Most people are pretty bad at taking advice from others. People don't mind hearing the advice, they just hate to take it.  This is one facet of what psychologists call the 'egocentric bias': the general rule that we think we know better.

The egocentric bias strikes in the boardroom, in schools, in hospitals and everywhere where two or more people are gathered together and one turns to the other and says: "What do you think?"

It's the reason why every person and every generation has to make its own mistakes. People have a tendency not to listen until after it's too late.

This is a real shame because a lot of the time other people have really important insights or experience that we don't have ourselves (e.g. The Impressive Power of a Stranger's Advice). We can't hope to know everything ourselves.

So how can we force ourselves to properly weigh other people's advice?

An approach that's recently come to the fore in psychological research, and popular culture, is perspective-taking. You simply imagine someone who is like you faced with the same question and then you ask yourself what they would do.

It's the secular equivalent of the Christian question: "What would Jesus do?"

Now it's been tested in psychological research by Yaniv and Choshen-Hillel (2012). Across three studies they had some participants make choices from their own perspective and some from the perspective of another person who is similar to themselves.

What they found was that taking another imaginary person's perspective had the desired effect of encouraging participants to take other people's advice.

It's a fascinating finding but it only tests people's judgements in a relatively simple situation: guessing the amount of calories in a foodstuff. We'll have to wait for further research to look at more complicated or nuanced decisions.

Still, the procedure is so simple it's unlikely to do any harm. Plus anything that helps us think outside ourselves is very likely to be helpful since there are quite a few other studies which have found robust benefits for perspective-taking.

Image credit: Pryere

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...

Changing people's minds is hard.

We resist having our attitudes adjusted by others, especially when the message isn't directly relevant to us and we aren't paying that much attention.

But what if you could get people to change their own minds? People will listen to themselves and will automatically generate arguments that have personal relevance for them.

It's not as crazy as it sounds. Actually people are being encouraged to persuade themselves all the time. Here are a few examples:

1. When a parent wants to change a child's behaviour they might ask them why it is wrong, rather than just telling them it is wrong.
2. When we're encouraged to take part in role-playing exercises, we might espouse attitudes and values we don't believe in.
3. When we want to change our behaviour, say, to healthier eating, we might try to convince ourselves we don't like the forbidden foods as much as we do.

So, there are all kinds of situations in which we are arguing with ourselves, whether it's because we've initiated it ourselves, or because we've been subtly encouraged to do so by someone else.

Self-persuasion

But does it work? Does self-persuasion make any real difference?

Janis and King (1954) tested this by having some participants give a talk while two others listened. Then they swapped around and one of the passive listeners gave a talk to the other two on a different topic.

What emerged was that, on average, people were more convinced by the talk when they gave it themselves than when they merely heard it passively. This suggests that we really are persuaded more strongly when we make the argument ourselves, even if it isn't in line with our own viewpoint.

The same trick works with attitudes to smoking. People are more put off smoking when they deliver an anti-smoking message than when they passively receive it (research described in Brinol et al., 2012).

We see the same effect for self-confidence. When people are told to present themselves in a self-confident way to others, they actually feel more self-confident themselves.

The explanation seems to be that we are very good at convincing ourselves because we know just what sorts of arguments will sway us.

So if you want someone to persuade themselves, you can try asking them to put aside their own attitude for a moment and try getting them to generate their own arguments for the point you want to make.

Whatever the cover story, as long as the person is encouraged to generate their own arguments, it has a chance of changing their mind.

Image credit: Gary Knight

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 are lots of metaphors floating around in creativity. We talk about 'thinking outside the box', 'putting two and two together' and 'seeing both sides of the problem'.

But are these only metaphors or can we boost our creativity by taking them literally? We know our minds interact in all sorts of interesting ways with our bodies, so what if we enacted these metaphors physically?

That's the question Leung et al. (2012) examine in a new study published in the journal Psychological Science. This brings together two of my favourite topics here on PsyBlog: creativity and embodied cognition. Across five studies they tested ways of making people more creative by simply changing postures.

