Social Engineering Blogs

An Aggregator for Blogs About Social Engineering and Related Fields

Emotional Regulation and Supression

 The British Psychological Society reports on how people regulate their emotions.

They report that according to new research published in the journal Emotion, a person’s ability to regulate or not regulate their emotions has a big impact on the level of anxiety they feel.

This new research purports that individuals who adopt an emotional regulation strategy called reappraisal often suffer from less general and social anxiety than those who fail to express their feelings openly.

Nicole Llewellyn, a graduate student from the University of Illinois, explained the reappraisal strategy as one that sees people thinking about things in a more positive light, adding: “You sort of re-frame and reappraise what’s happened and think what are the positives about this?“  Individuals who follow this approach will often consider how an issue can be a seen as a stimulating challenge as opposed to a problem.

FarsNews.com reports on a related study, conducted by British researchers, that shows that different brain areas are activated when we choose to suppress an emotion compared to when we are instructed to inhibit an emotion.

Dr. Simone Kuhn of Ghent University and colleagues scanned the brains of healthy participants and found that key brain systems were activated when choosing to suppress an emotion. They had previously linked this brain area to deciding to inhibit movement.

“This result shows that emotional self-control involves a quite different brain system from simply being told how to respond emotionally,” Kuhn, the lead author, reported.

He went on to note, “We should distinguish between voluntary and instructed control of emotions, in the same way as we can distinguish between making up our own mind about what do, versus following instructions.”

This study published in Brain Structure and Function had fifteen healthy women view unpleasant or frightening pictures. The participants were given a choice to feel the emotion elicited by the image, or alternatively to inhibit the emotion, by distancing themselves through an act of self-control.

The researchers further delineated, “Most studies of emotion processing in the brain simply assume that people passively receive emotional stimuli, and automatically feel the corresponding emotion. In contrast, the area we have identified may contribute to some individuals’ ability to rise above particular emotional situations.”

 What are Your Thoughts on this new Emotion Regulation Information?

The Hot Hands Fallacy

Back in April – in our Exploring Unpredictable Social Strategies post – we told you that the best way to control your subordinates (if you have any) was to reward them randomly when they do something you like.  We explained:

“Each time your rewardees perform a desirable action, flip a coin. If heads, reward it; if tails, ignore it. When the coin generates a long ‘ignore’ streak, your respondent should perform the action over and over again with ever-increasing rapidity and urgency, expecting to be rewarded more and more each time he or she isn’t. This is the gambler’s fallacy at work.”

If you don’t remember, the gambler’s fallacy is a flaw in probabilistic reasoning that causes most people to mistrust long streaks in randomly generated events.  The fallacy gets its name from a common mistake gambler’s make when betting on roulette and slots.  When a roulette wheel has a black streak, players will bet increasingly larger sums of money on red because they think the black streak is more likely to end the longer it continues.  When a slot machine fails to pay out, players will crank the lever faster and faster, depositing money with each pull, because they believe their losing streak will end soon.  In both cases, they’re wrong; random events are always unpredictable.  They’re always as likely to win as they are to continue losing.

If you have the power to give out or withhold rewards, then you should do so using behavioral psychology’s equivalent of the slot machine: the random ratio reward schedule.  This is as easy as requiring your rewardees to “win” a coin toss each time they do something you like before receiving their reward.  Just like the gamblers, they will continue to work harder for your approval if they can’t predict when they will be rewarded.  However, we also supposed that this simple system may not work under certain conditions.  In this post, we’ll show you what those conditions could be.

But first, another fallacy.

The Hot Hands Fallacy

When Amos Tversky’s name appears at the top of a study, there’s a strong chance something you believe will be challenged.  If you like basketball, then the 1985 study he co-authored with Thomas Gilovich (Cornell University) and Robert Vallone (Stanford University) will debunk a common belief you may hold about the game: that some players go on hot or cold scoring “streaks.”  To Tversky, one of the most famous contemporary psychologists (second only to his close friend and colleague Daniel Kahneman; both specialize in cognitive psychology), this sounded like a fallacy.  After all, he and Kahneman documented the existence of the gambler’s fallacy over a decade earlier; he of all people would know flawed reasoning when he saw it.  So he, Gilovich, and Vallone took data from the 1980-81 Philadelphia 76ers’ home games and looked for evidence of streak scoring.

They found none.  Contrary to what 91% of surveyed basketball fans at Cornell and Stanford believed, no player was more likely to score on his second field goal attempt if he had scored on his first attempt, nor was he more likely to score on his third attempt if he had on his first two, and so on.

In case extraneous variables (defensive pressure and shot selection) were contaminating their findings, the authors analyzed free throw data from the Boston Celtics’ 1980-1981 and 1981-1982 seasons.  Did any player’s first free throw attempt affect his second free throw attempt?

No.

Next, the authors set up a controlled shooting test with 26 Cornell players (14 men, 12 women) to eliminate extraneous variables.  Each player shot from a distance at which his or her shooting percentage was 50 percent.  An arc was drawn on the court after this distance was determined, and each player shot once from different points along the arc.  To incentivize accuracy and assess players’ predictions, the players placed high or low bets on each successive shot and were paid a few cents when they scored and were docked a few cents if they missed.

Did statistical streaks appear for players in this part of the study?

No.

Did the players accurately predict their hits and misses?

No; they predicted streaks, though, whenever they made or missed shots successively.

Finally, the authors surveyed the student fans at Cornell and Stanford again to see how well they could interpret basketball data.  Each student was shown six sequences of X’s and O’s (intended to represent hits and misses, respectively) and were asked to indicate which sequences were streaks and which were random.  How did they do?

Terribly.  Only about 30 percent correctly identified the random sequences as random.  About 60 percent believed the random sequences were actually streaks.  And about 70 percent believed that alternating sequences (in other words, streaks of successive hits followed immediately by misses; for example, XOXO) were actually random.  The authors guessed that the reason the students did so poorly on this last test is because they expected repeating outcomes to continue repeating.  In the alternating sequence, the shots did not repeat, and the students saw it as random.  In the random sequences, hits and misses occasionally do repeat, and the students saw them as streaks.  Taken together, these mistakes – seeing streaks in random data where they don’t exist and misinterpreting alternating streaks as random – are called the Hot Hands Fallacy.

The Other Side of the Coin

If you’ve made it this far, you should now be asking yourself why these people did the exact opposite of what gamblers do.  And if you’re really astute, you’ll notice that the Cornell players in the controlled shooting test were gambling on their own attempts, betting that their ‘hot streaks’ and ‘cold streaks’ would continue, not end.

Why aren’t they committing the gambler’s fallacy?

Unfortunately, we don’t know for sure, mainly because no one has tried to find out.  The original Gilovich/Vallone/Tversky study we just examined (known as “GVT” in psychology circles) kicked off a 20-year-long sports argument.  Researches replicated GVT’s basketball studies, taking into account more and more minute variables into their analyses.  Other researchers went into baseball, tennis, golf, mini-golf, darts, bowling, and horseshoes.  We found hardly a study looking for what we were looking for; the mental processes that cause people to commit the fallacy – mental processes that could be exploited.

And then we found Alter and Oppenheimer, 2006.  It’s not a study; it’s a review of the all the work done by cognitive psychologists on the hot hands fallacy since GVT.  Based on their reviews, the authors make this claim:

“…when people assume that a process is random, they expect a more rapid alternation between outcomes than stochastic [randomly determined] modelling would suggest (Falk & Konold, 1997)…Whereas people expect coin tosses to be random, they are willing to entertain the possibility that streaky performance in a human-driven domain like basketball implies a degree of skill…once people decide that a basketball player has violated the assumptions of randomness, his skill is attributed to a ‘hot hand.’” (Alter & Oppenheimer, 2006).

Is this true? If yes, then we must update the advice we gave you back in April.  Yes, continue rewarding your underlings randomly using the coin-toss approach (or any other random method of your choosing).  But make sure they know what’s going on.  If they know they’re being rewarded randomly, they will commit the gambler’s fallacy as planned.  But if they are blind to the process, they’ll give you trouble; each time you repeatedly reward them (heads followed by heads followed by heads, etc.), they will expect you to continue this reward “streak” and will work less hard or more slowly.  The same applies if you repeatedly ignore them (tails followed by tails followed by tails, etc.); they’ll just assume you’re done being generous.  Don’t fall into these traps; inform them that it’s random, and you’ll keep them busy and compliant.

Or so we think.  We still have work to do on this because Alter’s and Oppenheimer’s theory needs hard evidence.  But for now, just to be safe, we’ll take it at face-value.  Make sure your minions know that the coin, not you, is calling the shots.

Sources

Gilovich, T., et al. (1985). The Hot Hand in Basketball: On the Misperception of Random Sequences. Cognitive Psychology, 17, 295-314.
Alter, A.L., and Oppenheimer, D.M. (2006). From a fixation on sports to an exploration of mechanism: The past, present, and future of hot hand research. Thinking and Reasoning, 12(4), 431-444.

Next Post in Series: Unpredictability: Hot Hands vs. Gambler’s Fallacies

Zeroing in on Narcissism

We’ve published over a dozen posts about the Dark Triad since we first started researching its potential links to attraction.  We want to answer this question: What, if anything, enables Dark Triad males to sleep with more women, more often, with less romantic commitment?  It could be that:

Dark Triad males may employ unique social strategies that effectively enlarge their pool of potential successes.
Dark Triad males may possess personality traits that are intrinsically attractive and/or behaviorally replicable.
Dark Triad males may appear more physically attractive than the average male.

If Dark Triad males really do in fact have greater sexual and/or romantic success with women, then it probably isn’t a result of just one of the above; all three are important.  So far, though, we haven’t been able to determine which of them is the most important.  We’ve seen evidence for behavioral strategies (i.e., identifying and mimicking Dark Triad behaviors), social strategies (i.e., increasing the number of potential sex partners by lowering standards, approaching frequently, hitting on women most men would not, etc.), and physical strategies (i.e., improving one’s appearance and raw physical sex appeal.)  But we haven’t yet seen a really solid study that addresses the latter two possibilities.

Until now.

Are Narcissists Sexy?

Scholarly reseach is a progressive enterprise, which means its okay to rip off your peers.  Its actually encouraged (as long as you cite your sources, of course).  When your peers publish a study that’s relevant to your area of interest, you can then take their findings and use them to design your own study.  Later, some other researcher will do the same with your findings.  Generations of researchers have been building on each other’s work like this, and, as a result, newer is usually better.  So when we came across a study examining the short-term attractiveness of narcissism published only two months ago, we jumped on it, just because it was relevant and brand new.

Once we read it, we realized it was a gold-mine.

Michael Dufner, John F. Rauthmann, Anna Z. Czarna, and Jaap J. A. Denissen conducted three experiments using college students in Germany and Poland.  The researchers hypothesized that two traits make narcissists initially attractive at zero-acquaintance: physical attractiveness and social boldness.

Study 1:  117 psych undergrads (58 male, 59 female) participated.  The students were assigned to one of three conditions in which they were given a fake narcissism questionnaire.  They were told that the questionnaire was filled out by a member of the opposite sex, and the scores on the questionnaires were low, medium, or high (depending on the condition).  After they examined the fake questionnaires, the students were asked to rate the friend appeal and mate appeal of the imaginary person.

*Note: These fake questionnaires used the NPI, validated Polish version.  The difference between this and the NPI that we discussed earlier is that the Polish version contains 34 items based on a 5-point Likert scale (1 = does not apply to me; 5 = applies to me).  We’ve mentioned before that we’d love to see a Likert-based NPI.  Here it is.

Study 2: This study used peer ratings.  152 participants invited a close friend (mostly of the same sex) to help in the study.  The friends (the inviters) provided ratings for mate appeal, friend appeal, physical attractiveness, and social boldness.  The participants (the invitees) took the NPI, validated German version, to assess their individual levels of sub-clinical narcissism, as well as surveys measuring self-esteem, mate appeal, and social boldness.

*Note: The NPI used in this study is the traditional 40-item dichotomous-response (0=agree; 1=disagree).  They also used the Emmons Four Factor Model.

