What stereotypes do Europeans of today hold about men and women's intuition?

"She works by intuition and feeling;" wrote the US psychologist G. Stanley Hall of the typical woman, "fear, anger, pity, love, and most of the emotions have a wider range and greater intensity [than in men]."

That was in 1904. Fast forward a hundred years, what beliefs do modern-day Europeans still hold about the intuition of men and women? Gerd Gigerenzer and his colleagues surveyed 1016 men and women in Germany and 1002 in Spain to find out.

Overall, the participants didn't see either sex as having more intuition than the other. But that's because they held stereotypes about the intuitive strengths of the sexes in different domains. In both Germany and Spain, the majority of participants believed that women's intuitions are better when it comes to personal life. For instance, 63 per cent of Germans believed that women's intuitions about choosing the right romantic partner are superior (and the figures were almost identical in Spain). Gigerenzer's team said there could be some validity to a related stereotype held by their participants: the idea that women are better at understanding other people's intentions. After all, there is evidence, the researchers said, that women are better at recognising emotional displays than men.

In relation to intuitions in a "professional social context", there was no overall sex-related stereotype about leadership intuition (this may also be an accurate reflection of fact, since studies show companies with more women in leadership positions do at least as well, if not better, than those with fewer women). Both countries showed a weak preference for believing that men have a better intuition for choosing a business partner and in politics.

Beliefs about intuitions in the last domain of "professional individual tasks" were stronger and exposed the greatest differences between the countries. In Spain, the majority of men and women believed that the sexes have equally good intuition for scientific discoveries; in contrast, in Germany only one third felt the same, with most people favouring men. This study can't speak to cause and effect, but it's notable that a greater percentage of scientists in Spain are female.

Participants in both countries also endorsed the stereotype that men have better intuition for dangerous situations, but this was almost entirely down the beliefs held by men! In both countries, men and women further endorsed the stereotype that men have better intuition for investing in stocks. This actually flies in the face of research that has found women to be more effective at portfolio investment.

Across the whole study there was evidence of in-group bias - men and women tended to attribute more credit to the intuition of their own sex. Intriguingly, there was no difference in beliefs with age group. This led the researchers to suppose that people's beliefs about the intuitive skills of the sexes is based on the current social context rather than the past. If the past had had more influence you'd expect older participants to endorse more traditional stereotypes.

Related to this, it was curious that gender-stereotypes were more often endorsed in Germany even though this country has been a liberal democracy for longer than Spain and is said to value gender-egalitarianism more strongly. The researchers said this may reflect the fact that Spain is catching up fast and maybe even overtaking Germany. We already discussed Spain's female advantage in science. Despite Germany having a female Chancellor, it's also a fact that there is a larger percentage of female politicians in Spain.

All all in all Gigerenzer and his team concluded their study shows "widespread stereotypes about men's and women's intuitions still exist even a century after the first president of the American Psychological Association made his infamous statement."

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Gigerenzer, G., Galesic, M., and Garcia-Retamero, R. (2013). Stereotypes About Men's and Women's Intuitions: A Study of Two Nations. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology DOI: 10.1177/0022022113487074

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

Link feast

In case you missed them, 10 of the best psychology links from the past week:

1. The fascinating story of how fall out from Cold War atomic bomb tests has helped, decades later, to settle the debate over whether or not adult brains can grow new neurons. The new findings suggest that more than 1400 new neurons are added to the adult hippocampus every day!

2. How do people survive solitary confinement? Also the focus of this afternoon's (3.30BST) episode of The Truth About Mental Health on BBC World Service.

3. How much consciousness does an iPhone have? Interesting blog post on phi - a way of measuring consciousness. But it's a cheeky headline - iPhones are barely mentioned in the article.

4. Michael Jackson was a paradox - the world's greatest showman and yet so bashful in person. Scott Barry Kaufman, author of a new book Ungifted: Intelligence Redefined, explains that such a contradictory personality is actually common place among creative people.

5. Ever get that feeling that, no matter how much practice you put in, your progress seems to have stalled?  I found this post over at 99U really inspiring: 3 Tips on Overcoming Learning Plateaus.

6. BBC Radio 4 started a new series of Frontiers this week, featuring scientists who are building brains from scratch. ""I believe these cultures are half-way to having a mind," says neuroengineer Steve Potter.

