In France there's a psychologist, Professor Nicolas Gueguen, who roams the North-West, asking young women for their telephone numbers—or at least his research assistants and experimental confederates do.

This isn't just to boost the national stereotype, but all in the name of science.

The results they've reported over the years confirm some things we think we already know and a few new insights. His experiments often involve approaching random strangers (usually women) in the street and asking them for something (usually their phone number). So far he's found that:

• Men getting out of expensive versus cheap cars are more likely to get the numbers of passing women.
• A fire-fighter's uniform makes women more likely to divulge the digits.
• A touch on the forearm makes a man more likely to get a woman's number (it also works on men, see 10 Psychological Effects of Nonsexual Touch).
• And, on a slightly different tack, why loud music in bars increases alcohol consumption.

Now, in his latest experiment, he's been testing the pulling power of musicians. How much extra sheen does it give a man if he's carrying a guitar case when he asks a woman for her number?

Naturally women are pretty cagey when approached by random strangers in the street, so Gueguen et al. (2013) chose a young man who had been highly rated by a panel of women.

He was told to stand in a local shopping centre and approach women of between 18 and 22, without regard to their appearance, and say to them:

"Hello. My name’s Antoine. I just want to say that I think you’re really pretty. I have to go to work this afternoon, and I was wondering if you would give me your phone number. I’ll phone you later and we can have a drink together someplace."

Then he smiled and gazed into their eyes. The poor chap had to do this in three different conditions while holding either:

• a guitar case,
• a sports bag or,
• no bag at all.

What happened was that when he wasn't holding anything he got a number 14% of the time. The sports bag, though, put women off and dropped his average to just 9%.

It was the guitar case that did the trick, bumping up his chances to 31%. Not bad at all considering he was approaching random strangers in the street.

So the mystical, romantic image of the musician had a pretty powerful effect. Well, it will until she discovers the guitar case only has a sports bag inside.

(No mention is made of what the young man did with all the telephone numbers, but I'm sure they were dealt with ethically.)

Image credit: Kris Kesiak

Making Habits, Breaking Habits

In his new book, Jeremy Dean--psychologist and author of PsyBlog--looks at how habits work, why they are so hard to change, and how to break bad old cycles and develop new healthy, creative, happy habits.

→ "Making Habits, Breaking Habits", is available now on Amazon.

→ "Making Habits, Breaking Habits", is available now on Amazon.

Having written a book on how to change your own habits, in interviews I was often asked: how can I change another person's habits?

Say I want my partner to stop cracking his knuckles or get my daughter to put down her mobile phone at meal times or start someone else exercising: how do I do that?

It's not something I cover in the book, which focuses mainly on how habits work, how much of our everyday lives they influence and how to change your own personal habits.

Ultimately the same techniques apply; but when you are working on someone else, you've got to take a few steps back. Do they want to change? If not, can you persuade them? How will this attempt to change them affect your relationship?

Then, if you manage that, you can move on to using all the same techniques that you might use on yourself.

So here are three preliminary things to think about when trying to change someone else's habits:

1. Are they open to change?

First up, and most obviously, people have to be open to the possibility of change.

People can be very defensive about their habits. They've taken years to develop and have become part of their identity; alternatively they are simply ashamed of them and want to try and justify them.

So, you may want your partner to stop cracking his knuckles or spending all his time on his smartphone, but is he open to the possibility that something might be done?

If not then even broaching the subject may be a waste of time. But let's say you think they might be open to change, that brings me on to...

2. Being non-judgemental

One thing therapists are taught when dealing with patients is to be non-judgemental. There's a good reason for that: it's not just that no one likes to be judged, but that it sets the wrong tone. The wrong tone is: I know best what's good for you and I'm telling you what to do. Not many people want to be ordered around like a dog.

The right tone has you both on an even footing and is warm and supportive. You're a helpful friend who is interested in their well-being but is still accepting who they are.

As you can imagine, this can be a difficult balance. But, for most people, just avoiding being judgemental is a really great start. We humans seem to love passing judgement on anything and everything and it's a difficult habit to give up.

3. Increasing their self-awareness

Along with detecting the seeds of change and being non-judgemental, one of the main things you can help someone else with is their self-awareness.

