Guest Post: The science behind our love-hate relationship with holiday songs

Alexandra Lamont, Keele University

In the run-up to Christmas, we’re subjected to a daily barrage of festive music – on the radio and television, in shops, train stations, restaurants, pubs and bars. In the UK, old favourites by bands such as Slade and Weezer are doing their regular rounds along with newer contenders from Kelly Clarkson and Justin Bieber. And, of course, Britain’s two most popular Christmas songs by Mariah Carey and The Pogues are getting their annual airing.

So are you humming "Jingle Bells" or "All I Want for Christmas" while you wrap your presents? Catchy music, “sticky tunes” or earworms, as they have become known, are songs that get stuck in our heads – and while about two-thirds are pleasant or neutral, some can become quite annoying. Earworms are common. Nearly 90% of Finnish adults reported having one earworm a week.

The best-selling Christmas song of all-time: White Christmas.

Musically, earworms seem to come more often from songs which have fairly conventional melodic patterns together with something unusual – a key change, or unexpected leaps or repetitions. Just like the well-known negative effects of actually heard background music on concentration and task performance, it seems that earworms can even impair our concentration on other tasks – whether those are songs with lyrics which could interfere with memory or even purely instrumental sequences like the Star Wars theme.

Read more: Why some songs get stuck in our heads more than others

There’s a piece doing the rounds written by journalism professor Adam Ragusea, who claims to have identified an elusive “Christmas chord” (a diminished minor 7th flat 5) that might explain the popularity of Christmas songs and why they give us earworms, although not all commentators are entirely convinced. New York-based musician Adam Neely argues it’s more about context.

But research suggests that although there could be some common features, the specific songs that evoke earworms are different from person to person. This chimes with what we find when we look at how people listen to music in general. Even very similar types of listeners who live together choose different daily favourite pieces of music – and our music listening and preferences are highly individualised.

What’s different about Christmas music is we are all listening to a much smaller pool of musical options at this time of year. Because of the dominance of Christmas music in public settings such as shops and bars or on the radio, we all get a lot more exposure to the same songs than we do at other times of year. So we could argue that Christmas music helps bring us together – whether we love it or hate it.

Dreaming of a hit record

Among the cheesy sleigh bells-filled tunes, there are some great Christmas classics – and it’s interesting to note that "White Christmas" by Irving Berlin is not only consistently one of the most well-known Christmas songs but is the best-selling song of all time. It also has the characteristics of an earworm, with melodic shifts and slides around a simple rising and falling melodic shape, and it (like many other songs) contains that scrunchy “Christmas chord”. But how does a song like that maintain its popularity over the decades?

The pattern of liking for an individual song over time is held to fit an inverted U-shape curve. According to this, when we first hear a new piece of music we tend to not like it very much. But repetition breeds liking – and repetition both within a song and through repeated listening over days, weeks and months will usually increase our liking in a fairly rapid linear way.

There’s a limit to this repetition effect. Too much exposure sends liking down the other side of the curve, meaning that when we have heard something too much we eventually, and quickly, get quite fed up with it. In our research we find that people regulate their own exposure to their own music over very long periods of time, putting things to one side in favour of new music and constantly keeping their current music fresh.

Following this, coming back to music after a period of time away means it moves back up the liking curve and we can tolerate or enjoy it again. Most of us do this quite intuitively, filing songs away physically or figuratively for later, and we have labelled this kind of listening the “squirrel” approach.

That means a lot of Christmas music, whether we think it’s good or bad, will be more popular than it might deserve to be as it usually only gets aired a few months of the year. By the time we’re taking down the Christmas tree in January, we’ve all become thoroughly sick of Mariah and Weezer and so we put them away in the attic with the tree, to be dusted off and enjoyed again next year.

Alexandra Lamont, Senior Lecturer in Music Psychology, Keele University

La version originale de cet article a été publiée sur The Conversation.

Guest Post: Could lies about Santa be good for your child?

Kristen Dunfield, Concordia University

Christmas is a magical time of year, especially for children. Unfortunately, between elaborate Elf on the Shelf staging and fending off questions about Santa, parents are often left wondering how much of the magic depends on them.

Specifically, many parents worry about whether they should encourage their children’s belief in the physical reality of Santa, about the potential impact of lying to them and what to do when their children realize they’ve been duped.

Rest assured, parents, it’s not all up to you. In fact, the best approach involves supporting your kids while they figure it out on their own. They will, and it won’t be as bad as you expect.

As a developmental scientist, I spend most of my time researching children’s trust. I’m interested in how trust develops and what happens when it’s broken. During the holiday season, I spend a lot of time thinking about Santa.

