Anger, disgust, and mitigating factors

Third in the series from Cognition & Emotion

This one is one of my VERY favorite topics because it has to do with judging the immoral activities of others.  Whether you like it or not, we are often forced to do this, either when sitting on a jury, being a parent, or being a boss at work.  It also comes up a lot now with terrorist investigations, foreign policy, and other political issues.

A study by Piazza, Russell, and Sousa looked at what happens when someone’s immoral acts makes us either angry or disgusted.  You can imagine different kinds of immoral acts eliciting these different emotions in us.   For example, a thief might make us more angry than disgusted.  The study looked at how willing we are, when judging these people and their acts, to consider mitigating circumstances.

It turns out that when the immoral act makes us angry, we lose our ability to consider mitigating circumstances.  But disgust doesn’t.   There is something different in the brain circuitry between anger and disgust that influences the way it biases our judgment. 

I guess the takeaway here is that if you want to do something immoral and then make up an excuse for it, do something disgusting not angering.  And when you are judging someone else, be careful if you are angry, because there might be a legitimate mitigating factor that you are not considering.

what we think we are thinking is not really what we are thinking.

Second in the series from Cognition & Emotion (v27, n4). 

This is one of my favorite topics – when we look inside our heads to figure out what we are thinking and we get it exactly wrong. 

Moran and Bar-Anan looked at this in a very subtle way.  They played either a very annoying noise or a piece of pleasant music.  Each one ended with a signal.  The signal itself wasn’t annoying or pleasant itself, but signaled that the annoying or pleasant sounds were about to end.  Kind of like Pavlov’s dog, the subjects of the study soon learned this connection - that the signal meant that the noise or the music was going to end. 

Then they asked the subjects to rate how much they liked or disliked the signal.  What would you expect?  Would they prefer the signal that ended the annoying noise?  Or would they prefer the signal that ended the pleasant music?

The conscious ratings of preference fell pretty much where you would expect.  When a signal ended pleasant music, the subjects reported that they didn’t like it so much.  They were disappointed that the nice music was ending.  But when the signal ended annoying noise, the subjects reported that they liked it.  They were happy that the annoying noise was ending.

But here is where it gets interesting.  They also used some automatic measures of preference. I need to read the full paper to find out if it was fMRI or EEG or Emotiv facial expression reading.  But they used some kind of system that looks at what your unconscious brain is thinking.  As we have seen before, these unconscious thoughts have more of an effect on what you do most of the time than your conscious thoughts.

And it turns out that your unconscious thoughts were exactly the opposite of your conscious ones.  The signal that ended the pleasant music activated pleasantness and the signal that ended the annoying noise activated annoyance.

Here is my explanation of the difference.  You can tell me if you agree.  When the annoying noise is playing, the annoyed parts of the brain are activated.  So when the signal sounds to end it, there is still some activation there.  Your conscious brain uses logic to decide that something ending annoyance should be good.  But the leftover electrical activity is still zipping around in the annoyance area. 

Which one is really stronger?  As usual, random emotional electrical activity zipping around beats out logic every time.  As much as we try to fool ourselves, we are not logical rational beings.  Isn’t it great ?!?!?

motivation, emotion, and making good decisions

The latest issue of Cognition & Emotion (Volume 27,Issue 4) just came out and I received the abstracts by email.  I have not read the entire papers (yet), but even the abstracts have some fascinating results that I thought I would share today.  If you trust my quick interpretations, it could save you from having to go find the papers yourself.

Here is the first one:

In general, our thinking is often strongly impacted by the mood we are in.  I am sure this resonates with your own experience.  Being in a good mood changes the way we look at otherwise neutral events.  Same with being in a bad mood.  Even if the mood is totally unrelated to what you are doing.  How often have you snapped at someone for no reason just because you are in a bad mood?  Or done something nice for someone for no reason except that you are feeling good? 

Most of the time, this probably doesn’t make much of a difference.  But other times, like big decisions at work, driving, or whatever, we really want to suppress the effects of our mood and just make the best decision possible.

A paper by Riemer and Viswanathan finds some new wrinkles in this.  They found that when we are making decisions based on things we see in the outside world, we are better at suppressing the effects of these strong moods when we are not very motivated by whatever we are deciding on.  On the other hand, when we are making judgments based on things we are accessing from our memories, we are better at suppressing the strong mood when we are highly motivated by the decision.

I have several thoughts on why this might be true, but I want to read the entire paper before jumping to any conclusions.  What do you think? 

System 1 entrepreneurship

I have been engaged in a lot of conversational debate on social media, sometime quite contentious, on the Kahneman model of System 1 and System 2 thinking.  I am sure most of you have a sense of what these are, but just to get us all on the same page: System 1 is an intuitive and associative processes that is based on recognition.  It feels effortless and instinctive.  We are in the middle of an experience and just “know” what to do.  In contrast, System 2 is deliberate and analytical.  It takes cognitive resources, effort, and focused attention. 

The easy debate is when and where System 1 and System 2 type thinking dominates the decision making process.  System 1 is where we usually start out.  In an easy situation, when we are under time pressure, or when experience tells us what decision/response will work to an acceptable level, we do it.  We never need to put forth the effort of System 2.  But when the decision is personally important, we have time to think, and experience fails us, we recruit our deeper cognitive faculties and engage in System 2 thinking.   

