Mental Health Blogs

Archive for the ‘We’re Only Human’ Category

There are certain rules of conduct on which most ethical people would agree. It’s not nice to date the boss’s daughter just to get ahead in the company. Or marry her son. And no parent would approve of a child befriending another child just because he happens to own an Xbox 360 Elite. That would be like an adult warming up to a colleague simply because he happens to have season tickets for the New Orleans Saints.

All of these ethical lapses fall under the general category of using people, which we’re taught early on not to do. People are not instruments or tools to be wielded for our own purposes, pawns to help us achieve our personal goals.

Yet we do use people anyway, often in more subtle ways than these. Why is that? Why do these moral strictures fail much of the time? New and forgiving research suggests that the urge to use people may be deeply embedded in human nature. Indeed, seeing others as useful or not may be as fundamental as perceiving gender or race in navigating out social world.

University of Waterloo psychologist Grainne Fitzsimons is interested in the interplay of personal goals and stereotypes. We are all motivated by goals, from big ones like career success to more modest ones, like losing ten pounds—or simply getting to the train on time. In fact, we spend much of daily lives in pursuit of one goal or another. We also categorize people. We all do, whether we like it or not, simply because we need to find order in the world’s complexity. So we pigeonhole others as blue-collar or professional, conservative or liberal, Black or white or Asian, man or woman, young or old.

Given that personal goals and stereotyping are both so basic to our psychology, Fitzsimons reasoned, is it possible that our goals actually influence how we pigeonhole people? Or put another way, why would we not categorize others as instruments or tools if we see them as helping us get what we want in life? Working with psychologist James Shah of Duke, he designed an experiment to explore this possibility.

Here’s the gist of the study. They had a group of volunteers focus on a goal—say, staying fit and healthy. Then they had them pick three people who they felt could help them meet their goal; let’s call them Ian, Susan and Joe. They also listed three people who they did not perceive as helpful or useful in staying fit—not a hindrance but not instrumental either. We’ll call them Nancy, Ben and Lori.

The names are important because, later on, the volunteers read a series of sentences with these names embedded in them: “The cashier gave Ian his change.” “Ben was tired of arguing” And so forth. There was a pretense for this reading, but then the psychologists surprised the volunteers with a memory test, in which they had to supply the right names: “The cashier gave ____ his change.”

The researchers expected mistakes. Indeed, it was really the mistakes they were studying. They wanted to see if they were more likely to mix up people who they had categorized as useful with other people they saw as useful (confusing Ian with Susan, for example), as opposed to confusing useful people with non-useful people (Joe and Nancy, for instance). If they did the former—confusing instrumental people only with each other—that would suggest that were grouping anyone who served their purposes as alike. It would suggest that we have a mental category for “people-who-get-me-what-I-want.”

And that’s precisely what they found. As reported on-line this week in the journal Psychological Science, the controls—those who were not focused on the fitness goal—made random errors, confusing Ben with Ian with Nancy with Susie. But those who were intent on their personal health-and-fitness goal were much more likely to perceive and remember people categorically, according to their utility, their value in helping reach the goal. Not to put too fine a point on it: All instruments look alike.

This is humbling, but it does not mean we’re slave to our automatic stereotyping. Our neurons may be categorizing the boss’s daughter as a useful tool for achieving our career goals, but whether or not to be a cad remains a choice. Our ethical sensibilities can still trump that impulse to use people as pawns, but it helps to be mindful of our baser nature.

For more insights into the quirks of human nature, visit “Full Frontal Psychology” at True/Slant. Selections from “We’re Only Human” also appear regularly in the magazine Scientific American Mind.

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Don’t bother searching your long-term memory. There is no “Piece of Cake Heuristic.” I just made that up. I made it up and capitalized the main words and threw in an obscure word and added quotation marks—all so you, the reader, might consider the concept intellectually important and worthy of your attention. After all, it has a name and it’s in print—so it must have some heft, right?