Developmental psychology suggests that fantastical beliefs in children are associated with positive developmental outcomes. And parents need not worry, children will bust the Santa myth themselves, when the time is right.
(Shutterstock)

As a proud auntie of three children under the age of four, my Santa musings have taken on a new significance. But, unlike many parents, I see the development of a belief in the physical reality of Santa, and the eventual myth-busting, as impressive achievements to be celebrated, not feared!

Research in the field of developmental psychology suggests that such fantastical beliefs are not actually harmful, but are associated with a number of positive developmental outcomes — from exercising the “counterfactual reasoning skills” needed for human innovation to boosting emotional development.

When kids question the magic

The vast majority of children will at some point believe in Santa. While many children learn these beliefs at home, the cultural support for Santa is so strong that children in households that don’t actively endorse the myth still sometimes believe.

Yet, despite Santa’s impressive marketing strategy, most children will abandon their belief by the age of eight. Though many parents fear this transition, it’s an inevitable part of growing up.



Santa is a mix of mundane and magical qualities. He is a jolly man dressed in red with a snowy beard. He also flies with the help of reindeer, visits all the world’s children in a single night and knows if you’ve been naughty or nice.

With age, a child’s thinking develops to the point where they start to notice Santa does magical things that physical objects can’t. This newfound knowledge is evident in the types of questions children are asking.

Younger children are often interested in general details about Santa, like: “Where does Santa live?” Older children are more likely to hone in on Santa’s extraordinary abilities: “How does Santa get around the whole world in a single night?”

Should you bust the myth?

Recognizing these challenging questions for what they are — cognitive development in action — may free some parents from the burden of belief.

If your goal is to extend your child’s belief in the physical reality of Santa, you can respond to the questions with plausible explanations or evidence. This is where NORAD, the online tracker that shows Santa’s progress around the globe on Christmas Eve, can come in handy.

If instead you want to let your child take the lead, you can simply direct the question back to them, allowing your child to come up with explanations for themselves: “I don’t know, how do you think the sleigh flies?”

Finally, if you think it’s time to usher your child into the common adult understanding of Santa as a beloved fantasy figure, you can provide different, disconfirming evidence and explanations.

My Santa myth was busted shortly after the discovery of Santa’s gift tags in my mother’s robe pocket. Regardless of which strategy you choose, it is inevitable that eventually the evidence against Santa will become overwhelming and the belief will become unsustainable.

Lies with good intentions

If you choose to extend your child’s belief in Santa, and your child realizes you have deceived them, how will they respond?

If Santa’s elves make handmade toys, how does he deliver electronics? And what does this do to the magic of Christmas for children from poorer families?
(Shutterstock)

As it turns out, probably pretty well. In a study examining children’s reaction to discovering the truth about Santa, parents generally took the transition much harder than their children, who actually felt quite positive about the discovery.

And why wouldn’t they? Santa is one of countless things children learn through the testimony of others. Because we rely on others for so much of what we know, humans are surprisingly well-equipped for the task. They evaluate both the source and content of the information they have received in light of their existing knowledge and their memory of past interactions with the source.

This means that, when compared to all of the reliable information that parents share with their children over their lives, it is highly unlikely a single lie will cause irreparable damage.

Children are also discovering the truth about Santa at around the same time they are starting to understand that some lies, like Santa lies, are told with good intentions.

Why Santa is for small gifts

Believing in impossible beings such as Santa is a special kind of magic available only to children.

Research suggests that fantastical beliefs are associated with a number of positive developmental outcomes. So, if your child is still a believer, feel free to protect that belief.

As your child ages, especially if there are younger siblings in the house, there are creative ways to keep the Santa experience positive, even after their belief in the physical reality of Santa has been abandoned.

Finally, always remember, as children are figuring out how the world really works, that they are going to look to the people and things around them for evidence.

It might be a good idea to give modest gifts from Santa and save the big ones for parents, because no matter what your family income, every child deserves to feel loved by Santa on Christmas morning.

Kristen Dunfield, Assistant Professor of Psychology, Concordia University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Guest Post: Your child probably knows the truth about Santa

by Kate Ellis-Davies, Nottingham Trent University

Most parents lie to their children. It’s usually done to get the children to behave the way the parents want. One study found that well over 80% of American parents and more than 90% of Chinese parents admitting to this kind of “instrumental” lying. Lying about the existence of Father Christmas often falls into this category, used as a tool to teach pro-social behaviour (helping and sharing) through the promise of presents if the children are good.

Of course, there can be other reasons for carrying on the Santa myth that are more to do with children’s immediate happiness. These could include extending the naivety of childhood and raising the excitement of the holiday season. But given what we know about children’s ability to figure out the truth, it seems likely that slightly older kids may well be playing along with their parents’ fantasy in order to reap the benefits of the promised rewards.

When studies have questioned whether lying to children about Father Christmas does them any harm, the theory seems to be that the dishonesty undermines parents’ image as trustworthy and reliable sources of information. But there’s no real evidence of any lasting damage.

Research with children who no longer believe has shown that they tend to stop believing in Santa around seven years of age. When interviewed about their feelings about being lied to – and how they felt about Santa now – the children generally tended to report positive happy emotions around the topic. Parents, on the other hand, were left saddened by their child’s loss of Santa belief.

Children tend to come to the end of their belief of Santa either through their own tenacious questioning of the logic and practicality of the myth, or by older, more seasoned siblings and peers bursting the bubble. This is particularly the case for today’s tech-savvy kids, who have the internet to answer every question and give them extra space for conversations away from the protective guidance of adults keen to keep the myth alive.

Yet while children often come to the realisation that Santa is not what they had been lead to believe on their own, they also tend to act along with the fiasco and continue to play along with 58% of children in one study playing the role of Santa-believer. This goes counter to the under-sevens’ tendency to correct the mistakes adults make, in speech for example, and to trust more reliable adults.

So what’s in it for the kids in maintaining the lie? Well the commonly written letter to Santa may give us some clues. Rather than reading this note assuming that this child believes in Santa, if we cynically consider that he or she no longer believed in Santa but is playing along – then the child is playing along like a pro.

We can see children’s willingness to play along with pretence and fantasy well beyond the seasonal myths into a more general eagerness to suspend reality for the enjoyment of play, something long associated with their development. The act of playing along may also support children as they test out out their knowledge and theories of the real world.

Logical to pretend

Within the letter to Santa, children often recognise the premise that they should have been good to warrant the requested presents, demonstrating they have followed the behavioural compliance set out by their parents. They put in a good mix of optimistic present requests, but with a placating note for those that might be overreaching and some humbler suggestions with a higher likelihood of approval. Plus there may be a nod to their doting grandparents for the affection it can be assumed they appreciate.

Really, the traditional letter represents a child’s well-constructed communication to people they know are lying in the hope they will reward the pro-social behaviour and willingness to play along. So, while researchers have reported that younger Santa cynics may have well-developed abilities in logic and reasoning, this doesn’t necessarily mean they won’t play along with the myth for a little longer. Doing so may be enjoyable in itself, have some present-shaped benefits, and be a positive family experience.

There is also little evidence that childhood myths challenge otherwise trusted and secure parent-child relationships. Instead, when children realise that their parents were engaged in a protracted deception, the children appear to be less saddened than their parents.



Kate Ellis-Davies, Senior Lecturer, Division of Psychology, Nottingham Trent University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Guest Post: Sheep can recognize celebrities from photographs

Catherine Douglas, Newcastle University

Sheep are surprisingly smart. New research from the University of Cambridge shows the animals can learn to recognise people from photographs, even people they’ve never seen in real life, such as celebrities.

The researchers tested the sheeps’ recognition abilities using images of famous people including Barack Obama, actors Emma Watson and Jake Gyllenhaal, and UK newsreader Fiona Bruce. While this is an amusing way to demonstrate what sheep can do, the research could actually have serious uses.

Shutterstock

For one thing, increasing our understanding of sheep’s perceptual abilities could be used to argue for improved animal welfare. But sheep are also being used as models for understanding brain disorders such as Huntingdon’s disease and Parkinson’s disease, along with psychiatric disorders such as autism and schizophrenia. So learning more about their cognitive capacities could aid the work in this field.

In 2001, the Cambridge team showed that sheep could discriminate between photos of familiar sheep and humans and respond to the emotions portrayed in these photos. But they wanted to see whether sheep could actually recognise the people rather than just memorise familiar photos.

They used a computer screen to show eight Welsh mountain sheep the celebrity pictures, and then used food rewards to train the animals to select these familiar faces from a wider selection of pictures of other people and objects. The sheep could recognise the celebrities even though they had never met them personally and had only been introduced to a face-on photo. Incidentally, the sheep didn’t appear to have a preference for Emma, Barack, Fiona or Jake.

To see if the sheep were actually recognising people, rather than just memorising certain images, the researchers showed them photos of the celebrities taken from different angles. The sheep were able to correctly identify the celebrity 80% of the time, dropping to 66% for photos taken at a different angle. This compares to rates of 90% and 76% in humans.

This is an enviable record for the sheep given that they are recognising the faces of another species. (How many humans could recognise different sheep from their photos?) This sound scientific set-up was also able to time the sheep’s responses, showing they appeared as confident whether looking at the face in the same position as the original photo or from a different angle.

There was one final surprise for the sheep. After proving they could recognise faces of people they’d never met from two-dimensional photos, the sheep were shown pictures of their regular human handler. Although they hadn’t been trained to recognise these images, they selected them over the unfamiliar photos anyway.

