Research Digest Free every fortnight Issue 176 (28.10.10): 1. The Social Comparison Bias
2. Unborn fetuses demonstrate their sociability after just 14 weeks gestation
3. ‘Don’t do it!’ – how your inner voice really does aid self-control
4. Asch’s conformity study without the confederates
5. Speakers with a foreign accent are perceived as less credible
6. Mothers who attend Baby Signing classes are more stressed
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Subscribe free at www.researchdigest.org.uk/blog Research Digest Free every fortnight The Social Comparison Bias – or why we recommend new candidates who don’t compete with our own strengths Whether it's a gift for small talk or a knack for arithmetic, many of us have something we feel we're particularly good at.
What happens from an early age is that this strength then becomes important for our self-esteem, which affects our
behaviour in various ways. For example, children tend to choose friends who excel on different dimensions than
themselves, presumably to protect their self-esteem from threat. A new study reveals another consequence - 'the social
comparison bias' - that's relevant to business contexts. Stated simply, when making hiring decisions, people tend to
favour potential candidates who don't compete with their own particular strengths.
Stephen Garcia and colleagues first demonstrated this idea in a hypothetical context. Twenty-nine undergrads were asked
to imagine that they were a law professor with responsibility for recommending one of two new professorial candidates
to join the law faculty. Half had to imagine they were a professor with a particularly high number of mixed-quality
journal publications. These participants tended to say they would recommend the imaginary candidate with fewer but
higher quality publications. By contrast, the other half of the participants were tasked with imagining that they were a
professor with few but particularly high quality publications. You guessed it - they tended to recommend the candidate
with the lower quality but more prolific publication record. In each case the participants favoured the candidate who
didn't challenge their own particular area of (imaginary) strength, be that publication quality or quantity. The participants
had been told that the department had a balanced mix of existing staff so it's unlikely their motive was a selfless one
based on achieving a balanced team.
To make things more realistic, a second study involved a real decision. Forty undergrads completed verbal and maths
tasks to which they were given false feedback. Next, they were presented with the scores achieved by two other students,
one of whom they had to select to join their team for an up-coming group 'coordination task' that would involve throwing
a tennis ball around. Participants tricked into thinking they'd excelled at the maths tended to choose the potential team
member who was weak at maths but stronger verbally, and vice versa for those participants fed false feedback indicating
they'd excelled verbally. Again, the researchers argued that it was unlikely the participants were simply striving for a
balanced team because the maths and verbal skills in question weren't relevant to the tennis ball task.
A final study involved 55 employees at a Midwestern university - they were asked to imagine that they were in a
company role with either high pay or great decision-making power. Next they had to recommend to their company that it
either offer high pay or high decision-making power to a new recruit. The participants tended to advise offering the new
recruit the opposite of whatever they had. The participants also said the particular perk of their imaginary post - pay or
decision-making - would be the most important to their self-esteem.
'The present analysis introduces the social comparison bias: a social comparison-based bias that taints the
recommendation process,' the researchers said. 'At a broader level, the social comparison bias might help partially to
explain why some top-notch departments or organisational units lose prestige over time ... Individuals unwittingly fail to
reproduce departmental strengths by protecting their personal standing instead of the standing of the broader department.'
_________________________________
Garcia, S., Song, H., and Tesser, A. (2010). Tainted recommendations: The social comparison bias. Organizational
Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 113 (2), 97-101 DOI: 10.1016/j.obhdp.2010.06.002
Subscribe free at www.researchdigest.org.uk/blog Research Digest Free every fortnight Unborn fetuses demonstrate their sociability after just 14 weeks gestation The idea that humans are social animals has become a truism. Among other things, experts point to the
gregarious behaviour of babies - their precocious talents for mimicry and face recognition. What about
human behaviour pre-birth? Is that social too? Using what they call the 'experiment of nature' provided by
twin fetuses, Umberto Castiello and his team have shown that by the 14th week of gestation, unborn
twins are already directing arm movements at each other, and by the 18th week these 'social' gestures
have increased to 29 per cent of all observed movements. In contrast, the proportion of self-directed
actions reduced over the same period.
Furthermore, the 'kinematics' of the twins' 'caressing' arm movements to each other's head and back were
distinct from movements aimed at the uterine wall or at most parts of the their own bodies. That is, the
social movements were longer-lasting and slower to decelerate than most other fetal movements, making
them similar to the kind of movements fetuses learn to make towards their own eyes. This suggests that
the fetuses recognise on some level that there is something special about their twin.
The researchers made their observations using four-dimensional (3-D plus changes over time) ultrasound
scans of five women pregnant with twins. These were performed twice for twenty minutes - at the 14th
and 18th weeks of gestation.
'The prenatal "social" interactions described in this paper epitomise the congenital propensity for sociality
of primates in general and of humans in particular,' the researchers said, 'grounding for the first time such
long-held intuition on quantitative empirical results.' Castiello and his colleagues added that further
research of this kind could one day reveal the links between social behaviour patterns in the uterus and
the later appearance of developmental disorders associated with social impairments.
_________________________________
Castiello, U., Becchio, C., Zoia, S., Nelini, C., Sartori, L., Blason, L., D'Ottavio, G., Bulgheroni, M., and
Gallese, V. (2010). Wired to Be Social: The Ontogeny of Human Interaction. PLoS ONE, 5 (10) DOI:
10.1371/journal.pone.0013199
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‘Don’t do it!’ – how your inner voice really does aid self-­
control As you stretch for yet another delicious cup cake, the abstemious little voice in your head pleads 'Don't do
it!'. Does this self talk really have any effect on your impulse control or is it merely providing a private
commentary on your mental life? A new study using a laboratory test of self-control suggests that the
inner voice really does help.
Alexa Tullett and Michael Inzlicht had 37 undergrads perform the Go/No Go task. Briefly, this involved
one on-screen symbol indicating that a button should be pressed as quickly as possible (the Go command)
whilst another indicated that the button press should not be performed (No Go). Because the Go symbol
was far more common, participants tended to find it difficult to suppress making a button press on the
rare occasions when a No Go command was given. People with more self-control would be expected to
make fewer errors of this kind.
Crucially, Tullett and Inzlicht also had the participants perform a secondary task at the same time - either
repeating the word 'computer' with their inner voice, or drawing circles with their free hand. The central
finding was that participants made significantly more errors on the Go/No Go task (i.e. pressing the
button at the wrong times) when they also had to repeat the word 'computer' to themselves, compared
with when they had the additional task of drawing circles. This difference was exacerbated during a more
difficult version of the Go/No Go task in which the command symbols were periodically switched (so that
the Go command became the No Go command and vice versa). It seems that the participants' self-control
was particularly compromised when their inner voice was kept busy saying 'computer' so that it couldn't
be used to aid self-control.
'By examining performance on a classic self-control task, this study provides evidence that when we tell
ourselves to "keep going" on the treadmill, or when we count to ten during an argument, we may be
helping ourselves to successfully overcome our impulses in favour of goals like keeping fit, and
preserving a relationship,' the researchers said.
_________________________________
Tullett AM, and Inzlicht M (2010). The voice of self-control: Blocking the inner voice increases
impulsive responding. Acta psychologica, 135 (2), 252-6 PMID: 20692639
Subscribe free at www.researchdigest.org.uk/blog Research Digest Free every fortnight Asch’s conformity study without the confederates With the help of five to eight 'confederates' (research assistants posing as naive participants), Solomon Asch in the
1950s found that when it came to making public judgments about the relative lengths of lines, some people were
willing to agree with a majority view that was clearly wrong.
Asch's finding was hugely influential, but a key criticism has been his use of confederates who pretended to believe
unanimously that a line was a different length than it really was. They might well have behaved in a stilted,
unnatural manner. And attempts to replicate the study could be confounded by the fact that some confederates will
be more convincing than others. To solve these problems Kazuo Mori and Miho Arai adapted the MORI technique
(Manipulation of Overlapping Rivalrous Images by polarizing filters), used previously in eye-witness research. By
donning filter glasses similar to those used for watching 3-D movies, participants can view the same display and
yet see different things.
Mori and Arai replicated Asch's line comparison task with 104 participants tested in groups of four at a time (on
successive trials participants said aloud which of three comparison lines matched a single target line). In each
group, three participants wore identical glasses, with one participant wearing a different set, thereby causing them
to observe that a different comparison line matched the target line. As in Asch's studies, the participants stated their
answers publicly, with the minority participant always going third.
Whereas Asch used male participants only, the new study involved both men and women. For women only, the
new findings closely matched the seminal research, with the minority participant being swayed by the majority on
an average of 4.41 times out of 12 key trials (compared with 3.44 times in the original). However, the male
participants in the new study were not swayed by the majority view.
There are many possible reasons why men in the new study were not swayed by the majority as they were in Asch's
studies, including cultural differences (the current study was conducted in Japan) and generational changes. Mori
and Arai highlighted another reason - the fact that the minority and majority participants in their study knew each
other, whereas participants in Asch's study did not know the confederates. The researchers argue that this is a
strength of their new approach: 'Conforming behaviour among acquaintances is more important as a psychological
research topic than conforming among strangers,' they said. 'Conformity generally takes place among acquainted
persons, such as family members, friends or colleagues, and in daily life we seldom experience a situation like the
Asch experiment in which we make decisions among total strangers.'
Looking ahead, Mori and Arai believe their approach will provide a powerful means of re-examining Asch's classic
work, including in situations - for example, with young children - in which the use of confederates would not be
practical.
_________________________________
Mori, K., and Arai, M. (2010). No need to fake it: Reproduction of the Asch experiment without confederates.
International Journal of Psychology, 45 (5), 390-397 DOI: 10.1080/00207591003774485
Subscribe free at www.researchdigest.org.uk/blog Research Digest Free every fortnight Speakers with a foreign accent are perceived as less credible – and not just because of prejudice Speakers with a foreign accent are perceived as less believable than native speakers. A new study shows this isn't just
because of prejudice towards 'outsiders'. It also has to do with the fluency effect, one manifestation of which is our
tendency to assume that how easily a message is processed is a mark of its truthfulness. The effort required to understand
an accented utterance means that the same fact is judged as less credible when uttered by an accented speaker, compared
with a native speaker. This remains true even if the accented speaker is merely passing on a message from a native
speaker.
Shiri Lev-Ari and Boaz Keysar recruited 9 speakers to utter 45 trivia facts, such as 'A giraffe can go without water longer
than a camel'. Three of the speakers were native (American) English speakers; three had mild foreign accents and
originated from Poland, Turkey or Austria/Germany; and three had strong accents and were from either Korea, Turkey or
Italy.
Twenty-eight undergrad participants rated the veracity of each of the spoken facts (which speakers uttered which facts
varied from participant to participant in a balanced design). Crucially, participants were led to believe that the study was
really about using intuition to judge facts. Also, it was made clear to them that the facts had been penned by the
researchers - that the speakers were merely acting as messengers. To drill home this idea, the researchers also had the
participants go through the charade of themselves uttering a few facts, ostensibly to be presented to other participants.
On a 0-14cm scale from 'definitely false' at one end to 'definitely true' at the other, the participants rated facts spoken by
mild and heavily accented speakers as less believable than facts uttered by native English speakers (the mean ratings
were 6.95, 6.84 and 7.59, respectively - a statistically significant difference).
What if participants are made aware that the difficulty they have processing a foreign accent could be interfering with
their judgements? A second study with another 27 undergrads tested this very idea. It was similar to the first but this time
participants were told the explicit aim of the study. Now, facts spoken by a speaker with a mild accent were judged to be
just as credible as facts spoken by a native English speaker. However, facts spoken by a heavily accented speaker were
still judged to be less true. It seems we can override our bias for assuming easily processed utterances are more truthful but only up to a point. Also, it's worth remembering that in real life, prejudice towards foreign speakers is likely to
augment the effects observed here.
'These results have important implications for how people perceive non-native speakers of a language, particularly as
mobility increases in the modern world, leading millions of people to be non-native speakers of the language they use
daily,' the researchers concluded. 'Accent might reduce the credibility of non-native job seekers, eye-witnesses, reporters
or news anchors.'
_________________________________
Lev-Ari, S., and Keysar, B. (2010). Why don't we believe non-native speakers? The influence of accent on credibility.
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 46 (6), 1093-1096 DOI: 10.1016/j.jesp.2010.05.025
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Mothers who attend Baby Signing classes are more stressed
A survey of 178 mothers has found that those who take their children to Baby Signing classes are more
stressed than those who don't. Baby Signing involves using gestures in an attempt to communicate with
pre-verbal or minimally lingual infants. The idea is hugely popular. Tiny Talk, a UK company, runs over
400 classes each week.
One claim of Baby Signing classes is that it is beneficial to children's language development. The
evidence for this is equivocal. Another claim is that by improving child-parent communication, the
classes help relieve parental stress. It's this latter claim that Neil Howlett and his colleagues have
examined in their study of mothers recruited via signing classes, internet sites, toddler groups and
community organisations in the south east of England. Eighty-nine mothers who attended Baby Signing
classes with their infants were compared with 89 mothers who did not.
Howlett's team used the 120-item self-report Parenting Stress Index (PSI) to measure the mothers' stress
levels. Although mothers who attended signing classes reported being more stressed than those who
didn't, the researchers didn't obtain baseline stress measures (prior to class attendance) so they have no
way of knowing if the classes caused the increased stress or if stressed mothers are simply more likely to
attend the classes. No evidence was found that more months spent signing with one's child was associated
with even greater stress, so the idea that signing causes the stress looks unlikely.
Howlett's team think the signing mothers were probably more stressed in the first place and that's why
they took their children to signing classes (a plausible suggestion given that the classes claim to help
reduce stress). Consistent with this, the signing mothers recorded particularly high scores on the 'child
domain' of the PSI, which indicates they were stressed about their child's behaviour. Moreover, the
finding chimes with past research showing that mothers who enrol their preschool children in academic
focused activities also have heightened anxiety.
'Gesture classes claim to reduce stress and create a better bond between child and mother,' the researchers
concluded. 'Our results find no evidence for this and even suggest that the effect may be detrimental.'
_________________________________
Howlett, N., Kirk, E., and Pine, K. (2010). Does ‘Wanting the Best’ create more stress? The link between
baby sign classes and maternal anxiety. Infant and Child Development DOI: 10.1002/icd.705
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