59 Seconds: Think a Little, Change a Lot (12 page)

Mirror, Mirror, on the Kitchen Wall

Work conducted by Stacey Sentyrz and Brad Bushman, at Iowa State University, suggests that placing a mirror in your kitchen may help you shed pounds.
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In several studies, participants were given the opportunity to eat healthy or unhealthy food. In one study, in a supermarket, almost a thousand shoppers were presented with the option of trying new types of full-fat or no-fat margarine. Half of the time a mirror was strategically placed behind the spreads to ensure that the participants could see their own reflection, and the other half of the time it was removed. The presence of the mirror resulted in a remarkable 32 percent reduction in trying the full-fat margarine. The researchers argued that seeing your own reflection makes you more aware of your body.

The Pitfalls of Diet Packs

Supermarket aisles are full of small-portion “diet packs” of snacks that will help you control your craving and so eat less. But will
buying such packs really help you cut down on consumption? To find out, researchers at Tilburg University in the Netherlands gave participants either two bags of potato chips or nine diet packs and asked them to watch TV.
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Before tucking into their treats and TV, participants were weighed in front of a mirror to create a “dieting mind-set.” The results revealed that participants given the diet bags ate twice as many chips as those given the large bags. The researchers speculated that the participants given the diet packs felt they didn’t need to exercise so much self-control and thus ended up eating more.

   
THE BENEFITS OF WRITING YOUR OWN EULOGY

In Charles Dickens’s
A Christmas Carol
, Ebenezer Scrooge is visited by three ghostly figures. The first two, the Ghost of Christmas Past and the Ghost of Christmas Present, show how Scrooge’s selfishness has made his life lonely and miserable. It is only when the Ghost of Christmas Future appears and leads him to his ill-kept and forgotten grave that Scrooge finally changes his character and becomes a far more giving and compassionate person. Dickens looked at the effect of taking a long-term view and the contemplation of life after death, but a large number of psychologists have done the same, and their findings suggest that Scrooge’s fictional transformation can also occur in real life.

In one study, people were stopped in the street and asked to use a 10-point scale to rate how they felt about their favorite charities (“How beneficial is this charity to society?” “How much do you think society needs this charity?” and “How desirable is this charity to you personally?”).
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Some of the people were stopped as they walked past a funeral home, while others were stopped a few blocks later, in front of a nondescript building. When interviewing people in front of the funeral home, researchers positioned themselves so as to ensure that participants were forced to face a large sign reading “Howe’s Mortuary.” The results revealed a Scrooge-like effect, with those facing up to their own death feeling far more benevolent than those standing in front of the nondescript building.

Christopher Peterson at the University of Michigan believes that encouraging people to consider how they would like to be remembered after their death has various motivational benefits, including helping them to identify their long-term goals and assess the degree to which they are progressing toward making those goals a reality.
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So, with no further ado, let’s evoke your own Ghost of Christmas Future.

Imagine a close friend standing up at your funeral and presenting your ideal eulogy. Write the script for your friend. What would you really like them to say about you? Feel free to avoid any sense of modesty, but keep it realistic. How would you want them to describe your personality, achievements, personal strengths, family life, professional success, and behavior toward others? When you have finished writing, take a long and honest look at the eulogy for your ideal self. Do your present lifestyle and behavior justify the comments, or is there work to be done?

creativity

Exploding the
myth
of brainstorming,
how to get in touch with your
inner Leonardo
merely by
glancing
at modern art,
lying down
, and
putting a
plant
on your desk

IN THE EARLY 1940s
, advertising executive Alex Osborn argued that it was possible to enhance creativity by putting a group of people in a room and having them follow a set of simple rules involving, for example, coming up with as many thoughts as possible, encouraging wild and exaggerated ideas, and not criticizing or evaluating anyone’s comments. When selling his approach to businesses, Osborn claimed that “the average person thinks up twice as many ideas when working with a group than when working alone,” and, perhaps not surprisingly, his novel approach quickly conquered the world.
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Over the years, organizations around the globe have encouraged their employees to tackle key problems using this approach.

