Hot and Hired

In H.C. Andersen's tale "The Ugly Duckling" we learn that being seen as attractive is important for happiness.  The main character is rejected as an ugly duck and only finds happiness when he realizes that he is an attractive swan:

He had been persecuted and despised for his ugliness, and now he heard them say he was the most beautiful of all the birds. Even the elder-tree bent down its bows into the water before him, and the sun shone warm and bright. Then he rustled his feathers, curved his slender neck, and cried joyfully, from the depths of his heart, “I never dreamed of such happiness as this, while I was an ugly duckling.” (Andersen, 1844)

 Likewise, attractive people may be destined for happiness if we believe that good looks alone are enough to bring all good things in life.  Which brings us to this week's meme:

The premise is that, if you are as attractive as Ridiculously Photogenic Guy, your entire résumé (or curriculum vitae) can just be a head shot because you will get any job that you want based on your stunning good looks.  So does attractiveness trump skills for every job application?  The real life answer is a bit more complicated.

Jahwahar and Mattsson (2005) conducted two experiments to test this idea.  Of particular interest is Experiment Two because the participants were actual Human Resources professionals.  These HR workers (36 female and 25 male) were asked to evaluate four candidates for a job by looking at the candidates' test scores and head shots.  They were instructed to choose one person to give the job to, and to evaluate on a scale of 1-5 how likely they would be to give that type of job to each candidate.

They were not told that:

*the four candidates were always one attractive woman (Julie), one less attractive woman (Stacy), one attractive man (Paul), and one less attractive man (Richard).  The attractiveness level of each candidate's photo was verified in this and in previous studies. (But if you are named Stacy or Richard - don't worry!  The names were chosen to indicate the sex of the candidates.).

*the test scores from the candidates were invented to give the impression that there was no difference in skills or aptitudes that would make a candidate better or worse for the job.  The same scores were always used but, depending on the job in question, the supposed test was given a different name.  For example "Sales Potential Test" and "Social Work Aptitude Test" were used to label the same results for different jobs.

*the job that they needed to consider was either a male-dominated job, automobile sales supervisor; or a female-dominated job, school social worker.  The gendered domination was determined based on a report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.  Each HR worker considered only one of these jobs for the four candidates.

*their level of Self-Monitoring was being assessed.  The HR workers completed a Self-Monitoring Scale (Snyder & Gangestad, 1986).  High Self-Monitors are very aware of and concerned about the impression that they give to others and of the impressions that others give off.  Low self-monitors are less aware of and less concerned about those impressions.

Their results suggest that Ridiculously Photogenic Guy may sometimes have a slight advantage - by being a guy or by being attractive - but not always.  It may depend on the type of job he applies for and the characteristics of the person who is evaluating him.

The HR workers in Jahwahar and Mattsson's Study 2 were influenced by the gendered nature of the job:  they were more likely to hire a man (65%) or highly endorse a man to become an automobile sales supervisor; they were also more likely to hire a woman (67%) or highly endorse a woman to become a school social worker.  This effect was further clarified by separating out the data based on the participants' levels of Self-Monitoring.  Low Self-Monitoring HR workers did not follow this gendered trend in hiring; but High-Self Monitoring participants were very likely to hire more men for the "male job" and more women for the "female job."


Attractiveness also seemed to give an advantage:  62% of all hires were the more attractive candidates, Julie and Paul.  And, when evaluated by High Self-Monitoring HR workers, attractive men and women received higher ratings for jobs that are dominated by the opposite sex.  For example, High Self-Monitoring HR workers rated Paul higher than the less attractive Richard for the school social worker job.  Low Self-Monitors did not show that same influence.

So Ridiculously Photogenic Guy may have an advantage by being attractive.  Moreover, a High Self-Monitor is more likely to hire him for a male dominated job (because he is a guy) and also more likely to evaluate him well for a female dominated job (because he is ridiculously photogenic).  But what about the rest of us who are applying for jobs?

These effects were not huge, but when there is only one position available and lots of qualified candidates it might be small differences like these that drive the final hiring decision.  Thus, Jahwahar and Mattsson have a somewhat creepy suggestion:

Given these results, what can applicants who are less attractive do to overcome selection bias against them? ...the bias against less attractive individuals may not be because of (lack of) attractiveness per se but may be because of the assumption that such individuals are less socially skilled than attractive individuals. If this is true, then less attractive applicants could moderate the impact of their appearance by demonstrating social skills and directing the interviewer’s attention to other strengths. Likewise, applicants whose sex is incongruent with the sex type of the job should provide as much individuating information as possible to minimize gender-stereotyped inferences of their attributes and trigger more controlled information processing (p. 572).

