The human mind is always searching for meaning in the world. It’s one of the reasons we love stories so much: they give meaning to what might otherwise be random events.

From stories emerge characters, context, hopes and dreams, morals even. Using simple structures, stories can communicate complex ideas about the author’s view of the world and how it works, often without the reader’s knowledge.

And when stories embody values in which we don't believe, we tend to reject them. But, according to a new study published in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, it goes further than just rejection, psychologically we push back against the challenge, reasserting our own familiar structures of meaning.

In their research Proulx et al. (2010) used two stories that illustrate divergent views of the world to explore how people react to offensive ideas.

The Tortoise and the Hare

The first story was Aesop’s fable The Tortoise and the Hare. I’m sure you know it (if not, it's here) so I’ll cut straight to one of its morals: if you keep plugging away at something, like the tortoise, you’ll eventually get there, even if you’re obviously outmatched by those around you.

Another interpretation is that the hare loses the race because he is overconfident. Either way, both the hare and tortoise get what they deserve based on how they behave. This is the way we like to think the world works: if you put in the effort, you’ll get the reward. If not, you won’t. The lazy, overconfident hare always loses, right?

An Imperial Message

Quite a different moral comes from the second piece the researchers used: a (very) short story by Franz Kafka called 'An Imperial Message'. In this story a herald, sent out by the Emperor, is trying to deliver an important message to you. But although he is strong and determined, no matter how hard he tries, he will never deliver it (you can read the full story here).

Contrary to Aesop's fable, Kafka is reminding us that effort, diligence and enthusiasm are often not rewarded. Sometimes it doesn't matter if we do or say the right things, we won't get what we want.

In many ways Kafka's story is just as true as Aesop's fable, but it is a much less palatable truth. Aesop's fable seems to make sense to us while Kafka's story doesn't, it feels empty and absurd. Consequently we'd much rather hold on to Aesop's fable than we would Kafka's depressing tale.

Unconsciously threatening

These two stories were used by Proulx et al. to test how people reacted firstly to a safe, reassuring story and, secondly, to a story that contains a threat to most people’s view of the world. They thought that in response to Kafka’s story people would be unconsciously motivated to reaffirm the things in which they do believe. In their first experiment the researchers used measures of participant’s cultural identity to test this affirmation.

Twenty-six participants were given Aesop’s advert for hard work and another 26 were given Kafka’s more pessimistic tale. As predicted participants who read Kafka’s story perceived it as a threat to the way they viewed the world. They reacted to this threat by affirming their cultural identities more strongly than those who had read Aesop’s fable, which didn’t challenge their world-view.

In other words the participants in this study were pushing back against Kafka’s story by reaffirming their cultural identity.

Absurd comedy

In two more studies Proulx et al. addressed a couple of criticisms of their first study: that participants might have found Kafka’s story (1) too unfair and (2) too unfamiliar. So, in a second study they used a description of a Monty Python sketch which participants weren’t told was supposed to be a joke. In the third study they used Magritte’s famous absurdist painting of a bowler-hatted gentleman with a big green apple in front of his face.

The idea of using absurdist stimuli like Monty Python and the Magritte painting is that, like Kafka’s short story, they challenge our settled perceptions of the world.

The research backed up this idea. Both Python and Magritte produced the same counter-reaction in people, leading them to restate values in which they believed. Similar but non-absurd stimuli didn’t have the same effect.

Instead of using cultural identity, though, the researchers measured notions of justice and need for structure. Participants reacted to the meaning threat implicit in Python by handing out a larger notional punishment to a lawbreaker. Here the threat of the absurd caused participants to re-affirm their belief in justice.

In the third study participants reacted to the meaning threat of the Magritte painting by expressing a greater need for structure. They were suddenly craving meaning; something, anything that makes sense, instead of this bowler-hatted man with an apple in front of his face.

Absurd truth

What this research underlines is that we push back against threats to our world-views by reasserting structures of meaning with which we are comfortable.

The researchers measured cultural identities, ideas of justice and a generalized yearning for meaning, but they probably would have found the same results in many other areas, such as politics, religion or any other strongly held set of beliefs.

When there’s a challenge to our established world-view, whether from the absurd, the unexpected, the unpalatable, the confusing or the unknown, we experience a psychological force pushing back, trying to re-assert the things we feel are safe, comfortable and familiar. That’s a shame because stories like Kafka’s contain truths we’d do well to heed.

Image credit: Domenico Zauber

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Like the telephone or the TV, email is a technology so embedded in our lives, we think nothing of it. Both help and hindrance, on one hand it's the internet's original 'killer application' and on the other it's a spam-spewing slave-driver.

We're used to hearing about the negative side of the balance-sheet, about email's addictive nature and the unnecessary stress it injects into the modern worker's life, but we downplay these problems because it's so incredibly useful.

Now that email is well into middle age (the first emails were sent in 1965), let's take stock of what we know about the darker side of email.

