瑞思網

Are you creative? Try this simple test...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So it's not as easy as you think!

PsyBlog's How to Be Creative

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

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

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

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

Click here to find out more...

Experiment demonstrates how a powerful feeling feeds back into self-perception of height.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Power up

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

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

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

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

An inch taller

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

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

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

Image credit: Uppy C

PsyBlog's How to Be Creative

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

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

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

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

Click here to find out more...

Psychological research on persuasion suggests that stories which transport people are more likely to be persuasive.

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

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

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

Engage to persuade

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Crafting better stories

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

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

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

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

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

Image credit: Stephen Poff

PsyBlog's How to Be Creative

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

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

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

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

Click here to find out more...

Why people are reluctant to exchange lottery tickets, but will happily exchange pens.

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

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

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

Would you swap the ticket?

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

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

Why the huge difference?

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

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

Regrets, I've had a few

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

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

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

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

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

Image credit: Nasrul Ekram

PsyBlog's How to Be Creative

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

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

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

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

Click here to find out more...

科学家研制高科技免洗牛仔裤 穿数月也无异味-牛仔裤,高科技,环保-北方网-科技无限.

Do grey skies make you blue or is it summer that gets your goat?

Here in the UK the weather feels depressing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Image credit: Noukka Signe

PsyBlog's How to Be Creative

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

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

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

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

Click here to find out more...