· Groups resist criticism—especially from newcomers.

Picture this: you've just started a new job and you're sat nervously in your first meeting. You look around, still trying to match names to faces. Early on a problem is discussed you know all about from a previous job. Putting aside nerves, you hop right in and start to explain just how it was dealt with at that previous company.

When you finish speaking everyone just looks at you. For a few seconds the only sound is the air-conditioning and people fidgeting with their pens. Then a red-haired woman—clearly a company veteran—recovers and makes one or two non-committal remarks. The meeting moves straight on to other business leaving you wondering what you did wrong.

Later on the red-haired woman returns to the problem on which you weighed in earlier. She repeats your suggestion almost exactly. Everyone begins nodding and smiling at her. Someone says "Good point. Yes!"

No one looks at you.

Hostility to newcomers

Although this scenario might come straight from a sitcom like The Office, it's not that fanciful. Recent psychological research has established that just this unreasoning hostility to newcomers clearly exists in groups, even when their suggestions are sound. Psychologist Matthew J. Hornsey and colleagues have confirmed the effect as well as examining how newcomers can worm their way into a group's affections and begin to generate influence (Hornsey et al., 2007).

Firstly, though, they asked whether groups are really this hostile when newcomers, as opposed to old-timers, make critical remarks. Hornsey and colleagues asked 187 health professionals at a hospital to make judgements in circumstances similar to those described above. One group of participants were lead to believe their hospital was being criticised by a newcomer who had worked there 3 weeks, while another group thought it was an established old-timer of 18 years. In each case the criticisms presented to participants were identical, the only difference was their apparent source.

The results were clear. Compared with old-timers, the health professionals:

• thought newcomers provided less constructive criticism,
• agreed less with newcomers' suggestions,
• were more negative about their criticisms.

This certainly supports our intuitive understanding that it can be difficult for newcomers to criticise their new group.

Generating influence

Next Hornsey and colleagues wanted to see whether there was any way of reducing these negative reactions to newcomers' criticisms. To do this they recruited 217 members of an online gaming community who were all interested in a particular game. They were then shown an extract purportedly taken from a chat site that criticised their game and asked to comment on whether they agreed with the critic and whether the criticisms were justified.

To test whether the anti-newcomer bias could be lessened, the participants were split into four groups and the identity of the critic was presented in four different ways.

• A newcomer who distances himself from another group to which he used to belong.
• A newcomer who embraces another group to which he used to belong.
• An old-timer who distances himself from another group to which he used to belong.
• An old-timer who embraces another group to which he used to belong.

So sometimes the critic was shunning their membership of an old group and sometimes they were embracing it.

Once again, confirming the previous findings, online community members were none too impressed when criticism of 'their' game came from a newcomer. Again, the newcomer aroused more negativity than old-timers despite making exactly the same criticisms. But the researchers did find that this negativity could be reduced if the newcomer shunned a group of which they used to be a member, then their criticisms were more likely to be viewed as legitimate. Hornsey and colleagues' results also showed that old-timers benefited from this effect as well.

This finding makes sense when you think about how a newcomer's group identity is perceived by other members of the group. Whether consciously or not, people want others to value their group as much as they do. When newcomers distance themselves from an old group, it increases their perceived allegiance to the current group. If the criticism comes from a member of the group perceived as committed, this helps to cushion the critical blow.

Toe the line

What the psychological research tells us, then, is that influencing groups to change as a newcomer is not easy. Sources of criticism or agents of change commonly face increased negativity and outright rejection. However beautifully the change is packaged, people will quickly perceive the implicit criticism of the status quo.

The temptation when joining a new group is to try and make a big splash, to impress others with our critical perceptions and new ideas. On the contrary, what the present research suggests is that toeing the line in the first instance is often the best long-term strategy. Groups are hostile to criticism from newcomers and are likely to resist, dismiss or ignore it—unless you can prove your loyalty.

One way of emphasising allegiance to a new group is by creating psychological distance from an old group. But even this might not work all the time since criticising an old group can signal a disloyal nature. Consequently newcomers to a group who want to gain influence and promote change should tread very carefully until they are well-established. Unfortunately sometimes being right just isn't enough.

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"What's in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet." ~Romeo and Juliet

In these lines from Shakespeare's famous play, Juliet is trying to persuade Romeo that the bitter feud between their respective families doesn't matter, that he and his surname are easily divisible, and so they can be together.