1. 59 per cent check email from the bathroom

You don't need to be an expert on Pavlov's drooling dogs to work out why email is so habit-forming. Most of it is humdrum, but occasionally we get something exciting and that's what we're hoping for when we check our email. In psychological terms email is a 'variable-interval reinforcement': we don't know exactly when the good stuff is coming so we have to keep checking.

It's no wonder, according to AOL's 2010 survey, 47% claim to be hooked on it, 25% of people can't go without email for more than 3 days, 60% check email on vacation and 59% check email from the bathroom.

2. You check more often than you think

Participants in a study by Renaud et al. (2006) claimed to check their email, on average, once an hour. However when the researchers spied on them, it turned out they checked their email every five minutes.

Despite the small sample size in Renaud's study (6 people), further research has suggested people do set their email program to check their email every 5 minutes (Jackson et al., 2002) as well as significantly underestimating how often they check their email. As a consequence we also underestimate how disruptive it can be.

3. Email eats a quarter of the working day

When Czerwinski et al. (2004) carried out a diary study of people in various different occupations they found that, on average, people spent 23% of their working day dealing with email.

This is because people are not just using email to communicate, they are also using it as a way of tracking tasks—one study has found that workers are managing an average of 65 tasks in 10 different spheres at any one time (Gonzalez & Mark, 2004).

4. It takes 64 seconds to recover from an email

We often react quickly to incoming email, almost like the phone ringing. In one workplace study, Jackson et al. (2002) found that 70% of emails were reacted to within 6 seconds of their arrival, and 85% within 2 minutes.

The problem is that it took participants in the same study 64 seconds to recover their train of thought after an email interruption.

Add this to the fact that Gonzalez & Mark (2004) have found that people spend an average of only 3 minutes on each task before they switch to another, and it's difficult to see how anyone can achieve the psychological state of 'flow' necessary for complex tasks.

5. Stressed emailers

Given the effort we put into email and all the task-switching that's going on, it's unsurprising that it generates stress. Of course we each deal with email in different ways, Hair et al. (2005) have identified three types of emailer:

1. Relaxed responders treat email almost like snail mail. They refuse to let it control them and get back to people when they feel like it.
2. Driven responders try to reply instantly to email and expect others to do the same.
3. Stressed responders don't find email useful, to them it is mostly an irritation.

My survey revealed 57% of people consider themselves relaxed, 32% driven and 11% stressed emailers, but this may well underestimate the actual number of stressed emailers.

6. Email kills sarcasm (and emotional communication)

People consistently overestimate their ability to communicate effectively with email. A series of studies by Kruger et al. (2005) found that both senders and receivers don't realise how poor email is for communicating things like sarcasm.

In one study participants thought that their sarcasm would be communicated 80% of the time. Face-to-face this was accurate, but over email the actual figure was 56%.

This overconfidence was also seen when people tried to communicate anger, sadness, seriousness and humour in an email. Without body language cues, it's hard to communicate more than literal meanings. Sorry, emoticons don't cut it :-(

7. People feel less co-operative

Email negotiations often feel difficult, especially with people we don't know well. When Naquin et al. (2008) compared them with face-to-face negotiations, they found that people were less co-operative over email and even felt more justified in being less co-operative.

Part of the reason negotiations are difficult is that people tend to be more negative on email. For example, Kurtzberg et al. (2005) found that when people evaluated each other in performance appraisals using both pen-and-paper and email, they were consistently more negative about their colleagues when using email.

8. Low rapport on email

Another reason negotiations can be difficult over email is that when negotiating with a stranger, because email is so short and to-the-point,  there is little or no rapport to fall back on. So if negotiations hit a problem, they can quickly fall apart.

Morris et al. (2002) have found that even a single telephone call can create enough good feeling between the parties to bridge the rapport gap.

9. Lying feels more justified

People will lie in any medium, but compared with pen-and-paper, they lie more over email and feel that lying is more justified. In Naquin et al.'s (2010) study, participants lied 50% more when they negotiated over email compared with pen-and-paper. They propose three reasons:

1. Emails are less permanent: it feels closer to chatting than writing a letter.
2. Less restrained: people feel freer online because of the online disinhibition effect.
3. Lower personal connection: over email we feel psychologically distant, resulting in low trust and rapport.

10. Irritating emailers

A fluffly AOL survey has classified the most irritating types of emailers by the type of emails they send (Woffenden, 2004). In order of how irritating, from most to least:

1. The cryptic: rated the most irritating type of emailer, this person fills their emails with unexplained acronyms, mostly to try and impress the boss.
2. The author: thinks they are writing a novel not an email.
3. The forwarder: sends on every idiotic chain letter and joke they receive, apparently without exercising their judgement.
4. The player: claims not to have received your email. Quite irritating; but in these days of spam filters, hard to prove.
5. The smiley: emoticon users were amongst the least irritating types of emailer.
6. The succinct: the least irritating type of emailer keeps it short and to the point.

Email cold turkey

The practical up shots of this research are nothing you won't have heard before: check you email less, remember the costs of task-switching, keep email succinct. Finally, remember it can be difficult to maintain relationships online because people feel psychologically distant from one another, so make a call every now and then.