1. On one hand...on the other hand

Creative ideas are often arrived at by bringing together two apparently unrelated thoughts. When we can think about a problem in terms of two different sides, we are more likely to find a way to integrate them. This is encapsulated by the phrase "On the one hand...on the other hand..."

So, what if while trying to solve a problem you physically hold up one hand followed by the other? Might this send a signal to the unconscious to encourage it to consider the problem from more than one angle?

Leung et al. had participants doing this and found that those who gestured with both hands came up with more novel ideas than those who gestured with just one hand.

2. Literally sit outside a box

'Thinking outside the box' is an awfully overused cliché. Nevertheless it does capture the idea that in creativity you have to try and explore new areas.

In their research Leung et al. had participants literally either sitting in boxes or sitting next to boxes while doing creativity tests. Magically just this simple manipulation worked. People quite literally sitting outside the box came up with more ideas than those sitting in the box.

3. Wander around, but not in a square

If you don't have a box handy, you might like to try just wandering around randomly, but whatever happens don't walk in a square.

Leung et al. found that people came up with more ideas when they wandered around randomly than when they walked in a square or than when they didn't walk at all.

4. Put two and two together

Not all creative thinking is about plucking amazing ideas out of the ether.

Sometimes we need to do the grunt work of logically fitting together ideas or objects we've already got in front of us. We've got to put two and two together and make sure the answer isn't 17, metaphorically speaking.

This is what psychologists call 'convergent thinking' and it's where we bring our logic, knowledge and skills to bear on a problem.

A fourth study tested the idea that sorting piles of cards from two stacks into one would encourage convergent thinking.

It did. Participants who sorted the cards from two piles into one did better on a test of convergent thinking than those who just fiddled around with the cards in one pile.

5. Imagine it

Too lazy to get a box or wander around randomly? Then this last study is for you. Here participants either watched a Second Life avatar wandering freely or walking in a square.

According to the results this also worked as those watching the freely wandering avatar came up with more unconventional ideas for gifts than those watching the square-walking avatar.

This one is cool because it shows that the postures aren't as important as the state of mind that they encourage. The mere suggestion that someone might adopt these postures was enough to cue a more creative state of mind.

And lie down

This new research joins previous studies which have suggested that simple postures can affect creativity.

In one study people lying down were better at solving anagrams (Lipnicki & Byrne, 2005); in another their concentration was boosted by wearing a white coat. And another used mind-body dissonance—e.g. thinking an unhappy thought while smiling—to boost creativity (How To Promote Visionary Thinking).

All of these studies show how the position of our bodies feeds back into the state of our minds. And it also shows how deeply metaphors are planted in our consciousness.

Image credit: Holger Eileby

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...

Have you ever wondered why one person can speak in public without apparent nerves while another crumples under pressure?

Or why one elite athlete can shake off their nerves to win Olympic gold while another chokes?

Even with ample experience some people never seem to learn to cope with their emotions.

A key insight comes from a controversial psychology study carried out on a rickety bridge by Dutton and Aron (1973).

The love bridge

Men crossing the bridge were approached by an attractive woman who asked them to fill out a survey. The men were chosen because they were known to be nervous and this was exaggerated by the fact the bridge was swaying, its handrails were very low and there was a 230-foot drop to the river below.

After the men filled out the survey the woman gave them her number and said they could call her if they wanted the study explained in more detail.

A little further up men crossing another bridge were also being approached by a female researcher half-way across. The difference was that this bridge was sturdy, did not sway and was only a few feet above a small stream.

One of the key tests was: how many people would call up the attractive woman?

On the stable, safe bridge only 2 out of the 16 participants called. But, on the rickety bridge, 9 out of 18 called. So something about the rickety bridge made people more likely to call.

Fear transformed into attraction?

Dutton and Aron's explanation was that it's how we label the feelings we have that's important, not just the feelings themselves. In this experiment men on the rickety bridge were more stressed and jittery than those on the stable bridge. And the argument is that they interpreted these bodily feelings as attraction, leading them to be more likely to make the call.

So: fear had been transformed into attraction.

This explanation is now controversial because subsequent studies have found that it's rare to be able to reinterpret a negative emotion like fear into a positive one like attraction. Indeed some studies have specifically shown it can't be done (Zanna et al., 1976).