Well, maybe–or maybe not, according to new research. University of Chicago psychologist Aparna Labroo and colleagues wondered if simply naming an idea—an economic theory, a medical diagnosis, a legal precedent—might make it easier for the mind to process, and thus more accessible. They further speculated that this cognitive ease might shape judgments of importance. They gave this idea a jargony label (the “Name-Ease” Effect), and then tested it in the laboratory.

Labroo’s idea is consistent with much earlier work on mental effort: If ideas are easier to process for whatever reason, we tend to find them more familiar and comfortable. Vocabulary, pronunciation, even the typeface in which these sentences are printed—all these can affect cognitive palatability. Labroo wanted to see if official names might have the same force. The link to importance is a bit more complicated. We all believe ideas are important if they are memorable—after all, that’s why we remember them. But we also associate importance with difficulty: The tougher to grasp, the more important an idea must be. If it’s too easy to process, it must be trivial.

The psychologists wanted to sort out these competing ideas, and here’s one of several experiments they ran. They had a group of volunteers read a legal case concerning school prayer. They all read the same case description, but for some the case was given a name, Engel v. Vitale. Once they had all read the case, some of the volunteers were asked to recall the details of the case, while others were instructed to think about the meaning of the case. In other words, some completed a memory task while others completed a comprehension task. Then they all rated the importance of the school prayer case.

The researchers were exploring the interplay of effort, memory and understanding in judgments of importance—and the findings were intriguing. Knowing that the case was officially called Engel v Vitale made it seem more important—but only for those who were focused on remembering it. In other words, the name made the information easier to process, and attributing this ease to the case’s memorability gave it weight. The case name did the opposite for those who were actually trying to comprehend the case: It made the case seem too familiar, and thus run-of-the-mill and simplistic.

Labroo and her colleagues reran this experiment many times, with a variety of ideas: an economic principle (the Coase Theorem); a mathematical concept (the Weierstrass Theorem); a medical diagnosis (acromegaly); and a psychological concept (Optimal Distinctiveness Theory). They got the same basic results, no matter what the subject matter. The psychologists’ paper on the “Name-Ease” Effect was published on-line this week in the journal Psychological Science. You be the judge of its importance.

For more insights into the quirks of human nature, visit the “Full Frontal Psychology” blog at True/Slant. Excerpts from the “We’re Only Human” blog also appear regularly in the magazine Scientific American Mind.

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When my oldest son was three years old, someone gave him a very large can of Legos as a gift, enough to build a fortress. So we decided to build a fortress. Or I did, but he was an enthusiastic co-conspirator in the project—at least for about ten minutes. But then he got distracted by the sound of an ambulance siren outside; then he re-discovered a plastic triceratops; then he thought he should inspect the ashes in the fireplace. I tried to reengage him in the fortress, because I was doing an excellent job. But he had lots of things to do. He was busy.

Toddlers are distractible. Their minds flit constantly here and there, and they have a terrible time concentrating on even the most stimulating project. They might be fascinated by a colorful new toy, but only until the next best toy comes along, or the next or the next.

This can be maddening for parents, especially for those of us who want to give are kids a leg up on getting into a premiere university. Parents often try to teach their toddlers self-control and mental discipline, to reign in their impulsivity. Increasingly, pre-school teachers do this, too. They see inattention and lack of focus as academic problems to be fixed.

But should we really be trying to teach self-control? Is there perhaps a reason why toddlers are such space cadets? Psychologists are beginning to raise these questions, and some are even suggesting that it may be detrimental to the developing brain to push it toward maturity too soon. Indeed, children’s impulsivity may be an essential tradeoff, one that allows the young mind to learn social conventions and language.

University of Pennsylvania neuropsychologist Sharon Thompson-Schill and her colleagues study a region of the brain called the prefrontal cortex, or PFC. This is basically the part of the brain that gives us mental agility and self-control; it filters out irrelevant information and allows us to focus. It is also the last part of the brain to mature and become fully functional. It lags behind the rest of the brain until about age four.