This seems disheartening - those of us who are not ridiculously photogenic should shoot for Miss or Mister Congeniality? (Really, I am a nice person - just LOOK at my social skills!)  Also, didn't their study just suggest that personal factors like attractiveness can sometimes trump skills?  Another issue is that there can be other variables, such as ethnicity, that were not considered by the present study - maybe the stereotype of your ethnicity trumps your attractiveness level or interacts with your sex - so why stress out over improving your attractiveness level when you cannot easily change your ethnicity or sex? And we can never control the characteristics of the person who interviews us.

In the end, the signs that I see around campus imploring our new graduates to iron their shirts and dress up for interviews probably have it right:  look your best and sell your strengths.  We cannot all be ridiculously photogenic, but all of us can get a job.  And when that job means that you get to make hiring decisions, monitor yourself so that stereotypes don't play a starring role in your decision making process.

Further Reading:

Listen to "The Ugly Duckling" or "Den Grimme Ælling" in its native language, Danish!

The Jahwahar and Mattsson (2005) article can be accessed in its published form through your local college library.

Take a Self-Monitoring assessment that was developed by Snyder in 1974.  Do you agree with the results?

Buzzfeed's take on the benefits of being attractive.  I'm not sure of the accuracy of their sources, but entertaining to watch.  How do you think most viewers feel about this video?

In case you need some inspiration - don't forget: You Are Beautiful.

Google and Overconfident Idiots

Since starting this blog I have spent a lot of time on psychology-related social media (find us on Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest!).  So just like a meme can remind me of psychology, psychological research can remind me of a meme.  Lately there has been a lot of buzz over a collection of studies by Fisher, Goddu, and Keil (2015).  For example, the Wall Street Journal's website proclaimed, "How the Internet Makes You Think You Are Smart."  Similar headlines made me remember this meme starring Overly Suave IT Guy:

If Overly Suave IT Guy is not citing his sources, that is bad and you know all about that from this previous post.  But is he really an idiot?  There are several ways to be an "idiot":

1) Not knowing the answer.  But this does not fit because Google supplied him with the answers.

2) Not knowing how to find the answer.  But again, he knew about Google.

3) Believing you are more knowledgeable than you really are because you know how to Google.  Now this sounds a lot like that Wall Street Journal tagline...so what is that based on?

Fisher et al. performed a series of studies with the ultimate goal of assessing if the act of doing Internet searches could prime us to feel more confident about our ability to give good answers.  Their paper is long, a bit convoluted, and it seems to me that many journalists did not slog through reading the whole thing.  If they had they would have reported that:

Studies 1a and 1b provided the preliminary basis for study 1c.  In 1c participants were given a pre-test that asked them to rate from 1-7 how well they think that they could answer detailed questions on a number of topics.  Then half of the participants were asked a trivia question and given detailed instructions for how to search online for the answer; these instructions led them to a specific website.  The other half of the participants were asked the same trivia question, and after a 12.6 second break to emulate the time that it would take to look up the information, they were given the exact transcript of the website to read.  Both groups rated themselves on their ability to answer the trivia question and then took a post-test that repeated the pre-test ratings activity.  

Although the two groups did not differ on the pre-test, the group that looked up the information online rated themselves higher on their ability to answer the trivia question and give good answers on the post-test topics.  This effect remained even when the post-test instructions clarified that their ratings should assume that they would not use outside sources to come up with these answers (Study 2b).

In the post-test part of Study 2a the participants were told that better answers to questions were related to more brain activity.  Instead of rating themselves like before, participants from both groups (look up online vs no look up) had to choose which fMRI brain scans would best represent their ability to answer questions from each of the pre-test topics.  The group that looked up the information online was more likely to choose images of very active brains:  again the act of looking up information online was associated with a stronger belief in their ability to give good answers.

Study 3 replaced these fMRI images with another rating task:  participants from both groups had to rate their abilities to give good answers for questions about themselves instead of the pre-test topics.  Some of these questions were easy and others were mind-bendingly difficult ones like, "How did your learning style in your high school freshman year math class affect your interest in miniature golf" (p. 14).  There was no statistical difference between the groups on their assumed abilities to answer any of these questions, so the authors suggested that searching online does not give people global over-confidence.

