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May 25

Is Too Much Familiarity Bad For Creativity?

Originally posted on BigThink.com

Several years ago University of California at Davis professor Dean Simonton conducted a study that examined more than three hundred creative geniuses born between 1450 and 1850. The list included thinkers Liebniz and Descartes, scientists Newton and Copernicus and artists Vinci and Rembrandt. He compared the relationship between their education and eminence, a metric he determined by an array of criteria. He plotted the graph and found an inverted U sparking the following conclusion: “The most eminent creators were those who had received a moderate amount of education, equal to about the middle of college.”

Simonton’s research highlights a commonly held notion: too much familiarity can be detrimental to creativity. The problem, Simonton hypothesizes, is that creativity benefits from an outsider’s mindset. “Too much experience…” on the other hand, “may restrict creativity because you know so well how things should be done that you are unable to escape to come up with new ideas.” It seems reasonable, then, to suggest that, “if you want a creative solution to a problem, you’d better find someone who knows a little about the situation but not too much.”

Consider the clever website InnoCentive.com. The premise is simple: ‘Seekers’ go to post problems for ‘Solvers.’ The problems range from “Recovery of Bacillus Spore from Swabs,” to “Blueprints for a Medical Transportation Device for Combat Rescue.” They are usually posted by large corporations, so the rewards can be lucrative – sometimes millions of dollars.

There are two things remarkable about InnoCentive, each brought to light by astudy conducted by researchers at Harvard Business School. The first is that it works; about 33 percent of the problems are solved on time. The second is that solvers tend to solve problems that are at the fringe of their expertise. If a biochemistry problem only attracted biochemists it tended to remain unsolved. But if the same problem was tackled by, say, a molecular biologist or an organic chemist the chances were greater that the problem would be solved. Outside thinking was vital.

Think about the failures of expertise, as the author of Talent is Overrated Geoff Colvin does: “Why didn’t Western Union invent the telephone? Why didn’t U.S. Steel invent the minimill. Why didn’t IBM invent the personal computer? Over and over, the organizations that knew all there was to know about a technology or an industry failed to make the creative breakthrough that would transform the business.”

Is too much expertise killing creativity?

Well, not exactly. Colvin goes on to remind readers that the greatest innovators of any field share a few characteristics in common: years of intensive preparation and technical competence. Great innovations, he says, are roses that bloom after long and careful cultivation.

He considers James Watson’s and Francis Crick’s discovery of the structure of DNA. Colvin cites the research of Robert Weisberg, who showed that several other distinguished scientists were trying to solve the same problem at the same time. Colvin argues that, “if we presume that too much familiarity with a problem is a disadvantage, then we would expect to find that Watson and Crick came at this one unburdened by the excessive data that clouded the thinking of the other researchers. But in reality, the story was just the opposite.”

The larger point is that creative breakthroughs require about 10,000 hours or ten years of deliberate practice within a given field:

The most eminent creators are consistently those who have immersed themselves utterly in their chosen field, have devoted their lives to it, amassed tremendous knowledge of it, and continually pushed themselves to the front of it. Zero evidence supports the conclusion that too much knowledge might be a hindrance in creative achievement.

And what about the success of InnoCentive? What’s important is not to be an outsider, but to have an outsider’s mindset. People at the fringe of their expertise solved problems on InnoCentive, but they were still solving problems within their general field of expertise. Indeed, innovation occurs at the boundary of disciplines, but you’ll never hear about a novelist winning a Nobel Prize in physics.

As for Simonton’s study, it’s important to remember that during the period that his subjects existed – 1450-1850 – many fundamental principles of the scientific method were still unknown. It was still possible – especially in the first half of that 400 year stretch – for someone to be an expert in multiple disciplines. Moreover, a high-level degree in, say, 1650, didn’t confer much.

Today’s landscape is much different – all the low hanging fruit is good. A breakthrough in any field requires exclusive preparation in that field; even experts don’t know everything about their field. So it’s important to maintain a skeptical point of view and think like an outsider. But when it comes to creative breakthroughs, the more familiarity the better.