It's a central feature of habits is that people perform them unconsciously and repeatedly in the same situations. To name a few good habits: we brush our teeth in the bathroom, look both ways before we cross the road and put our seatbelts on in the car before we pull away.

A vital step in changing a habit, then, is identifying the situation in which it occurs. You can help other people identify the situations by gently pointing out what seems to prompt them to perform the habit. For example, are there particular emotions or physical situations that are associated with the habit?

If so, making the other person aware of these can help them change that habit.

Working together

So getting other people to change is firstly about backing up from the techniques of habit change and seeing if the other person is open to tweaking their behaviour. You can't make other people change if they don't want to.

After this you can move on to all the techniques I describe in the book. I've listed some of these in my article on how to make New Year's resolutions. These include things like choosing an alternative behaviour, making specific plans, thinking about things that are likely to trip them up, and so on.

These three pointers are just to get you started and by no means cover all bases. For children things are slightly different, for more seriously ingrained and destructive habits, these are only the beginning. But nevertheless these are a good place to start.

In theory with two people working together to change one person's habit, you are in a stronger position. It's not just that you can be their cheerleader; it's also that you can objectively look at their behaviour and make them aware of connections that might otherwise be mostly or completely unconscious.

Image credit: chantOmO

Making Habits, Breaking Habits

In his new book, Jeremy Dean--psychologist and author of PsyBlog--looks at how habits work, why they are so hard to change, and how to break bad old cycles and develop new healthy, creative, happy habits.

→ "Making Habits, Breaking Habits", is available now on Amazon.

→ "Making Habits, Breaking Habits", is available now on Amazon.

To see how easily the mind jumps to the wrong conclusions, try virtually taking part in a little experiment...

...imagine that you are presented with information about two groups of people about which you know nothing. Let's call them the Azaleans and the Begonians.

For each group you are given a list of positive and negative behaviours. A good one might be: an Azalean was seen helping an old lady across the road. A bad one might be: a Begonian urinated in the street.

So, you read this list of good and bad behaviours about the Azaleans and Begonians and afterwards you make some judgements about them. How often do they perform good and bad behaviours and what are they?

What you notice is that it's the Begonians that seem dodgy. They are the ones more often to be found shoving burgers into mailboxes and ringing doorbells and running away. The Azaleans, in contrast, are a sounder bunch; certainly not blameless, but overall better people.

While you're happy with the judgement, you're in for a shock. What's revealed to you afterwards is that actually the ratio of good to bad behaviours listed for both the Azaleans and Begonians was exactly the same. For the Azaleans 18 positive behaviours were listed along with 8 negative. For the Begonians it was 9 positive and 4 negative.

In reality you just had less information about the Begonians. What happened was that you built up an illusory connection between more frequent bad behaviours and the Begonians; they weren't more frequent, however, they just seemed that way.

When the experiment is over you find out that most other people had done exactly the same thing, concluding that the Begonians were worse people than the Azaleans.

Explaining the illusion

This experimental method is actually from a classic study by Hamilton and Gifford (1976), which is all about how we perceive other people's positive and negative traits. In the experiment, people had different perceptions of the two groups, good for the majority and bad for the minority, purely because they had more information about the majority. It's not hard to see why this sort of process might contribute to the formation of prejudice in society at large.

Now, psychologists have not agreed how to explain this and other types of illusory correlations.

One explanation is that people over-estimate the diagnostic power of infrequent events. In other words: if there is only one Martian who lives in your street and he/she/it listens to skiffle music, then you tend to think that all Martians must like skiffle. On the other hand if half the street is filled with law-abiding Martians, only a few of whom like skiffle, you'll guess that it's only a minority interest.

Others say that illusory correlations are down to how memory or learning works or just a function of incomplete information. Whatever the explanation, we do see these illusory correlations everywhere.

Golf and stock prices

Here's an example of a much less subtle type of illusory correlation from the world of CEOs. When you are deciding what to pay a CEO, what factors do you take into account? I'm sure you can list a few but what about golfing ability? Would you pay a CEO more because they were better at golf? No?

