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Archive for the ‘We’re Only Human’ Category

One of Robert Frost’s best-loved poems is the short verse “Fire and Ice,” which goes like this:

Some say the world will end in fire;
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if I had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To know that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

Most good poets are part psychologist, and Frost shows keen insight into the human mind in these seemingly simple lines. Indeed, his 1920 poem anticipated ideas that are just now emerging in cognitive science—specifically the notion that our bodily sensations are inextricably bound up with emotions like hatred and desire. Or to put it a way that the Bard of New England would have appreciated, the metaphorical thermometer is as much a gauge of social life as it is of degrees Fahrenheit.

At least that’s the theory, which psychologists have been exploring in various ways in the laboratory. Here’s a recent example, from Hans IJzerman and Gun Semin of Utrecht University. The psychologists were intrigued by such metaphors as “the cold shoulder” and “warm feelings,” and decided to test the link between thermometer readings and feelings of closeness or distance, affection or iciness. They ran a few experiments to test this in different ways.

The first experiment was straightforward. Volunteer who had just arrived in the lab were asked to hold the experimenter’s beverage for a few minutes, ostensibly so he could do something that required two hands. Some were handed a cold beverage, and others a warm one. Then they were asked to rate both themselves and an acquaintance on a well-known scale that measures social proximity; the more they overlapped with
the other, the higher their score on closeness; the less overlap, the more distant they were feeling. The results were also straightforward. Holding the warm beverage induced greater feelings of closeness than the cold beverage.

Those findings are intriguing but hardly conclusive, so the researchers looked at the body-mind link a different way. When we are literally close to someone or something, we see more detail; our experience is more concrete. Similarly, distance makes of vision of things more vague and abstract. The psychologists reasoned from this that feelings of warmth would induce not only emotional warmth toward others, but also more vivid and concrete perceptions.

They didn’t use beverages in this study. Instead they varied the room temperature, from the low 60s F to low 70s F. This isn’t a huge variation, but the researchers figured it would be enough to test the idea that temperature shapes emotion and thought. They showed all the volunteers a short film clip of chess pieces moving around, but not the usual way chess pieces move, and they asked the volunteers to describe “in their own words” what was happening. The idea was that room temperature would shape their perceptions and as a result the language that the volunteers used. That is, warm observers would write concrete descriptions of the chess scene, and chilly observers would write more abstract descriptions.

And that’s exactly what they found. When they coded the language in the narratives, they found that room temperature did indeed affect the volunteers’ choice of words. The warm volunteers also expressed greater feelings of closeness toward the experimenter.

The psychologists decided to take this one step further, to see if temperature shapes not only language but worldview. It’s well known that people from cultures that place a high value of individualism—Americans, for example—have a particular cognitive style, compared to more communitarian cultures. Specifically, those from communal cultures tend to see patterns in the world, where individualists tend to see disconnected parts. The researchers suspected that warmth would spark more a more relational worldview, while cold would induce a more self-reliant view.

They varied the room temperature as before, but this time they had the volunteers take a perception test specifically designed to differentiate these cognitive styles. That is, some people perceive patterns where others see independent components, and this is taken as a measure of either a relational or individualistic worldview. And once again, temperature showed a clear and direct connection to how volunteers processed what they saw. As reported on-line in the journal Psychological Science, warmth made volunteers see the connections between things, while the chilly were more individualistic in their perceptions of the world.

So affection, concrete language, communitarian worldview—that’s a lot to hook to the simple rising and falling of mercury. But perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising, the researchers say. After all, the mind evolved along with the body over millions of years, so the way we think and feel was no doubt shaped by real and important experiences in the world. What could be more basic than staying warm?

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

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An inviolable principle of most addiction recovery programs is total abstinence. It appears that for true addicts, one drink or one toke or one line is enough to trigger a binge—and a likely relapse. This dogma is not so hard and fast when it comes to food because . . . well, because we all have to eat.

Still, chronic overeaters do often embrace a version of the abstinence dogma, treating certain foods like Johnny Walker to an alcoholic. It might be an economy-sized bag of potato chips or a
hot fudge sundae or a double order of Buffalo wings. Every foodie has a taboo food or two that will predictably shatter his or her discipline and will power and send the dieter into face-stuffing freefall.

