The standard advice for multiple-choice tests is: if in doubt, stick with your first answer.

College students believe it: about 75% agree that changing your first choice will lower your score overall (Kruger et al., 2005). Instructors believe it as well: in one study 55% believed it would lower students' scores while only 16% believed it would improve them.

And yet this is wrong.

One survey of 33 different studies conducted over 70 years found that, on average, people who change their answers do better than those who don't (Benjamin et al., 1984). In none of these studies did people get a lower score because they changed their minds.

Study after study shows that when you change your answer in a multiple-choice test, you are more likely to be changing it from wrong to right than right to wrong. So actually sticking with your first answer is, on average, the wrong strategy.

Why do so many people (including many who should know better, like the authors of test-preparation guides) still say that you should stick with your first answer? Kruger et al. (2005) argue that it's partly because it feels more painful to get an answer wrong because you changed it than wrong because you didn't change it.

So we tend to remember much more clearly the times when we changed from right to wrong. And so when taking a test we anticipate the regret we will feel and convince ourselves that our first instinct is probably right (when it's probably not).

Image credit: Alberto G

PsyBlog's How to Be Creative

If we can all be creative, why is it so hard to come up with truly original ideas?

It's because creativity is mysterious. Just ask any scientist, artist, writer or other highly creative person to explain how they come up with brilliant ideas and, if they're honest, they don't really know.

But over the decades psychologists have given ordinary participants countless tests, forms and tasks and conducted hundreds of hours of interviews. From these emerge the psychological conditions of creativity.

Not what you should do, but how you should be...

Click here to find out more...

The well-known known illusion above can be seen in two ways: as both a duck and a rabbit. Which do you see first? And if you see one, can you also see the other?

Most people see the duck first and can flip between the two representations, but the question is: how easy is it for you to flip between them? Does it require real mental strain, or can you do it at will?

Wiseman et al. (2011) had a hunch that the ability to flip between representations is related to creativity.

To test this participants were given a simple test of creativity which involves listing as many novel uses as you can for an everyday object in two minutes.

Take for example, a chair: yes you can sit on it but that's not a novel use. You can also stand on it which is a little more novel. Much more novel is using it to build a home-made fort, burning it to fight the cold or hitting someone with it in a bar-room fight.

The more of these examples you can come up with in an allotted amount of time, typically the more creative you are (try it, it's good fun).

In the study participants were then asked how easy they found it to flip between the rabbit and the duck in the illusion above.

What Wiseman et al. found was that participants who found it very easy to flip between rabbit and duck came up with an average of almost 5 novel uses for their everyday item. Those who couldn't flip between rabbit and duck at all came up with less than 2 novel uses.

This suggests that the ease with which you can flip representations is a clue to how creative you are. The moment when you flip between duck and rabbit is like a small flash of creative insight. It's when you notice the world can be seen in a different way.

Highly creative people often display this talent for finding new uses for an existing object or by making connections between two previously unconnected ideas or things.

If you want to try Guilford's Alternative Uses Task, then remember it's two minutes to think up as many alternative uses as you can for an everyday object like a brick or a paper-clip. Also, you need to know this about the scoring system:

"Multiple novel but similar responses were combined and given just a single point. A response was judged as similar if it fell into the same functional category. For example, 'a ring' and 'an earring' for the paper-clip both fall into the category jewellery, so would be assigned only one point."

So it's not as easy as you think!

PsyBlog's How to Be Creative

If we can all be creative, why is it so hard to come up with truly original ideas?

It's because creativity is mysterious. Just ask any scientist, artist, writer or other highly creative person to explain how they come up with brilliant ideas and, if they're honest, they don't really know.

But over the decades psychologists have given ordinary participants countless tests, forms and tasks and conducted hundreds of hours of interviews. From these emerge the psychological conditions of creativity.

Not what you should do, but how you should be...

Click here to find out more...

Language can reveal all kinds of truths about our psychology. Take these expressions:

• He's the big man on this project.
• We look up to her.
• Lady Gaga is huge.
• He puts her on a pedestal.