Why would that be? Well, the psychologists speculate that an immature PFC may not be a deficit at all, but rather an advantage in the first years of life. Here’s an example of their evidence, discussed in the most recent issue of the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science. It has to do with guessing. Say you are naïve about the game of football, but you are playing a guessing game: Will the offensive team pass or run the ball? You observe that the team passes the ball three out of every four plays, so you guess “pass” 75 percent of the time and “run” 25 percent of the time.

That’s not smart. Smart would be saying “pass” all the time. And if you played this game with your toddler, that is likely what he or she would do. Toddlers are often better at this, because their immature brains are still operating on a brute-force competition between two alternatives: pass or run. They are not yet capable of nuance and probability. That is, they’re not really capable of guessing.

And good thing, because toddlers can’t afford to guess. They have a lot of learning to do, and much of that learning has to do with hard-and-fast rules and conventions. Having an immature and inflexible mind is an advantage in finding patterns in the chaos of the world. In fact, this rigidity may be essential to language acquisition. Learning language is an intimidating task; it requires saying the right thing in the right context, and agreeing with everyone else that these are the right things to say. Consider the example of irregular verbs: They are simply conventions; they can only be learned by brute force, and that’s precisely how toddlers learn them. It’s no surprise, the psychologists note, that kids pick up languages so effortlessly compared to adults

And it’s not just language. Toddlers are mastering all sorts of social conventions that, like irregular verbs, simply must be learned. They’re the rules of the world. In this sense, trying to hasten the brain’s development may be not only difficult by unwise.

For more insights into the quirks of human nature, visit the “Full Frontal Psychology” blog at True/Slant. Selections from “We’re Only Human” also appear in the magazine Scientific American Mind.

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One of my personal crotchets is people who walk down busy city sidewalks without looking where they’re going. These days they might be texting on an electronic device, but it’s not the technology I object to. They could just as well be reading a book. What’s annoying is the expectation that the crowds will part, that all the other pedestrians will make the effort to get out of their way.

This may be simple rudeness. But I suspect that some of these people truly believe they can skillfully multi-task even in a crowd. Well they can’t, and I’ve now got science to prove it. Finnish researchers did a laboratory simulation to see how pedestrians avoid collisions in everyday sidewalk encounters. Millions of people pass by millions of other people without incident every day on the world’s streets, and the scientists wanted to know how we manage this. Although they simulated polite pedestrians, their findings hold a valuable lesson for the self-centered as well.

Cognitive psychologist Lauri Nummenmaa and her colleagues studied volunteers’ eye gaze as they encountered an animated man walking toward them on a city street. They wanted to see if the simulated stranger’s eye gaze was an important cue in avoiding sidewalk collisions. In the simulation, the stranger looked steadily either to the left or the right, and the volunteers had to decide which way to move. The results, reported on-line this week in the journal Psychological Science, were clear: If the stranger looked to his left, volunteers not only looked but also moved to the stranger’s right; and vice versa. The scientists also ran a more realistic scenario in which the stranger looked straight ahead until the last minute, and then suddenly shifted his gaze left or right. They got the same results.

Much recent work on the brain’s “mirror neurons” suggests that humans automatically mimic others, and that this unconscious aping is important to social interaction. Interestingly, the volunteers in these studies did not mirror the stranger’s eye gaze, suggesting that their own eye movements are not simply an automatic neuronal reflex. That reflex may be occurring, but it doesn’t stop there: It appears the pedestrians are also “mind reading,” quickly but deliberately interpreting a stranger’s eye gaze as a signal of intent to walk left or right. That is, they are social animals, analyzing and navigating a social world.

This lab simulation captures only half a real-life sidewalk encounter. On an actual city street, not only am I observing and reasoning about your gaze and intentions, you are doing the same with my gaze. It’s a social contract that protects both of us and keeps the world moving smoothly. Unless, of course, your mind is somewhere else.

For more insights into the quirks of human nature, visit the “Full Frontal Psychology” blog at True/Slant. Excerpts from “We’re Only Human” appear regularly in Newsweek.com and in the magazine Scientific American Mind.