Because email isn't the all-powerful application it once was, with the advent of texting, Facebook, Twitter and the rest, we tend to forget both how useful email is and how dangerous it can be. I've avoided overblown talk of addiction, but given this research there's certainly a case for going email cold turkey every now and then.

Image credits: Lars Plougmann & Biscotte

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The first famous case of someone allegedly losing their job from indiscreet remarks made online was in 2002. Heather Armstrong, author of the blog 'dooce', claimed she was fired after her colleagues discovered she'd been lampooning them online.

In internet terms getting fired for a blog rant is ancient news; to make the headlines now your indiscretions have to be on Twitter or Facebook. One recent example was this girl who was 'Facebook fired' after she said exactly what she thought of her boss on Facebook after a bad day at work.

What she'd forgotten was they were Facebook friends, so the update would appear front and centre the next time he logged into Facebook. She might as well have said it straight to his face and, for good measure, kicked him in the shins.

These are two examples of what psychologists call the 'online disinhibition effect', the idea that when online people feel less inhibited by social conventions. Compared with face-to-face interactions, online we feel freer to do and say what we want and, as a result, often do and say things we shouldn't.

Internet psychologist John Suler has written about six characteristics of the internet which lead to radical changes in our online behaviour (Suler, 2004):

1. Anonymity

Online people feel they can't be identified in the same way they can when they're in public. It's similar to going out in a costume at night with a mask on to cover the face (see research on deindividuation). That sense of disconnection from our normal personality allows new ways of behaving. People may even consider their online behaviours to arise from an online alter ego.

Ironically, though, some people are far less anonymous online than offline. Because of the online disinhibition effect some share too much on their social networking profiles, sometimes even things they wouldn't admit to their closest friends. It's easy to forget that you don't need espionage training to type someone's name into Google.

2. Invisibility

Because others can't see us online, we don't have to worry about how we look to others and what emotional signals we are sending through facial expressions.

Imagine, for example, that you're telling a friend about a distressing experience face-to-face. You may feel the urge to try and hide the depth of your emotion from them, which stops you telling the story. Online, however, you can continue to tell the story without giving away how bad it really is.

It can allow us to open up about things that we can't discuss face-to-face. Online support groups rely on this openness to allow members to discuss their deepest hopes and fears. This is one of the potentially positive aspects of the online disinhibition effect, as long as users protect their privacy and identity.

3. Stop/start communication

Face-to-face we see people's reactions to what we've said or done immediately. That tends to put us off upsetting them or risking their judgement.

Online there are no such restrictions: because of online asynchronicity it's possible to say something and wait 24 hours before reading the response, or never read it at all.

This cuts both ways. So-called 'internet trolls' are people who post to discussion forums or other online groups with the express purpose of stirring up controversy (known online as flame wars). They are experts in a kind of emotional hit-and-run. On the other hand, people who have difficulty when communicating face-to-face can become eloquent and courteous when online.

The majority of us probably fall somewhere in between these two extreme positions. Nevertheless the lack of instant feedback from other people's body language causes all sorts of communication failures online. One of the most common causes of these failures is jokes. Without the accompanying body language, friendly jibes are easily misunderstood and interactions can quickly take a turn for the worse.

4. Voices in your head

The very act of reading online can create a surprisingly intimate connection. Because other people's words are in our heads, we may merge them with our own internal monologues.

While humans have been reading novels and letters for centuries, these are relatively formal modes of communication, and it's only in the last decade that online communication has brought the intimacy of a letter to informal, everyday conversation.

5. An imaginary world

The anonymity, invisibility and fantasy elements of online activities encourage us to think that the usual rules don't apply. Like a science fiction escape fantasy, the net allows us to be who we want and do what we want, both good and bad.

The problem is that when life becomes a game that can be left behind at the flick of a switch, it's easy to throw responsibility out of the window.

6. No police

We all fear disapproval and punishment, but this imaginary world appears to have no police and no authority figures. Although there are people with authority online, it's difficult to tell who they are. There is no internet government, no one person in charge of it all. So people feel freer online: away from authority, social convention and conformity.

Of course the idea that authority doesn't exist online is fantasy because the policeman exists inside all of us, to a greater or lesser extent.

Wing it

These factors work together to create a world in which we can feel freer. But this freedom is an illusion maintained by the online experience of invisibility, anonymity and lack of immediate, visceral, emotional feedback from others, or at least our ability to turn that feedback off.

Perhaps this is freedom: some people do report feeling closer to their real selves when online. But there's a reason we developed all those social inhibitions in the old-fashioned, offline world. They stop us offending other people, which helps us keep our jobs and maintain our relationships. That's not to say that the internet can't help us build relationships with others or find jobs, it clearly can. It's just that we tend to be less aware of both how much our behaviour can change online and the potential drawbacks to these changes.

Every now and then we need reminding that the internet is still a relatively fresh invention and, socially, we are still coming to terms with it. Long-established niceties of face-to-face behaviour haven't yet taken hold online and, in the absence of precedent, we have to wing it.