But there are a lot of details that remain quite contentious, at least as I have seen in recent debates.  How these two systems really work is hotly debated.  What triggers the shift from one to the other?  Can one be called “better” than the other?  Or more rational?  Generally, these conversations use examples from typical human factors decision making domains such as aerospace, military, and healthcare. But today, I want to move over to the domain of entrepreneurship.  This is an area that human factors professionals don’t often focus on.

As many of you know, I spent many years directing a university entrepreneurship center where I helped faculty, students, and members of the community start businesses based on their science, technology, and design ideas.  As part of this work, I had to study the thought leaders in entrepreneurship and startup management and new venture business strategy.  Many of these experts were quite adamant that they key to success was to use the approach of "ready, shoot, aim".  Better to do something immediately and fix the deficiencies in version 2.  But what they don't say, perhaps because they don’t know about human factors, is that this only works when you have built up enough of an information arsenal that "ready" has an imbedded "aim" in it.  These are expert decision makers who can recognize details about the situation without thinking about it.  So they are aiming, they just don’t realize it.  Giving this same advice to novice startups can be fatal.  Since many of the Center’s clients were technical experts but entrepreneurship novices, they needed to “aim.”  The ones that came in with the latest new venture bible tucked under their arms were much more likely to fail.  It was part of my role to convince them that aiming was much more important than their book suggested.

Since then, I have continued to consult in this area so I have seen many attempts by people with great ideas to create a company from nothing except sweat equity and desire.  Some of these founders have some pretty good insights on how to start a company.    But they are often swayed by this “ready, fire, aim” idea.  I think it is perhaps the best value I can add to explain what System 1 thinking is and why they don’t have it in this case.  So we sit down, roll up our sleeves, and do some “aiming.”

The "Antidote" to positive thinking

I just finished reading Oliver Burkeman's book "The Antidote: happiness for people who can't stand positive thinking."  I recommend starting with an interview like this one, and then go for the book if you want more.  Hopefully, this post will give you all the "more" you need.

The basic message is simple, especially if you have been reading my blog or have studied human factors.  Life is relative.  We evaluate everything based on what we expect and have experienced in the past.  So people in really poor communities are often very happy because they focus on things that are good, like family.  Or they can compare their lives to reasonable expectations and have things come out just fine in comparison.  Similarly, wealthy people are often unhappy because they compare themselves to people who are even more wealthy or create extremely high expectations that they can't live up to (at least not on a regular basis).

This follows the principle of hedonic adaptation.  Hedonic adaptation is when a good thing becomes the norm and we start expecting it.  So we stop appreciating just how good it is.  It is essentially habituation to positive outcomes. 

Now consider this in light of the basic premise of positive thinking.  For any action there are a few possible outcomes.  If you visualize the one you want the most and expect it to happen, there are two possible results.  Either you get it, in which case you are happy but will eventually habituate to it.  Or you don't get it, and fail in comparison to your expectation - leading to self-identity dissonance (which I have blogged before as an unhappy state). 

If you are really visualizing the fantastic results that many positive psychologists recommend, then your odds are not very good in this game.  You will experience failure more often than success.  This can become a real burden on your self-identity and self-esteem.

His investigation for an alternative covers a variety of philosophies, ranging from Zen Buddhism to Stoicism.  He proposes focusing on means rather than outcomes.  Consider all of the actions you can take at the moment.  Whichever one is likely to have the best result, and only an acceptable downside for failure, is the one you should do.  And then whatever happens, it is the best outcome that was actually possible at that time.  Then start the process over again.  This not only means that you are very likely to have a good outcome, and therefore a positive experience and self-identity resonance, but it also helps you experience the moment because you are focusing on very short term goals. 

So the "antidote" to positive thinking is not negative thinking.  It is thinking about actions rather than outcomes.  And setting reasonable expectations (or no expectations at all if you can pull that off).  And if you need goals, make them short term and attainable. 

What I liked about the book is that he bases his arguments on some real research that is well footnoted.  What I didn't like is that he also uses a lot of anecdotes, which are just as much outliers and the positive psychology results he criticizes.

Self-identity resonance, primary and secondary skills, and commitment.

I really want to be good at Skill A (e.g. basketball or public speaking).  It is part of how I see myself.  It is part of my self-identity, which as I have discussed before (for example here and here) is powerful in driving behavior.  Behaviors that support your true self-identity are much easier to stick to, even when they are hard. 

But most skills require you to also develop secondary skills that on their own are pretty boring.  To be a good basketball player, you might have to practice free throws – shooting 100 per day and focusing on the boring mechanics that will lead to expertise.  To be good at public speaking you may need to build slide templates or practice where to put your hands.  These secondary skills are not part of your self-identity, so they are hard to commit to.  It is easy to take short cuts.  To quit early and do something else. To convince yourself that you have done enough already.  That developing this sub-skill is not really that important. 

So we know we want to be good at the primary task and are willing to dedicate ourselves to practicing.  But to develop expertise requires a lot of practice (10,000 hours is now the bestselling benchmark) and includes a deliberate and concentrated focus on the secondary skills as well.  How do you keep at it?  I have to admit, this is a personal weakness of mine.  There are a lot of skills I want to get better at, some of them important to my career or personal life.  But those secondary skills get in the way.  I haven’t figured out the secret of dedicating the mental concentration needed to build expertise in the boring parts.  If you have any suggestions, I would love to hear them.