Studies 4a, 4b, and 4c only assessed participants who looked up answers online but it varied how they could access the information or what they could find.  For example, in 4a participants who actively searched online (using lesser known search engines like duckduckgo.com) rated their ability to answer questions higher than participants who were given direct hyperlinks to the answers.  In the remaining two studies, no statistical difference was found in the ability ratings between participants who were led to find answers easily vs. with difficulty on Google; or in the ability ratings between participants who could retrieve few vs. no answers based on a diabolical Google filter.  Thus the authors concluded that it is active Internet searching that is giving rise to confidence in ones answers, regardless of how fruitful those recent searches have been.  The authors also compared results from these three studies to the data from participants who were not able to look up information in the previous studies:  as before, the act of looking up information online predicted higher confidence in ones ability to give good answers.

See...it's rather exhausting.  But does it convince us that Overly Suave IT Guy really is an idiot but thinks he is bright because he Googles?  Certainly these are statistical differences that are unlikely to be due to chance, but are these practical differences that we could see in our own lives?  

In Fisher et al. the self-ratings were always on a scale of 1 (in my words, "I predict that my answer will suck.") to 7 (in my words, "I predict that my answer will be perfectly accurate.").  For studies 1-3, the average self-ratings from both groups ranged from 3.07 to 3.94.  So all participants were estimating their ability to give answers to post-test topics to be very average; the statistical difference shows us that the participants who had just looked up information online were on the higher side of average.

Another twist is that along with high sample sizes that increase the likelihood of such statistical differences, the participants may not represent average Americans.  Ironically, as I read this article I had to do some Googling myself: the participants were all members of Amazon Mechanical Turk and I did not know what that is.  It turns out to be a crowd-sourcing service run through Amazon.com.  If you have an Amazon account you can sign up to be a Turker (not to be confused with a Twerker) and complete surveys or do other tasks online to give feedback to corporations and researchers, often about Internet content.

Further Googling led me to past research on the Turkers.  They tend to be paid about 75 cents (American) for 30 minutes of work, although average payment can range from 1 cent to $5 dollars that are applied toward their Amazon accounts.  More than half of the Turkers come from the U.S. (or at least their IP addresses indicate this) and those American Turkers tend to be young adults, the majority are female, most have college educations, and are likely to participate "to kill time" (on average, a few hours a day).  They report that the majority of their Turking assignments have to do with performing Internet searches.

The Fisher et al. article does not contain these details nor does it clarify how much participants were compensated for each study.  Although participation was limited to Turkers with U.S. IP addresses, curiously, more men (1,004) than women (704) participated in these studies (but can sex be verified in an online environment anyway?).  The authors do acknowledge that Turkers may have a lot of experience performing Internet searches, but there is no mention that these adults are unlikely to represent "the average American" any better than college students, the most common source of participants.

So Unusually Suave IT Guy may or may not deserve our scorn, but the average Googler does not have to worry.  Your Internet searches may slightly inflate your confidence but they will not turn you into an over-confident idiot.  Moreover, other research on the Hive Mind - or in psychologese Transactive Memory - offers a more positive spin on how Google can function as our collective back-up brain.  For example, listen to Dr. Betsy Sparrow discuss research she did in 2011 with Jenny Liu and Daniel Wegner:

Further Reading:

A version of the Fisher et al. (2015) article can be accessed on the American Psychological Association's website and the published journal article can be accessed through your local college library.

This version of the Sparrow et al. (2011) article can be accessed for personal use.

A recent podcast from "On Being" titled "Online Reflections of our Offline Lives."  Listen to Danah Boyd (of Microsoft and Data & Society) wax philosophical on the role of technology in our daily lives.  It might not be as scary as we are led to believe.

So gifted...

In the 1971 movie "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory," Gene Wilder plays a much more menacing version of Willy Wonka than you may be familiar with from the 2005 remake. Spoiled children are his biggest pet peeve and he watches them die candy-related deaths with nonchalance (see the demise of Augustus Gloop here) much to the horror of their parents.  So it is no surprise that Wilder's Wonka stars in this week's meme:

Why is this funny?

One possibility is that people believe that giftedness should imply a high level of all skills, including social and behavioral skills (the "harmony hypothesis").  So if a child is labeled as "Gifted" in school, it would be very funny to find that child eating sand at the playground.  This harmony hypothesis is not supported by research.  Intellectual giftedness usually means that the child is a quick learner, has an IQ that is unusually high, and is often able to complete schoolwork at a level that is more advanced their grade level.  Thus, a child who is gifted but has low social skills can exist.  In addition, children who are "Twice Exceptional" are examples of how intellectual giftedness can coexist with learning disabilities and behavior issues that require intervention.

Another possibility is that people believe that gifted children are weirdos who all have emotional and behavioral problems (the "disharmony hypothesis").  For example, in a 2013 study of German school teachers, their implicit stereotypes about gifted students included that they are, "less emotionally stable...less agreeable" (p. 40).  The authors, Baudson and Preckel, point out this stereotype does not match reality: gifted children do not have higher rates of emotional or behavioral problems than average children.

At the same time, reviews of Giftedness research remind us that these children are often very sensitive, which may be misperceived as being over-emotional.  They also may struggle with perfectionism - for example, getting very upset if they receive an A- instead of an A.  Gifted children, like all children, become friends with kids who are similar to them, so these reviews also suggest that gifted children will be most socially successful with other gifted kids.  So maybe these traits have been misunderstood to mean that Gifted children have emotional and behavioral problems.

The final possibility is that this meme is funny because it is making fun of parents who brag that their children are Gifted and exceptional without any evidence to support that claim.  This is my favorite interpretation because the humor is not based on a misperception of gifted kids.

Brummelman, Thomaes, Neleman, Orobio de Castro, and Bushman (2015) detail the creation of their Parental Overvaluation Scale (the POS, which is ironic in American slang).  Overvaluing means viewing your child as somehow more deserving of good things and of being a better person than the average child.  In fact, the paper's title includes the phrase, "My child is God's gift to Humanity" to demonstrate how extreme this perception can be.  The authors found that this warped view was often, but not always, reported by narcissistic parents.  For all parents, overvaluing was demonstrated by irrationally high evaluations of their children's knowledge, compulsive praising of their children's efforts, and over-estimation of their children's intelligence.

For example, Brummelman et al. had parents rate how likely it was that their children were familiar with certain important, historical concepts.  Some of these were real, like "Vietnam War," but others were made up, like "Storming of Austria" (p. 679). The parents who overvalue their children were not only more likely to believe that their kids would be familiar with the real examples, they were also more likely to believe that their children would be familiar with the fictional examples!

The authors also recorded parents' behaviors as they helped their children solve mathematics problems:  overvaluing parents praised their children 62% more often.  This praise was not related to how accurately the problems were solved, so it was not reflecting reality!

Most relevant to our meme, Brummelman et al. asked parents to evaluate their children's intellect, including how much they agree with this statement: "I see my child as gifted" (p. 672).  Even though their children's IQ scores were not higher than other children's, the overvaluing parents were more likely to agree that their children are gifted!

Parents who overvalue their children may be doing more harm than simply being annoying to Willy Wonka:  these behaviors may turn entitled children into adult narcissists who believe that they are superior humans.  Bushman, one of the creators of the POS, has recently gotten wide media attention in the United States for his suggestion that parents lay off of so much praise to avoid creating little narcissists.  Over-simplified headlines reading, "Don't praise your child!  Don't tell your child that he is special!" seemed to spring up overnight!

This parent-blaming reminds me of a song from "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory":

However, Bushman's claims are guesses in the longterm - we don't know if overvalued children actually turn into narcissistic adults - and the average parent is unlikely to be an overvaluing parent.  You also know that irrationally excessive praise is only one part of overvaluing behaviors.  So if your praise is justified and if you tell your child that he or she is special because EVERY human is unique and special, it is unlikely to cause a problem.

Either way - Gifted or not - if your children are eating sand like Augustus Gloop eats chocolate, you should talk to their pediatrician about pica!  This can be a sign of nutritional deficiencies.


 Further Reading:

The Brummelman et al. (2015) article in JPSP is available through your college library, but a version of the authors' related study that spawned Bushman's media frenzy is available online.  The published version in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States can also be accessed through your college library.

Hoagies Gifted Education Page and the National Associate for Gifted Children are good sources for parents and teachers who want to learn more about intellectual giftedness.

Have to deal with overvaluing parents?  Help from WebMd: Talking to parents who brag about their kids.

This man claims that his biggest phobia is a fear of Willy Wonka!

Saying "I love you"...

For this post I have to revert to preschool scatological humor for just a moment...

so if a brief, funny reference to poop is offensive...

read no further.

I have often thought that diarrhea is really the perfect excuse if you want to leave a boring situation.  If anyone tries to stop your departure, whispering, "I have diarrhea," will be the instant get-out-of-jail-free card because everybody has been there and -- for goodness sake -- nobody wants you to stick around in that state.  

With this shared human experience we introduce this week's meme:

When I searched this meme on the Internet I found a curious thing:  like this version starring Optimistic O'Connell, the other versions display a male making this statement.  Ignore the diarrhea part for now - what interested me was that this is a meme of about a confession of love.  And some versions -- like this one -- convey that this confession is being expressed to a female.

Past research suggests that, in heterosexual dating relationships, men tend to tell their partners, "I love you," earlier women do.  A pair of studies by Ackerman, Griskevicis, and Li (2011) confirm that trend, and demonstrate that this reality is the opposite of our stereotype.  Sixty-four percent of college students (who were stopped on a street corner and offered, "candy and juice drinks" (p. 1082) for their insights - I guess that is all it takes...) actually believed that the reverse was true:  that women say "I love you" first.

Ackerman et al. (2011)  includes other laboratory studies about how people feel when their partners just can't hold it in and blurt out "I love you."  Not surprisingly:  they like it.  But does the timing matter and what do we interpret that "I love you" to mean?  Because the authors come from an Evolutionary Psychology point of view, they were particularly interested in the variable of sex.

The authors' final studies determined that men are happiest when their female partners say "I love you," before the relationship has become sexual; women are happiest when that confession of love occurs after sex has been initiated.  This gender difference meshed well with the participants' reported interpretations of "I love you" at different points in the relationship:  men interpreted women's pre-sex "I love you" to mean, "I will probably have sex with you in the future;" while women interpreted a pre-sex "I love you" to mean, "I am trying to convince you to have sex with me."  If instead men's first "I love you" occurs after sex is introduced into the relationship, women interpret that same phrase to mean, "I will stick around for you."

Ackerman et al. invoke Evolutionary theory to interpret these findings.  The basic idea, put forth by researchers such as Buss, is that men have evolved to look for baby-makers - so they would like it if they get the signal that sexual reproduction might be possible.  Women have evolved to look for a mate who will stick around when they are pregnant and nursing babies - so they would like it if they get the signal that a guy is in it for the long-haul and not just looking for one night of reproduction of the fittest.

Evolutionary theory is one way to look at gender differences.  An alternative point of view, Social Role Theory, comes from Eagly and Wood (1999).  They suggest that today's gender stereotypes may have their roots in the long history of men having more power than women.  This inequality came from some biological differences (men are stronger and faster; solely women contend with pregnancy and breast feeding) that gave way to common roles that men and women took on in society.  Seeing thousands of years with more men in leadership positions we still leap to conclusions that all men are better leaders than all women; seeing thousands of years with more women than men caring for children we still leap to conclusions that all women are more nurturing than all men.

So it may be that evolutionary reproductive urges are guiding the timing and interpretation of "I love you."  It could also be that Social Role Theory is guiding these behaviors.  In that case, men's history of greater power and our stereotype of them as being leaders allow them to take more risks in relationships by saying "I love you" first and not being scared off if women say it before sex has occurred.  Likewise, women's history of less power and our stereotype of them as caregivers might encourage them to hold back that "I love you" until they have evidence (like sex) that their partners will be glad to hear this.

At this point we cannot say which perspective is right.  But what you can know for certain is this:  if somebody tells you "I love you," and you don't feel the same way...just tell them you have diarrhea and they will get out of your way.

Further Reading:

A post on a related topic from the Science of Relationships blog:  "Who Falls in Love First"?  This study is also explained using Evolutionary theory; can you imagine how Social Role Theory might interpret the same findings? 

Click here for home remedies for diarrhea and for a broken heart.

You can find a version of this article on Joshua Ackerman's website and obtain the published article through your local university library:  Ackerman, J.M, Griskevicius, V., Li, N.P. (2011) Let's get serious: Communicating commitment in romantic relationships. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 100(6),1079-1094.