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I ride a public bus to and from work, and today some of my fellow commuters were sneezing. My guess is that people sneeze on the bus ride every day, but I am especially mindful of any contagion at the moment. And well I should be. We’ve got the regular seasonal bug out there, plus the ominous swine flu on the horizon. And the airwaves and newspapers are filled with warnings about this year’s heightened risk for a flu pandemic. More than 30,000 have already been struck by swine flu, with more than 100 deaths.

A stranger’s sneeze can be a good thing in a way. Think of it as a public service announcement, a very-simple-to-understand message about health risk. A sneeze can remind us to wash our hands and schedule our inoculations—probably more effectively than a lecture. But what if, in our hyper-vigilance, we overreact to everyday sneezes and coughs and sniffles? Can such signals change healthy prudence into an unreasonable fearfulness about germs and more?

A team of University of Michigan researchers thought that might be the case, and ran a couple field studies to test the idea. Psychologist Norbert Schwarz and grad student Spike Lee suspected that a heightened perception of risk for a flu pandemic might unconsciously trigger fears of other, totally unrelated hazards. So last May, when the first wave of swine flu was just beginning to claim lives, the researchers stationed a sneezing actor in a busy campus building. As large numbers of students passed on their way to and from class, the actor would occasionally sneeze loudly. The psychologists then cornered and interviewed the students—and compared those who has witnessed the sneeze and those who had not.

They asked both groups to assess the risk of an “average American” getting a serious disease. They didn’t mention the flu, although it is a serious disease and could well have been on some of the students’ minds. Perhaps not surprisingly, those who had just witnessed someone sneezing perceived a greater chance of falling ill. But here’s the interesting part: Those with sneezing on their mind also perceived an increased risk of dying of a heart attack before age 50, dying in an accident, or dying as result of a crime. That is, the public sneeze triggered a broad fear of all health threats, even ones that couldn’t possibly be linked to germs—and sparked thoughts of mortality.

What’s going on here? Well, it gets better—or worse. The researchers asked the same people their views on the country’s existing health care system: Is it a wreck, or working pretty much okay? Those within hearing distance of the sneezing actor had far more negative views of health care in America. Think about that: The country’s health care system encompasses everything from obstetrics to diabetes prevention to insect-borne illnesses, yet a single sneeze in the corridor colored people’s views of the entire system.

This last finding was so striking that the psychologists ran another version of the sneezing scenario at a local mall, just to double-check the perplexing results. This time the interviewer himself sneezed and coughed (or did not) while conducting the interview, and in this version the interviewer didn’t even bother to ask about the personal risk of illness—at least not directly. Instead, the interviewer was ostensibly doing a public opinion survey on federal budget priorities. He asked, for example: Given limited tax dollars, should the government spend the money on vaccine production or on green jobs?

Clearly this issue is only tangentially connected to the flu or personal health, but it does play into people’s fears and doubts about health and disease: Is the government watching out for Americans’ welfare, broadly construed? And the results (to be published in a forthcoming issue of the journal Psychological Science) were unambiguous. Those who had just witnessed someone sneezing were much more likely to favor a public investment in vaccine production rather than green jobs. In other words, the sneeze sparked concerns not about personal health, but more broadly about public health.

This is quite remarkable when you tie it all together: Completely outside of awareness, a simple sneeze triggered fear of the flu, which in turn sparked fears of mortality, which even shaped people’s views on a somewhat abstract public policy question. So achoo! Let’s write our Congressmen about health care reform.

For more insights into the quirks of human nature, visit the “Full Frontal Psychology” blog at True/Slant. Selections from “We’re Only Human” also appear regularly at Newsweek.com and in the magazine Scientific American Mind.