However, we can reinterpret one positive emotion into a different positive emotion, and the same for negative emotions.

Certainly neutral bodily feelings can be interpreted either way. That's why you can have a strong cup of coffee and the arousing effect might contribute to either elation or irritation, depending on how your day is going.

For a more extreme example think about the physical feeling you get on a roller-coaster. It's not dissimilar from being mugged. You sweat, the knees wobble, the heart races and the bowels loosen. But one experience people will pay for and the other everyone would pay to avoid.

Of course the aftermath of each experience and the interpretation is quite different.

Going back to the original questions: the speaker who tries to reinterpret their nerves as excitement and anticipation is likely to do better than one who thinks of them as signals to run away and hide.

In the same way the athlete who deals with performance anxiety by trying to channel it into their race will do better than the athlete who allows it to overwhelm them.

Our emotions aren't just things that happen inside us which bubble up from the deep over which we have little or no control. Like conscious thoughts their effect on our behaviour depends on how we interpret them.

Emotions aren't the opposite of rationality, they are part and parcel of rationality and do respond to how we think. While Dutton and Aron's experiment may have been flawed, the motivating idea behind their experiment was not: how we label and interpret our feelings can fundamentally change our experience of them.

Image credits: Jamie Hladky & _chrisUK

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...

Imagine two people: one from the upper classes and one from the lower classes. Let's say our lower class individual works in a factory, lives in a small house in an average area and receives a relatively small salary.

Our upper class individual, though, has inherited money, lives in a large house in a beautiful area and doesn't need to work for money.

Now let's say both these individuals are driving along in their cars (one cheap, one expensive), when they approach a pedestrian crossing (crosswalk for our US friends). There's someone there waiting to cross and, by law, they are obliged to stop. And let's say we're in a country where generally people obey these sorts of rules.

On balance, who do you think is more likely to cheat and cut off the pedestrian? The upper class person or the lower class person?

Well, wonder no more because this exact observational study was carried out by Piff et al. (2012) in California. They stood at a junction watching who cut off pedestrians and how expensive their cars were.

The results were pretty clear. Overall about a third of drivers failed to stop for pedestrians, but it was those in the most expensive cars that were disproportionately represented amongst the discourteous drivers. About 30% of drivers in the cheapest cars failed to stop compared with over 45% of those in the most expensive cars.

Piff and colleagues then retired to the laboratory to see if they could catch upper class people cheating more than the lower classes on other sorts of tests. Sure enough, they could:

"...upper-class individuals were more likely to exhibit unethical decision-making tendencies (study 3), take valued goods from others (study 4), lie in a negotiation (study 5), cheat to increase their chances of winning a prize (study 6), and endorse unethical behavior at work (study 7) than were lower-class individuals."

Perhaps the stereotype of the money-grabbing Mr Burns-type has some truth after all.

The authors think that all kinds of factors probably contribute to this finding. Here are a few:

• Upper class people are more insulated from ordinary society and tend to think the rules don't apply to them.
• Upper class people have the resources to make problems 'go away', so they are less exposed to the adverse consequences of their unethical behaviour.
• They care less about what other people think.

Of course none of this is to say that all upper class people are cheats. That's far from the truth.

What this study is finding is a trend amongst some upper class people. There are plenty of examples of upper class people acting in ethical and praiseworthy ways, it's just that this is more unusual than the rest of us might like.

The authors conclude by saying:

"Although greed may indeed be a motivation all people have felt at points in their lives, we argue that greed motives are not equally prevalent across all social strata. As our findings suggest, the pursuit of self-interest is a more fundamental motive among society's elite, and the increased want associated with greater wealth and status can promote wrongdoing."

Image credit: Die Jugend

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...

It's surprising how much simple movements of the body can affect the way we think. Using expansive gestures with open limbs makes us feel more powerful, crossing your arms makes you more persistent and lying down can bring more insights (read more here: 10 Simple Postures That Boost Performance).

So if moving the body can have these effects, what about the clothes we wear?

We're all well aware of how dressing up in different ways can make us feel more attractive, sporty or professional, depending on the outfit, but can the clothes you wear actually change cognitive performance or is it just a feeling?