While she speaks truthfully of her own love, in questioning the power of names she is intentionally dissembling. Clearly they do matter, a very great deal, as the tragic ending of Romeo and Juliet bears out.

In fact we are so sensitive to what things are called and the unconscious associations these generate, that our performance in a variety of arenas may be marred by something as seemingly insignificant as our own initials.

Initial problems

To test whether initials can really scupper our best intentions, psychologists Leif Nelson and Joseph Simmons went on a hunt through baseball records, grade point averages and law school admissions—even carrying out their own experiment—to search for evidence.

Publishing their results in Psychological Science, Nelson and Simmons (2007) unearthed some suggestive findings:

• Baseball. Strikeouts are recorded with the letter K in baseball (for the sports impaired: a strikeout is a bad thing for a batter). Nelson and Simmons found that across 90 years of professional baseball, players whose names—whether first or last—began with a K have been slightly more likely to strikeout than anyone else.
  
• Academic performance. Nelson and Simmons then looked at MBA applicants over 15 years to a large US university. They hypothesised that people whose names began with C or D would find these grades less aversive and so strive less hard to avoid them. And that's what they found: applicants whose first or last name began with a C or D had lower GPAs. It was only a small effect, but significant across 14,000 applicants.
• Law school. The same pattern was seen in law schools: lawyers with initials of A or B were found to have attended better law schools than those with initials of C or D.

These are all correlations, though, which might be explained in all sorts of different ways. To give us evidence that initials have a causative role in performance what we really need is an experiment.

Implicit egotism

Nelson and Simmons, therefore, gave 284 participants the chance to win a prize in an anagram competition. The way the prizes were labelled was manipulated so that sometimes they coincided with the participants' initials, and sometimes not.

The experimenters predicted that participants would be unconsciously drawn towards the lesser, consolation prize, if one of their initials coincided with the prize's label. Consequently they would complete fewer anagrams.

Surprisingly this is exactly what they found: people completed less anagrams (on average 1 fewer) when the consolation prize happened to be labelled with the first letter of their own name. In effect, because of a simple alphabetical association, participants tried to fail.

Theorists argue there is a kind of implicit egoism at work. We unconsciously prefer our own names because they are associated with ourselves and most people like themselves. That this effect isn't down to a kind of novelty-seeking is borne out by the fact that people are choosing worse outcomes. The vast majority of people wouldn't consciously choose to get a 'D', go to a poor law school, or only win the consolation prize.

This effect may well have a small but measurable influence in all sorts of situations. One that has been investigated recently is the association between people's initials and their tendency to work for companies that start with the same letter.

Anseel and Duyck (2008) obtained a database containing one-third of all private sector employees in Belgium, over half a million names, then they looked at their employers' names. They found as predicted that people were more likely to work for companies with initials matching their own, especially if their initials and the company's were unusual such as Q or Y.

Implicit egotism could well be working both ways here: not only are employees more likely to apply for jobs with companies with the same initial but employers prefer applicants that share their organisation's initial letter.

What's in an initial?

So the answer to Juliet's question, "What's in a name?" is: quite a lot. This research suggests there's more than we might imagine in only an initial. Perhaps Juliet, if she'd lived longer than her 13 years, would have been well advised to change her family name of 'Capulet' to something more aspirational to help her application for that MBA or to get her into a decent Italian law school.

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Much of our lives are spent in groups with other people: we form groups to socialise, earn money, play sport, make music, even to change the world. But although groups are diverse, many of the psychological processes involved are remarkably similar.

Here are 10 insightful studies that give a flavour of what has been discovered about the dynamics of group psychology.

1. Groups can arise from almost nothing

The desire to form and join social groups is extremely powerful and built into our nature. Amongst other things groups give us a most valuable gift, our social identity, which contribute to our sense of who we are.

Just how readily people form and join groups is demonstrated by Tajfel et al. (1971) in the so-called 'minimal groups paradigm'. In their study boys who were strangers to each other were given only the slightest hint that they they were being split into two groups. Even without knowing or seeing who else was in their group they favoured members of their own group over the others. Group behaviour, then, can arise from almost nothing.

2. Initiation rites improve group evaluations

Existing groups don't let others join for free: the cost is sometimes monetary, sometimes intellectual, sometimes physical—but usually there is an initiation rite, even if it's well disguised.