Image credit: rego & lanier76

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There are now 190 million Twitter users around the world producing 65 million tweets each day. 19% of US internet users now say they use Twitter or a similar service to share updates about themselves—double the figure from the previous year (Pew, 2009).

So who tweets? Why? What are they talking about? And what is so engaging about all those little textual transmissions?

Since Twitter didn't exist until 2006, psychologists have had little chance to explore it, but some of the early research suggests a social network unlike those that came before. Here are 10 of my favourite insights from this research, some less obvious than others.

Before we get onto the research, though, here's a quick intro for Twitter newbies:

What is Twitter?

Twitter is a cross between a social network and a blog. The blog part is that users read and write 140 character 'tweets' which are largely public. The social network part is that people 'follow' each other then become part of each other's Twitter conversations, they can also 'retweet' or retransmit other people's messages to their own followers.

The video above shows you what it looks like on a mobile phone.

1. Twitter is like a game of broken telephone

Because messages are short and can be broadcast quickly and easily, Twitter can feel to its users like a fast-paced conversation (Boyd et al., 2010). The difference from a normal conversation is that people are taking part in a whole range of different interactions. It's like being at a party and talking to 10 different groups at the same time.

All sorts of processes that you would recognise from conversations are also going on in Twitter: much information is simply repeated (retweeted) but messages are corrupted over time, like a game of broken telephone (UK: Chinese whispers), as people re-evaluate, re-interpret or misinterpret the meaning of the original tweet.

But Twitter doesn't always feel like a conversation as people use it in different ways. In the same way that talking isn't always conversation, sometimes it's a command, an expression of surprise or an aid to thought. In other words, Twitter isn't just social, it has a big informational component, which we'll come on to.

2. People join Twitter to follow their friends

Network analysis of Twitter users in the early days by Java et al. (2007) suggested that people join because their friends are already using it. The networks resembled those seen in the analysis of cell phone networks.

The huge number of users is just what we've come to expect from the internet: people can easily conform to the technological norm because services are often free, and it's well-known that free is a special price we can't resist. The number of users is less interesting than what people are using it for and why.

3. Most tweets are babble

While not academic research, some insight into what people are talking about on Twitter comes from an analytics company who categorised 2,000 tweets collected over one week. They fell into six categories (similar percentages were found by Java et al., 2007):

1. Pointless babble: 41%
2. Conversational: 38%
3. Pass-along value: 9%
4. Self-promotion: 6%
5. Spam: 4%
6. News: 4%

What they call 'pointless babble' might better be called social pleasantries, social grooming or at least just babble. Like when someone says "How are you?" and you say "Fine." It may be low-level, but it's not pointless.

4. The average age is 31

The average (median) age for a Twitter user is 31, older than the median MySpace user who is 26, but younger than Facebook which is now 33. LinkedIn has the oldest users with the median being 39. Predictably the strongest growth in Twitter use is amongst those aged 18-24 (Pew, 2009).

5. Men are Twitter leaders

Some suggestions of sex differences come from Heil & Piskorski (2009). They found that there were slightly more women than men on Twitter (55% women), but that, on average, men had 15% more followers than women, with men twice as likely to follow another man as they were a woman, and women 25% more likely to follow men. Both men and women, however, were found to tweet at the same rate.

This finding is unusual given that it's normally women who are the focus of attention on social networks, from both other men and other women.

I'm always cautious about reporting sex differences and keen to point out that psychologically men and women are very similar. But perhaps there's something about Twitter that, on average, fits slightly more with men.

6. 20 per cent are 'informers', 80 per cent are 'meformers'

After examining 350 messages collected from Twitter, Naaman (2010) found two different types of user:

• Informers: 20% shared information and replied to other users
• Meformers: 80% mostly sent out information about themselves.

Informers tended to have larger social networks, perhaps because they passed on more interesting things and weren't talking about themselves all the time.

This split hints at the different ways that people use Twitter. It also suggests that the conversational aspects of Twitter may have been overstated. If 80% of users don't reply to others then it's not that social.

7. Trends are one-time and short-lived

Tweets on a particular topic (Twitter trends) rarely last longer than a week and usually no more than a few days (Kwak et al., 2010). Most topics only trend once, then die, usually never to return. 85% of these trends are news-related.

Perhaps the reason for this is that trends, which are attached to the use of particular words or phrases, are often very specific.

8. Average tweet frequency is 1

The average (median) lifetime number of tweets for a Twitter user is 1 (Heil & Piskorski, 2009). This means most people who sign up are just following others or don't use it at all. Once again, the power of 'free' and very low barriers to entry.

At the other end of the scale 10% of Twitter users contribute 90% of the tweets. This finding is unusual compared to other social networks where the use isn't nearly so top-heavy. Heil & Piskorski note that in this respect Twitter is more like Wikipedia, which has a similar rate of top-heavy usage. Many but not all of the most-followed Twitter users are, unsurprisingly, celebrities.

