A series of surprising studies in psychology shows how deeply our own beliefs influence the outcome of experiments, turning the science on its head. The self-help industry should take note
“Want to lose weight? Buy smaller plates.” “Mindfulness at work: a superpower to boost productivity.” “Leaving Facebook can make you happier.” That’s what the headlines and Ted Talks would have you believe. But are any of these psychological tricks – or life hacks, as they are often called these days – actually true? The truth is, we don’t know; and, in a very real sense, we can’t ever know, because of limitations that are inherent in the design of the relevant experiments – not just those on weight loss, mindfulness or social media, but just about all experiments in what we might call “lifestyle science”. That, at least, is the implication of a new study by a pair of Stanford psychologists, Nicholas Coles and Michael Frank. We’ll get to their work in a minute, but first I’d like to take you back to the German city of Mannheim in 1988.
It was here that psychologist Fritz Strack conducted a study that has since been cited almost 3,000 times and become a staple of psychology textbooks and New York Times bestsellers, including Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow. In the experiment, participants were given a cover story: that previous research using questionnaires had excluded participants who were unable to use their hands to fill in the form, and that this study would explore the feasibility of instead holding the pen in your mouth. Half the participants were asked to hold the pen in their teeth (which forced their mouth into a smile) and half in their lips (which forced their mouth into a neutral pout) while they viewed a selection of cartoon strips. Sure enough, the participants who were smiling when they saw the cartoons rated themselves as more amused than the participants who were pulling a neutral (if slightly odd) expression. Importantly, when they were asked afterwards whether they’d suspected anything fishy was going on, none of the participants showed any sign of realising that the pen-in-mouth cover story was simply a way to get them to smile. Strack seemed to have shown that – at least sometimes – our facial expressions determine our moods, rather than vice versa.
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