7. With all the recent talk about the need for replications in psychology and better rules about the storage and sharing of data, cognitive psychologist Rolf Zwaan urges us not to forget the value of weirdness and wackiness in science. Interesting post, but it felt like a bit of a false dichotomy to me. Surely science can be open, replicable and wacky.

8. This is your brain on coffee.

9. Need a gift idea for the neuroscientist in your life? - neuroscience dress featuring retinal ganglion cells (ht @vaughanbell)

10. Psychology confirms what Jerry Seinfeld knew - we'd enjoy restaurant meals more if we could pay for them in advance. Fun and interesting blog post by Dave Nussbaum based on a new book Happy Money.
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Post compiled by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

A preliminary psychology of "keeping it real"

Keeping it real often means hanging out

From Ancient Greek philosophy to humanistic psychology to modern day rap songs, there's a long tradition of espousing the benefits of being true to yourself or "keeping it real". Despite this interest, a new study by Alison Lenton and colleagues is one of the first to investigate what being true to oneself actually feels like, how often it happens and in what circumstances.

Lenton and her colleagues began by surveying 104 participants (average age 35; 66 women) on the Amazon Mechanical Turk (MT) website that pays people for completing tasks online. The participants said they experienced a state of authenticity one to two times per week, and experienced inauthenticity nearly every two months. They were strongly motivated (5.8 on a scale of 1 to 7) to be their true selves and similarly motivated to avoid inauthenticity (5.2 on the same scale). The state of being true to oneself was different from the personality trait of being a "genuine person" - people reported experiencing both authenticity and inauthenticity regardless of their personality.

Hundreds of people were also recruited to write about either a time they'd felt most true to themselves, or a time they felt like they were being fake. Experiences of self authenticity tended to involve fun, familiar places or people, close others, helping someone or being creative. They were also associated with "low arousal" positive emotions like contentment and calmness, and the fulfilment of personal needs, especially self-esteem, relatedness to others and autonomy. "I was with my girlfriend and three best friends and we stayed there [at the millpond in Cambridge] late drinking, chilling out, and talking about our lives and childhoods," said one participant. "I was really happy at that moment in life and felt relaxed, honest, that nothing else mattered or would ever change."

Episodes of inauthenticity, by contrast, were associated with difficult events, being evaluated by others, demonstrating a lack of social competence, feeling isolated, failing one's own standards and feeling ill. The "signature" emotion of being phoney was anxiety, and there was a sense of failing to fulfil any personal needs. "The buildings were completely unrecognisable as were the people," said one person of their first day at uni. "I felt as though I was alone and had lost my sense of self."

One particularly intriguing finding - participants describing a time they'd felt authentic, as opposed to phoney, tended to say the experience overlapped far more with their ideal self. There's an obvious contradiction here. If they were being themselves, how come they resembled their ideal self, which is likely to be influenced by social expectations? One possibility is that what we really mean by "be true to yourself" is "be the person you want to be".

This recalls an intriguing study published in 2010, in which people reported feeling more authentic when they were behaving in an extraverted, agreeable and open-minded way, regardless of whether this matched their own personality. Behaving this way usually means certain needs are being met, including closeness with others and being competent. Another possibility, then, is that by "keeping it real" we really mean - satisfy the basic human desire to connect with others and be a creative, good person.

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Lenton, A., Bruder, M., Slabu, L., & Sedikides, C. (2013). How Does “Being Real” Feel? The Experience of State Authenticity. Journal of Personality, 81 (3), 276-289 DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-6494.2012.00805.x

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

The Special Issue Spotter

We trawl the world's journals so you don't have to:

Anxiety disorders (Clinical Psychologist).

Open-access journal publishing in psychology (Psychological Inquiry). open access

Resilience in child development (The Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry).

Exploring Cognitive Readiness in Complex Operational Environments (Journal of Cognitive Engineering and Decision Making).

Disgust (Psychological Bulletin).

Neuroscience of sleep (Nature).

Cognitive science approach to developmental disorders (Japanese Psychological Research).

Mapping the brain (Nature). open access

Styles, approaches, and patterns in student learning (British Journal of Educational Psychology).