May 22

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Environmental Cues That Boost Creativity

Originally posted on BigThink.com

For most of human history creativity was something that came from the muses; it was about flashes of insight from another world. Today we know that creativity is something that happens in the brain; many psychologists and neuroscientists are working to identify cognitive mechanisms and processes active during the creative process. However, the public still believes that creativity is a “gift” applicable across many fields even though research shows that creativity is improvable, contingent on upbringing and societal circumstances and domain-specific. Particularly interesting are studies of the last few years that suggest that subtle cues in our physical environment significantly influence creative output.

Consider a study published in Science by Juliet Zhu and a team of researchers from the University of British Columbia. The psychologists recruited six hundred subjects and tasked them with several basic cognitive tests that required either an analytic approach or a more creative mindset. The key part of the experiment was that the tests were conducted on computer screens with red, blue, or neutral backgrounds. Did the color of the screen matter?

The differences were noticeable. Computer screens with a red background boosted performance on analytical tasks including memory retrieval and proofreading. Blue computer screens, on the other hand, improved performance on creative tasks such as coming up with uses for a brick and brainstorming. Why? Zhu argues that red unconsciously motivates us to think more deliberately and analytically because it’s associated with things such as stop signs, emergency vehicles and danger. In contrast, blue is associated with the sky, ocean and peace and tranquility – things that influence a more free-flowing and exploratory mindset.

This brings me to a brand new study by Zhu and her colleagues Ravi Mehta and Amar Cheema released in the Journal of Consumer Research. The psychologists were interested in looking at how various levels of sound affect creativity. In one experiment they assigned 65 undergrads Remote Associate Tasks (RAT). In a RAT participants are given stimuli words (shelf, read, end) and asked to determine a related target word (book).

There were four conditions: low-noise (50 dB), moderate-noise (70 dB), high-noise (85 dB) and no-noise (the sounds of the room the participants completed the tasks). For the three noise conditions the researchers blended sounds from a cafeteria, roadside traffic and distant construction noise to create an ambient sound typical of consumption contexts such as a shopping mall or grocery store. The participants listened to the noise, which came from speakers in the room, while they solved the RAT. The psychologists found, “a significant main effect of noise level on RAT performance such that respondents in the moderate-noise condition generated more correct answers than those in the low-noise high-noise or control conditions.”

The study involved four other experiments. As predicted by Zhu and her team, each demonstrated similar results. Here’s what the authors conclude:

We find that increasing levels of noise induce distraction, leading to a higher construal level. That is, both moderate and high noise levels lead to more abstract processing as compared to a low noise level. This higher construal level then induces greater creativity in the moderate-noise condition; however, the very high level of distraction induced by the high-noise condition, although it prompts a higher construal level, also causes reduced information processing, thus impairing creativity. In other words, while a moderate level of noise produces just enough distraction to induce disfluency, leading to higher creativity, a very high level of noise induces too much dis- traction so as to actually reduce the amount of processing, leading to lower creativity.

Zhu et al. also conclude that further research will be needed to determine what exactly their research means. They expressed interest in how different types of noise might affect creativity.

The larger point of this research is that there are simple things we can do to boost our creativity: blue rooms and a moderate amount of ambient noise for instance. It also suggests that creativity doesn’t arrive to us from the muses; it’s a skill carried out by certain parts of the brain that are influenced by certain aspects of the physical environment. Moreover, creativity is improvable; it’s not reserved for certain people.

Perhaps one advantage creative people have, then, is an ability to find environments that maximize their output. Maybe. At any rate, it’s worth keeping these studies in mind the next time you need to supplement your creative output.

May 16

Original Ideas: The Last Step In The Creative Process

Check out a new post at my Big Think blog.

Shakespeare was a ruthless thief. Some of his first plays – the three parts of Henry VI – were so similar to Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great that many eighteenth-century scholars believed Marlowe wrote them. By today’s standards, the plays of Henry VI were a copyright lawsuit waiting to happen. But the paraphrasing and borrowing of characters and plot lines was common practice in Elizabethan England; everybody stole from everybody. Shakespeare, as it were, was the best thief; he was constantly mining the work of his contemporaries.

Ironically, the more Shakespeare copied and imitated the more he started thinking on his own terms. The aesthetically rich atmosphere of Elizabethan England would always influence him – no man is an island – but by the time Shakespeare penned Hamlet (some fifteen years after the Henry VI plays) he had found his original voice.

Shakespeare’s story isn’t unique. All creative geniuses are thieves.

Continue reading here.