Aronson and Mills (1959) tested the effect of initiation rites by making one group of women read passages from sexually explicit novels. Afterwards they rated the group they had joined much more positively than those who hadn't had to undergo the humiliating initiation. So, not only do groups want to test you, but they want you to value your membership.

3. Groups breed conformity

After joining a group and being initiated, we have to get a feel for the group norms, the rules of behaviour in that group. Group norms can be extremely powerful, bending our behaviours in ways we would never expect.

One of the most famous experiments showing how easily we conform to unwritten group rules was conducted by Asch (1951). He had participants sit amongst a group of other people, judging the length of a line. The trick was that all the other members of the group were confederates of the experimenter who had been told to lie about which line was longer. Incredibly 76% of participants denied the evidence from their own senses at least once, just to conform with the group. Afterwards people made up all kinds of excuses for their behaviour. Most popular was a variation on: "that many people can't be wrong". Oh yes they can.

4. Learn the ropes or be ostracised

Group norms are extremely pervasive: this becomes all the more obvious when we start breaking them. Garfinkel (1967) had adolescents return to their families and behave totally out of character, i.e. speaking only when spoken to, being polite, acting formally—but only for 15 minutes at a time. Rather than being delighted their parents were shocked and angry, accusing their children of being selfish and rude. Break the group's rules and you'll know about it soon enough.

5. You become your job

Although groups have norms—rules that apply to everyone in the group—people have roles within groups and corresponding rules that apply to just their position. The most well-known demonstrations of the power of roles is the Stanford Prison Experiment.

Psychologists put young men into a simulated prison environment, making some prisoners and others guards (Zimbardo, 1972). After only 6 of its planned 14 days the experiment had to be stopped because participants conformed all too well to their roles as submissive prisoners or domineering guards. Some were emotionally disturbed by the experience. Even the experimenters were succumbing to their 'roles' as prison superintendents before the plug was pulled on the whole experiment.

6. Leaders gain trust by conforming

A high-profile, high-status role in any group is that of its leader, but where do leaders come from? In some groups, they are appointed or imposed from outside, but in many groups leaders emerge slowly and subtly from the ranks.

A study that has much to teach was carried out by Merei (1949) who observed children at a Hungarian nursery school. He noticed that successful leaders were those who initially fitted in with the group then slowly began to suggest new activities adapted from the old. Children didn't follow potential leaders who jumped straight in with new ideas. Leaders first conform, then only later, when trust has been gained, can they be confident that others will follow. This has been confirmed in later studies (with grown-ups!).

7. Groups can improve performance...

The mere presence of others can make us perform better. Social psychology pioneer Norman Triplett noticed that racing cyclists with a pacemaker covered each mile about 5 seconds quicker than those without (Triplett, 1898). Later research found this wasn't all about the effects of competition. The presence of other people seems to facilitate our own performance, but more so when the task is relatively separate to others and can be judged on its own merits.

8. ...but people will loaf

In other circumstances, though, people in groups demonstrate a tremendous capacity for loafing. Another social psychology pioneer, Max Ringelmann, found in the 1890s that participants in a tug 'o war only put in half as much effort when they were in a team of 8 than when they were on their own. It seems that when hiding in the group is easy, for example when tasks are additive and each person's contribution is difficult to judge, people will slack off to an impressive degree.

9. The grapevine is 80% accurate

Intelligence, rumour, gossip and tittle-tattle is the lifeblood of many groups. It travels at a tremendous pace in big organisations because people love a good bit of gossip, but what are 'they' talking about and can you believe what 'they' say?

Simmons (1985) analysed workplace communication and found that about 80% of the time people are talking about work and a surprising 80% of the information was accurate. Other studies have come up with a similar figure, suggesting that while details are inevitably lost along the way, the grapevine is mostly accurate.

10. Groups breed competition

While co-operation within group members is generally not so much of a problem, co-operation between groups can be hellish. People may be individually co-operative, but once put in a 'them-and-us' situation, rapidly become remarkably adversarial.

Insko et al. (2001) had participants playing a classic game called 'the prisoner's dilemma' which they used to measure competitiveness. When on their own people were competitive 37% of the time but when they were in a group of three this increased to 54%. People easily become suspicious of other groups, reasoning that while their individual members may be 'alright', the group as a whole cannot be trusted.