Or so the wisdom goes. But is it true? Surprisingly, this idea has never been tested in a real-life situation, so a team of psychologists decided to do just that. Traci Mann of the University of Minnesota and several colleagues suspected that the notion of catastrophic relapse was too simplistic for a complex behavior like eating. Food-minded people do violate their own rules, of course, but perhaps they make up for their transgressions with a little deprivation later on. This is the idea they wanted to explore.

To do so, the psychologists recruited a large group of college undergrads—all women. They deliberately chose college-age women because as a group they tend to be more weight-conscious and to diet more than the general population. They also questioned each of the volunteers individually to identify their attitudes toward eating, how often they dieted, their weight fluctuations, and so forth. The women thought they were taking part in a broad study of “health habits.”

To make the situation as realistic as possible, the women simply went about their days—going to class, studying, socializing, whatever—but they carried electronic “diaries” with them at all times. The psychologists paged the women once an hour during waking hours, and asked them a variety of questions, including queries about eating and snacking and—importantly—about diet violations. The study took two days, and the results showed no evidence that eating a forbidden food triggers binge or relapse. This was true even among the women most preoccupied with weight and dieting.

The researchers wanted to double-check this finding. So they did a second study, this one lasting eight days, during which the women kept detailed logs of their food consumption. In the first study, it was unclear how each of the volunteers defined a food violation. It might have been a single bite of a Snickers bar, or an entire tray of lasagna. So in this study, the researchers created a ruse that required about half the volunteers to drink an 8-ounce milkshake; they figured this would be a eating violation to most weight-conscious college women. They then compared their post-milkshake calorie consumption to their calorie consumption for the week before, and they also compared the violators to those who had not violated their diet.

And guess what? Drinking the forbidden milkshake was not a dietary catastrophe. Indeed, as reported on-line in the journal Psychological Science, the women who drank the shake ate no more calories overall than the other women, and their calorie consumption the day of the violation was no greater than their typical daily consumption had been for the prior week—about 1,400 calories. In other words, they somehow compensated for the milkshake later in the day—skipping an evening snack, going light at dinner—and as a result got themselves back on track without delay.

This is good news. It’s not clear from this study if the women deliberately compensated for the taboo milkshake, or if that caloric balancing act takes place on an unconscious level. Perhaps that doesn’t matter. The bottom line is that a milkshake is just that and no more. It’s not symbolic of weakness or failure, and doesn’t have to ruin a day or a week or a lifetime commitment.

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 in the magazine Scientific American Mind and at Newsweek.com.

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That doesn’t mean lying is okay, and both father and son know this. It’s uncomfortable to watch Nick squirm through his lies as he digs himself in deeper. And Steve is a fairly typical parent too, in the sense that all parents are very bad at lie detection. What’s more, Nick likely learned to lie from watching his parents tell white lies. Parents typically view precocious lying as innocent, something that will correct itself; but in fact a lot of kids get “hooked” on lying very early.

Nick’s story comes from science writers Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman, who include it in NurtureShock, their delightful new collection of essays on the “science of kids.” Though not exactly a parenting manual, the book does offer a lot of useful information on why kids do what they do. For example, Talwar and her colleagues have tried using stories to teach kids like Nick to curb their lying. In one study, they had kids listen to either “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” or “George Washington and the Cherry Tree”; they heard the story after they had cheated, but before the psychologist asked them about cheating.

For those who don’t recall: In “The Boy Who Cried Wolf,” the shepherd boy lies repeatedly about a wolf, and in the end is eaten by a wolf when nobody believes his calls for help. So it’s about severe punishment for lying. George Washington, by contrast, tells his father the truth about chopping down the tree, and is forgiven and praised for his truthfulness. When Bronson and Merryman conducted a survey, three of four respondents said the wolf story would be the more effective teaching tool, but in fact it was the opposite. The honest George tale cut lying by 75 percent in boys, and 50 percent in girls.

Why? Probably because kids already know that lying is a punishable offense; they’re not learning anything new there. What’s new—and welcome information—is that honesty might bring them both immunity from punishment and parental praise.

Bronson and Merryman’s essay on lying is representative of this engaging volume, in its mix of pitch-perfect science writing and soft-pedaled guidance for parents. Many of their essays—on sleep, racial attitudes, self-control, sibling relations, and more—are animated by actual flesh-and-blood kids, who we meet on an excursion through many of the nation’s top child psychology laboratories. It’s a rewarding and entertaining excursion. NurtureShock is published by Twelve Books, and is in bookstores now.