May 10

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Thinking Laterally In A Linear World: Why More Education Isn’t Important

For the British social psychologist Liam Hudson, IQ as a measurement for achievement is a lot like height in the NBA, past a certain threshold, it doesn’t matter. In the NBA, that threshold is about 6 feet. Baring a few exceptions, nearly every player in the NBA Hall of Fame is at least 6 feet tall. For IQ, the threshold is around 120. Geniuses like Isaac Newton and Blaise Pascal sported IQs well over 150. But Richard Feynman, winner of the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics and widely considered one of the greatest physicists of all time, did just fine at 120. A high IQ correlates with things like good health, high salary and high academic achievement, but it guarantees little in terms of personal success. Indeed, scores of people with an IQ above 120 go on to accomplish next to nothing.

Malcolm Gladwell brings this research to light in his 2008 book Outliers. In addition, he examines the relationship between Nobel Prize winners and the colleges they graduated from. We tend to think that a Nobel Prize requires a diploma from an elite university, but a degree from elite institution does not matter as much as one might think. Gladwell looked at winners of the Nobel Prize in Medicine and Chemistry and found that they represented a wide range of colleges including Hope, Hunter, Holy Cross and Antioch. He concludes that a good education, not an elite education, is sufficient.

Yet, would knowing this change anything? Would anybody turn down a few free IQ points? Would someone turn down Harvard for the University of Florida? No. Despite what the data suggests, we’re still obsessed with being the smartest and getting into the best school.

This is why education in the United States is thought of as an ascent: we progress upwards from 1st grade; a 4.0 is better than a 3.0 which is better than a 2.0; the valedictorian is at the top of his class; we move up in class rankings but not down.

The drive to be at the apex of society is a good attribute in the competitive world. But creativity isn’t linear; it’s about thinking laterally. It’s about reaching across domains to bring two seemingly unrelated ideas together to create one original idea. It’s about what exists at the periphery. It’s about, as Steve Jobs said, “connecting things.”

Just think about the traits creative people possess. As New York Times columnist David Brooks explains:

[They] don’t follow the crowds; they seek out the blank spots on the map. Creative people wander through faraway and forgotten traditions and then integrate marginal perspectives back to the mainstream. Instead of being fastest around the tracks everybody knows, creative people move adaptively through wildernesses nobody knows.

Now think about the competitive environment that confronts the most fortunate people today and how it undermines those mind-sets. First, students have to jump through ever-more demanding, preassigned academic hoops. Instead of developing a passion for one subject, they’re rewarded for becoming professional students, getting great grades across all subjects, regardless of their intrinsic interests. Instead of wandering across strange domains, they have to prudentially apportion their time, making productive use of each hour.

Is competition trumping creativity?

Not exactly. Creative output is the product of its social and intellectual environment. There’s a reason ancient Athens was home to the best philosophers, Elizabethan England had the best playwrights, Silicon Valley harbors the world’s top tech entrepreneurs and North Korea doesn’t produce the same amount of Nobel Laureates as the United States. Certain circumstances favor creative expression.

Capitalism is one of those. When people are given the chance to pursue self-interest they usually do. They also tend to cluster: poets hang out with poets; fashion designers hang out with fashion designers; cognitive science professors hang out with cognitive science professors. The byproduct of our natural tendency to seek out likeminded people is improvement; being surrounded by the best makes us better. This is why, in a larger sense, competition is good for creativity.

Brooks would agree. However, his worry (and mine) is that on the path to improvement we’re ignoring the side roads. That is, competition should be thought of as a means to a niche – a place people go to create a creative monopoly. In today’s hyper competitive world, however, competition is a means to an end; we’re competitive just for the sake of it, and what’s lost is a willingness to be creative just for the sake of it.

This brings me back to Outliers. The lesson from the research that Gladwell highlights is that after a certain point in one’s academic career it’s important to focus less on better grades, test scores, acceptance letters and more on thinking laterally and seeking out original ideas. Indeed, understanding society only as a competitive myopia is a real creativity killer.

May 9

Relaxation & Creativity: The Science of Sleeping on It

A new post up at Big Think!

Sigmund Freud postulated that dreaming is a reflection of the unleashed id; it represents one’s deep sexual fantasies and frustrations implanted during childhood. But what happens when we fall asleep is usually much less dramatic; we dream about the problems of everyday life. Now scientists understand dreaming as an integral part of the creative process – it’s not just about the problems of everyday life, it’s about solving them.

In 2004, the neuroscientists Ullrich Wagner and Jan Born published a paper in Nature that examined the relationship between sleep and problem solving. In one experiment, they tasked participants with transforming a long list of number strings. The task required participants to apply a set of algorithms that would scare off most save a handful of math geeks. However, the researchers integrated an elegant shortcut that made the task easier. How many people, Wagner and Born asked, would catch it?

Continue reading here

May 8

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What Improv Teaches Us About Creativity

My latest at my Big Think Blog. I explore improv and the idea of agreement.

The most important rule in improvisation comedy is the idea of agreement, the notion that a scene flourishes when all the players accept anything that happens to them. Improv isn’t about wisecracks and one-liners. It’s about creating a structure where characters and narratives are quickly created, developed, sometimes forgotten and other times resolved. With just a tip-bit – usually a one-word suggestion at the beginning of the show – good improvisers generate compelling and captivating stories that engage the audience. Comedy is the natural byproduct.

The question, of course, is how do they do it?

Consider a study conducted several years ago out of Johns Hopkins University by neuroscientist Charles Limb. Limb designed a clever experiment that measured the brains’ of jazz pianists using an fMRI machine as they improvised on a MIDI keyboard. His study focused on two parts of the brain: the medial prefrontal cortex (MPC) and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC). The medial prefrontal cortex is a part of the brain associated with self-expression; it’s a mental narrator that keeps tabs on the story of your life. The DLPFC is closely associated with impulse control. It’s a part of the brain that makes you think twice before you eat a slice of pizza or gamble – a sort of mental shackle that keeps your neurons in check.

The key finding involved the DLPFC. Limb found that the musicians “deactivated” their DLPFC once they began improvising. That is, the musicians turned off part of their conscious brain to let the unconscious mind do the work. As Limb says, “musical creativity vis-à-vis improvisation may be a result of… the suspension of self-monitoring and related processes that typically regulate conscious control of goal-directed, predictable, or planned actions.” In other words, the pianists were inhibiting their inhibitions. (Watch Limb’s TED lecture here)

Continue reading here.

May 3

How To Generate A Good Idea

My latest on my Big Think blog. Here’s the gist:

Several years ago, Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister conducted a study that measured the productivity of computer programmers. Their data set included more than 600 programmers from 92 companies. According to Susan Cain, author of the recently released book Quiet: The Power of Introverts, DeMarco and Lister found that what distinguished the best programmers was not experience or salary, but privacy: personal workspace and freedom from interruption.

In fact, “sixty-two percent of the best performers said their workspace was sufficiently private compared with only 19 percent of the worst performers. Seventy-six percent of the worst programmers but only 38 percent of the best said that they were often interrupted needlessly.”

In Quiet, her manifesto, Cain criticizes the new “Groupthink” model that she says dominates our schools and work places. Indeed, students are encouraged to collaborate with their peers often, and many businesses (70% by Cain’s estimate) sport open office plans to encourage their employees to freely exchange ideas. The idea behind Groupthink models is that creativity and achievement requires other people. Lone geniuses are out, says Cain, and collaboration is in.

Continue reading here

Apr 29

7 Comments

The Irrationality of Irrationality: The Paradox of Popular Psychology

Here’s my latest on ScientificAmerican.com 

In 1996, Lyle Brenner, Derek Koehler and Amos Tversky conducted a study involving students from San Jose State University and Stanford University. The researchers were interested in how people jump to conclusions based on limited information. Previous work by Tversky, Daniel Kahneman and other psychologists found that people are “radically insensitive to both the quantity and quality of information that gives rise to impressions and intuitions,” so the researchers knew, of course, that we humans don’t do a particularly good job of weighing the pros and cons. But to what degree? Just how bad are we at assessing all the facts?

To find out, Brenner and his team exposed the students to legal scenarios. In one, a plaintiff named Mr. Thompson visits a drug store for a routine union visit. The store manager informs him that according to the union contract with the drug store, plaintiffs cannot speak with the union employees on the floor. After a brief deliberation, the manager calls the police and Mr. Thompson is handcuffed for trespassing. Later the charges were dropped, but Mr. Thompson is suing the store for false arrest.

All participants got this background information. Then, they heard from one of the two sides’ lawyers; the lawyer for the union organizer framed the arrest as an attempt to intimidate, while the lawyer for the store argued that the conversation that took place in the store was disruptive. Another group of participants – essentially a mock jury – heard both sides.

The key part of the experiment was that the participants were fully aware of the setup; they knew that they were only hearing one side or the entire story. But this didn’t stop the subjects who heard one-sided evidence from being more confident and biased with their judgments than those who saw both sides. That is, even when people had all the underlying facts, they jumped to conclusions after hearing only one side of the story.

The good news is that Brenner, Koehler and Tversky found that simply prompting participants to consider the other side’s story reduced their bias – instructions to consider the missing information was a manipulation in a later study – but it certainly did not eliminate it. Their study shows us that people are not only willing to jump to conclusions after hearing only one side’s story, but that even when they have additional information at their disposal that would suggest a different conclusion, they are still surprisingly likely to do so. The scientists conclude on a somewhat pessimistic note: “People do not compensate sufficiently for missing information even when it is painfully obvious that the information available to them is incomplete.”

In Brenner’s study, participants were dealing with a limited universe of information – the facts of the case and of the two sides’ arguments. But in reality – especially in the Internet era – people have access to a limitless amount of information that they could consider. As a result, we rely on rules of thumb, or heuristics, to take in information and make decisions. These mental shortcuts are necessary because they lessen the cognitive load and help us organize the world – we would be overwhelmed if we were truly rational.

This is one of the reasons we humans love narratives; they summarize the important information in a form that’s familiar and easy to digest. It’s much easier to understand events in the world as instances of good versus evil, or any one of the seven story types. As Daniel Kahneman explains, “[we] build the best possible story form the information available… and if it is a good story, [we] believe it.” The implication here is that it’s how good the story is, not necessarily its accuracy, that’s important.

But narratives are also irrational because they sacrifice the whole story for one side of a story that conforms to one’s worldview. Relying on them often leads to inaccuracies and stereotypes. This is what the participants in Brenner’s study highlight; people who take in narratives are often blinded to the whole story – rarely do we ask: “What more would I need to know before I can have a more informed and complete opinion?”

The last several years have seen many popular psychology books that touch on this line of research. There’s Ori and Rom Brafman’s Sway, Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational and, naturally, Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow. If you could sum up the popular literature on cognitive biases and our so-called irrationalities it would go something like this: we only require a small amount of information, often times a single factoid, to confidently form conclusions and generate new narratives to take on new, seemingly objective, but almost entirely subjective and inaccurate, worldviews.

The shortcomings of our rationality have been thoroughly exposed to the lay audience. But there’s a peculiar inconsistency about this trend. People seem to absorb these books uncritically, ironically falling prey to some of the very biases they should be on the lookout for: incomplete information and seductive stories. That is, when people learn about how we irrationally jump to conclusions they form new opinions about how the brain works from the little information they recently acquired. They jump to conclusions about how the brain jumps to conclusions and fit their newfound knowledge into a larger story that romantically and naively describes personal enlightenment.

Tyler Cowen made a similar point in a TED lecture a few months ago. He explained it this way:

There’s the Nudge book, the Sway book, the Blink book… [they are] all about the ways in which we screw up. And there are so many ways, but what I find interesting is that none of these books identify what, to me, is the single, central, most important way we screw up, and that is, we tell ourselves too many stories, or we are too easily seduced by stories. And why don’t these books tell us that? It’s because the books themselves are all about stories. The more of these books you read, you’re learning about some of your biases, but you’re making some of your other biases essentially worse. So the books themselves are part of your cognitive bias.

The crux of the problem, as Cowen points out, is that it’s nearly impossible to understand irrationalities without taking advantage of them. And, paradoxically, we rely on stories to understand why they can be harmful.

To be sure, there’s an important difference between the bias that comes from hearing one side of an argument and (most) narratives. A corrective like “consider the other side” is unlikely to work for narratives because it’s not always clear what the opposite would even be. So it’s useful to avoid jumping to conclusions not only by questioning narratives (after all, just about everything is plausibly a narrative, so avoiding them can be pretty overwhelming), but by exposing yourself to multiple narratives and trying to integrate them as well as you can.

In the beginning of the recently released book The Righteous Mind, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt explains how some books (his included) make a case for how one certain thing (in Haidt’s case, morality) is the key to understanding everything. Haidt’s point is that you shouldn’t read his book and jump to overarching conclusions about human nature. Instead, he encourages readers to always think about integrating other points of view (e.g., morality is the most important thing to consider) with other perspectives. I think this is a good strategy for overcoming a narrow-minded view of human cognition.

It’s natural for us to reduce the complexity of our rationality into convenient bite-sized ideas. As the trader turned epistemologist Nassim Taleb says: “We humans, facing limits of knowledge, and things we do not observe, the unseen and the unknown, resolve the tension by squeezing life and the world into crisp commoditized ideas.” But readers of popular psychology books on rationality must recognize that there’s a lot they don’t know, and they must be beware of how seductive stories are. The popular literature on cognitive biases is enlightening, but let’s be irrational about irrationality; exposure to X is not knowledge and control of X. Reading about cognitive biases, after all, does not free anybody from their nasty epistemological pitfalls.

Moving forward, my suggestion is to remember the lesson from Brenner, Koehler and Tversky: they reduced conclusion jumping by getting people to consider the other information at their disposal. So let’s remember that the next book on rationality isn’t a tell-all – it’s merely another piece to the puzzle. This same approach could also help correct the problem of being too swayed by narratives – there are anyways multiple sides of a story.

Ultimately, we need to remember what philosophers get right. Listen and read carefully; logically analyze arguments; try to avoid jumping to conclusions; don’t rely on stories too much. The Greek playwright Euripides was right: Question everything, learn something, answer nothing.

Apr 22

7 Comments

Blogging At Big Think

Starting today I will be a blogger for BigThink.com. For those of you who are not familiar, Big Think is a wonderful website with great content. Here’s what they’re all about:

In our digital age, we’re drowning in information. The web offers us infinite data points—news stories, tweets, wikis, status updates, etc—but very little to connect the dots or illuminate the larger patterns linking them together. Here at Big Think, we believe that success in the future is about knowing the ideas that allow you to manage and master this universe of information. Therefore, we aim to help you move above and beyond random information, toward real knowledge, offering big ideas from fields outside your own that you can apply toward the questions and challenges in your own life.

My blog is called Moments of Genius. Here’s a quick summary of what it will be about.

Everybody has their own pet theory about how to generate ideas and be productive: some chug caffeine, others relax; some work in groups, others work alone; some work at night, others in the morning. This blog draws from recent findings in cognitive science to inform and answer these questions and others like it. It’s for the creative professional, the businessperson or the artist who seeks to create new ideas and work efficiently. It’s about translating findings in psychology and neuroscience so we can be more productive, make better decisions, be more creative, collaborate efficiently and solve problems effectively.

My first post went up today. It’s an expansion of a previous Why We Reason post on childhood and creativity. Here’s the gist:

The Monster Engine is one of the best ideas I’ve come across. It’s a book, demonstration, lecture and gallery exhibition created by Dave Devries. The premise is simple: children draw pictures of monsters and Devries paints them realistically. According to the website, the idea was born in 1998 when Devries took an interest in his niece’s doodles. As a comic addict, Devires wondered if he could use color, texture and shading to bring his niece’s drawings to life.

But Devries had a larger goal: he wanted to always see things as a child. Why? In many ways, children flourish where adults fail. Children are more creative and are natural inventors. Their worldview is incomplete and demands discovery. They prosper because they embrace their ignorance instead of ignoring it. And they are willing to explore, investigate and put their ideas to the test because they are willing to fail. Unlike adults, they don’t care how other people perceive or evaluate their ideas, and they’re unconcerned with the impossible or what doesn’t work.

So what does this mean for Why We Reason? In short, Why We Reason will remain for the time being. I still have a few WWR posts in the works and they need to see the light of day. However, some changes will be made in the near future. In the mean time, I encourage my readers to bookmark, tweet, share, etc., my posts on Big Think.

Apr 17

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Are Superstitions Rational?

By many accounts, Bjorn Borg is one of the greatest tennis players of all time. The former world no. 1 won 11 Grand Slam titles between 1974 and 1981. Most remarkably, he won 82 percent of all the professional matches he played. He had skills.