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When Pulitzer Prize-winning music critic Tim Page was in second grade, he and his classmates went on a field trip to Boston. They later wrote about the experience as a class assignment, and this is part of what the nine-year-old Page wrote:

“Well, we went to Boston, Massachusetts through the town of Warrenville, Connecticut on Route 44A. It was very pretty and there was a church that reminded me of pictures of Russia from our book that is published by Time-Life. We arrived in Boston at 9:17. At 11 we went on a big tour of Boston on Gray Line 43, made by the Superior Bus Company like School Bus Six, which goes down Hunting Lodge Road where Maria lives and then on to Separatist Road and then to South Eagleville before it comes to our school. We saw lots of good things like the Boston Massacre site. The tour ended at 1:05. Before I knew it we were going home. We went through Warrenville again but it was too dark to see much. A few days later it was Easter. We got a cuckoo clock.”

Page received an unsatisfactory grade on his essay. What’s more, his irate teacher scrawled in red across the top of the essay: “See me!” As he recalls in his new memoir Parallel Play, such incidents were not uncommon in his childhood, and he knew why he was being scolded: “I had noticed the wrong things.”

The subtitle of Page’s memoir is Growing Up With Undiagnosed Asperger’s, and indeed Page didn’t learn until age 46 that he suffers from what’s called an autism spectrum disorder, or ASD. ASD is usually defined by impairments in social interaction and communication, but many people with autism and the milder Asberger’s syndrome also tend to fixate on irrelevant information in their world. Their attention seems to be awry or, to use Page’s words, they notice the wrong things.

But why? What’s going on in the autistic mind that makes the details of bus routes infinitely fascinating? Why are people like Page so easily distracted from the main act? Psychologists at University College London think that it might be a mistake to think of such distractibility as simply a deficit. To the contrary, Anna Remington and John Swettenham and colleagues speculate that people with ASD might have a greater than normal capacity for perception, so that what appears as irrelevant distraction is really a cognitive bonus. They decided to test the idea in the lab.

They studied a group of people with ASD, mostly Asperger’s, along with normal controls. They had all the subjects look at a computer screen, which displayed various combinations of letters and dots forming circles. They had to very rapidly spot the letters N or X among the other letters, and hit the corresponding key on the keyboard. Some of the circles—those with more letters—were more difficult to process than others. There were also other letters floating outside the circle, but the subjects were specifically instructed to ignore those letters. Those floating letters were the laboratory equivalent of an irrelevant distraction in the real world.

The psychologists were measuring perceptual capacity. That’s why they varied the complexity of the task. They were also measuring distractibility. They reasoned that, as long as the subjects’ total perceptual capacity was not exhausted, they would also process the irrelevant, distracting letters within their visual field. Once they had surpassed their capacity, irrelevant processing would stop. So if ASD subjects in fact have greater processing capacity, then they should process more distracting information even as the main task becomes increasingly complex.

And that’s exactly what they found. As reported on-line in the journal Psychological Science, while there was no difference among subjects in either reaction time or accuracy on the main task, those with ASD processed the irrelevant letters while solving much more complex problems. Put another way, they weren’t ignoring the main task, nor were they distracted away from it. Instead, they were completing their important work and moving on, using their untapped capacity.

But here’s the rub. While this increased distractibility may be a talent rather than a deficit, the psychologists say, it nevertheless can have detrimental consequences in real-life situations. Just ask Tim Page about his uncanny facility for bus routes.

For more insights into the quirks of human nature, visit the “Full Frontal Psychology” blog at True/Slant. Selections from the “We’re Only Human” blog also appear regularly at Newsweek.com and in the magazine Scientific American Mind.

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The “pennies a day” marketing scheme has been around a long time, and whoever came up with it showed extraordinary psychological insight. Indeed, science is only now beginning to demonstrate what these marketers sensed intuitively—that people are not entirely rational when it comes to processing numbers. What’s more, the way we think about scales and rates and ratios can make us into either cautious or indiscriminate consumers.

In a way this is obvious. “Pennies a day” is a meaningless ratio, because we’re not really reaching into our pockets each and every day for those copper coins. That’s what the marketers want you to visualize, but most of us are not truly fooled by the ruse. We know automatically–without doing any arithmetic at all—that we’re really talking about dollars a month and maybe hundreds of dollars over a year or years. It’s all a matter of knowing the meaningful scale.