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If you want someone to comply with a random request for a cigarette, you should speak into their right ear, according to a new study by researchers in Italy.

Marzoli & Tommasi (2009) had a female confederate visit a disco and approach 176 random people asking for a smoke. Clubbers were about twice as likely to hand one over if the request was directed at the right ear, whether or not the clubber was male or female. Whether these findings will hold good for other types of request is unknown.

These findings confirm previous studies which have found a right-ear preference for attending to and processing verbal stimuli. It is thought that this is because language is preferentially processed by the left side of the brain, which receives its input from the right ear.

This right-ear preference was confirmed in an observational study also carried out by Marzoli and Tommas. Both men and women in the club were observed to use their right ear 72% of the time to listen to their conversational partners.

Mobile phones

People's preferred ear when using a telephone, though, has proved more controversial. Early studies carried out in the 80s suggested that people preferred to hold it to their left ear, not their right. But this was in the days before mobile phones and perhaps people were more used to leaving their right hand free for dialling or taking notes.

However more recent unpublished data from mobile phone users does suggest people prefer holding their phone to their right ear (Sanchez et al., 2002; PDF).

→ Read more about the psychology of the everyday.

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Reading and writing from left to right is a skill so well-practised, so ingrained in language, that it's easy to ignore. Yet, according to some research, the direction in which language flows could have implications that spread into many other areas of our experience.

Consider that people are often found to envisage time flowing in a line from left to right; to look at objects like art works from the left to the right; and to imagine numbers from 1 to ∞ laid out from left to right.

There is even something about the very movement from left to right that grabs the attention and holds it. Research finds that people or objects moving from left to right are perceived as having greater power (Maass et al., 2007):

• Soccer goals are rated as stronger, faster, even more beautiful when the movement of the scorer is from left to right, rather than right to left.
• Film violence seems more aggressive, more painful and more shocking when the punch is delivered from left to right, compared with right to left.
• Cars in an advert are rated as stronger and faster when they are moving from left to right, rather than right to left (take note advertising executives!).

Perhaps it's no coincidence that athletes, cars and horses are all usually shown on TV reaching the finishing line from left to right.

Subject, verb, object

It seems likely that this left to right bias has its roots in language (although not everyone agrees, cf. Chatterjee, 2001). Evidence for this comes from people who speak languages written from right to left like Arabic or Urdu who, sure enough, display the same bias, but in the opposite direction.

There is another left to right bias in the basic syntax of language: the vast majority of languages describe events in the order subject, verb, object (with the notable exception of the passive tense).

Together these two facts mean we not only look to the left first, but we also expect the subject to be on the left, and the object to its right. Subjects are by definition active 'do-ers' while objects are the passive receivers of the do-ers' actions.

Adam and Eve

This led Dr. Anne Maass and colleagues at the University of Padova, Italy to a number of fascinating predictions (Maass et al., 2009). First, they said, people will tend to see objects or people that appear on their left as having more 'agentic' properties - in other words the left is associated with power, decisiveness and action, while the right-hand-side less so.

Second they thought that males stereotypically - and I stress stereotypically before the hate mail flows - have more agentic properties than females. Therefore if they examined pairs of men and women pictured together, the man would be more likely to appear on the left side of the picture and the woman on the right.

Searching Google Images they tested the theory with pictures of a well-known couple: Adam and Eve. Their prediction was borne out as Adam was on the left in 62% of pictures, suggesting he was seen as more agentic than Eve.

Marge and Homer

But what about couples where stereotypes begin to break down? To test this 134 people were asked to give agentic ratings to three more pairs of famous fictional couples: The Flintstones, the Simpsons and the Addams family. Here's what they got:

• Fred and Wilma Flintstone came out about equal.
• Marge and Homer Simpson also came out about equal.
• Gomez Addams was perceived as more agentic/active/decisive than Morticia Addams.

So unlike Gomez Addams, Homer Simpson and Fred Flintstone are not seen as old-fashioned patriarchs.

When they searched for pictures of the couples it turned out that both Fred Flintstone and Homer Simpson were no more likely to be depicted to the left of their wives than to the right. But Gomez Addams appeared on the left in 82% of all the representations found by the researchers. This supported their theory: being on the left did show a relationship with the perceived agency of the characters.