But that’s not all he had. Like many athletes, he had superstitions. To prepare for Wimbledon, Bjorn grew a beard and wore the same Fila shirt during the matches. It worked too. He holds a career record of 51-4 at Wimbledon along with five consecutive singles titles he recorded in the second half of the 1970s. Bjorn’s “lucky beard,” as the Swedes termed it, has become a staple in other sports. Today, NFL, NBA and NHL players sport the “playoff beard” in search of a competitive edge.

Superstitions are, by many accounts, irrational and scientifically backwards. However, empirical evidence suggests that this might not be entirely true. A few years ago social psychologist Lysann Damisch teamed up with Barbara Stoberock and Thomas Mussweiler to measure what effects, if any, superstitions had in sports.

In one experiment, the social scientists tested the “lucky ball” myth by having two groups of participants attempt ten golf putts from a distance of 100cm. Like good psychologists they told one group of participants that the ball they were about to use “turned out to be lucky” (superstition-activated condition). In contrast, they told the second group they were using a ball that everyone used (control condition). The researchers found that participants in the superstition-activated condition drained 35 percent more putts than participants in the control condition.

In a related study conducted last year, undergraduate Charles Lee of the University of Virginia joined with Sally Linkenauger to see if superstitious beliefs about equipment affected performance. They recruited 41 undergraduates with backgrounds in golf for their study. Similar to Damisch’s team, Lee and Linkenauger told half of the students they were using a really nice putter and the other half that British Open champion and PGA tour player Ben Curtis, who was known to be an expert putter, previously owned the putter they were able to use. (Importantly, all of the undergraduates knew who Curtis was.) Their findings were telling: students who putted with “Curtis’” putter sank, on average, one and a half more balls.

What accounts for these findings? The basis for superstitious beliefs is sheer fantasy, but their effects can be real and consequential. For example, a 2010 paper by Travis Ng of Hong Kong University found that superstitions surrounding ‘8’ and ‘4’ in Cantonese – 8 is considered lucky because it rhymes with prosper and prosperity whereas 4 is unlucky because it rhymes with die or death – affected the economics of license plates. Here’s the BPS Research Digest:

Controlling for visual factors that affect price (for example, plates with fewer digits are more sought-after) Ng’s team found that an ordinary 4-digit plate with one extra lucky ’8′ was sold 63.5 per cent higher on average. An extra unlucky ’4′ by contrast diminished the average 4-digit plate value by 11 per cent. These effects aren’t trivial. Replacing the ’7′ in a standard 4-digit plate with an ’8′ would boost its value by roughly $400.

So why do we believe in superstitions in the first place? Some cases are clearer than others. In terms of athletic performance, evidence suggests that a superstitious belief in certain objects (Curtis’ putter) and habits (Bjorn’s beard) gives us confidence, which moreover improves performance. In terms of the study involving Ben Curtis’ putter, it’s the clubs history that’s relevant. For the same reason people would like to wear a sweater knitted by Mother Teresa or use Einstein’s pencil, we believe that the equipment a legend used would give us an advantage on the playing field. In the case of Bjorn’s beard, the habit provides structure and security to an otherwise disorganized or nervous pre-Wimbledon routine.

It’s also hypothesized that superstitions arise from our natural tendency to seek evidence of intentionality in the world. We want reasons for things, and we want those reasons to have an author (e.g., God, destiny, karma, the force). We hate randomness. Many religious beliefs come about from teleological reasoning along these lines. And like superstitions in sports, there are real consequences. This is what research from anthropologist Richard Sosis suggests. As a recent NYTimes reports:

[Sosis] found that in Israel during the second intifada in the early 2000s, 36 percent of secular women in the town of Tzfat recited psalms in response to the violence. Compared with those who did not recite psalms, he found, those women benefited from reduced anxiety: they felt more comfortable entering crowds, going shopping and riding buses — a result, he concluded, of their increased sense of control.

All of this research encourages the idea that superstitious beliefs might not be entirely irrational. Although there is no empirical data to suggest that superstitions are real in it of themselves, their behavioral consequences illustrate a different trend.

There are downsides, of course, to fantastical thinking – athletes often become overly obsessed with pregame rituals and many religious beliefs led to less than ideal scenarios. But superstitions are essential. For better or for worse, they are a natural component of our cognition.

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