Smart sheep

I was asked if, as an Ig Nobel laureate myself, I thought this recent Cambridge sheep study would be a contender for an Ig Nobel award, the prize for science that “first makes you laugh, then makes you think”. Celebrity-spotting sheep might sound funny but the science involved in this study actually isn’t sniggerable.

First it makes an interesting contribution to animal science, showing sheep have much greater cognitive abilities than many people realise. This includes farmers, who often manage hundreds of animals with little actual contact, in the presence of dogs and during unpleasant experiences such as worming or shearing. This means sheep are usually at their least composed around humans, without the inclination to show off their impressive cognitive capacities.

My own work and that of colleagues in Scotland has found that ewes can identify pain in their lambs who have undergone tail docking or castration. Another recent study demonstrated that it is possible that sheep have a sense of self and can recognise themselves in a mirror – something we only know is possible in very few species, including chimpanzees, dolphins, elephants and magpies.

Learning more about sheep’s cognitive abilities could also feed into work on using their brains to study neurological conditions in humans. We know that the neural networks that sheep’s brains use for face perception are similar to those used by human brains. That means that we might be able to use sheep to test treatments for human diseases where patients lose the ability to recognise faces or emotions, such as Huntington’s disease.

If sheep were on the Ig Nobel judging panel, they would laugh at the idea that people are surprised at their abilities. (And we know that animals really can laugh. And they might also be interested to know that Ig Nobel prizes have been awarded for studies showing many human identical twins cannot tell themselves apart visually. Or that humans with an itch on the left side of their body, can relieve it by looking into a mirror and scratching their right side. This research suggests that actually humans aren’t as good at visual recognition as we perhaps think.

Catherine Douglas, Lecturer in Animal Science, Newcastle University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Guest Post: Turkey doesn't make you sleepy – but it may incite more trust

Kevin Bennett, Pennsylvania State University

‘Tis the season for giblets, wattles and snoods – oh my. On Thanksgiving and Christmas, Americans consume about 68 million turkeys – one for about every five of us. In fact, 29 percent of all turkeys gobbled down in the U.S. are consumed during the holidays.

And where turkey is being eaten, there is inevitably talk of tryptophan – a naturally occurring chemical found in turkey and other foods. This building block of protein often takes the blame for eaters feeling sleepy soon after the Thanksgiving meal.

Science has cleared tryptophan, though – it’s not the culprit when it comes to drowsiness after the feast. There are far more important factors leading to those post-turkey comas, not least of which is my Uncle Clarence’s story about parking at the airport. Add that to free-flowing booze combined with a load of carbohydrates followed by plenty more booze and you have a foolproof recipe for dozing off on the couch. Turkey, chicken, lamb and beef all contain roughly the same amount of tryptophan – ranging from 0.13-0.39 grams per 100 grams of food – yet the sleepiness myth has never surrounded those other foods.

Overeating and drinking are more likely at the root of your post-feast nap.
Brent Hofacker/Shutterstock.com

So tryptophan is off the snooze-inducing hook. But researchers in the Netherlands suggest it does have a different psychological effect: They’ve discovered that doses of tryptophan (chemically known as L-tryptophan and abbreviated TRP) can promote interpersonal trust – that feeling you get when you look somebody in the eye, shake her hand and think, “I can cooperate with this person and she would reciprocate.”

In a study published in the journal Psychological Science, pairs of volunteers were each given an oral dose of 0.8g of TRP or a placebo. For comparison, a 100g standard serving of turkey about the thickness of a deck of playing cards contains about 0.31g of tryptophan.

Each duo then sat in separate cubicles and played a game where one person (the truster) was given US$7 and had to decide how much to transfer to the other person. The transferred money was then multiplied by three and the trustee could give back part of the tripled money.

The more money you’re willing to give away in the first place, the greater your return in the end – but you have to trust the other person to cooperate. A very simple and profitable game if played right.

The researchers found that the TRP group gave $4.81 on average and the placebo group offered only $3.38. This is a sizable 42 percent increase in transferred money between the two groups.

So what’s going on? Here’s the brain science behind how the tryptophan-trust connection works.

TRP is an essential amino acid found in many foods including eggs, soybeans, chocolate, cheeses, fish, nuts and, of course, turkey. The brain region associated with interpersonal trust – known as the medial prefrontal cortex – is powered by the neurotransmitter serotonin. Neurotransmitters are chemical messengers found throughout the body that transmit signals from one nerve cell to another.

Our bodies synthesize many neurotransmitters from simple amino acids which are readily available in our food and can be quickly converted in a small number of biosynthetic steps. The neurotransmitter serotonin is controlled in part by the release of TRP. This means that as you increase levels of TRP you’re able to release serotonin in the brain region specially designed to process trust. Think of a flashing neon sign that reads “trust this person, trust this person.”