This top-heavy usage reflects the fact that being interesting is a talent that not everyone can acquire (without relying on the halo effect of being famous that is). Occasionally, though, some manage the trick of being famous and quite interesting, e.g. Stephen Fry.

9. Existential angst can motivate users

Twitter is often uncharitably said to be perfect for our narcissistic age. It enables people to gather followers, talk about themselves, all without having to listen to anyone else.

A small study conducted by Qiu et al. (2010) has suggested that amongst the extroverted it really is existential angst that motivates tweeting. The same wasn't found, though, for those who weren't so extroverted.

I'd put forward a more positive argument: Twitter is simply a fun toy that's easy to use. It's much easier than blogging, you can mess around, you don't have to say much and it makes the web a little more homely. At the same time it's not as obsessed as Facebook and other social networks with gathering and displaying huge amounts of information about you. It's less social than Facebook, which people seem to like.

10. Twitter is less social and more informational

Support for the idea that Twitter is more informational and less social than other social networks comes from Johnson and Yang (2009) who found that people treat other Twitter users primarily as interesting information sources.

In this study people also gained the most gratification from information they had found through Twitter. The social aspect of it, however, participants didn't find particularly gratifying, despite a positive expectation.

Network analysis also tends to play down the social aspects of the site. Twitter shows relatively low levels of reciprocity compared with other social networking sites. Only 22% of Twitter users have reciprocal links between them, compared with 68% on Flickr and 84% on Yahoo! 360.

Kwak et al. (2010) found that the average path length is 4.12 with 93.5% of people within 5 or fewer hops of everyone else. This is mostly because Twitter is dominated by a small number of celebrities, making many more big nodes than would be expected in a social network.

Future Twitter

Of course these are only the first insights emerging from the research and people are evolving new and interesting ways of using and analysing Twitter all the time. Here are a few that I came across on my virtual travels.

Hughes and Palen (2009) looked at the use of Twitter in mass and emergency events. Tweets during two hurricanes and two political conventions suggested that people are increasingly using Twitter to share information with each other.

Here's another way in which the informational nature of Twitter has come to the fore. Twitter is perfect for a crisis when information needs to be moved quickly and efficiently around social networks. Indeed researchers can detect emergency events like earthquakes by monitoring Twitter (Sakaki et al., 2010).

Twitter has also been used to measure the mood of the nation. Alan Mislove and colleagues collected 300 million tweets from the US, analysed their emotional content, and produced a 'mood of the nation' video. It shows how the emotional content of people's tweets changes over the day (red is negative and green positive):

Interestingly their Twitter analysis backs up a finding I covered previously that Monday is not the most depressing day of the week using a radically different method.

Twitter is even starting to be used by researchers as a health intervention (e.g. Young, 2009).

→ An extensive bibliography of academic research on Twitter and microblogging is available on Danah Boyd's site and here is a list of the most influential psychology Twitterers. You can also follow PsyBlog on Twitter.

Image credit: Dustin Diaz

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One of the most intriguing things about the psychology of persuasion is how many people say that persuasion attempts have little or no effect on them. Other people, oh sure, adverts, work on them. But not you and I, we're too clever for that.

Attractive woman holding a bottle of beer? Hah! How stupid do they think we are? We know what they're doing and we wouldn't fall for such cheap tactics.

Would we?

Persuasive experiments

So pervasive is this feeling that only 'other' people are influenced by things like adverts that many studies have explored the idea, with an initial surge in the 1980s and 90s. Psychologists wanted to see how much people thought they were influenced by persuasive messages like adverts and compare it with actual attitude changes, if any.

Typically these studies first got participants to watch an advert, read a newspaper article or other medium containing a persuasive message. Then they were asked how much it had influenced them and how much it might influence other people. Since the experimenters measured actual persuasion and knew from previous research how influential the messages were, they could compare people's guesses with reality.

What they found, in study after study, was that participants thought others would be influenced by the message, but that they themselves would remain unaffected. When psychologists looked at the results, though, it was clear that participants were just as influenced as other people. This was dubbed the 'third-person effect'.

Third-person effect

Reviewing the research in this area, Perloff (1993) found that studies on political adverts, defamatory news stories, public service announcements and many more all showed a robust third-person effect. Similar conclusions were reached by Paul et al. (2000), who looked at 32 separate studies.

Perloff also found that when people don't agree with the message or judge its source as negative, the third-person effect became even stronger. The effect is also stronger when messages aren't directly relevant to people.

In other words people are likely to be influenced more than they think on subjects that are currently of little or no interest to them. An everyday example would be seeing an advert for a car, when you're not in the market for a new car. We'd probably guess it has little or no influence on us, but this research suggests we'd be wrong.

Take back control

The third-person effect is unusual because it goes against the general finding that we overestimate other people's similarity to ourselves.

This is what psychologists call the false consensus effect: we tend to assume that others hold more similar opinions and have more similar attributes and personalities to ourselves than they really do.

