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TEDx Talks
Published: 2013-06-22
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7XFLTDQ4JMk
uhhuh hi everyone boss I wish I could dance but I can't and you really don't want me to so inside I thought I would talk a little today about how people think I'm fascinated by this question my social psychologist which basically means I my professional people watcher so this is what I do I try to figure out how humans think and how we might be able
to think better here's something I noticed a few years ago about how I seem to think here's a typical week in my life which usually seems to involve entirely around publishing papers so here I am and the maximum of my artistic abilities as a stick figure going along at baseline and a paper gods accepted I get this rush this blip of happiness and then I'm back
to base line by about lunch time a few days later a paper might got rejected and not feels pretty awful and I am weak for that look to and but somehow I just can't stop thinking about it and here's the craziest part even if another paper gets accepted the next day well that's nice but somehow I can't get that pesky reduction out of my head so
what is going on here white is a failure seem to stick in our minds so much longer than a sex last well together with my colleague and avoid stint in the political science department I started thinking about this question this question of do our minds got stuck in the negatives we all know intuitively that there are different ways of thinking about things the same glass the
saying goes can be seen as half full or half empty and there's a lot of research in the social sciences showing that depending on how you describe the glass to people as half full or half empty it changes how they feel about it so if you describe the glass as half full Mrs Clinton gain frame because you're focusing on what's gained then people like it but
if you described the same glass eyes half empty a loss frame and people don't like it but we wondered what happens when you try to switch from thinking about it one way to thinking about it another way can people shift back and forth or do they get stuck in one way of thinking about it does one of these labels in other words tend to stick more
in the mind while to investigate this question we conducted a simple experiment we told participants in our experiment about a new surgical procedure and we randomly assigned them to one of two conditions for participants in the first condition the first group we describe the surgical procedure in terms of gains we sat and had a seventy percent success rate and for participants in the second group we
describe the procedure in terms of loss as we thought it had a thirty percent failure rate so is the exact same procedure were just focusing people's attention on the part of the glass that's full where the part of the class that's empty perhaps unsurprisingly people like the procedure one is described as having a seventy percent success rate and they don't like it when it's described as
having a thirty percent failure rate but then we added a twist we told participants in the first group you know you could think of that eyes a thirty percent failure rate and now they don't like it anymore they change their minds and with all participants in the second group you know you can think of that's eyes a seventy percent success rate but unlike the first group
they stuck with their initial opinion they seem to be stuck in the initial loss frame that they saw at the beginning of the study we conducted another experiment this time we told participants about the current governor of an important state who is running for reelection against his opponent we again had two groups of participants and we describe the current governors track record to them in one
of two ways we said that when the current governor took office statewide budget cuts were expected to a fact about ten thousand jobs and then half the participants around that under the current governor's leadership forty percent of these jobs have been saved and they like the current governor they think he's doing a great job the rest the participants rather than under the current governor is leadership
sixty percent of these jobs have been lost and they don't like the current governor they think he's doing a terrible job but done once more we added a twist for participants in the first group we re frames the information in terms of losses and now they didn't like the current governor anymore and for participants in the second group we re frames the information in terms of
games but just like in the first study this didn't seem to matter people in this group still didn't like the current governor so notice what this means once the last frame gets in there it sticks people can't go back to thinking about jobs saved once they've thought about jobs lost so in both of these scenarios actually the current governor gets ousted in favor of his opponent
well at this point we were getting curious why does that happen could it be that it's actually mentally harder for people to convert from losses to gain from it is for them to go from gains to Lawson's so we conducted a third study to toss how easily people could convert from one frame to another this time we told participants imagine there's been an outbreak of an
unusual disease and six hundred lives are at stake and we ask participants and one group F. a hundred lives are saved how many will be lost and we ask participants in the other group if a hundred lives are lost how many will be saved so everyone just have to calculate six hundred minus one hundred and come up with the answer of five hundred but whereas people
in one group have to convert from gains or losses in order to do that people in the second group have to convert from losses to gains we timed how long it took them to solve the simple math problem and what we found was that when people had to convert from gains to losses they could solve the problem quite quickly took about seven seconds on average but
when I had to convert from losses to games well now it took them far longer almost eleven seconds so this suggests that once we think about something as a loss that way of thinking about it tends to stick in our hands and to resist our attempts to change at what I take away from this research and from related research is that our view of the world
has a fundamental tendency it's helped toward the negative it's pretty easy to go from good to bad but far harder to shift from bad to good we literally have to work harder to see the upside of things and this matters so think about the economy here's our economic well being from two thousand seven to two thousand time and you can see it tanked just like we
all remember and then by late two thousand ten and have recovered by most objective measures but here's consumer confidence over the same time period you can see it tanks right along with the economy but then it seems to got stock instead of rebounding with the economy itself consumers seem to be psychologically stock back there in the recession so oddly then it may take more effort to
change our minds about how the economy is doing than to change the economy itself on a more personal level with this research means to me is that you have to work to see the outside literally this takes work this takes off part and you can practice that you can train your mind to do the spotter there is research out of UC Davis showing that just writing
for a few minutes each day about things that you're grateful for can dramatically boost your happiness and well being and even your hall we can also rehearse good news and share it with others we tend to think rate that misery loves company that venting will help get rid of our negative emotions that will feel better if we just talk about how terrible our day what's and
so we talk and we talk and we talk about the boss who is driving us crazy and that friend who never called us back and that meeting at work where every little thing that could go wrong dead but we forgot to talk about the good stuff and yet that's exactly where our minds need the most practice so my husband who has this disconcerting habit of listening
to what I say other people should do and then pointing out that technically speaking I'm a person too has has taken to listening to me for about two minutes on days when I come home all grumpy and complaining about everything any lessons any size okay but what happened today that was good and so I tell him about the student who came up to me after class
with this really interesting insightful question and I tell him about the friends who email me out of the blue this morning just to say hello and somewhere in the telling I start to smile and I start to think that maybe my day was pretty decent after all I think we can also work in our communities to focus on the upside we can be more aware that
bad times to stick one mean comment can stick with somebody all day all week even and I tend to propagate itself right somebody snaps at you and you snap back and use not the next guy to but what if the next time somebody snapped at you you forgave them what if the next time you had a really grumpy waitress you left her an extra large tent