A plate of turkey won’t convince you to buy into Cousin Gerald’s pyramid scheme.
Rawpixel.com/Shutterstock.com

Keep in mind, however, that our decisions to trust or not to trust do not rely solely on ingesting TRP. In the real world we take into account personality factors, how well we know someone, previous cooperation with that person, tone of voice, eye contact, body language and so on. These all have a hand in shaping the conscious and unconscious rules that govern our pro-social behavior and trust preferences.

So this holiday season, eat your turkey (or salmon or cashews or cottage cheese or chocolate) and remember that few things are more pleasurable than the joy that comes from sharing a holiday meal with loved ones. Science shows us that tryptophan can promote social bonding, but there still is no substitute for giving thanks. Trust me.

Kevin Bennett, Assistant Teaching Professor of Psychology, Pennsylvania State University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Guest Post: 5 Ways To Avoid Thanksgiving Dinner Fights

As we take our attention off disagreements with others, we can watch the quality of conversation change.

by Barry Brownstein

Political divisions are ugly, and those divisions have spilled over onto the Thanksgiving table. One study found that “partisan differences cost American families 62 million person-hours of Thanksgiving time.” Presumably, those same differences are impacting the quality of family time throughout the year.

Time to count our blessings has become another opportunity to count our grievances.

Here are five suggestions to help bring harmony to your Thanksgiving table.

1. Begin with Your Purpose in Mind
Our mind selectively interprets our experience, in part, based upon where our attention is focused.

When our purpose at the dinner table is clouded by wishes to feel superior to a relative who “just doesn’t get it” we are setting ourselves up for an unhappy Thanksgiving. Since our attention is directed by our purpose, our mind will jump on every shred of evidence to confirm that our relative is a “problem.”

By allowing our mind to gnaw on irritations and grievances, we have made harmony dependent upon others behaving as we think they should. Notice, as details of our complaints fill our mind, we suffer more.

We can lead by going first; we can find our higher purpose for this year’s Thanksgiving gathering. As we take our attention off disagreements with others, we can watch the quality of conversation change.

2. Ask Yourself: Would I Rather Be Right or Happy?
Is it important to have an opinion about everything?  How often do we look for a pause in the conversation so we can tell others why they are wrong?

When we express an opinion that doesn’t need to be expressed, we are saying to the other person: My function is to correct you, and your function is to accept my correction. Should we be surprised if others resist us?

Ryan Holiday, author of several books on Stoicism, writes of the price we pay for our opinions:

“If you were to think of the worst punishment you could inflict on a person it would be to cast a spell on them that says, ‘You will now have a strong opinion on everything you see and hear.’ Why? Because inevitably they find that much of what happens to them is disagreeable to that opinion, and worse, they will find themselves in many pointless disagreements with other people about those opinions.”

Here is the good news. We can be grateful for our opinionated relatives; they provide us an opportunity to practice not having to always be right. We can choose, instead, to be curious about the opinions of others.

3. Practice Ben Franklin’s Humility Rule
In his autobiography, Ben Franklin writes of learning of a flaw in his own character revealed to him by a friend: “I was generally thought proud, that my pride showed itself frequently in conversation, that I was not content with being in the right when discussing any point, but was overbearing and rather insolent.”

Franklin realized he was lacking in humility and, despite practice, he could not “boast of much success in acquiring the reality of this virtue.” So, Franklin added a rule to his life:

“I made it a rule to forbear all direct contradiction to the sentiments of others, and all positive assertion of my own. I even forbid myself, the use of every word or expression in the language that imported a fixed opinion, such as certainly, undoubtedly, etc., and I adopted, instead of them, I conceive, I apprehend, or I imagine a thing to be so or so, or it so appears to me at present.”

Franklin noticed how contradicting others gave him pleasure: “When another asserted something that I thought an error, I denied myself the pleasure of contradicting him abruptly, and of showing immediately some absurdity in his proposition.”

This Thanksgiving, we can practice denying ourselves the “pleasure” of contradicting others.

4. Understand the Nature of Feelings
We believe that the intensity of our feelings is a signal that we are right and others are wrong. Upset feelings are a guide to the quality of our thinking and not the correctness of our position. When we experience intense emotions, we commonly attribute our emotions to what is external. We are certain that “obnoxious” Uncle Joe has caused our discomfort by expressing his flawed opinions.

Full stop! Being irritated, being annoyed, being angry are pre-existing qualities in us and are not caused by Uncle Joe. Our reaction to Uncle Joe reveals to us a flaw in our own character.

Instead of irritation, we can cultivate gratitude by remembering how the sacrifices of the family members sitting at our table have improved our lives.

5. Reflect on Our Shared Human Experience
Politics is divisive, but all human experiences have common elements.

Viktor Frankl, the famed psychiatrist and author of Man’s Search for Meaning also wrote The Will to Meaning. In it, he describes a “tragic triad” of human experiences. He observed, “There is no human being who may say that he has not failed, that he does not suffer, and that he will not die.”