Ping pong

The problem with the research so far is that there are all sorts of uncontrolled factors. It may be that Adam and Gomez Addams tended to be depicted on the left of the picture for a reason other than agency. Therefore Maass and colleagues carried out another study to test their theory.

In this one 40 participants were asked to draw female and male teams playing each other at ping pong, basketball, draughts and volleyball. They also completed questionnaires that tested their endorsement of stereotypical beliefs about men and women.

What they found was that people who thought women were more agentic than men tended to put the women's team on the left while those who thought men more agentic tended to put the men's team on the left. This is further support for the idea that we associate the left with decisiveness, action and productivity, and the right less so.

It seems that this effect is not just about men and women either. In another experiment Mass and colleagues used pictures of young versus old people, predicting that young people would be seen as more agentic, which is exactly what they found.

Best cheek forward

The left to right effect is usually quite subtle but it can probably be spotted in all sorts of contexts, such as how we present ourselves to others. One neat study by Nicholls et al. (1999) analysed paintings of scientists and found that when they were posing 'as scientists' they presented their right cheek, thereby creating a left to right dynamic for the viewer of the painting. But, when posing for a family portrait, they presented their left cheek, reversing the trend, perhaps trying to create a more passive, domestic image of themselves.

Collectively these studies, if correct, suggest that the left to right bias from language influences how we perceive the world, how we depict others and perhaps even how we present ourselves.

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Peter Drucker, the management consultant, famously argued that about 80% of all products and services fail or fall well short of targets within six months of launching. Clearly markets have little understanding of what consumers want -- perhaps because people have little clue themselves.

Although you, like me, may find it distasteful to be referred to as a 'consumer', with its robotic, slack-jawed connotation, in an age when money has become the ultimate measure, there is a certain fascination in the psychology of consumption.

Collected below are recent articles on this subject:

· Beliefs influence taste. Meat means social power and, for some, it's the power that really tastes good. How our perception of taste is affected by values.

· Smell of money. Smells can subtly affect our behaviour. Find out which smells make customers spend.

· Under the influence. Continuing the restaurants theme, find out how expectations about wine affect how much we eat.

· Can't talk? Drink. Why loud music in bars increases alcohol consumption.

· Consuming ideas. Not only do we consume things, we also consume ideas. Read on about conceptual consumption.

· Too much choice. Psychologist Barry Schwartz gives a TED presentation explaining why too much choice is bad for us.

· Mysterious stockings. In one experiment people didn't have a clue why they preferred one identical pair of stockings over another. Find out what we don't know about shopping.

· Sex sells? Does sex really help sell products, or is it just one of those expressions ad execs use so they can wile away an afternoon choosing models? Find out whether sex sells.

· Experiences or possessions? Which types of purchases make us most happy?

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· Sponsored post: Live Happy is a new happiness-boosting iPhone/iPod app.

Our happiness levels are influenced by three factors: our genes, our circumstances and what we choose to do every day. While there's nothing we can do about our genes and circumstances are hard to change, we can much more easily control our daily activities.

Recent psychological research has begun to show particular types of activities which can increase our happiness levels over the short and even long term. But it can be difficult to keep up these activities over a period of time.

That's where a new application recently released for the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch comes in. The Live Happy application has been developed by psychology-based web and mobile application developers Signal Patterns in conjunction with Dr. Sonja Lyubomirsky, a leading light in the field of positive psychology.

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In 2005 Malcolm Gladwell published a book called Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. It had an extremely seductive message: that complex decisions are often more accurate when made quickly, unconsciously, in the blink of an eye.

Gladwell described a man who could spot fake antiquities that had fooled all the experts in an instant and another who took only minutes to accurately assess the longevity of a couple's relationship. It seemed that the received wisdom about complex decision-making was changing.

The claims Gladwell made for rapid cognition had their roots in a surprising line of evidence emerging in the psychological literature. Some experiments had begun to show the power of unconscious over conscious thought in complex decision-making.

In one experiment Dijksterhuis (2004) asked participants to choose between a series of apartments with different characteristics, but distracted one group to stop them thinking consciously about their decision. Compared with a group allowed to consciously deliberate, participants who had been forced to think unconsciously by the distraction made better decisions.