Bullying - a social influence perspective (Social Influence).
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Post compiled by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

LEGO figures are getting angrier

Nevermind increasingly violent video games or the ever-present danger of an uncensored internet, a far more insidious and unexpected change is afoot that could be affecting our children's emotional development. Researchers have discovered that the faces on LEGO Minifigures are becoming increasingly angry and less happy. Combined with a trend towards more combat-related LEGO themes, a team led by Christoph Bartneck at the University of Canterbury said "we cannot help but wonder how ... this impacts how children play."

The influence of LEGO is immense. The product is sold in more than 130 countries and the company produced more than 36 billion bricks in 2010 alone. The researchers state that on average each person on earth owns approximately 75 bricks.

Standing exactly four bricks high, the LEGO Minifigure was launched in 1975 with a standard enigmatic smile and yellow skin. In 1989, different facial expressions appeared; different skin colours debuted in 2003; and in 2010 the Minifigures started to be sold independently of other LEGO sets. Around 4 billion Minifigures have been sold worldwide.

Bartneck obtained images of all 3655 Minifigure types manufactured by LEGO between 1975 and 2010. The 628 different heads on these figures were then shown to 264 adult participants recruited via Amazon's Mechanical Turk online survey website. The participants' task was to categorise the emotions on the heads in terms of the six main human emotions, and to rate their intensity.

There was ambiguity in the faces - each received an average of 3.9 emotion labels. Looking at historical trends - there was a massive increase in the variety of emotional expressions from early 1990s onwards, a process that continued up to 2010. The vast majority of figures have happy faces (324), but the next most common is angry (192), followed by sadness (49), disgust (28), surprise (23) and fear (11). And the trend is for an increasing proportion of angry faces, with a concomitant reduction in happy faces.

The presence of a body changed the way faces were perceived in different ways depending on the emotion in question. For instance, a body tended to increase ratings for anger and happiness but reduce ratings for disgust and sadness. Skin colour made no difference.

Bartneck's team also observed that "LEGO has a considerable array of weapon systems in their program" and that the company "is moving towards more conflict based play themes." Together with the rising prevalence of angry faces, the researchers warned that LEGO "might not be able to hold onto its highly positive reputation. The children that grow up with LEGO today will remember not only smileys, but also anger and fear in the Minifigures' faces."

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C Bartneck, M Obaid, & K Zawieska (2013). Agents with faces - What can we learn from LEGO Minifigures? [pdf] Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Human-Agent Interaction (iHAI 2013), Sappor, Japan. ht @jonmsutton

--Further reading--
When psychologists become builders ... Where psychology and LEGO intersect. 
Mother-toddler play-time is more interactive and educational with old-fashioned toys
Live animals versus fancy toys - which do toddlers prefer?

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
Image credit Jon Sutton

Shining a light on the intuition of homicide detectives

"Just one more thing ..."

Dishevelled, diminutive and deep in thought, the TV detective Columbo would often bring a cigar-bearing hand to his forehead. You could almost hear the cogs whirring. Like so many other fictional detectives he had a brilliant intuitive sense, largely mysterious, almost magical. The same can be said for the puzzle-solving skills of real-life homicide detectives, whose thought processes have received little research attention. Now psychologist Michelle Wright has shone a light on detective intuition in a new study using photographs from twenty real-life solved murder scenes featuring victims who'd been beaten, stabbed, strangled or shot.

Wright asked 40 experienced UK detectives (aged 36 to 59; one woman) to look at the photos and sort them into groups, "so that all the crime scenes in a group are similar to each other in some way but different from those in another group." As they sorted the photos, the detectives were asked to speak their thoughts out loud. The task took about one and a half hours.

The detectives tended to sort the crimes into three groups according to their inferences about the nature of the murder as either: a domestic homicide, a crime-related homicide (in which the murder had taken place during the commission of another crime), or a male brawl. Wright found that the detectives readily spun a narrative from the photos, with first clues (e.g. a toppled chair and signs of Christmas decorations) leading to generation of a hypothesis (tension between spouses is often high at Christmas), leading to inferences (this could be a domestic), thus guiding their inquiry plans ("I would be looking at those known to her").