Before a cosmic moment has gone by, everyone at our Thanksgiving tables will experience Frankl’s “tragic triad.”

We can look at the faces around the table and let our hearts melt with the truth of our common journey.

When we focus on what we share, and not what divides us, Love comes to the forefront of our experience.

Reprinted from Intellectual Takeout.

Barry Brownstein is professor emeritus of economics and leadership at the University of Baltimore. He is the author of The Inner-Work of Leadership. He delivers leadership workshops to organizations and blogs at BarryBrownstein.com, and Giving up Control.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

Guest Post: Debunking the 'gaydar' myth

William Cox, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Kids are often told that you can’t judge a book by its cover.

Even so, people often believe they can rely on their gut to intuit things about other people. Stereotypes often influence these impressions, whether it’s that a black man is dangerous, a woman won’t be a good leader or a fashionable man is gay.

Stereotypes related to gay men and lesbians often operate under the guise of “gaydar” rather than stereotyping. “Gaydar” (a portmanteau of “gay” and “radar”) is a term that first appeared in the 1980s and refers to a “sixth sense” for identifying who is gay. Like many purported intuitions, however, gaydar often relies on stereotypes.

While many people believe stereotyping is wrong, calling it “gaydar” merely provides a cover for using stereotypical traits – like someone’s fashion sense, profession or hairstyle – to jump to conclusions about someone being gay. Nonetheless, some researchers have published studies that, at first glance, appear to show that people have accurate gaydar.

In some recent work, my colleagues and I have been able to demonstrate how the perpetuation of the gaydar myth has unintended negative consequences. We’ve also identified a mathematical flaw in some previous gaydar research, calling into question the results.

Stereotyping in disguise

My colleagues and I suspected that even people who would normally try to refrain from stereotyping might be more likely to use gay stereotypes if they are led to believe they have gaydar.

Two people dress up as Gaydar bots during San Francisco’s 2014 gay pride parade.
Scott Schiller/flickr, CC BY-NC

To test this idea, we conducted an experiment. We told some participants that scientific evidence says gaydar was a real ability, led others to believe that gaydar is just another term for stereotyping and said nothing about gaydar to a third group (the control).

Participants then judged whether men were gay or straight based on information ostensibly taken from social media profiles. Some of the men had interests (or “likes”) that related to gay stereotypes, like fashion, shopping or theater. Others had interests related to straight stereotypes, like sports, hunting or cars, or “neutral” interests unrelated to stereotypes, like reading or movies. This design allowed us to assess how often people jumped to the conclusion that men were gay based on stereotypically gay interests. Those who were told gaydar is real stereotyped much more than the control group, and participants stereotyped much less when they had been told that gaydar is just another term for stereotyping.

These patterns provided strong support for the idea that belief in gaydar encourages stereotyping by simply disguising it under a different label.

What’s the big deal?

In some ways, the idea of gaydar – even if it’s just stereotyping – seems useful at best and harmless at worst. But the very fact that it seems harmless may actually be responsible for its most pernicious effects. Using gaydar as a way to talk innocuously or jokingly about stereotyping – “Oh, that guy sets off my gaydar” – trivializes stereotyping and makes it seem like no big deal.

But we know that stereotypes have many negative consequences, so we shouldn’t be encouraging it on any level.

First, stereotyping can facilitate prejudice. In a study on prejudice-based aggression, we had participants play a game that involved administering electric shocks to a subject in the other room. Participants learned only one thing about this other person, either that he was gay or simply liked shopping (people tend to assume men who like shopping are gay).

In one condition, therefore, the participants knew that the man was gay and in the other they might have privately inferred that he was gay though it wasn’t confirmed, but that wasn’t known to anyone else (who might have accused them of being prejudiced).

These conditions are especially important for a subset of people who are covertly prejudiced: They’re aware that they’re prejudiced and ok with it, but don’t want others to know. We can identify these people with some well-established questionnaire measures, and we know that they express prejudice only when they’re able to get away with it.

As we predicted, these covertly prejudiced people tended to refrain from shocking the man who was confirmed as gay, but delivered extremely high levels of shocks to the man who liked shopping. If they had shocked the first man, people could accuse them of prejudice (“You shocked him because he was gay!”). But if others accused participants of prejudice in the second condition, it could be plausibly denied (“I didn’t think he was gay!”). In other words, stereotyping can give people opportunities to express prejudices without fear of reprisal.

Second, stereotypes – even innocuous ones – are troublesome for a number of reasons: They lead us to think narrowly about people before we get to know them, they can justify discrimination and oppression, and, for members of stereotyped groups, they can even lead to depression and other mental health problems. Encouraging stereotyping under the guise of gaydar contributes – directly or indirectly – to stereotyping’s downstream consequences.