But what if the manipulation of numbers is more subtle, or more complex? Are there marketing phrases and terms that do fool our imperfect minds? University of Michigan psychologist Katherine Burson and her co-workers believe so, and they’ve run a couple interesting experiments to simulate the kinds of offers we might well encounter in our daily lives. Here’s an example:

Imagine you’re in the market for a cell phone plan. After shopping around, you’ve narrowed your choices to two: Plan A costs $32 a month, and for that you’re guaranteed no more than 42 dropped calls out of 1000. Plan B only costs $27 a month, but the number of dropped calls is 65. In other words, you get what you pay for, and consumers make their choice based on what’s more important—money or service.

But what if the same offer was phrased this way? Plan A costs $364 a year, and drops 4.2 calls per 100. Plan B costs $324 and drops 6.5 calls per 100. It takes only the tiniest bit of arithmetic to see that nothing has changed. The offers are identical to what they were before, except that the scale has changed. But actually two scales have changed, and in different ways, so it’s not a no-brainer like “pennies a day.”

So how do consumers process these different offers? The psychologists gave these choices to a large group of volunteers, and the results were interesting. Consumers preferred Plan B when it was described as having a lower price per year, but they preferred Plan A when it was described as having fewer dropped calls per 1000. Notice that it’s the “per year” and “per 1000” that are important. Making the scale bigger also made the difference appear more exaggerated, so emotionally consumers feel like they’re getting much better service or a big savings in cost. Consumers actually changed their preferences with the larger scale—they became more discriminating—even though the real terms remained unchanged.

This is pretty remarkable—and unnerving. But there’s more. In a second experiment, the researchers offered a slightly different choice for movie rental plans. In this scenario, Plan A costs $10 a month for seven new movies per week. Plan B costs $12 a month for nine new movies a week. As before, either choice could make sense, depending on which meets your financial and movie-watching needs.

Then they once again changed the terms: This time the prices stayed the same, but instead of a weekly allotment of movies, consumers now got a yearly allotment. That is, for $10 a month they got 364 movies per year, and for $12 a month they got 468. How did the movie aficionados process these offers? As reported in the current issue of the journal Psychological Science, dramatically more consumers chose plan B when it was expressed in movies per year. It’s the emotional impact of that number–468. That’s a lot of movies, and a lot more than the other plan gets you, and still for only $12 a month. When you come to think of it, that’s really just pennies a day.

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Women are much choosier than men when it comes to romance. This is well known, but the reason for this gender difference is unclear. Evolutionary psychologists think it’s because, way back in prehistoric times, “dating” was much riskier for women. Men who made an ill-advised choice in the ancient version of a singles bar simply had one lousy night. Women who chose unwisely could end up facing years of motherhood.

That’s less true today, yet women remain much more selective. Is this difference a vestige of our early ancestry? Or might it be totally unrelated to reproductive risk, something more modern and mundane? A couple of Northwestern University psychologists, Eli Finkel and Paul Eastwick, decided to explore this question in an unusual laboratory: a real-life speed dating event.

For the uninitiated, speed dating is an increasingly popular way for men and women to meet and find potential partners. Participants attend a sponsored event and go on a series of very brief “dates,” about four minutes each. Typically, the women sit scattered around a room, and the men make the rounds. Afterward, both men and women indicate to the sponsor if they would be interested in seeing any of the others again. If two “yeses” match up, they get phone numbers and that’s it. They’re on their own.

Men say “yes” a lot more than women. That’s expected, but Finkel and Eastwick had a novel theory about why. Perhaps it could be explained by the simple convention of men standing and approaching—and women sitting passively. There has been a lot of recent work on the mutual influence of body and mind–how we embody our thoughts and emotions—and the psychologists speculated that physically approaching someone might be enough to make the potential date more appealing romantically—and thus to make the men less choosy overall.