It's not hard to see the strong association here between size and power that's embedded in the way we talk about the relations between people.

The reason why is almost too obvious to bother stating: larger people quite often do have more power. As children our parents, teachers and all our authority figures are taller than us. In adult life taller people earn higher salaries, are more likely to be in higher status jobs and more likely to end up US president.

And men are taller than women and have historically enjoyed more power.

But does the connection go both ways? Can being powerful also make us feel taller? That's what Duguid and Goncalo (2012) checked out in this neat study.

Power up

First they measured participants' actual heights, then paired them up. For each pair, one person was assigned the role of the boss and the other the employee. This was apparently done on the basis of a leadership aptitude test, but actually the results were chucked away and the leadership and employee roles were assigned randomly.

The 'leader' was told that they would have complete power during the task and that the employee must accept this. This ensured that one person in each pair felt more powerful.

Afterwards, as part of what they were told was different task, participants filled in another questionnaire. Hidden in this they were asked their height again. So now the experimenters had two measures of height: one before the power manipulation and one after.

Then the experiment was stopped before the promised role-play could be carried out.

An inch taller

The results showed that before the manipulation both groups averaged about 66 inches in height. But after the manipulation, those in the lower-power condition reckoned themselves to be, on average, 65.80 inches tall while those in the high-power condition had apparently grown to 67.01 inches.

A couple of other studies by the same researchers also showed this connection between power and height. When people felt more powerful, they also felt taller.

This shows that the connection between mind and body goes both ways in relation to power. We already know that people who stand in 'power poses', feel more powerful (see: 10 Simple Postures That Boost Performance), and this study is showing us the connection the other way: that feeling more powerful changes our perception of our own bodies.

Image credit: Uppy C

PsyBlog's How to Be Creative

If we can all be creative, why is it so hard to come up with truly original ideas?

It's because creativity is mysterious. Just ask any scientist, artist, writer or other highly creative person to explain how they come up with brilliant ideas and, if they're honest, they don't really know.

But over the decades psychologists have given ordinary participants countless tests, forms and tasks and conducted hundreds of hours of interviews. From these emerge the psychological conditions of creativity.

Not what you should do, but how you should be...

Click here to find out more...

Marketers have known for years that stories are a powerful tool for persuading people. That's partly because stories (unlike statistics) are easy to understand.

That's why politicians try to persuade us by telling stories about their vision of the world. They do spout statistics as well, but normally only in support of some kind of grand narrative.

We instinctively understand that people resist being told what to do, but will respond to the moral of a story. So we try to persuade each other with little stories about 'someone we know'. Then we simplify and embellish them to make the moral clear.

Engage to persuade

Research suggests that trying to persuade people by telling them stories does indeed work (Green & Brock, 2000). The question is why? Because if we know why, we can make the stories we tell more persuasive.

Stories work so well to persuade us because, if they're well told, we get swept up in them, we are transported inside them.

Transportation is key to why they work. Once inside the story we are less likely to notice things which don't match up with our everyday experience.

For example an aspirational Hollywood movie with a can-do spirit might convince us that we can tackle any problem, despite what we know about how the real world works.

Also, when concentrating on a story people are less aware that they are subject to a persuasion attempt: the message get in under the radar.

Two sorts of people who may be particularly susceptible to being persuaded by stories are those who seek out emotional situations and those who enjoy thinking (Thompson & Haddock, 2011).

Stories which contain emotional elements draw in those looking for an emotional charge. Meanwhile the twists and turns of the plot and the meaning of the story draw in those looking to rev up their brains.

Whether through emotion or thought, stories that engage are more likely to persuade. The higher the emotional and semantic content of a story, then, the more likely they are to distract people from the persuasion attempt.

Crafting better stories

Highly persuasive stories need to be engaging. Here are some more factors that make an engaging and persuasive story (from Green & Brock, 2005):

• Literary techniques like foregrounding, which is using things like irony or metaphor to make the banal and everyday seem new and fresh. It's about shaking the reader out of the mundane.
• Imagery is important as it helps the story come alive in the reader's mind.
• Suspense keep us reading for the oldest of reasons: to find out what happens next.
• Modelling: if you want someone to change a behaviour, then you can model it. The character in the story has to go through the transformation that you want the reader to go through.