One analysis has looked at the correlation between golfing ability and American CEO pay (Hogarth & Kolev, 2010). It found that as golfing ability improved, their pay went up. Non-golfers were, on average, the lowest paid of all.

And here's the kicker: the better the CEOs were at golf, the worse their stocks performed. So in people's minds being good at golf was associated with more pay, but in reality it was associated with worse performance!

The assumption is that there's an illusory correlation going on here. Somehow it's assumed that because someone is good at golf, they must also be good at other stuff, like running a multinational corporation, and so they get paid more.

Sticking with the business theme, all sorts of illusory correlations exist in equity markets. One sign that traders sometimes use to predict price movements is the 'head-and-shoulders' chart. It's when the stock's price movement looks like a person's head and shoulders: in other words, two smaller peaks with one big peak in between.

Although it's considered a reliable signal, and is associated with increased trading, the head-and-shoulders shape on the chart doesn't profitably predict price fluctuations (Bender & Simon, 2012). It's just another illusory correlation: what our meaning-hungry minds are seeing everywhere.

My favourite types of illusory correlations, though, are like when you turn the light on and there's a power-cut, or when you stamp your foot and there's a simultaneous clap of thunder. For a single moment, you feel like you've got super-powers.

Image credit: Village9991

Making Habits, Breaking Habits

In his new book, Jeremy Dean--psychologist and author of PsyBlog--looks at how habits work, why they are so hard to change, and how to break bad old cycles and develop new healthy, creative, happy habits.

→ "Making Habits, Breaking Habits", is available now on Amazon.

→ "Making Habits, Breaking Habits", is available now on Amazon.

Have a look at the following list of values and personal characteristics. If you had to pick just one, which most defines who you are and what matters to you?

• Your family
• Being good at sports
• Belief in a higher power
• Your friends
• Your creativity
• Aesthetics
• Your job

Perhaps what matters most to you isn't there (this isn't a comprehensive list!), in that case think about what does matter to you most.

In the burgeoning series of experiments which use this type of self-affirmation exercise, participants are then asked to write a paragraph or two on why this characteristic or value is so important to them. Sometimes they also think about a specific time or story that is illustrative.

The effects can be quite useful across a surprisingly large number of domains. It can help boost self-control in the moment and even increase social confidence for two or more months after it's carried out.

Problem-solving

In a new study, Cresswell et al. (2013) tested whether a simple self-affirmation exercise would have a beneficial effect on problem-solving under stress, particularly for individuals who have been stressed recently.

In their experiment, half the participants did the self-affirmation exercise while the rest performed a similar, but ineffectual exercise.

The results showed that those who had been stressed recently and were self-affirmed before they began the exercise performed better at the problem-solving task. This suggests the self-affirmation exercise could be useful for people under stress who are, for example, taking exams, going to job interviews or under pressure at work.

What's fascinating about the self-affirmation task is that it doesn't have to be related to the area in which you're looking to improve. So thinking about the importance of your family can increase your problem-solving performance, even though the two have little in common.

We don't know exactly why the self-affirmation exercise works; indeed the researchers tested a couple of options in their study—that perhaps it improves people's mood or that they engaged more with the task—but they don't find evidence for either.

Instead they think it more likely that the self-affirmation exercise helps you move your attention more flexibly, which improves memory function.

Whatever the mechanism, this growing body of evidence on the benefits of self-affirmation is encouraging.

Image credit: Vu Bui

Making Habits, Breaking Habits

In his new book, Jeremy Dean--psychologist and author of PsyBlog--looks at how habits work, why they are so hard to change, and how to break bad old cycles and develop new healthy, creative, happy habits.

→ "Making Habits, Breaking Habits", is available now on Amazon.

→ "Making Habits, Breaking Habits", is available now on Amazon.

"Have successful professionals always been successful? Take Francesca Gino. An Associate Professor at Harvard, she is considered by many to be a superstar.

But things did not always look so bright for her: two years in a row she gave job talks at a number of top 10 schools and universities, but got no offers from those schools. Yet, in 2009, everything suddenly turned up roses; she got offers from Harvard, Wharton, Berkeley, and New York University. What had changed?