Overall, the detectives made 594 inferences, most of them about the homicide type and the relationship between victim and killer. Using recorded facts from the murders, Wright found that 67 per cent of the detectives' inferences were accurate, 23 per cent were inaccurate and 9.5 per cent were ambiguous or contradictory. More senior detectives made more inferences without losing accuracy.

Three murder scenes were misinterpreted by the majority of the detectives because they made the same kind of inaccurate inferences. For example, one killing involved the victim's dress being pulled up around her neck with most detectives interpreting this as a sexually motivated crime. In fact the woman had been killed by her nephew for financial gain. Another scene was at a disco and many detectives inferred it was the result of a drunken brawl. In fact the killer was having an affair with the victim's wife and the murder was premeditated.

The initial decisions made during what detectives call the "golden hour" of a murder investigation can have huge implications for its success. For this reason it is vital that we learn more about the decision making processes involved. "The findings of this study make the first step at demystifying the notion of detective intuition," said Wright.

Detectives aim to keep an open mind, but this study revealed the ways their past experiences and knowledge lead them to make assumptions. Often times these are correct, but there were instances of systematic errors. Wright suggests that sorting tasks of the kind used in this study could be helpful during training of detectives, to "increase their awareness of the factors that influence their decision making behaviour" and to "enhance [their] knowledge of different types of homicide through exposure to a wide range of cases".

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Wright, M. (2013). Homicide Detectives' Intuition. Journal of Investigative Psychology and Offender Profiling DOI: 10.1002/jip.1383

--Further reading--
Does a murderer's crime-scene behaviour echo his criminal history?

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
Image from wikipedia.

Link feast

In case you missed them: 10 of the best psychology links from the past week:

1. "This study is about psychology, and should not have involved an MRI scanner," the excellent Neuroskeptic blog makes the case that a brain imaging study into people's reactions to strabismus would have been much better off without the brain imaging.

2. Why do identical twins end up having such different lives?

3. Keith Laws, Professor of Cognitive Neuropsychology, wrote a provocative blog post on the problems with the case formulation approach favoured by many clinical psychologists: "It is artistry linked to intuition...in short, it is anti-science..."

4. The surprising psychology of how names shape our thoughts (more from the Digest archive).

5. "There’s Nothing Cathartic About Expressing Anger"

6. Two new books with a very different take on psychiatry, reviewed together by Bryan Appleyard for The Sunday Times: Our Necessary Shadow: The Nature and Meaning of Psychiatry by Tom Burns; Cracked: Why Psychiatry is Doing More Harm than Good by James Davies.

7. What happened when students, post docs and neuroscientsts were asked to draw a neuron?

8. Photographic portraits of New York therapy rooms.

9. Interesting insights into the consequences of making too little or too much eye contact.

10. Many psychologists are among over 70 signatories calling for registered reports to become an accepted journal format across the life sciences. Following this format, papers are accepted before the results are in, based on the proposed methodology and research question. The hope is that this will increase the publication of negative results and reduce questionable research practices.

Looking ahead: the Cheltenham Science Festival continues this weekend with several sessions on psychology and neuroscience.
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Post compiled by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

Reading comprehension just as good using a Kindle as with paper

A significant milestone was passed last August when Amazon announced that sales of books on its Kindle e-reader platform outstripped print sales for the first time. There's no question that e-readers are convenient - you can load a single device with thousands of titles. But some commentators have started to question whether digital reading has adverse effects on memory and comprehension compared with reading from print.

In 2010, a reassuring study in fact found no difference in recall after reading material electronically versus paper. Now Sara Margolin and her colleagues have looked at reading comprehension and again found no deficits in understanding of material consumed on a Kindle or a computer versus paper.

Margolin's team invited 90 student participants (average age 19 years) to read ten short passages of text.  One third of them read on paper (A4 size, Times New Roman font), 30 of them read on a second gen. Kindle (6 inch screen), and the remainder read via a pdf reader on a computer monitor. Five of the passages were factual (biographies) and five were excerpts from literary fiction. After each passage, the students answered five to six multiple-choice comprehension questions. They could take as long as they wanted to read each passage, but there was no going back to the text once they started answering the questions.