Adam and Galinsky (2012) tested the effect of simply wearing a white lab coat on people's powers of attention. The idea is that white coats are associated with scientists, who are in turn thought to have close attention to detail.

What they found was that people wearing white coats outperformed those who weren't. Indeed they made only half as many errors as those wearing their own clothes on the Stroop Test (one way of measuring attention).

The authors dub the effect 'enclothed cognition', suggesting that all manner of different clothes probably affect our cognition in many different ways.

This opens the way for all sorts of clothes-based experiments. Is the writer who wears a fedora more creative? Is the psychologist wearing little round glasses and smoking a cigar more insightful. Does a chef's hat make the resultant food taste better?

From now on I will only be editing articles for PsyBlog while wearing a white coat to help keep the typo count low. Hopefully you will be doing your part by reading PsyBlog in a cap and gown.

Image credit: mars_discovery_district

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...

It might seem like a question that's too obvious to ask. Practically every job description ever written demands 'a good team player'.

Teams of all kinds pop up everywhere in organisations and the assumption is that they enhance organisational performance.

In fact the evidence for the supposedly stupendous power of teams is pretty weak. Hundreds of studies have been carried out examining people's performance in groups.

Far from finding a huge boost to performance from teamwork, the studies are neutral or only show small benefits (Allen & Hecht, 2004). Here are some typical characteristics of groups from Hackman (1990):

• High performing groups are not normal, instead groups often have huge variations in ability from top to bottom.
• People in groups often waste time squabbling over goals.
• Groups frequently suffer downward performance spirals.

The message from the research is clear: the benefits of teamwork are nowhere near as clear as the fashion would suggest. Worse, sometimes the arbitrary implementation of teams reduces organisational performance. The classic example is group brainstorming which just doesn't work (see my article on brainstorming).

There's no 'I' in 'team'

Obviously sometimes people do work together much better in teams. Some jobs are like team sports, they need close co-ordination between people to achieve their goals.

But many, many jobs don't have these characteristics. Academics and call-centre workers don't need to be in teams or groups, neither do sales, HR or many other standard corporate departments.

Indeed many people belong to multiple teams, many of which may have very little meaning for them. And when there's little meaning, there's little effort (see: social loafing).

So is teamwork just a management fad or is there a deeper psychological function?

Allen and Hecht do point out that teams can be psychological beneficial. The research suggests that people draw both confidence and satisfaction from being in a team, even if it doesn't boost performance much.

But they also caution that not everyone responds well to teams and their benefits have been overinflated.

Image credit: Thomas Cunningham

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...

Stanley Milgram was an American social psychologist who is most famous for his obedience experiments (see below), but he was fascinated by all aspects of social order, especially in the city.

Like me he wondered how city dwellers manage to live in such proximity to each other. He wondered at how orderly queues are and what happens when their delicate balance is challenged. And he wanted to see how interconnected people were in an age before Twitter and Facebook.

Here are eight pieces of his research which each provide insight into how society works.

1. Lost child

How helpful are people? For example, who would fail to stop and help a lost child? No one, surely?

To find out Milgram decided to enlist the help of some 6 and 10-years-olds. They were sent out onto US streets (with an observer nearby for safety) and told to ask the first passerby: "I'm lost. Can you call my house?"

In the towns the reaction was relatively heartening: 72% offered help. In the cities, less so, with only 46% offering help to the lost child.

Beyond the bare numbers the stories were even more telling. In the towns even those who didn't help were sympathetic, but in the city they ignored the child, swerved around or just pushed money into their hands. One New Yorker told the child: "Go into that restaurant. Your mother's waiting for you there."

2. Line cutting and queue jumping

Milgram considered the queue a classic example of how groups of people automatically create social order out of chaos.

But this social order can be fragile when faced with chaotic threats, like that of the queue-jumper. To test people's reactions Milgram had assistants travel around New York to 129 different queues in betting shops, railway stations and elsewhere and barge into queues (Milgram et al., 1986).

Surprisingly people's reactions were quite meek. On only 10% of occasions were queue-jumpers physically ejected from the line. And on only about half the occasions did anybody in the line do anything at all. Anything at all included, in this case, dirty looks or gestures as well as actual verbal objections.