Researchers have gone to a great deal of trouble to test the effectiveness of group brainstorming. In a typical experiment, participants arrive in a group. Half of them are randomly chosen to be in the “work as a group” condition and are placed in one room. They are given standard brainstorming rules and have to come up with ideas to solve a specific problem (perhaps design a new ad campaign or find ways of easing traffic congestion). The other half of the participants are asked to sit alone in separate rooms, are given exactly the same instructions and tasks, and asked to generate ideas on their own. Researchers then tally the quantity of ideas produced under the different conditions, and experts rate their quality. So do such studies show that group brainstorming is more effective
than individuals working alone? Many scientists are far from convinced. For example, Brian Mullen, at the University of Kent at Canterbury, and his colleagues analyzed twenty studies that tested the effectiveness of group brainstorming in this way and were amazed to discover that in the majority of the experiments, the participants working on their own produced a higher quantity and quality of ideas than those working in groups.
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Other research suggests that group brainstorming may fail, in part, because of a phenomenon known as “social loafing.” In the late 1880s, a French agricultural engineer named Max Ringelmann became obsessed with trying to make workers as efficient as possible.
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After carrying out hundreds of experiments, he inadvertently stumbled upon an unexpected effect that would inspire a century of psychological research. One of Ringelmann’s studies involved asking people to pull on a rope to lift increasingly heavy weights. Perhaps not unreasonably, Ringelmann expected people in groups to work harder than those on their own. But the results revealed the opposite pattern. When working alone, individuals lifted around 185 pounds, but they managed only an average of 140 pounds per person when working as a group. Additional work revealed that the phenomenon, like the “bystander” effect described in the “Persuasion” chapter, is largely the result of a diffusion of responsibility.
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When people work on their own, their success or failure is entirely the result of their own abilities and hard work. If they do well, the glory is theirs. If they fail, they alone are accountable. However, add other people to the situation, and suddenly everyone stops trying so hard, safe in the knowledge that though individuals will not receive personal praise if the group does well, they can always blame others if it performs badly.

Research shows that this phenomenon occurs in many different
situations.
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Ask people to make as much noise as possible, and they make more on their own than in a group. Ask them to add rows of numbers, and the more people involved, the lower the work rate. Ask them to come up with ideas, and people are more creative away from the crowd. It is a universal phenomenon, emerging in studies conducted around the world, including in America, India, Thailand, and Japan.

In short, a large body of research now suggests that for more than seventy years, people using group brainstorming may have inadvertently been stifling, not stimulating, their creative juices. When working together they aren’t as motivated to put in the time and energy needed to generate great ideas, and so they end up spending more time thinking inside the box.

So, when it comes to creativity, is it simply a case of staying away from the pack? No. In fact, other research shows that if you really want to get in touch with your inner Leonardo da Vinci, there are several quick and surprisingly powerful techniques available. All it takes is a glance at the right type of modern art, lying down on the job, doing nothing, or putting a plant on your desk.

   
TESTING FOR CREATIVITY

Psychologists have developed lots of weird and wonderful ways of testing for creativity. People have been presented with a paper clip and given a few minutes to create as many uses for it as possible. They have been given a pencil and a sheet of paper with a square grid drawn on it and asked to make each square into a different object (e.g., television, fish tank, book, etc.). In both cases, the number of responses would be counted and judged for originality by comparison to the responses from all of those taking part. Researchers also often use various types of visual and verbal lateral-thinking problems. Try the following questions to test this aspect of your creativity:

1. Can you add a single line to the following equation to make it correct? (There is just one rule—you are not allowed to place the line through the equal sign like this: ≠, thus converting it into a “not equal” sign.)
   10 10 11 = 10:50
   

2. Joanna and Jackie were born on the same day of the same month of the same year. They have the same mother and father, yet they are not twins. How is that possible?
   

3. A man has married twenty different women in the same town. All are still alive, and he never divorced any of them. Polygamy is unlawful, yet the man has not broken the law. How is this possible?
   

4. A man walks into an antiques shop and offers to sell a beautiful bronze coin. One side of the coin contains a wonderful image of a Roman emperor’s head, while the other shows the date as 500 B.C. The antiques dealer instantly knows that the coin does not date back to 500 B.C. Why?
   

Answers

1. This is all about time. By adding a short line over the second “1,” you convert the number “10” into the word “TO,” and now the equation reads “ten to eleven, which is the same as ten fifty.”
   10 TO 11 = 10:50
   

2. Joanna and Jackie are part of a set of triplets.
   

3. The man is a minister and so presided over the wedding ceremonies.
   

4. The year 500
   B.C
   . predates the birth of Christ, and thus a coin from that time would not be inscribed with an abbreviation for “Before Christ.”
   

LISTENING TO THE QUIET GUY

Surrealist Salvador Dalí would sometimes generate ideas for his paintings by using an interesting technique. He would lie on a couch and put a glass on the floor. He would then carefully place one end of a spoon on the edge of the glass and lightly hold the other end in his hand. As he drifted off to sleep, he would naturally relax his hand and release the spoon. The sound of the spoon falling into the glass would wake him up, and he would immediately sketch the bizarre images that had just started to drift through his half-asleep, semiconscious mind. In view of the impractical nature of so many of his ideas (think lobster telephone), clearly this technique might not be for everyone, but that is not to say that your unconscious mind is not a powerhouse of creative thought.

In fact, several studies suggest that when it comes to innovative ways of looking at the world, there may be a lot more going on in your unconscious mind than you realize. In a simple experimental demonstration of this, Stephen Smith at Texas A&M University presented volunteers with pictureword
puzzles that suggested common phrases and asked them to solve as many as possible.
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For example, they might be asked to identify the phrase indicated in the following set of words: