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The Humintell Blog February 22, 2017

Introducing the Four Horsemen

No, this isn’t a religious sermon, but it is an important message for anyone in a committed relationship.

In previous blogs, we have delved into several factors that make marriages fail, succeed, and flourish. Building off that work, it is important to examine some of the other major challenges that face married couples. While this focuses on marriages, as always, these principles can apply to all sorts of interpersonal relationships.

Dr. John Gottman, who has spent years studying relationships, warns of the “Four Horsemen,” that can consistently spell doom for marriage. While we discussed one, contempt, in a previous article, he describes the remaining horsemen as criticism, defensiveness, and stonewalling.

Criticism, which we touched on only briefly, constitutes attacks on your partner’s character, often involving ad hominem attacks. Importantly, Dr. Gottman distinguishes between “criticism” and what he describes as simple critiques or complaints.

Essentially, a criticism involves telling your partner that there is something wrong with them, while critiques and complaints presents concerns over specific behaviors or, at their best, offer positive requests for certain behaviors. For example, contrast this criticism: “How can you leave dirty clothes everywhere? Why do you have to be so messy?” with the complaint “Could you try to pick up your dirty clothes?”

The former example involved actually attacking one’s partner, while the latter was framed in the context of an active request. The critical difference, then, between criticism and complaints rests in fostering an acceptance of each other’s needs and in preventing an atmosphere of distrust or conflict. It is in those toxic, criticism-filled, atmospheres that the other Horsemen, such as defensiveness and stonewalling thrive.

Defensiveness is probably all too familiar to each of us. This horseman arises when we face perceived criticism and consider these attacks to be unfair or unjust. Then the defensive partner will attempt to retaliate by lashing out in response, turning the situation around on their significant other.

Building on the example discussed earlier, this could result in the retort that “You are just as messy! Why don’t you clean up more, if it bothers you so much?” Often, this is intended to mitigate the criticism and resolve the situation, but instead it usually fails to end the conflict, perpetuating tension and continuing to undermine trust in the relationship.

Similarly, the final horseman, stonewalling, is similar in some ways to defensiveness, except that it involves a complete withdrawal from the interaction. The stonewalling partner will respond to a criticism, or even valid complaint, by simply shutting down and refusing to respond or address the issue. This can involve leaving the room or completely ignoring your partner.

So, we’ve outlined these apocalyptic relationship habits, but what is there to do about them? The first step, of course, is properly recognizing their signs, but Dr. Gottman offers further advice on managing them properly. He emphasizes the notion of “management” over “resolution,” because these conflicts will inevitably occur, but it is important to better handle them when they do arise.

We’ve already discussed how criticism can be converted into valid complaints, but what about the other two? Rather than becoming defensiveness, we have to work to take responsibility for a given problem. Instead of shifting blame in the dirty clothes example, the partner ought to respond positively and help clean up the house. This needn’t involve taking complete blame, but requires at least acknowledging a sense of shared responsibility.

Finally, sometimes distance from a stressful situation may be necessary, which is the impulse that drives stonewalling. Instead of withdrawal, however, it may be important to agree on taking some time apart to engage in a soothing activity. Just fifteen minutes of time alone can allow couples to revisit issues with compassion instead of anger and frustration.

While these horseman are likely to be constant challenges for any couple, proper management can go a long way towards preserving healthy and happy relationships.

For more information on Dr. Gottman’s relationship advice, see our past blogs here and here.

Filed Under: Emotion, Nonverbal Behavior, Science

The Humintell Blog February 14, 2017

Valentine’s Day and Kindness

As many couples celebrate Valentine’s Day with extravagant dinners, elaborate bouquets, and tasty chocolates, it’s time to consider what can truly make those romantic moments last.

In our previous blog, we discussed the factors that make marriages fail and reviewed some research on how to avoid those mishaps. It is now important to turn to the question of how to make marriages actively succeed.

This is a particularly important question, given how uncommon truly healthy marriages are. According to the psychologist Ty Tashiro, only about three in ten people who get married spend the rest of their lives in happy and healthy relationships.

This may strike many of you as an extremely troubling statistic. We would like to see marriages as idyllic journeys off into the sunset, and it may be depressing to revise this notion. You are not alone. In fact, psychologists like Dr. John Gottman were inspired by skyrocketing divorce rates to learn more about the nature of happy marriages.

Dr. Gottman found that mutual attitudes of kindness are key to preserving happy relationships. These expressions of kindness proved to be effective predictors for satisfaction and marital stability, both Dr. in Dr. Gottman’s work and in other independent research.

There are two ways to look at marital kindness. Either it is a fixed trait that you simply have or don’t have, or it is more like a skill or muscle that is strengthened by repeated use. Dr. Gottman and his wife, Julie Gottman, argue that the most successful relationships are preserved by those who see kindness as a skill to be cultivated. But how can we develop this skill?

In working to answer this question, Dr. Gottman and Dr. Robert Levenson, his colleague at the University of Washington, set up the “Love Lab” in 1986. During a series of studies, they observed the behavior of newly married couples while also monitoring their physiological responses by connecting them to electrodes.

They found that less successful couples showed marked differences in physiology from happier ones. Essentially, some couples exhibited signs of fear and anxiety while interacting with their spouse, constantly preparing for a fight or conflict. This even extended to what ought to have been boring, mundane conversations and was measured with physiological factors such as sweating and heart rate.

The researchers concluded that the more successful couples thrived because they had cultivated a sense of mutual trust, understanding that they could let their guard down and open up. In subsequent research, Dr. Gottman found that this sort of climate must be cultivated, like kindness itself, through repeated acts of emotional connection with your partner.

He observed that couples often offer “bids” for connection, soliciting their partner’s response to happy news or simply observations on the world around them. Couples that accept these “bids” by responding with interest and kindness can cultivate a sense of trust. In fact, he found that 94 percent of couples that work to accept each other’s’ “bids” will stay together over the long-term.

Kindness comes into play by training yourself to recognize and accept these bids and becomes especially necessary when exhaustion or conflict makes this that much more difficult. By wielding and developing this skill, Dr. Gottman’s research provides a path forward to become or remain in one of those happy, healthy relationships that we all hope to have.

For past blogs on Dr. Gottman’s research check out our blogs here and here.

Filed Under: Emotion, Nonverbal Behavior

Persuasion and Influence Blog February 11, 2017

Choose to Reuse

The aim of our project was to reduce the waste of coffee cups on campus. Only 1/1000 takeaway coffee cups get recycled due to a difficult recycling process. With over 8,000,000 of these cups used every day in the UK alone; this has lead to an enormous amount of unnecessary waste.

To start our project, we emailed Warwick retail to see how many coffee cups are actually used on campus. They responded that 4500 cups are used each week in university run cafes.

After receiving this information we asked over 200 students in the library the following questions:

1. Is the environment important to you?
2. Are disposable coffee cups recycled? We then explained only 1/1000 coffee cups are actually recycled
3. Would you consider bringing your own travel mug if you were charged for a takeaway cup? We then informed them that in university run cafes they are in fact charged 10p for the use of a takeaway cup.

Here are the results:

After collecting this data we decided to make an Instagram account to inform people about the lack of recycling on campus and encourage them to use travel mugs.


We created and posted infographics as a visual aid to display some of the consequences of coffee cup waste. We used natural frequencies to persuade people to reduce waste and use a travel mug.
In addition, we encouraged people to post selfies with travel mugs on their personal instagram accounts and we also shared the ones we were aware of on our instagram page. Our captions either generally encouraged people to #choosetoreuse, framed the 10p price difference for using a travel mug in campus cafes as a charge or emphasised that other people were making the decision to use a travel mug (social proof).
The instagram page was shared on other social media sites and was also circulated within societies of the university to try to reach a wider audience.

We got in touch with Emily Grieve, the president of Her Campus society at Warwick. Her Campus is the #1 global community for college women, written entirely by the nation’a top college journalists from 300+ Universities around the world. We were interviewed about our project and an article was posted on the Her Campus website. Here is the link to the article:http://www.hercampus.com/school/warwick/warwick-choosing-reuse

Overall, our Instagram page gained over 300 followers and posts were seen by more than 500 people on other media sites. In addition, at least 30 students posted photos of themselves using travel mugs to their social media pages. Therefore, we believe that our message to reduce coffee cup waste on campus reached 1000 individuals. Furthermore, we have spoken to students who said they’ve changed their behaviour and bought a travel mug since the campaign!

Victoria Hill, Victoria Gilbert, Holly Brazier, and Peter Carr

Filed Under: Uncategorized

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