For Milgram's explanations, read: Do You Challenge Queue-Jumpers and Line-Cutters?

3. Obedience to authority

One of the most famous psychology experiments of all, Milgram's obedience experiments tested how far people will go when an authority figure orders them to hurt another human being.

Participants in the study were ordered by a man in a white coat to give (apparently) lethal electric shocks to another person (the learner).

63% of the participants continued right until the end: they administered all the shocks even with the learner screaming in agony, begging to stop and eventually falling silent.

Do you think you would obey?

Milgram clearly showed the dark side of people's tendency to cow to authority (for the study's full details: Stanley Milgram: Obedience to Authority or Just Conformity?

Stanley Milgram (Chronicle file photo)

4. Familiar stranger

Do you see the same people every day on the way to work or at the shops? People you've never talked to? Do you ever wonder where they work, what their story is and if they wonder the same about you?

Milgram wondered the same thing about people waiting for the train near where he lived in Riverdale, New York. So he had his students take pictures of all the people on the platform and then, a few weeks later, they got on the train and distributed the pictures to see who recognised who.

The results were fascinating: 90% identified at least one 'familiar stranger' and the average was 4 other people. 62% had spoken to at least one other passenger and almost half were curious about the people they travelled with. Unsurprisingly the most familiar strangers were those who stood out in some way.

He also discovered that people were more likely to talk to each other when they encountered that familiar stranger in unfamiliar circumstances, like when you see the guy from the train in another city.

5. It's a small world

Milgram was interested in the interconnectedness of human societies. What, he wondered, was the probability that two people chosen at random know each other? And if they don't know each other, what is the chance that they know someone, who knows someone...(and so on)...who does know that person?

He tested this by sending letters to random people in Nebraska or Boston and asking them to forward it to someone who might be more likely to know the target person, who lived in Massachusetts (Travers & Milgram, 1969).

He found that on average it would take 5.2 intermediaries for his letter to go from the first person to its destination, via each person's social network.

This suggests that society is highly interconnected (for the full story, though, see: Six Degrees of Separation).

6. Secret opinions

Milgram wanted to measure people's attitudes indirectly, not by just asking them what they thought, since people often lie. So he left stamped, addressed letters lying around in the street to see whether people would post them on depending on who they were addressed to (Milgram et al., 1965).

He found that 70% of letters that were addressed to the 'Medical Research Associates' were posted by random people who found them. But when the letter was addressed to 'Friends of the Communist/Nazi Party' only 25% sent them on.

This doesn't just measure public opinion but also shows how helpful people can be, especially if it costs them little effort.

Subsequent research with dropping wallets in the street to test honesty has proved difficult as people immediately pick them up and return them to the researcher. People are often more honest than we might predict.

7. Drawing power of crowds

Have you ever joined a crowd of people without knowing why, but just assumed something must be going on so it might be worth sticking around?

Milgram was fascinated by how people join crowds for no readily apparent reason. He tested this by having a group of people stop in a busy street and look up to the six-floor of an adjacent office block where nothing whatsoever was happening (Milgram et al., 1969).

What he found was that 4% of passersby would stop to join a single person gazing up, but 40% would stop if there were 15 people already there. On top of this fully 86% of passersby would at least look up to see what all the fuss was about.

8. Urban overload

The last piece of research isn't an experiment but a theory that tries to explain urban social behaviour.

Milgram thought that the way we behave in cities or busy urban areas is a natural response to information overload. In the city our senses are continually assaulted. There are too many sights, sounds and other people for us to process properly. This is both the attraction of the city and its downside.

City dwellers, therefore, try to conserve their psychological energy:

• They only have superficial interactions with each other—this is encouraged by frowning or looking angry all the time.
• They keep moving and transact any business they have as quickly as possible.
• Social niceties like apologising for jostling are skipped because city dwellers have less spare processing power available.

In the city the norm is anonymity and the unwritten rule is: I'll pretend you don't exist if you pretend I don't exist. City dwellers aren't bad people (as the lost child experiment might suggest), they're using rational strategies to deal with information overload.