Well, clearly she was older and wiser. But she also changed her pre-talk ritual: before each campus talk and interview she sat down and wrote out a reflection of a time in which she had power." (Lammers et al., 2013)

An inspiring story, certainly, which suggests a simple way to improve your performance in job interviews and probably in other situations where boosting the feeling of power is important.

All you do is sit down beforehand and reflect on a time when you had power. By doing this you are activating your own personal sense of power.

OK, though, but as a scientist I have to be sceptical of anecdotes. This may have worked for Professor Gino, but perhaps she just got better at interviews or her talent was finally recognised. That's why a new study led by Dutch psychologist, Joris Lammers, is so interesting.

What they did across two experiments was have some people write application letters for an imaginary job and others actually do a 15-minute face-to-face interview (Lammers et al., 2013).

For both the application letter and the interview studies, though, the researchers manipulated how much power they felt:

• Application letter experiment: before they wrote the letter, half the participants wrote about a time when they had power and half about a time when they didn't.
• Interview experiment: one-third of participants wrote about a time they had high power, one-third low power and the final third didn't write about anything beforehand.

Here are the results:

• Application letter experiment: people expressed a little more self-confidence when they thought about high-power situations beforehand, compared with lower power situations.
• Interview experiment: in the mock interview, 47% of participants who didn't write anything in advance were accepted for the 'job'. This went up to 68% when they wrote about a high power situation and down to only 26% for those who wrote about feeling low in power.

This shows that the exercise of writing about a high-power situation before a job interview can be beneficial. It may also be marginally helpful when writing the interview letter.

The researchers chose the job interview situation partly because there's something intensely dis-empowering about it. Everything about it—the evaluation, the continuous requirement for self-justification and evidence—seems designed to sap your self-belief.

Most interviewers prefer to see a confident, assertive individual, but the situation tends to make people meek, defensive and subservient. This exercise may help to counteract this problem.

Still, it's not just in interviews that this exercise is likely to be helpful. Feeling more powerful also makes you feel more confident, more in control and even more optimistic. The list of situations in which that might be useful is endless.

So have a think back to a time when you felt masterful and power up!

Image credit: John 'K'

Making Habits, Breaking Habits

In his new book, Jeremy Dean--psychologist and author of PsyBlog--looks at how habits work, why they are so hard to change, and how to break bad old cycles and develop new healthy, creative, happy habits.

→ "Making Habits, Breaking Habits", is available now on Amazon.

→ "Making Habits, Breaking Habits", is available now on Amazon.

We worry about work, money, our health, our partners, children...the list goes on.

And let's face it, there are plenty of things to worry about, and that's even before you've turned on the news. This means that when the mind is given an idle moment, often what it seems to fill it with is worrying.

Worry can be useful if it's aimed at solving problems but less useful when it's just making us unhappy or interfering with our daily lives.

The standard psychological methods for dealing with everyday worry are pretty simple. But just because they're simple and relatively well-known doesn't mean we don't need reminding to use them from time-to-time.

So here is a five-step plan called "The Peaceful Mind" that was actually developed by psychologists specifically for people with dementia (Paukert et al., 2013). Because of this it has a strong focus on the behavioural aspects of relaxation and less on the cognitive. That suits our purposes here as the cognitive stuff (what you are worrying about) can be quite individual, whereas the behavioural things, everyone can do.

1. Awareness

This is the step most people skip. Why? Because it feels like we already know the answer. You probably already think you know what makes you anxious.

But sometimes the situations, physical signs and emotions that accompany anxiety aren't as obvious as you might think. So try keeping a kind of 'anxiety journal', whether real or virtual. When do you feel anxious and what are the physical signs of anxiety?

Sometimes this stage on its own is enough to help people with their anxiety. As I never tire of saying, especially in the area of habits, self-awareness is the first step to change.

2. Breathing

If you've been reading PsyBlog for a while you'll know all about how both mind and body each feed back to the other. For example, standing confidently makes people feel more confident. Mind doesn't just affect body, body also affects mind.

It's the same with anxiety: taking conscious control of breathing sends a message back to the mind.