The third-person effect, though, goes in the other direction. When it comes to influence, instead of thinking other people are similar to us, we think they're different. There are two facets of human nature that support this exception:

• Illusion of invulnerability. People prefer to believe that they are, on average, less vulnerable than others to negative influences, like unwanted persuasion attempts. We all want to protect our sense of control over our lives. One way we do that is to assume that ads only work on other people.
• Poor self-knowledge. Although it's an unpalatable idea, we often don't know what's really going on in our own minds (see the hidden workings of the mind). Not only does this make scientific psychology a tricky enterprise, it also means that many of our intuitions about the way our own minds work are scrambled and subject to biases like the illusion of invulnerability. The effect of persuasive messages is a good example of this.

People often react to this sort of research by saying it's disheartening, which it is. It's not a happy thought that we don't know how easily we are influenced because we don't really know what's going on in our own minds.

However, sticking our heads in the sand and pretending influence attempts don't work is likely to increase our vulnerability. On the other hand, if we acknowledging our lack of insight into our own thought processes, we can raise our defences against the power of advertising and messages of influence, and take back control for ourselves.

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The art and science of persuasion is often discussed as though changing people's minds is about using the right arguments, the right tone of voice or the right negotiation tactic. But effective influence and persuasion isn't just about patter, body language or other techniques, it's also about understanding people's motivations.

In the scrabble to explain technique, it's easy to forget that there are certain universal goals of which, at least some of the time, we are barely aware. Influence and persuasion attempts must tap into these to really gain traction.

Techniques of persuasion

To illustrate these universal goals, let's have a look at six common techniques of influence that you'll have come across either explicitly or implicitly (from Cialdini, 2001):

1. Liking: It's much easier to influence someone who likes you. Successful influencers try to flatter and uncover similarities in order to build attraction.
2. Social proof. People like to follow one another, so influencers imply the herd is moving the same way.
3. Consistency. Most people prefer to keep their word. If people make a commitment, particularly if it's out loud or in writing, they are much more likely to keep it. Influencers should try to gain verbal or written commitments.
4. Scarcity. Even when companies have warehouses full of a product, they still advertise using time-limited offers that emphasise scarcity. People want what they can't have, or at least what might be running short.
5. Authority. People are strongly influenced by experts. Successful influencers flaunt their knowledge to establish their expertise.
6. Reciprocity. Give something to get something. When people feel indebted to you they are more likely to agree to what you want. This feeling could arise from something as simple as a compliment.

There are many more, but these six are often quoted, especially in business circles. The reason these work is that they tap into three basic human goals, and it's these goals that are the key to understanding how to influence and persuade people (from Cialdini and Goldstein, 2004).

1. Goal of affiliation

In the most part humans are social so they want to be liked. Rejection is no fun and we'll do almost anything to avoid it.

We reciprocate because it sends a message about our sociability. We try to elicit liking from other people by behaving in ways we guess will be attractive, like agreeing with them or complimenting them.

Not only do we want approval from specific people, we also want it from society at large (see this article on conformity). We want the things we do, think and believe to be broadly in line with what others do, think and believe. It's not impossible to be different, but it is difficult.

The techniques of liking and reciprocity mentioned above both clearly play on our desire for affiliation, as do many other techniques of persuasion and influence. Most people are joiners and followers so influencers like to give us something to join and someone to follow.

2. Goal of accuracy

People who don't care about doing things correctly never get anywhere in life. To achieve our goals in what is a complicated world, we have to be continually trying to work out the best course of action.

It could be accuracy in social situations, such as how to deal with the boss or how to make friends, or it could be accuracy in financial matters like how to get a good deal, or it could be accuracy in existential matters. Whatever the arena, people are always striving for the 'right' answer.

Influencers understand our need to be right and so they try to offer things that appeal to our need for accuracy. For example, experts or authority figures influence people heavily because they offer us a 'correct' view or way of doing things, especially one that we don't have to think too carefully about.

The techniques of social proof and scarcity both nag at our desire to be accurate because we assume other people are likely to be right and we don't want to miss out on a bargain.

3. Goal of maintaining positive self-concept

People want to protect their view of themselves because it takes a long time to build up a semi-coherent view of oneself and one's place in the world.

We work hard to keep our world-views intact: we want to maintain our self-esteem, to continue believing in the things we believe in and to honour whatever commitments we have espoused in the past. In an inconsistent world we at least should be self-consistent.

Persuaders and influencers can leverage this goal by invoking our sense of self-consistency. A trivial but instructive example is the foot-in-the-door technique. This is where an influencer asks you to agree to a small request before asking for a bigger one. Because people feel somehow that it would be inconsistent to agree to one request and then refuse the next one, they want to say yes again.

People will go to surprising lengths to maintain their positive view of themselves.

Unconscious motivators

Everybody wants to be accurate, to affiliate with others and to maintain their concept of themselves, however little awareness we might have of these goals. Effective persuasion and influence attempts can target one or more of these goals.