But what if gaydar is actually accurate?

Some researchers say that stereotypes about gay people possess a grain of truth, which could lend credence to the idea of having accurate gaydar.

In these studies, researchers presented pictures, sound clips and videos of real gay and straight people to the participants, who then categorized them as gay or straight.

Half of the people in the pictures, clips and videos were gay and half were straight, which meant that the participants would demonstrate an accurate gaydar if their accuracy rate were significantly higher than 50 percent. Indeed, participants tended to have about 60 percent accuracy, and the researchers concluded that people really do possess an accurate gaydar. Many studies have replicated these results, with their authors – and the media – touting them as evidence that gaydar exists.

Not so fast…

But as we’ve been able to show in two recent papers, all of these previous studies fall prey to a mathematical error that, when corrected, actually leads to the opposite conclusion: Most of the time, gaydar will be highly inaccurate.

How can this be, if people in these studies are accurate at rates significantly higher than 50 percent?

There’s a problem in the basic premise of these studies: Namely, having a pool of people in which 50 percent of the targets are gay. In the real world, only around 3 to 8 percent of adults identify as gay, lesbian or bisexual.

What does this mean for interpreting the 60 percent accuracy rate? Think about what the 60 percent accuracy means for the straight targets in these studies. If people have 60 percent accuracy in identifying who is straight, it means that 40 percent of the time, straight people are incorrectly categorized. In a world where 95 percent of people are straight, 60 percent accuracy means that for every 100 people, there will be 38 straight people incorrectly assumed to be gay, but only three gay people correctly categorized.

Therefore, the 60 percent accuracy in the lab studies translates to 93 percent inaccuracy for identifying who is gay in the real world (38 / [38 + 3] = 92.7 percent). Even when people seem gay – and set off all the alarms on your gaydar – it’s far more likely that they’re straight. More straight people will seem to be gay than there are actual gay people in total.

If you’re disappointed to learn that your gaydar might not operate as well as you think it does, there’s a quick fix: Rather than coming to a snap judgment about people based on what they wear or how they talk, you’re probably better off just asking them.

William Cox, Assistant Scientist, Department of Psychology, University of Wisconsin-Madison

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Guest Post: The psychology of New Year’s resolutions

by Mark Griffiths, Nottingham Trent University

Research has shown that about half of all adults make New Year’s resolutions. However, fewer than 10% manage to keep them for more than a few months.

As a professor of behavioural addiction I know how easy people can fall into bad habits and why on trying to give up those habits it is easy to relapse. Resolutions usually come in the form of lifestyle changes and changing behaviour that has become routine and habitual (even if they are not problematic) can be hard to do.

Happy New Year, 2017!

The most common resolutions are: losing weight, doing more exercise, quitting smoking and saving money.

The main reason that people don’t stick to their resolutions is that they set too many or they’re unrealistic to achieve. They may also be victims of “false hope syndrome”. False hope syndrome is characterised by a person’s unrealistic expectations about the likely speed, amount, ease and consequences of changing their behaviour.

For some people, it takes something radical for them to change their ways. It took a medical diagnosis to make me give up alcohol and caffeine and it took pregnancy for my partner to give up smoking.

To change your day-to-day behaviour you also have to change your thinking. But there are tried and tested ways that can help people stick to their resolutions – here are my personal favourites:

Be realistic. You need to begin by making resolutions that you can keep and that are practical. If you want to reduce your alcohol intake because you tend to drink alcohol every day, don’t immediately go teetotal. Try to cut out alcohol every other day or have a drink once every three days. Also, breaking up the longer-term goal into more manageable short-term goals can be beneficial and more rewarding. The same principle can be applied to exercise or eating more healthily.

Do one thing at a time. One of the easiest routes to failure is to have too many resolutions. If you want to be fitter and healthier, do just one thing at a time. Give up drinking. Give up smoking. Join a gym. Eat more healthily. But don’t do them all at once, just choose one and do your best to stick to it. Once you have got one thing under your control, you can begin a second resolution.

Be SMART. Anyone working in a job that includes setting goals will know that goals should be SMART, that is, specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-bound. Resolutions shouldn’t be any different. Cutting down alcohol drinking is an admirable goal, but it’s not SMART. Drinking no more than two units of alcohol every other day for one month is a SMART resolution. Connecting the resolution to a specific goal can also be motivating, for example, dropping a dress size or losing two inches off your waistline in time for the next summer holiday.

Tell someone your resolution. Letting family and friends know that you have a New Year’s resolution that you really want to keep will act as both a safety barrier and a face-saver. If you really want to cut down smoking or drinking, real friends won’t put temptation in your way and can help monitor your behaviour. Don’t be afraid to ask for help and support from those around you.