They tested this in a series of 15 heterosexual speed dating events, involving 350 young men and women. Each participant went on about 12 dates, but the researchers changed the rules: In these events, the women and men approached each other about equally. Following each date, each participant rated the other for romantic desire and romantic chemistry. They also rated their own sense of self-confidence on the date. A bit later, they decided thumbs up or thumbs down.

The results were a score. As reported on-line in the journal Psychological Science, the well-known gender difference vanished when men and women assumed more egalitarian roles. The difference didn’t completely reverse when women were on the move. That is, their choosiness went away but they didn’t become more indiscriminate than men. This suggests that the ancient tendencies may still have some force, but they are also reinforced by arbitrary social norms. What’s more, it was increased self-confidence that appeared to make the difference: Simply standing and being on the move boosted confidence, which in turn boosted romantic attraction.

We don’t speed date through real life, of course, but there are all sorts of social conventions based on gender, and these presumably shape romantic feelings and actions. Having men behave more like women and women more like men appears at least to narrow this one gap between the sexes.

For more insights into the quirks of human behavior, visit the “Full Frontal Psychology” blog at True/Slant. Selections from “We’re Only Human” also appear regularly at Newsweek.com and in the magazine Scientific American Mind.

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Fans of the old Saturday Night Live will remember skits about the androgynous Pat. Pat’s formless body and non-descript clothes offered no clue about gender. Nor did Pat’s behavior, and the running joke was that the celebrity guest hosts would go ridiculous lengths to figure out if Pat was a man or a woman. They always failed.

The skits were funny in part because Pat defied a deep-seated urge to put people into tidy pigeonholes—to stereotype. Pat wasn’t aggressive in a stereotypical male way, and Pat wasn’t particularly caring in a stereotypical female way. Pat was just Pat.

We all trade in stereotypes every day, whether we like it or not. It’s how we sort an impossibly complex world into manageable categories: man, woman, Italian, Chinese, lawyer, engineer. Stereotypes can be unfair and hurtful to many people, but the power of stereotyping is undeniable. It’s a fact of the human psyche.

But what exactly is going on in the mind when we stereotype someone? Is the process instantaneous and automatic, or do we deliberate over traits and categories before making judgments? A clever new study of the actual internal process of stereotyping—from basic perception to judgment—offers some provocative findings.

Tufts University psychologists Jonathan Freeman and Nalini Ambady used many common stereotypes, including gender stereotypes, to explore a new theory about the cognitive mechanics underlying caricatures. Here’s the basic idea: When we catch sight of a stranger’s face, we immediately begin to extract information: That’s no problem if it’s the Marlboro Man or Betty Crocker, but most of us aren’t archetypal icons of our gender. Most humans are somewhere in between, so our immediate perception is usually more tentative: “He’s probably male.” This tentative perception in turn triggers a tentative stereotype: “He’s likely to be aggressive.” In other words, our perceptions and categories are not crisp and fixed, but rather in dynamic flux. It takes a few seconds for this ambiguous impression to stabilize into a final interpretation of the stranger.

At least that’s the theory, which the psychologists decided to test in the lab. To do so, they morphed photos of men and women into amalgams of male and female traits, some more ambiguous than others. None were as baffling as the fictional Pat, but they were deliberately ambiguous—like in the real world. Then they used an innovative lab technique to explore the cognitive processing of these faces: Instead of scanning their brains, they tracked their hand movements. They flashed the photographs on a screen, and instructed the volunteers to move a mouse rapidly toward one of two adjectives—for example, “aggressive” and “caring”—in opposite corners of the screen. The psychologists tracked the computer mouse movements to see how quickly and directly they categorized each face by stereotypical traits.

The idea here is that the hands have a mind of their own, in the sense that movements reflect the mind’s hesitation and conflict. The results were fascinating. An instantaneous stereotype would be a straight line from the starting point to one of the two adjectives—male, therefore aggressive, no hesitation. Nobody did that. Instead the movements appear as curves, suggesting some hesitation and deliberation in each judgment.