So, when you're anxious, which is often accompanied by shallow, quick breathing, try changing it to relaxed breathing, which is usually slower and deeper. You can count slowly while breathing in and out and try putting your hand on your stomach and feeling the breath moving in and out.

In addition, adopt whatever bodily positions you associate with being relaxed (although suddenly lying down before giving a talk in public might be a step too far!). Typically these are things like relaxing muscles, adopting an open stance to the world (unfold arms, hint of a smile).

3. Calming thoughts

It's all very well saying: "Think calming thoughts", but who can think of any calming thoughts when stressful situations are approaching and the heart is pumping?

The key is to get your calming thoughts ready in advance. They could be as simple as "Calm down!" but they need to be things that you personally believe in for them to be most effective. It's about finding what form of words or thoughts is right for you.

4. Increase activity

It might seem strange to say that the answer to anxiety is more activities, as we tend to think the answer to anxiety is relaxation and that involves doing less.

But, when unoccupied, the mind wanders, often to anxieties; whereas when engaged with an activity we enjoy, we feel better. Even neutral or somewhat wearing activities, like household admin, can be better than sitting around worrying.

The problem with feeling anxious is that it makes you less likely to want to engage with distracting activities. You see the problem.

One answer is to have a list of activities that you find enjoyable ready in advance. When anxiety hits at an inactive moment, you can go off and do something to occupy your mind.

Try to have things on your list that you know you will enjoy and are easy to get started on. For example, 'invent a time machine' may be biting off a tiny bit more than you can chew, but 'a walk around the block' is do-able.

5. Sleep skills

Often when people are anxious they have problems sleeping. Sometimes when you feel anxious there's nothing worse than lying in bed, in the dark, with only your own thoughts to occupy your attention.

And lack of sleep leads to anxiety about sleeping which can lead, paradoxically, to worse sleep.

Breaking out of this loop can be hard but practising 'sleep hygiene' can help. This is all about getting into good sleeping habits. I've covered this before in 6 Easy Steps to Falling Asleep Fast, so check that article out for the details.

Image credit: Several seconds

Making Habits, Breaking Habits

In his new book, Jeremy Dean--psychologist and author of PsyBlog--looks at how habits work, why they are so hard to change, and how to break bad old cycles and develop new healthy, creative, happy habits.

→ "Making Habits, Breaking Habits", is available now on Amazon.

→ "Making Habits, Breaking Habits", is available now on Amazon.

When it comes to pinpointing the source of our woes, we tend not to think too much about the little hassles of everyday life; after all they're just little hassles, nothing compared to the big stuff.

You're late for a meeting, you run out of biscuits or you get a parking ticket; irritating certainly, but nothing really serious, or anything like it.

Instead, we tend to blame the big events in life: divorce, disease and bereavement. And, when looking for what puts people over the edge, that's exactly where psychological researchers have concentrated their attention: on the big stuff.

But many are waking up to the fact that although the little hassles in life are smaller, they're also more numerous, so they can really add up over time. And, whether stressful events are big or small, it matters a lot how we deal with them.

Daily stressors

In new research published in Psychological Science, Charles et al. (2013) looked at people's reactions to everyday stressors and how this played out a decade later. Participants were asked about their daily stressors over eight days and generally how they felt. People reported having all the usual sorts of stressors like having arguments, a fridge breaking down or being late for an appointment.

Then, 10 years later, they were revisited and asked whether they had been treated for anxiety, depression or any other emotional problems in the last year.

What the results showed was that how people reacted to the little stressors of everyday life predicted whether they developed psychological problems a decade later (incidentally, the number who did report a disorder was almost one in five).

This fits in with other recent studies which have also shown that people's reactions to ordinary stressors predict depressive symptoms (e.g. Parrish et al., 2011).

Whether problems are big or small, what matters is how we react to them. People who tend to do worst are those that have the strongest emotional reaction to both big and small events.

We tend to think that depression is always a reaction to some really bad thing happening and sometimes it is; but sometimes it's all those little things piled on top of one another that can get you down.

Image credit: Stephen Poff

Making Habits, Breaking Habits

In his new book, Jeremy Dean--psychologist and author of PsyBlog--looks at how habits work, why they are so hard to change, and how to break bad old cycles and develop new healthy, creative, happy habits.