With these goals in mind it is possible to tailor persuasion attempts to the particular characteristics of an audience, rather than relying on transparent generic techniques. Whether it's at work, dealing with your boss, or at home negotiating with a neighbour, we can all benefit from thinking about other people's unconscious motivators. Then we can work out how to align our message with their goals.

→ More to come on the latest research into influence and persuasion.

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It's a mystery why money doesn't make us happy, because it feels like it damn well should. With money we can buy whatever we want, go wherever we want, even be whoever we want. Surely that should make us happy?

And yet study after study shows that in affluent societies money might bring satisfaction, but it doesn't bring much happiness.

Perhaps, as people become really rich, they don't choose more enjoyable activities (i.e. they stay in the office working)? Perhaps material goods just can't make us happy? Or perhaps there is always someone richer, spoiling the party with their more impressive wealth?

Failure to savour

There's something missing from these accounts, though, and it's the old argument that when you live in luxurious surroundings, have experienced the best restaurants and received the most lavish gifts, it becomes more difficult to savour the simple things in life.

Supporting this account, a new study published in Psychological Science has found that participants were less able to savour positive emotions both when they were richer themselves and when they were prompted to think about wealth by looking at a picture of money (Quoidbach et al., 2010).

In a second study participants who were cued with the idea of money didn't enjoy or savour a chocolate bar as much as those not reminded of money. When participants looked at a picture of money beforehand, the average time spent eating the chocolate went down from 45 seconds to 32 seconds. Levels of enjoyment reported afterwards also went down, from 5 to 3.6 on a scale of 1 to 7, where 7 is maximum enjoyment.

And this is only the effect of looking at a picture of money for a few seconds. Think what our society, with its constant reminders of opulence in both public and private, are doing to us. It's a wonder we can enjoy anything.

Relativistic psychology

This is just one facet of our mind's habit of comparing everything with everything else, from complex concepts like money right down to the most basic perceptual level. Like when you open your eyes in the morning, or turn up the volume on your mp3 player; for a moment the senses are overloaded but soon the contrast fades as the mind acclimatises.

It's easy to forget that things aren't 'loud' or 'bright', they are just 'louder' or 'brighter' than something else. Money is just one more thing that our minds treat in this relativistic fashion.

So spare a thought for the super-rich, the poor darlings can't appreciate a tin of spam, a lump of coal or a cardboard box in quite the same way that you and I can. It's not much of a silver lining I'll grant you, but it's something to hold on to.

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The line between real and fake has never been so blurred.

In the cinema, on television, in the newspapers, in public life: can we tell what's real and what's fake and does it matter? Perhaps authenticity is more important now that so much can be  faked so easily? Maybe the psychological costs of inauthenticity are greater than we might imagine?

A fascinating new study published in the journal Psychological Science hints at an answer by examining the effects of wearing fake designer sunglasses on the self (Gino et al., 2010).

The counterfeit self

Whether we consciously acknowledge it or not, part of the reason we buy certain goods is because of the message it sends to other people about our status. Counterfeiters exploit this by producing goods which send the same message at a fraction of the cost; effectively telling other people that we are richer than we really are.

As long as they are good fakes, other people won't know any different. Even so,

"Although the wearer intends them to signal positive traits, wearing counterfeits can in fact send a negative signal to the self."

So Gino et al. wondered if this has consequences for the self, like an increase in unethical behaviour.

To test this out four experiments were carried out in which participants were given designer sunglasses and told in some conditions they were real and in other conditions fake—actually they were always real.

The results showed that, when told the sunglasses were fake, people behaved in more unethical ways than when told they were real. In one experiment, those wearing sunglasses they were told were authentic cheated on a task 30% of the time, while those told they were fake cheated 71% of the time.

People even became more cynical:

"...participants who believed they were wearing fake sunglasses interpreted other people’s behavior as more dishonest, considered common behaviors to be less truthful, and believed that others would be more likely to behave unethically."

Less authentic

In a final experiment the mechanism at work was tested. This suggested that people did feel less authentic when wearing the fake sunglasses, and this led to more unethical behaviour, which came as a surprise:

"...when we asked a separate set of students [..] to predict the impact of counterfeits, they were unaware of the consequences for ethical behavior."

So it seems for designer clothes, far from shrugging off inauthenticity, people sending fake signals about their wealth to others make themselves feel fake, with negative consequences for their behaviour.

This study could well have been commissioned by Gucci, Armani or any other brand (it wasn't), but still it raises the question of whether these types of findings would extend into areas of everyday life unrelated to branding. Perhaps in general faking it cues feelings of inauthenticity and consequently unethical behaviour? Given this research, I wouldn't be surprised.

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Anyone who has ever found themselves trying to turn on the bathroom light seconds after phoning  the power company to ask how long the power cut will last, knows how easily habits bypass our conscious thought processes.

Part of the reason habits are so difficult to change is they are triggered unconsciously, often by situations we've encountered time and time again. Before going into the bathroom: turn on the light. After getting new email: waste 10 minutes aimlessly surfing the web.

Temptations, on the other hand, play more on visceral factors like hunger, sex or thirst. We see a muffin and can't resist.