As Milgram once said:

“It may be that we are puppets—puppets controlled by the strings of society. But at least we are puppets with perception, with awareness. And perhaps our awareness is the first step to our liberation."

Image credit: Pryere

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...

Want to lead others? Well, much has been said and written about what makes a great leader, so here are the crib notes.

These are the factors that psychologists consistently find make a good leader (Hogan & Kaiser, 2005):

1. Decisiveness: good leaders make frequent decisions and stick with them. When there is uncertainty (and when isn't there?) good leaders choose and take responsibility.
2. Competence: leaders should provide resources for their group. The headman in prehistoric times was often the best hunter in the group. Nowadays being competent often means having the knack of influencing others.
3. Integrity: leaders you can trust increase followers' performance, satisfaction and commitment. Integrity breeds respect.
4. Vision: projecting a vision of the road ahead is vital, this gives people a common purpose and motivation to persevere. Without a vision, the followers are lost.

Although being a great leader (like Aung San Suu Kyi, above) isn't necessarily the same as being a great manager, there's much common ground.

These four factors were confirmed in a study of Fortune 1000 companies that had been turned around by their CEOs (Collins, 2001). That research also found two further factors that lifted leaders from 'good to great':

1. Modesty: the most effective leaders weren't grand-standing show-offs; they were incredibly modest and humble.
2. Persistent: the leaders who transformed their organisations the most never gave up. That doesn't mean they were inflexible, but that they never stopped pushing towards their goals.

These may all sound like pretty straightforward characteristics, but apparently few have what it takes. Many surveys have been carried out asking people what they think of their immediate bosses. On average these find that about half are seen as incompetent.

(This is a companion piece to a previous article: 7 Reasons Leaders Fail)

Image credit: Surian Soosay

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...

Last week I asked you the following question:

Say you're in your car, sitting at a red light behind another car. The lights turn green but the car in front doesn't move. Twelve seconds go by. Do you think you'd be more likely to honk if the car was an old Ford or if it was a brand new Porsche?

Over the weekend 1,313 people took part and the results were clear-cut. Here's what you said: 781 people thought they'd be more likely to honk at the high-status car and 532 said it would be the low-status car.

Statistically this is a significant difference which means we wouldn't expect to get these results by chance, so it probably means there's something going on here.

Now let's look at the breakdowns by gender:

• Men, high-status: 408
• Men, low-status: 331
• Women, high-status: 373
• Women, low-status: 201

So the pattern is the same across men and women, although stronger for women (again differences within genders are significant).

For real

This is just the result I was expecting as when participants were asked this question by Doob and Gross (1968), they got a similar result. More people thought they would honk at the high-status car.

The difference is that Doob and Gross carried out the experiment for real. As well as asking, they wanted to see what people would really do in the situation. They had drivers pausing at intersections in either expensive or cheap cars and waiting to see if the person behind honked.

Overall what they found was that when the car was low-status, 84% of drivers honked at least once within 12 seconds. But, when the car was high-status, only 50% of drivers honked. Indeed people honked faster and more often at the low-status car. These results were also replicated in a later study (Deaux, 1971).

So, in reality people's collective tendency was the exact reverse of their prediction and also what PsyBlog readers predicted.

Why?

The explanation for why people honk less at high-status cars is simple.

It's the same reason you don't tell your boss what you really think: unconsciously (or otherwise) we fear what high status people can do to us. We may be frustrated by the car in front pausing at the lights, but that frustration is inhibited by any signals that the car's driver is high-status.

Status is just one example of how our aggressive behaviour is curbed by aspects of the situation. For example people are generally less aggressive towards polite people and more aggressive towards members of their own sex (Harris, 1974).

So, how do you explain people's inaccurate prediction? Perhaps we like to think we're not cowed by authority, that people who are richer have no effect on us and so we compensate too much. On the other hand maybe we feel more affiliation with the driver of the cheaper car—they are more like us.

Whatever the explanation, it's a good example of how our predictions of our own behaviour can be biased in the wrong direction. It's also a good example of when crowds are not so wise.

Image credit: D. Sharon Pruitt

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...