Overall accuracy was at around 75 per cent and, crucially, there was no difference in comprehension performance across the three conditions. This was true whether reading factual or narrative passages of text. "From an educational and classroom perspective, these results are comforting," the researchers concluded. "While new technologies have sometimes been seen as disruptive, these results indicate that students' comprehension does not necessarily suffer, regardless of the format from which they read their text."

Unfortunately the study didn't look at the participants' familiarity with e-reader devices. It remains to be seen whether the same results would hold with an older sample and/or with readers who may be less experienced with digital devices. Also the text passages were only around 500 words long. Future research needs to examine comprehension for entire chapters and books. Devices like iPads, which are back-lit and have more potentially distracting functionality, also need to be tested.

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Margolin, S., Driscoll, C., Toland, M., and Kegler, J. (2013). E-readers, Computer Screens, or Paper: Does Reading Comprehension Change Across Media Platforms? Applied Cognitive Psychology DOI: 10.1002/acp.2930

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

Extras

10 eye-catching studies that didn't make the final cut:

Watching your favourite TV shows restores your levels of self-control.

Nearly one third of pedestrians were distracted by their phone when crossing the road.

Extreme political views are often founded on a misunderstanding of the relevant policy issues.

A man "previously evaluated as having a high level of physical attractiveness" asked young women on a shopping street for their phone number. When he was carrying a guitar case, 31 per cent obliged compared with 9 per cent when he was carrying a sports bag and 14 per cent when he carried no bag.

The psychological benefits of recreational running: A field study.

Players of an American football video game suffered psychologically when they weren't allowed to engage in trash talk.

Most TED talk presenters are male non-academics. Among academic TED talkers, most are senior males with impressive publication records. But giving a TED talk doesn't benefit the impact of their academic work.

Pepsi and Coca Cola brand labels affect the brain's response to drinking cola, especially in less experienced drinkers.

More men approached a woman lying on a beach when she had a tattoo on her back, and they approached more quickly. They also thought their chances of a date or sex were greater. 

Across four methodologically diverse samples, marijuana use consistently buffered people from the negative consequences associated with loneliness and social exclusion
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Post compiled by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

Arrogant, moi? Investigating narcissists' insight into their traits, behaviour and reputation

Braggarts who hype their own achievements while derogating those around them can fare well in a new situation. Their confidence appeals and they may achieve high status at first. But over the longer term evidence suggests that narcissists are harmful to themselves and others. They alienate people and their work performance is scored poorly by bosses. So why do they persist? Do they have insight into their narcissism? Do they realise what other people think of them? A new study aimed to find out.

Erika Carlson surveyed two samples. One was made up of 86 undergrads, who answered questions about themselves and also provided contacts for five informers - friends, partners and family - they too answered questions about the participants' personalities and behaviour. The second sample of 234 participants was recruited online via Amazon's Mechanical Turk (a network of volunteers who are paid for their time online) and they answered questions about their personality, behaviour and reputation.

Carlson found that participants who scored more highly on a narcissism questionnaire also tended to describe themselves as condescending and disagreeable and as people who criticise and brag. They also realised that other people see them this way. The narcissists recognised that their traits and behaviour weren't good for other people but they believed they were good for themselves.

In other words, narcissists are arrogant and they know it, but they don't care. In fact many said they aspired to be more narcissistic. "Narcissists do have genuine insight into their narcissism," said Carlson. "[They] seem to perceive narcissism as a 'get ahead' trait that brings them personal gain ... a personal strength, and justify their narcissism in terms of the benefits it has for them."

It's an intriguing finding but there are some limitations in the study. It's important to note this was a subclinical sample - overall levels of narcissism were not that high and it's not clear if the results would apply to people diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder. Also, I found myself wishing for some kind of comparison. How did the narcissists' insight compare with high scorers on other personality traits? Are they unusually insightful and honest? Might that honesty be a hidden virtue of the narcissistic personality type?

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Carlson, E. (2013). Honestly Arrogant or Simply Misunderstood? Narcissists' Awareness of their Narcissism. Self and Identity, 12 (3), 259-277 DOI: 10.1080/15298868.2012.659427

--Further reading--
For group creativity, two narcissists are better than one
A deadly sin for modern times - Narcissistic myopia.
A psychopath, a narcissist & a Machiavellian enter a room, who was perceived more favourably? (journal abstract)

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.