Study 3: Social science experiments are mostly done in labs where it’s easy to control conditions.  But labs don’t always provide realistic simulations of the interactions and behaviors the researchers are interested in observing.  The authors of this study tried to solve that problem by paying 61 men 35 euros each to approach 25 women on the street and ask for their contact information.  The men were scored for sub-clinical narcissism using the Dirty Dozen Test, and were also scored for self-esteem.  Each man’s number of successfully obtained contacts (phone numbers, email addresses, Facebook friend requests, etc.) counted as his level of mate appeal.

*Note: The Dirty Dozen Test used 12 of the most highly correlating items from the NPI, PCL-R, and MACH-IV to assess a persons sub-clinical levels of narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism, respectively.

In Study 1, higher narcissism predicted higher mate appeal, while lower narcissism predicted lower mate appeal.

Study 2 provided a wealth of information:

Narcissism positively correlated with mate appeal, physical attractiveness, and social boldness.
Under controlled conditions, self-esteem would not affect narcissists’ mate appeal.
Each of the seven Emmons factors except Exploitativeness/Entitlement (E/E) positively correlated with mate appeal.
Physical attractiveness and social boldness mediated the link between narcissism and mate appeal.  This means that narcissism is not inherently attractive; it correlates with with these two traits, which are inherently attractive.

Study 3 showed that narcissism did not predict which type of woman a man would approach; all the men in the study approached more or less the same type.  It also mirrored the findings of Studies 1 and 2, but under real-life conditions.

In Context

The study contributes considerably to our work on the potential attractiveness of narcissism.  Here’s what it teaches us:

In Four Factors of Narcissism, we pointed out Emmons’ claimed that E/E is highly associated with neuroticism and is therefore the least attractive factor in his factor model.  The results of the Back zero-acquaintance study supported this claim.  But this study claims that the E/E factor doesn’t correlate with attractiveness at all, neither positively or negatively.  Who’s right?
This study gives us more evidence that narcissists are popular in zero-acquaintance situations.  We’ve examined one study so far that supports this idea; however, it did not narrow down the cause.  This one tells us that a specific social strategy (boldness) and physical attractiveness are the causes.
This study’s results suggest that narcissists do not lower their standards when choosing which women to target.  This directly contradicts another study we examined, but the effect was observed under more natural conditions, making this new study’s claims that much stronger.  Furthermore, the men in this study weren’t incentivized to approach women indiscriminately; they were paid and sent out.  More contacts did not increase their individual payouts at the end of the study.  Their approaches were dictated purely by personal preference.
In a controlled setting, self-esteem would not affect sex appeal.  This is a huge and controversial claim.  Conventional wisdom says that confidence is the “magic bullet” in dating.  But this study’s data analyses suggest that it’s irrelevant.  Only social  boldness and physical attractiveness mediate narcissists’ mate appeal.  This claim also directly contradicts the idea that physically-determined behavioral confirmation controls attractiveness.

We’ve taken a huge step forward toward determining what makes the Dark Triad personalities attractive.  This study is fantastic; it controls for physical attractiveness and for self-esteem.  It uses natural, real-life settings to support its claims.  It uses the NPI to screen participants for high- and low-level sub-clinical narcissism.  And above all, it avoids self-report data.  The second study is, of course, flawed by the personal closeness of the subjects and the students, but the authors admit it, and the third study addresses it.  The only other obvious oversight is the lack of attention paid to behavioral strategies.  If the researchers had re-run the third study using scripted or pre-planned interactions, we would then be able to see which specific narcissistic behaviors – if any – increase attractiveness.

We’re confident that boldness is an effective mating strategy for men.  Is it the most efficient method?  Probably not.  How bold is too bold?  We don’t know.  To answer these questions, we need to test behavioral strategies in greater depth and detail.

Sources

Dufner, M., Rauthmann, J. F., Czarna, A. Z., & Denissen, J. J. A. (2013). Are narcissists sexy? zeroing in on the effect of narcissism on short-term mate appeal. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, doi: 10.1177/0146167213483580

For a summary of our Dark Triad posts, visit our Dark Triad Summary page.