For inspiration break down your favourite novels, TV shows or films to see how the narrative works. Oddly whether the story is true or not doesn't seem to matter that much, people are persuaded by fiction just as much as fact.

There are all sorts of innovative applications. Doctors at Harvard Medical School are given stories and novels to read to encourage humane treatment of their patients. Lawyers continually use stories in court to persuade. Public health bodies lobby TV shows to get their health issues included in popular narratives.

Persuading through narrative is as old as the hills and it works. So what's your story?

Image credit: Stephen Poff

PsyBlog's How to Be Creative

If we can all be creative, why is it so hard to come up with truly original ideas?

It's because creativity is mysterious. Just ask any scientist, artist, writer or other highly creative person to explain how they come up with brilliant ideas and, if they're honest, they don't really know.

But over the decades psychologists have given ordinary participants countless tests, forms and tasks and conducted hundreds of hours of interviews. From these emerge the psychological conditions of creativity.

Not what you should do, but how you should be...

Click here to find out more...

Regret might not make a list of the most powerful emotions. It would probably include things like anger, happiness, jealousy, sadness and especially for us English, embarrassment.

We tend to think of regret as essentially a backward-looking emotion. We regret things in the past, like not trying hard enough in school, how we treated a friend or the things we said to our partner in the heat of an argument. In this sense you might argue that it's useless: why regret something you can't change?

But regret isn't just a backward-looking emotion, it also looks forward and it can be a terribly powerful emotion which affects our behaviour in the here and now. That's because we also have the power to anticipate feeling regret in the future, which we naturally try to avoid. My favourite example involves a simple study about lottery tickets and pens.

Would you swap the ticket?

In this study participants were given lottery tickets—not real ones, but organised by the researchers so that one person could win. Then they were asked if they would be willing to exchange them for another one which had an identical chance of winning (Bar-Hillel & Neter, 1996). To encourage them to switch tickets, they were offered a tasty truffle. Even though there was no difference between the tickets and there was a treat as an incentive, less than 50% of participants agreed.

Then the experiment was repeated with different participants, except this time, instead of lottery tickets, participants were given pens. As before they were offered a small incentive to make the switch. In this condition 90% of participants agreed to the swap.

Why the huge difference?

What is going on is that a pen is just a pen, but a lottery ticket is not just a lottery ticket. No matter what, all the pens are identical, but only one lottery ticket will actually win, although before the draw they all have the same chance of winning. What this means is that we can start using our imaginations, projecting ourselves forward into the future and thinking about possible consequences.

What if we decide to swap our lottery ticket and then it turns out to be the winning one? How will we feel then? It's this anticipation of regret that stops people swapping their tickets.

Regrets, I've had a few

The odd thing is that some psychologists argue that anticipated regret may be stronger than the actual regret we would feel if our choices don't work out.

Anticipated regret is such a powerful emotion that it can cause us to avoid risk, lower our expectations, steer us towards the familiar and away from new, interesting experiences.

We anticipate more regret when we go against the grain, when we make positive decisions ourselves, rather than letting the chips fall as they may.

And all for what? So that we can avoid something that won't be that bad anyway and might not happen at all?

People sometimes boast that they have no regrets, which I don't believe. But I'd like to hear them say they've got no anticipated regrets. That would be something to be proud of. After all, the past is gone, but we've still got a chance of shaping the future.

Image credit: Nasrul Ekram

PsyBlog's How to Be Creative

If we can all be creative, why is it so hard to come up with truly original ideas?

It's because creativity is mysterious. Just ask any scientist, artist, writer or other highly creative person to explain how they come up with brilliant ideas and, if they're honest, they don't really know.

But over the decades psychologists have given ordinary participants countless tests, forms and tasks and conducted hundreds of hours of interviews. From these emerge the psychological conditions of creativity.