The backlash

This finding appeared highly counter-intuitive and psychologists were soon hard at work trying to replicate it. The answers are now starting to come in. Three recent studies have re-examined Dijksterhuis' findings to try and confirm whether or not the effect is real.

In the first a team at the University of New South Wales and the University of Essex, writing in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, describe four separate experiments searching for the fabled power of unconscious thought (Newell et al., 2009). One of these was a straight replication of Dijksterhuis' study and the other three were variations on the theme. All four experiments pointed towards the same conclusion:

"In stark contrast to the claims in the literature and the media we found very little evidence of the superiority of unconscious though for complex decisions." (Newell et al., 2009; p.19).

Indeed in more naturalistic conditions conscious thought was sometimes superior to unconscious thought.

Two other recent papers published in the journal Judgement and Decision Making also failed to find the purported benefit for unconscious thought. Acker (2008) analysed the results of 17 attempted replications of the unconscious thought effect. These studies showed that it was conscious thought that was most effective in complex decision-making and indeed unconscious thought tended to muddy the waters.

In a second paper recently published in the same journal Thorsteinson and Rakow (2009) again found no evidence for the power of unconscious thought. Indeed their results suggested that the very best way to make decisions was consciously and by resorting to a very old-fashioned but highly effective piece of technology: pencil and paper. Participants who made notes to compensate for the vagaries of memory were likely to make the best decisions.

Power of the unconscious

Despite these null findings, Dijksterhuis's studies and the points made by Gladwell in his book Blink can't be discounted. Although unconscious thought may not be superior to conscious thought, it is frequently not that inferior. We still seem to make remarkably good decisions without consciously thinking, which is heartening in itself.

Conscious thought also has its disadvantages -- most famously in the literature, thinking too much. Participants in one study when asked to think about the reasons for their decisions went on to make worse choices (Wilson & Schooler, 1991). A further study found that consciously introspecting about a tricky decision tended to interfere with cognitive processing and blur the differences between choices (Tordesillas & Chaiken, 1999).

For all its faults, though, the rather less glamorous approach of conscious deliberation in complex decision-making currently wins the day. These recent experiments suggest the power of unconscious thought is less dazzling than some would have us believe.

Consequently there's still a lot to be said for ruling a piece of paper down the middle and putting the pros on one side and cons on the other. You're unlikely to do any worse than making a snap decision and will probably do better. Better to think rather than blink.

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· Both sexes know men prefer a direct approach from woman, but is it just because men can't read the signs?

Men and women's attitudes to relationships have become remarkably similar -- when dating women are now much more likely to make the first move.

It will come as no surprise that research finds men prefer this first move to be direct. But do men and women agree on what a direct approach is and why such directness is necessary in the first place?

These questions are addressed in a new study published recently in the journal Personality and Individual Differences (Wade et al., 2009). Forty women aged between 19 and 22 were asked to list the types of opening lines they might use to signal their interest in dating a man.

Researchers sorted these into 10 categories, then 40 men and women rated them in order of perceived directness. Here are the 10 categories (with examples) from most to least direct:

1. Directly ask out on a date: Want to go get dinner?
2. Ask if single: Do you have a girlfriend?
3. Give out phone number, or ask for a call: You should call me.
4. Give a compliment: I like your hair.
5. Ask about shared interests: Do you watch The Wire?
6. Indirectly hint at a date: What are you doing later this weekend?
7. Say something funny/sexual humour: Wanna make out?
8. Suggest familiarity: Have we met before?
9. Personal interest questions: How was your weekend?
10. Subtle hello: Hey, what’s your name?

Then men were asked which lines they thought would be most effective for women to use on them. They pretty much put the chat-up lines in order of directness, with the most direct also perceived as the most effective.

When women were asked to do the same they produced a similar list with one exception. Women didn't rate as highly giving out phone numbers or asking for a call. Overall, though, women clearly understand that men prefer the direct approach.

The only surprise is the low ranking of funny or sexual humour. Men don't seem to appreciate the lewd come-ons suggested by gender stereotypes. This relatively low rating for a jokey approach is another thing shared by both sexes. Previous work by Bale et al. (2006) found that women weren't particularly impressed with men trying to be funny, despite what we are often told. It seems opening lines are a serious business for both sexes.