→ "Making Habits, Breaking Habits", is available now on Amazon.

→ "Making Habits, Breaking Habits", is available now on Amazon.

First a confession: I have never understood the popular fascination with whether women (or men) are better at multitasking.

That's because multitasking is something that's best avoided for any task that needs concentration. Humans don't multitask well, unless one of the activities is automatic and doesn't require much (conscious) processing.

Still, one of the reasons the question keeps coming back is because of the media obsession with the battle of the sexes; they like to report anything that shows even the most minuscule psychological gender differences.

As a result what we get is the news that, one week, women are better at multitasking and the next week it's men.

Part of the reason you see these articles is that some studies do indeed find a small superiority for women and some find a small superiority for men, depending on the exact tasks.

But let's take a real-world activity like driving. What if you compare how good men and women are at driving while talking on a mobile phone? Now, somewhere at the back of your mind, perhaps, there may be prejudices brewing.

Stifle those thoughts, though, because Watson and Strayer (2010) have found no difference between men and women on this sort of multitasking.

And it turns out that this is the case in general for multitasking. Overall studies struggle to find strong, consistent evidence one way or the other (Strayer et al., 2013).

Certainly, some people, both men and women, are better multitaskers than others, and that is interesting. But as for the difference between men and women, the truth is there is much more variation amongst men and women than there is between men and women.

As ever with a young science like psychology, the balance of evidence may change in the future, but at the moment the best guess is that the differences are very small or non-existent.

So the next time someone makes a comment about gender differences in multitasking, you can say: "Rubbish, I read on PsyBlog that there are no proven differences between men and women at multitasking."

Image credit: Rodrigo Sombra

Making Habits, Breaking Habits

In his new book, Jeremy Dean--psychologist and author of PsyBlog--looks at how habits work, why they are so hard to change, and how to break bad old cycles and develop new healthy, creative, happy habits.

→ "Making Habits, Breaking Habits", is available now on Amazon.

→ "Making Habits, Breaking Habits", is available now on Amazon.

It's striking how much of our emotional experience is down to interpretation.

Take the physical feelings you get when you're about to talk in public: the sweaty palms, the churning stomach and the spinning room. Isn't that much the same physical experience you get when you've fallen in love?

Yet one experience most would run a mile from and the other we enjoy. The difference is partly down to the meaning we give these events.

But how far does this go? What about the hassles of everyday life and stress in general? Is stress really a killer or can it be reinterpreted away?

Well, there's certainly such a thing as the way that we habitually think about stress. One of the most common, which is frequently reinforced by the media, is the 'stress-is-debilitating' mindset.

What Crum et al. (2013) wonder in a new paper is: can we change this mindset and does thinking about stress in a positive way have any effect on how we react to it?

To conduct some preliminary tests, they recruited a group of investment bankers, who were split into three groups, each of which were shown a different 10-minute video. Some of them watched a video that suggested stress can be good for you.

The 'stress-is-enhancing' video suggested that some people do their best work under pressure: for example, Captain "Sully" Sullenberger landed his stricken airliner on the Hudson River and Winston Churchill successfully led Britain through WWII.

A second group watched a video reinforcing the idea that stress is debilitating, while a third acted as a control.

The bankers reported back over a few weeks on their stress mindset, how they were doing at work and their levels of stress. The results showed that those who'd seen the 'stress-is-enhancing' video did develop a more positive stress mindset. This led to them reporting better performance at work and fewer psychological problems over the subsequent two weeks.

This suggests something as simple as a short video can start to change how you think about stress, at least in the short-term.

Another study by Crum et al. examined one possible mechanism for how a changed mindset might be beneficial. This found that people who tended to think stress was enhancing were more likely to want feedback. So, people who think positively about stress are likely to use that to help them solve problems.

In addition, thinking that stress is enhancing was associated with lower levels of cortisol, a hormone closely associated with the stress response. In other words, people's physiological reaction to stress was better when they endorsed the idea that stress is enhancing.

So, is stress good or bad for you? This evidence underlines the fact that, as so often, what you believe influences how both mind and body reacts.