Not what you should do, but how you should be...

Click here to find out more...

Here in the UK the weather feels depressing.

We're in the middle of winter in the northern hemisphere and it's cold and we're being battered by gales and torrential rain. The sun, even when it does show its face, is setting at 4pm. It's no wonder people in the street look fed up.

But according to most of the research on the connection between weather and mood, they shouldn't be. I've covered these highly counter-intuitive findings before and the title of that article sums it up: Weather Has Little Effect on Mood.

When you tell people this, though, they don't believe it. Most of us intuitively think the weather has quite a strong effect on our mood. Many assume that the rain and cold weather depresses us and sun and warmth perks us up.

So why don't we see this effect in the research?

That's the question a new study by Klimstra et al. (2011) tries to answer with a group of adolescents and their mothers. They tested the idea that although our reactivity to weather averages out across the whole population, there are large differences between individuals.

And it turns out this is true. In fact Klimstra et al. found four distinct groups:

1. Unaffected: about half the people in their study fell into this group. For these people it didn't matter that much whether it was raining or sunny, hot or cold, their mood was mostly unaffected.
2. Summer lovers: here's the group you'd expect. For these people, their mood improved with less rain, more sun and higher temperatures (15% of adolescents and 30% of their mothers fell into this category).
3. Summer haters: here's a group of people you hear less about.  These were the exact opposite of the summer lovers so they were happier when there was more rain, less sun and lower temperatures. Summer haters were more prevalent amongst the adolescents (27%) than their mothers (12%).
4. Rain haters: this group's mood didn't change with the temperature, sunshine or the wind; they just hated the rain. These guys were in the minority, making up 8% of adolescents and 12% of their mothers.

This helps explain why studies keep finding that weather doesn't have much effect on mood: it's because we're different and these differences were mostly being averaged out.

Most surprising are not the group of winter SADs (seasonally affected disorder) but the summer SADs. We hear a lot about the former and nothing about the latter, but from this study the summer SADs look like a significant group of people, especially amongst adolescents.

There was also an association between how the adolescents and their mothers reacted to the weather. This suggests your weather type may well run in the family. If you're a summer hater, it's likely your parents are too.

Image credit: Noukka Signe

PsyBlog's How to Be Creative

If we can all be creative, why is it so hard to come up with truly original ideas?

It's because creativity is mysterious. Just ask any scientist, artist, writer or other highly creative person to explain how they come up with brilliant ideas and, if they're honest, they don't really know.

But over the decades psychologists have given ordinary participants countless tests, forms and tasks and conducted hundreds of hours of interviews. From these emerge the psychological conditions of creativity.

Not what you should do, but how you should be...

Click here to find out more...

Err, don't people yawn because they're bored and/or tired?

Yes, it's true people do yawn more at bedtime or after they've woken up and they do yawn when they're bored (people even yawn in their sleep).

But yawning isn't that simple. If it was, how could you explain that some paratroopers yawn before their first jump, as do some violinists before they go on stage and Olympic athletes before their event (Provine, 2005). These are hardly situations in which people are likely to be bored.

Many people believe that yawning gets more oxygen into the body or expels more carbon dioxide. But this is not true. The theory is now thought to be seriously flawed, if not plain wrong.

The truth is no one really knows the real root cause of a yawn. Some good guesses have been made, though, and it's likely that some combination of them is true. First let's look at the physiological, before we get onto the psychological.

Hot brain

My favourite physiological reason for yawning is that it might help cool the brain down (Gallup & Gallup, 2007). Our brains work best within a narrow temperature range and yawning increases blood flow to the brain which acts like a radiator to move heat away from it.

Oddly this may help explain the paratroopers jumping out of a plane. When you're about to do something stressful you need your wits about you so yawning may help put your brain into tip-top working order.

Yawning may also partly be about stretching muscles since yawning sets off the urge to stretch. After stretching we're ready to act, say by running away from a predator.

Social yawning

It's well-known that yawns are contagious. Just by reading about them here, you're more likely to start yawning. In fact I can feel a yawn coming on now.

Yawns are most contagious between members of the same family, followed by friends, acquaintances and lastly strangers (Norsica et al., 2011).

But not everyone is susceptible to the yawn contagion. People who are particular empathic seem sensitive to other people yawning. So test a friend's empathic ability by yawning to see if they follow suit (Platek et al., 2003).

So, why is yawning contagious in the first place? It could just be that we copy each other's yawning for the same reason we copy other aspects of their body language: to fit in and be liked (see: The Chameleon Effect).

But it could also be that the yawn is a social signal to stay alert even though things are boring at the moment. The yawn might help to increase alertness and so keep our hunter-gatherer forebears alive for a little longer.

Or finally it could just be a way of signalling to others that we're relaxed in stressful situations. Despite being about to jump out of an aeroplane at 5,000 feet, give a virtuoso performance to a packed concert hall or win Olympic gold, frankly we're  just not that bothered.

How to stop an attack of the yawns

Finally, how might you combat a monster attack of the yawns? A couple of clues come from a case study of two patients suffering from chronic attacks of yawning (Gallup & Gallup, 2010). Neither patients were regularly tired or were having problems with their sleep.

They both found that applying a cold cloth to their foreheads or nasal breathing stopped their symptoms. They both had problems regulating their body temperature so the hot brain theory of yawning might have something to it.

Image credit: Sherman Geronimo-Tan

PsyBlog's How to Be Creative

If we can all be creative, why is it so hard to come up with truly original ideas?

It's because creativity is mysterious. Just ask any scientist, artist, writer or other highly creative person to explain how they come up with brilliant ideas and, if they're honest, they don't really know.

But over the decades psychologists have given ordinary participants countless tests, forms and tasks and conducted hundreds of hours of interviews. From these emerge the psychological conditions of creativity.

Not what you should do, but how you should be...

Click here to find out more...

As the year draws to a close, it's time to take a look back over 2011. From the stats I've pulled out the most popular articles from the last twelve months, many of which are about the interaction between mind and body.

Here they are listed in descending order, as measured by page views:

1. 10 Simple Postures That Boost Performance
2. 10 Psychological Effects of Nonsexual Touch
3. 6 Easy Steps to Falling Asleep Fast
4. 11 Goal Hacks: How to Achieve Anything
5. 10 Ways Our Minds Warp Time
6. Why We Buy: How to Avoid 10 Costly Cognitive Biases
7. The Zeigarnik Effect
8. Top 10 Self-Control Strategies
9. 10 Hidden Benefits of Smiling
10. 7 Simple Ways to Improve Your Memory Without Any Training

If you joined the throng here at PsyBlog in 2011 then welcome and thank you for your support.

PsyBlog now has over 50,000 subscribers to its email updates and RSS feed alone. The site continues to grow thanks to word of mouth, so if you find it useful please do tell your friends about it.

Also, a reminder that you can get free email updates to PsyBlog every time an article is posted (with the usual no-spam guarantee). You can like PsyBlog on Facebook here, follow PsyBlog on Twitter here and give it a plus one on Google+ here.

Image credit: holeymoon

PsyBlog's How to Be Creative

If we can all be creative, why is it so hard to come up with truly original ideas?

It's because creativity is mysterious. Just ask any scientist, artist, writer or other highly creative person to explain how they come up with brilliant ideas and, if they're honest, they don't really know.

But over the decades psychologists have given ordinary participants countless tests, forms and tasks and conducted hundreds of hours of interviews. From these emerge the psychological conditions of creativity.

Not what you should do, but how you should be...

Click here to find out more...

There's little doubt that people's names are hard to remember. No, it's not just you, research suggests there's something unusual about names which makes them particularly tricky to recall. Indeed some researchers suggest that people's given names are the most difficult of all words to learn (Griffin, 2010).

One study gave participants fake names and biographies to study (Cohen & Faulkner, 1986). Then they were tested on what they could remember. Here are the percentages for different pieces of information that were recalled:

1. Jobs: 69%
2. Hobbies: 68%
3. Home towns: 62%
4. First names: 31%
5. Last names: 30%

So names are more difficult to remember than what people do, what their hobbies are and where they come from. And, you won't be surprised to hear, as we age, most of us get even worse at remembering names.

But, why?

All kinds of theories have been put forward. One is that lots of us have the same names. People guess that common first names like 'John' and surnames like 'Smith' are more difficult to remember because, on our minds, one John Smith interferes with another.

Counter-intuitively, though, some research suggests common names are easier to recall than unusual names (James & Fogler, 2007). Other research suggests the opposite so it's not exactly clear what is going on (Griffin, 2010).

What's in a name?

The most popular explanation in the research is that names are essentially arbitrary and meaningless.

For most of us our names give away few clues about our appearance, our personalities or anything about us, except maybe a rough age, ethnicity, social class and whether our parents were celebrities (hello 'Moon Unit', 'Tu Morrow' and 'Moxie Crimefighter'—yes, all real names of celebrity offspring).

If, for example, I was called 'The Pink Panther', and I happened to look like a pink panther, you'd almost certainly find it easy to remember my name (Fogler et al., 2011).

Meaning is the key: we seem to find it difficult to remember names because they have weak semantic hooks. Oddly we find it easier to remember that a person is a potter, i.e. makes pots, than if their surname is actually Potter (James, 2004). We automatically treat names as meaningless, even if they have meaning.

Perhaps it's because we get so used to the lack of association between a person's name and what they do, or much else about them. 'Dave' could just as easily be a serial murderer as a quantity surveyor. In fact it's surprising if we meet, say, a Miranda Brain and she turns out to be a neurosurgeon.

That's why one common trick for remembering names is to force yourself to make some kind of memorable association in your mind. It's also probably why nicknames are better remembered than given names: they have more meaning because people acquire them for particular traits or events.

So, the next time you are beating yourself up for forgetting a name, don't worry, it's perfectly normal. Just be kind to others and keep reminding them what your name is. And when someone forgets your name, console yourself with Shakespeare:

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

Image credit: beast love

PsyBlog's How to Be Creative

If we can all be creative, why is it so hard to come up with truly original ideas?

It's because creativity is mysterious. Just ask any scientist, artist, writer or other highly creative person to explain how they come up with brilliant ideas and, if they're honest, they don't really know.

But over the decades psychologists have given ordinary participants countless tests, forms and tasks and conducted hundreds of hours of interviews. From these emerge the psychological conditions of creativity.

Not what you should do, but how you should be...

Click here to find out more...

Help comes from a new survey of research on money and happiness gloriously titled 'If Money Doesn't Make You Happy Then You Probably Aren't Spending It Right' (Dunn et al., 2011).

They are trying to explain this paradox:

"Wealthy people don't just have better toys; they have better nutrition and better medical care, more free time and more meaningful labor—more of just about every ingredient in the recipe for a happy life. And yet, they aren’t that much happier than those who have less. If money can buy happiness, then why doesn't it?"

Their answer is that we tend not to maximise our money because the human mind is surprisingly poor at working out what will make it happy. The conclusions they reach aren't just useful for wealthy people, they can help all of us.

Here are the 8 pieces of advice:

1. Why Many Small Pleasures Beat Fewer Larger Ones
2. The Dangers of Comparison Shopping
3. Why Spending Money on Others Promotes Your Happiness
4. Buy More Experiences and Less Stuff
5. Buy Less Insurance
6. How to Get More Pleasure from Your Money
7. The Impressive Power of a Stranger's Advice
8. How to Dodge Buyer’s Remorse

Image credit: iChaz

PsyBlog's How to Be Creative

If we can all be creative, why is it so hard to come up with truly original ideas?

It's because creativity is mysterious. Just ask any scientist, artist, writer or other highly creative person to explain how they come up with brilliant ideas and, if they're honest, they don't really know.

But over the decades psychologists have given ordinary participants countless tests, forms and tasks and conducted hundreds of hours of interviews. From these emerge the psychological conditions of creativity.

Not what you should do, but how you should be...

Click here to find out more...