But here’s the really interesting part, reported on-line this week in the journal Psychological Science: The more ambiguous the face was, the more curved the path to judgment. That is, a male face with female traits might ultimately be judged as male and therefore aggressive, but not before the volunteer’s hand was tugged a bit toward the alternative stereotype of caring female. It’s like the mind is saying: Yeah, probably aggressive, but what about those nurturing features? What do I make of those? It’s as if the perceived gender ambiguity triggers a cognitive “competition” between incomplete and contradictory stereotypes, which persists until the mind settles on one or the other.

This is more than just a clever experiment, Freeman and Ambady believe. Even though the cognitive ambiguity is active only for an instant during the stereotyping process, those few seconds of contemplating life’s ambiguity may undermine our mind’s rigid categories—and have lasting effects on social judgments and behavior way down the line.

For more insights into the quirks of human nature, visit the “Full Frontal Psychology” blog at True/Slant. Excerpts from “We’re Only Human” also appear regularly at Newsweek.com and in the magazine Scientific American Mind.

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Everyone knows that men are aggressive and women are caring.

That sentence you just read is an example of stereotyping. Every one of us trades in stereotypes every day, whether we like it or not. It’s how we sort an impossibly complex world into manageable categories: man, woman, Italian, Chinese, lawyer, engineer. Stereotypes can be unfair and hurtful to many people, but the power of stereotyping is undeniable. It’s a fact of the human psyche.

But what exactly is going on in the mind when we pigeonhole someone? Is the process instantaneous and automatic, or do we deliberate over traits and categories before making judgments? A clever new study of the actual internal process of stereotyping—from basic perception to judgment—offers some provocative findings.

Tufts University psychologists Jonathan Freeman and Nalini Ambady used many common stereotypes like the gender caricature above to explore a new theory about the cognitive mechanics underlying stereotyping. Here’s the basic idea: When we catch sight of a stranger’s face, we extract information: It could be “he’s male” or “she’s female” but, since most people in the real world are a mix of traits, our perception is usually more tentative: “He’s probably male.” This tentative perception in turn triggers a tentative stereotype: He’s likely to be aggressive. In other words, our perceptions and categories are in dynamic flux, which only gradually stabilizes into a final interpretation of the stranger.

Okay, so remember the androgynous Pat from Saturday Night Live? It was impossible to tell from looking whether Pat was a man or woman, and the running joke was that celebrity guest hosts would go to all lengths to figure out Pat’s true gender. They always failed, but their frustrated attempts were funny.

What was going on in their brains as they tried to make sense of Pat? That basically is the question that Freeman and Ambady asked in the lab. They presented volunteers with photos of men and women that had been morphed into mixes of male and female traits, some more ambiguous than others. As the volunteers glanced at each photo, they moved a computer mouse as quickly as possible toward one of two adjectives—“aggressive” or “caring”—in opposite corners of the screen. The psychologists tracked the computer mouse movements, to see how quickly and directly they categorized each face by stereotypical traits.

The results were fascinating. An instantaneous stereotype would be a straight line from the starting point to one of the two adjectives—male, no question, or female. Nobody did that. Instead the movements appear as curves, suggesting some hesitation and deliberation in each judgment. But here’s the really interesting part, reported on-line this week in the journal Psychological Science: The more ambiguous the face was, the more curved the path to judgment. That is, for example, a male face with female traits would ultimately be judged as male and therefore aggressive, but not before the volunteer’s hand was tugged a bit toward the alternative stereotype of caring female.

What this indicates, the psychologists say, is that gender ambiguity triggers a cognitive “competition” between partial, opposing categories—a “fuzzy mélange” of both male and female categories—that continues until the mind settles on one or the other. And this is true for faces much less ambiguous than Pat’s.

This is of more than academic interest, Freeman and Ambady believe. Even though this partial and tentative alternative is active only for an instant, simply activating it in the mind is likely to have lasting effects on social judgments and behavior long after the initial glimpse of a stranger’s face.

For more insights into the quirks of human nature, visit the “Full Frontal Psychology” blog at True/Slant. Excerpts from “We’re Only Human” also appear regularly at Newsweek.com and in the magazine Scientific American Mind.

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