Change your behaviour with others. Trying to change habits on your own can be difficult. For instance, if you and your partner both smoke, drink and eat unhealthily, it is really hard for one partner to change their behaviour if the other is still engaged in the same old bad habits. By having the same resolution, such as going on a diet, the chances of success will improve.

Don’t limit yourself

Changing your behaviour, or some aspect of it, doesn’t have to be restricted to the start of the New Year. It can be anytime.

Accept lapses as part of the process. It’s inevitable that when trying to give up something (alcohol, cigarettes, junk food) that there will be lapses. You shouldn’t feel guilty about giving in to your cravings but accept that it is part of the learning process. Bad habits can take years to become ingrained and there are no quick fixes in making major lifestyle changes. These may be clichés but we learn by our mistakes and every day is a new day – and you can start each day afresh.

If you think this all sounds like too much hard work and that it’s not worth making resolutions to begin with, bear in mind that people who make New Year’s resolutions are ten times more likely to achieve their goals than those who don’t.



Mark Griffiths, Director of the International Gaming Research Unit and Professor of Behavioural Addiction, Nottingham Trent University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Guest Post: Is New Year the best time for resolutions?

by Simon Crisp, Monash University

For many of us, the start of a new year heralds a new beginning, and an important opportunity to commit to significant personal changes. But why does this single moment in the year hold almost superstitious significance as the optimal time for change?

As a psychologist who counsels people throughout the year, I believe there are several reasons. The end of a calendar year and simultaneous holiday break allows people to reflect on the previous year and take stock of things they’ve achieved – or not.

This reflection can provide important information about how successes were achieved, or why desired changes were not: bad timing, lack of preparation, a need to change priorities, diminishing motivation, and so on.

Psychologically, the new year provides a “clean slate” where one can start afresh and leave behind the disappointments, frustrations and “old self” and start again.

So far that all sounds good but, as we all know, few people actually achieve their New Year’s resolutions. I believe there are several main reasons for this.

One of the most common is that resolutions are impulsive, often-drunken and fanciful fantasies. Caught up in the festive spirit, it may only occur to people to make a resolution during the New Year’s Eve celebrations – hardly an ideal place to select and plan behaviour change.

Afterwards we trivialise our choice of goal and commitment to it as not much more than a whim, not really believing we will actually achieve the goals we set. At this point it really doesn’t look too promising. By the time the hangover has worn off or we’re back from holidays, the resolutions you made might be forgotten, or at least treated as a holiday novelty.

By way of contrast, in my clinical work I see people throughout the year who are motivated to make changes in their lives. On the whole, my clients (thankfully) do make substantial changes in significant areas of their lives, but the difference here, in contrast to many people’s New Year’s resolutions, is that my clients are motivated to change for often very negative reasons, or due to devastating events.

That’s not to say we can’t make important changes for positive reasons with the aim of enhancing our lives, rather than just making ourselves less unhappy. What we can take from this clinical experience are the important elements that can lead to successful life-changes for any person.

It’s vitally important to find the right time for change – a time when you’re in the right mental space and perhaps financial situation to achieve your goal. Arguably, the most important step is putting in the hard work in preparation for the life change.

It’s also important to ensure your goal is realistic, meaningful, worthwhile, desirable, appropriate to your broader needs and, ultimately, whether it’s worth the sacrifices that may be required to achieve it.

Of course, the road to significant and lasting personal change is often fraught with challenges. It’s important to:

• anticipate set-backs and use them as important learning opportunities
• establish a team of genuine supporters
• break larger goals into smaller achievable steps, including something that can be done each day
• ensure you reward yourself for progress regularly – celebrate each step as it’s achieved.

While ridding yourself of a bad thing (such as excessive alcohol use) can be motivating and worthy, unless you balance such a goal with some positive gain it’s unlikely you’ll be motivated by the process. In fact, without positive gain, you’re likely to feel pessimistic about the significant change.

In clinical psychology too, it’s essential to introduce “positive psychology”, even to the most troubling issues, including depression, entrenched negative behaviours, or destructive inter-personal relationships.

Positive psychology could include a focus on increased fitness and exercise, rather than simply aiming to lose weight, or increasing opportunities for fun and novelty, rather than simply drinking less.

Time and again, I see that we are more motivated to change if that change includes adding something of value to our lives. Importantly, this change in itself becomes self-rewarding and more likely to repeated – and with enthusiasm.

The pioneering researcher in positive psychology, Dr Martin Seligman at the University of Pennsylvania, argues that this leads to “learned optimism” and ultimately greater contentment and increased happiness.

So, while New Year’s day may not be the ideal moment to make a meaningful change, it could still be the first step along a productive and successful path toward important life changes.



Simon Crisp, Clinical Psychologist, Monash University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.