New research published in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin by Quinn et al. (2010) suggests a different strategy for changing a bad habit than for resisting a temptation.

"Don't do it!"

First, though, the researchers wanted to find out what habit-control strategies people use in everyday life. Ninety-nine students kept diaries of their battles with bad habits and temptations. Over 7 or 14 days they recorded each time they felt like giving in to a temptation or a bad habit they were trying to get rid of.

Top of the list for unwanted activities were excess sleeping, eating and procrastination (no big surprises there in a sample of students). The top strategies to combat these were:

• Vigilant monitoring: watching out for slip-ups and saying "Don't do it!" to yourself.
• Distraction: trying to think about something else.
• Stimulus control: removing the opportunity to perform the habit, say by leaving the bar, fast-food restaurant or electronics store.

For strong habits it was the vigilant monitoring that emerged from self-reports as the most useful strategy, with distraction in second place. While for strong temptations rather than habits, participants reported that stimulus control was the most effective strategy while monitoring dropped to third place behind distraction.

For both weak habits and weak temptations the strategy used mattered less, although for weak temptations the monitoring strategy emerged as the best.

How to defy a bad habit

As you'll be gathering from reading PsyBlog, though, psychologists are suspicious of what people say. Instead they like experiments to see what people do. So, in a second study they used a lab-based analogue of real life, to see if vigilant monitoring really is an effective strategy for controlling strong habits.

Sixty-five participants learned one response to a word, then in a second study had to change this response in defiance of the habit they'd built up.

Backing up the first study, the experiment found that vigilant monitoring was the most successful short-term strategy for suppressing a strong habit. Once again for weak habits the type of strategy used made little difference.

Habits versus temptations

So, why does vigilant monitoring work for habits but not for temptations?  Quinn et al. argue that it doesn't work for temptations because watching out for slip-ups heightens our attention to the temptation which we are, ironically, once again tempted by. Stimulus control, though, removes the opportunity: out of sight, out of mind.

Unlike temptations, habits are learnt by repetition and so they can sneak in under the radar. We find ourselves repeating them without thinking. Vigilant monitoring probably works because it helps us notice the habit and remember that we wanted to change it.

The bad news

But, as anyone who has ever tried to change a long-held habit will know, continually monitoring for bad habits is tiring and some days your self-control is weaker than others.

This isn't helped by what are known as 'ironic processes of control' which I cover in my series '10 more brilliant social psychology studies'. This is the idea that monitoring a thought in the hope of getting rid of it only makes that thought come back stronger.

In the long-term it may be necessary to try and replace the old habit with a new one. Unfortunately this new habit is likely to be much more unstable than the old one.

I'd like to leave you with better news but sometimes it's good to know the worst. We are often slaves to our habits and many of these habits are extremely hard to change because they are triggered outside our conscious awareness. Anyone who tells you different is either lying to themselves or trying to sell you a quick-fix that probably won't work.

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You and I can talk, we can reach out and touch each other on the arm and we can see each other, but we can never know exactly what's going on in the other's head.

It's partly why psychological science is so hard and it's why understanding how we are viewed by others is so hard.

Research shows that we normally try to work out how others see us by thinking about how we view ourselves, then extrapolating from that. The problem with this approach is that to varying degrees we all suffer from an 'egocentric bias': because we're locked inside our own heads, we find it difficult to see ourselves objectively. In some ways all the information we have clouds our judgement.

Think abstract

In a new study published in Psychological Science, Eyal and Epley (2010) recommend using abstract thinking to get a better view of ourselves, as seen by others.

In one crucial experiment the researchers split 106 participants into two groups and asked them to judge how attractive they were to another person. The first group adopted the standard tactic of putting themselves in the other person's shoes, while the second group were asked to imagine how they would be rated by the other person in several months' time.

People trying to put themselves in the other person's shoes were awful at the task. In fact there was no association between how they thought others would rate them and how they actually did rate them. It seems when trying to judge how attractive we are to others, putting ourselves in their shoes doesn't work.

But, when participants thought about their future selves, a technique that encourages abstract thinking, suddenly people's accuracy shot up. They weren't spot on, but they did much better. A further experiment confirmed these findings in general evaluations, suggesting this effect wasn't restricted to attractiveness.

Zoom out

The fine-grained, low-level way we tend to think of ourselves hinders us from understanding how others view us. You would think we would be able to judge how attractive we are to others - after all we've all got access to mirrors - but in reality we find it difficult. In some ways we are blinded by how much we know. Thinking about ourselves in the future, though, moves our mind to a more abstract level, allowing us to better see ourselves through others' eyes.

Although not examined in this research, the technique of thinking abstractly is likely to work best for people we don't know so well. On the other hand we are likely to have an accurate view of how our family or friends see us.

The yawning gap between the way we experience ourselves from the inside compared with how others see us is why we often have so much trouble working out how we are evaluated by others. When we look at ourselves, we can't see the wood for the trees; thinking abstractly allows us to zoom out and get the big picture.

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