effect where possible.The law of small numbers is the tendency for us to overestimate the representativeness of samples to the wider population. For example, consider a scenario in which six babies have recently been born in hospital. When asked which sequence of gender is more likely out of; (a) GGGGGG and; (b) BGBGBG, most people intuitively answer (b), even though each individual event has no relation to the others and every time a baby is born the chance of it being a boy or girl is 50:50 (Kahneman, 2011). This demonstrates how intuitive the law of small numbers is as we assume that our sample of 6 will closely resemble the general population which does balance out as being around 50:50 girls and boys due to the size of the population. In contrast, our sample is very small and therefore it is just as likely for (a) to occur as it is (b), but we don’t intuitively think this.This closely links with the gambler’s fallacy, which is our misunderstanding of the nature of randomness and our intuitive tendency to assign patterns to random processes. This cognitive bias makes us prefer (b) as it has some regularity to it, whereas (a) seems unlikely due to our lack of understanding of random processes and the fact that each individual event is not casually related to the others. Anyway, enough of the technical terms, back to the effect this has on parole judges and consequently, asylum seekers.In Chen et al’s study, the researchers argue that the gambler’s fallacy causes judges to be more likely to deny asylum by up to 5%. This number is based on how many cases the judge had already approved or denied earlier that day. If a judge approved a case the previous day, they are almost 1% more likely the deny the current case they’re looking at the day after. If the previous case was approved on the same day, this number increases to 3%. If three cases are considered on the same day, with the previous two both approved, the judge becomes 5% less likely to approve the third case. This effect is also shown in reverse when a judge denies the previous two cases, they are then 5% more likely to approve the next. This results in a 10% difference between deciding to approve or deny a case, simply based on the approval rate of cases earlier in the day. This is a huge number for a decision affecting something as important as whether or not you will be allowed to remain in the country of your choice.Another study mentioned in the podcast, carried out by Danziger, Levav, and Avnaim-Pesso (2011), suggests that the time since your last meal break also leads to a cognitive bias in decision-making. This is related to Pavlovian classical conditioning, which states that we come to associate positive feelings with the stimulus present at the time after repeated co-occurrences. For example, Pavlov managed to train dogs to salivate at the sound of a bell after repeatedly presenting them with food when the bell sounded, causing them to associate the presentation of food (and the associated response of salivating) with the sound of a bell. Danzinger et al in their study found a similar effect with parole judges. This graph shows the percentage of cases approved by judges across the day, with the dotted line indicating a meal break:As you can see, at the start of the day and immediately after a meal break there was a 65% chance that the judges would approve a case. This gradually declined until it hit 0% just before a meal break, and then shot up to around 65% again straight after the break. This is arguably because the judges experience a good feeling when they have a break and eat some food which they then associate with whatever case they then come to look at, making them more likely to approve the cases close to their meal breaks. This is another cognitive bias that seems to have a great effect on the likelihood of asylum seekers having their case approved.Whilst parole judges are trained to consider the legal merits of cases presented to them, these cognitive biases are largely unknown and not included as part of their training. I think it’s important that courts become more aware of the existence and effects of these in order to attempt to counteract them in judges decisions. In the meantime, if you’re seeking asylum I suggest you somehow aim to get a hearing first thing in the morning before the judge has looked at any other cases, or immediately after they’ve had a meal break. Moskowitz suggests that perhaps a good lawyer would be able to lobby for this. Failing this, perhaps the best option left would be to inconspicuously give the judge a snack so that they come to associate the good feeling they receive from food with your asylum case. Make sure this snack isn’t Twiglets though, because Twiglets taste gross and definitely won’t leave a good taste in the judge’s mouth!References  Cialdini, R. (2009) Influence: Science and Practice. 5th edn. Harlow: Pearson Education (US).  Chen, D. L., Moskowitz, T. J. and Shue, K. (2016) ‘Decision-Making Under the Gambler’s Fallacy:  Evidence from Asylum Judges, Loan Officers, and Baseball Umpires’, SSRN Electronic Journal.  Danziger, S., Levav, J. and Avnaim-Pesso, L. (2011) ‘Extraneous Factors in Judicial Decisions’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. 108(17), pp. 6889-6892.  Dubner, S. J. (2016) How to Make a Bad Decision. Freakonomics Radio.  Kahneman, D. (2012) Thinking, Fast and Slow. London: Penguin Press/Classics.By Gemma Crook