Ambiguous signals

The interesting question, although it may seem easy to answer, is why do men prefer a direct approach? Two obvious answers are men's purported inability to read body language or an assumed distaste for reading situational subtleties (in other words: too stupid or can't be bothered).

But researchers in Germany provide us with evidence for an alternative explanation. Grammer et al. (2000) videotaped opposite sex pairs meeting for the first time to catch the nuances of body language in the first 10 minutes of an interaction. Afterwards women were asked how much interest they had in the man they'd been talking to. The researchers revealed two counter-intuitive results:

• In the first minute women behaved no differently to men they fancied than those they didn't. They sent many positive nonverbal signals to all the men and hardly any negative signals.
• It is only between the 4th and 10th minute that any correlation was seen between an increased sending of positive nonverbal behaviours and wanting to date the man. But even then the difference was only between some positive signals and slightly more positive signals. Again negative signals were very rare.

The reason men prefer a direct approach becomes clearer. Women may think they are sending out all the right nonverbal signals and may blame men for failing to pick up on them. But from a man's perspective there may often be little to pick up on because women, being polite, are always sending positive nonverbal signals.

While it's not good practice to generalise too much from one relatively small study of 45 participants whose age ranged from 18 to 23, the results accord with what men say anecdotally: they often can't tell if women are interested or not because the signals are too ambiguous.

So subtlety is out and it's back to the age-old problem for both men and women: who has the guts to risk rejection with the direct approach?

· Related: the psychology of relationships, particularly: the hidden purpose of chat-up lines.

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· Research shows group members equate creativity with conformity.

Creativity is a much coveted asset for a very simple reason: an idea that transcends orthodoxy has the power to bring wealth, fame and status. Commercial, scientific, educational and artistic organisations, therefore, often talk about how they want to foster creativity.

Unfortunately groups only rarely foment great ideas because people in them are powerfully shaped by group norms: the unwritten rules which describe how individuals in a group 'are' and how they 'ought' to behave. Norms influence what people believe is right and wrong just as surely as real laws, but with none of the permanence or transparency of written regulations.

The enemy of creativity

These unwritten rules or 'groups norms' flow almost imperceptibly from one person to the next so that changes are difficult to spot unless they are carefully measured. A classic psychological study on group norms randomly allocated new university students to either conservative sororities or more liberal dormitories (Siegel & Siegel, 1957). Over time students assigned to the liberal dormitories became less conservative as the group's norms seeped into their consciousness.

Not only do norms spread like wildfire, groups don't even need to be that well-established, people will conform to others with only the slightest encouragement. In another classic social psychology study people thrown into a group of strangers denied their own senses to increase their conformity with others. When simply judging the length of a line, participants happily went along with the group despite clear evidence from their eyes that the group was wrong.

Thinking inside the box

The purpose of norms is to provide a stable and predictable social world, to regulate our behaviour with each other. In many respects norms have a beneficial effect, bolstering society's foundations and keeping it from falling into chaos. On the other hand stability and predictability are enemies of the creative process.

When groups are asked to think creatively the reason they frequently fail is because implicit norms constrain them in the most explicit ways. This is clearly demonstrated in a recent study carried out by Adarves-Yorno et al. (2006). They asked two groups of participants to create posters and subtly gave each group a norm about either using more words on the poster or more images.

Afterwards when they judged each others' work, participants equated creativity with following the group norm; the 'words' group rated posters with more words as more creative and the 'images' group rated posters with more images as more creative. The unwritten rules of the group, therefore, determined what its members considered creative. In effect groups had redefined creativity as conformity.

In another part of the same experiment these results were reversed when people's individuality rather than their group membership was emphasised. Creativity became all about being different from others and being inconsistent with group norms. When freed from the almost invisible shackles of the group, then, people suddenly remembered the dictionary definition of creativity: to transcend the orthodox.

Camels are horses designed by committee

So of course schools kill creativity, of course politicians are fighting over the middle ground, of course most TV programmes are the same and of course all our high streets are identical. People are social animals who work in groups and, especially with the advance of globalisation, the number of groups that govern or control our world has shrunk. These groups naturally kill creativity, or at least redefine it as conformity.

Creativity within groups isn't impossible, though, it's just that it has to fight all the harder to get out. Coming up with something truly new often means having to steer a path away from the herd, towards new horizons.

If you really covet creativity, then there's one rule you'd be well advised to follow: go it alone.

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