Image credit: Truthout.org

Making Habits, Breaking Habits

In his new book, Jeremy Dean--psychologist and author of PsyBlog--looks at how habits work, why they are so hard to change, and how to break bad old cycles and develop new healthy, creative, happy habits.

→ "Making Habits, Breaking Habits", is available now on Amazon.

→ "Making Habits, Breaking Habits", is available now on Amazon.

Sometimes psychologists come up with such good names for their findings that I'm powerless to resist. Take this newly minted expression: 'the temporal Doppler effect'.

This really appeals to both the psychologists in me and my inner physics geek.

Here's a reminder of the Doppler effect, which I'm sure you've experienced even if you haven't heard of the Austrian physicist Christian Doppler (click here for YouTube video):

(In case you can't see the video: the Doppler effect is most often experienced when an ambulance with siren blaring travels past you. The pitch of the siren shifts downwards as it whizzes past. The siren's notes aren't actually changing in pitch; it's the effect of the ambulance's movement on the sound-waves reaching your ear that produces the effect.)

So, what is a temporal Doppler effect and what does this have to do with psychology?

It seems to suggest that as events approach us from the future they feel closer, compared with events in the past, which feel further away as they recede. In other words: one week in the future feels closer in time than one week in the past.

How far away does it feel?

Could that be true? For example, imagine I ask you one week before Valentine's Day how psychologically distant that feels to you. Then, imagine I ask you the same question one week after Valentine's Day. Surely they should feel about the same distance?

What the temporal Doppler effect suggests is that Valentine's Day will feel closer in time one week beforehand than one week after.

Sounds mad? Well this is exactly the experiment that Caruso et al. (2013) carried out. And guess what? They got this temporal Doppler effect. On a 1 to 7 scale, where 1 means it feels close in time and 7 means it feels far in time, people rated an upcoming Valentine's Day an average of 3.9 when it was one week in the future, but an average of 4.8 when it was one week in the past.

They got similar results for comparisons of time-points both one month and one year in the future and the past. This temporal Doppler effect kept showing up: the future seems to feel psychologically closer to people than the past, despite the fact we know it's exactly the same.

Metaphors of time and space

So why does it happen? Caruso et al. put forward two explanations, one more abstract than the other. I'll do the abstract one first but feel free to bail out and get on to the concrete one if it gets too much!

The abstract argument goes like this: we don't directly experience time although we see its effects. Unlike space, which we can clearly see, time is invisible. In contrast, you can reach out and touch objects and feel the space between them.

Because time is abstract we try to understand it psychologically using metaphors. We say that 'time flows like a river', 'time marches on' or 'time flies'. These are all spatial ways of thinking about an abstract idea.

The result is that we unconsciously apply the same spatial rules to time. Just like things that are coming towards us sound higher in pitch and appear to us closer in space than things going away, so we intuit that things ahead of us in time are also closer than things in the past.

Convinced?

If not you'll be interested in a further experiment Caruso et al. carried out where they tried to reverse the temporal Doppler effect with a simple manipulation: they had people walking backwards in virtual reality (VR).

Compared to those walking forwards in VR, those walking backwards showed no tendency towards thinking the future was closer than the past. This helps support the idea that how we think about time is linked to how we think about space and why the temporal Doppler effect occurs.

Future-facing

Now here's the more concrete explanation. The temporal Doppler effect is also highly adaptive. It's very useful for our survival and success in life that the future seems closer than the past. What happens tomorrow we can plan for, what happened yesterday is just a memory.

Yes, it's important to understand where you've come from, but without a plan, you can't know where you're going. The temporal Doppler effect is one example of how we're future-oriented creatures; always scheming for, worrying about, plotting and simulating the future. So that hopefully, when we get there, we've got some kind of plan.

Image credit: Myxi

Making Habits, Breaking Habits

In his new book, Jeremy Dean--psychologist and author of PsyBlog--looks at how habits work, why they are so hard to change, and how to break bad old cycles and develop new healthy, creative, happy habits.

→ "Making Habits, Breaking Habits", is available now on Amazon.

→ "Making Habits, Breaking Habits", is available now on Amazon.