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

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Franz Kafka’s 1919 short story “A Country Doctor” is a tale about . . . well, who knows what it’s about really? The bare-bones plot involves a physician who must make his way through a blizzard to tend to a young boy who is ailing. Or might be ailing, or might not; it’s not clear. Beyond that it is hard to describe, much less interpret the string of absurdities and nonsense that make up this short piece. Time and traditional narrative break down entirely. It’s a disorienting assault on meaning.

That won’t surprise any reader familiar with the works of Kafka and other existentialist writers, who deliberately toyed with reality in order to disorient the reader. Indeed, the word Kafkaesque has come to be a synonym for bizarre, confusing, surreal.

But why is this great literature rather than just gibberish? What is its effect on the reader’s mind? How does a surreal tale like “A Country Doctor” work on a psychological level?

We may never know Kafka’s intentions, but psychologists are beginning to get some insight into the mental dynamics of reading such absurdist writing. One recent study suggests that Kafkaesque threats on life’s meaning might actually prime our need for (and perception of) order and pattern in the world. So paradoxically, experiencing meaninglessness may inspire a keener search for meaning. Here’s the evidence.

Psychologists Travis Proulx of UC-Santa Barbara and Steven Heine of the University of British Columbia ran an experiment in which volunteers actually read a modified version of “A Country Doctor,” this one illustrated with a series of drawings as nonsensical as the text. Other volunteers read a short story roughly like the Kafka tale, but more conventional in form. When they were done reading, all the volunteers took a difficult test that required them to identify patterns in long and seemingly random strings of letters. The psychologists expected that those who were disoriented by the Kafkaesque prose would be more earnest in searching—and more successful in spotting order in the chaos.

And that’s exactly what they found. As reported on-line in the journal Psychological Science, those who were unmoored by Kafka found more of the hidden patterns that actually existed, but they also identified more patterns overall, correctly and incorrectly—suggesting that they were highly motivated to seek and find order. But here’s the most intriguing aspect of these findings: A disorienting literary experience appears to have sharpened the volunteers’ yearning for meaning on a fundamental cognitive level; it’s unlikely that the volunteers even thought of themselves as searching for meaning, yet their neurons seemed primed to make order anywhere and everywhere they could.

Proulx and Heine ran another similar experiment and got the same results. Taken together, the studies suggest that we humans are irrepressible meaning makers. Indeed the need for order and predictability may be fundamental to the human condition, and challenging the world’s predictability may be one key to art’s psychological power. Kafka apparently had this uncanny insight into the human mind nearly a century ago, at age 36.

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I have high school friends who are dead already, as a direct result of their chosen lifestyle. They drank too much, drove too fast, ate whatever they craved at any given moment. They were impulsive, live-for-today types, and they paid a price for these traits. Nobody’s shocked that they died early.

We all know people like this. We also know people who are conscientious workers, homebodies and parents, committed partners and committed bachelors, workaholics, health nuts, easy-going and neurotic. There’s no denying the stark individual differences in personality. “Who we are” seems to emerge early in life, and to endure through the lifespan. It shapes our life choices, from health to family to work and finances.

But why do we have personality at all? It wouldn’t seem to make sense from an evolutionary point of view. The traits that have been wired into our genes and neurons over the millennia tend not to be differences, but things we all share in common–habits of mind that have helped the entire human species survive and adapt. That’s why evolutionary psychologists have tended to dismiss personality traits as irrelevant “noise.”

Until recently. Now a small cadre of psychologists has been revisiting personality, to see how it might fit into an evolutionary understanding of humanity. One of the leaders in this effort is University of Texas psychologist David Buss, who lays out several emerging ideas in the April issue of the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science. Here’s just one:

Each of us has a finite supply of time and energy. Think of a hypothetical young man making his way in the modern world. He might choose to put his energy into prospering—being healthy and well-fed—or he might instead choose the life of a romantic gadabout. Or perhaps he’ll opt for being a devoted parent and provider. But he probably can’t do all these things well. He has to make choices.

So it was with our ancient ancestors. They were similarly called upon to make tradeoffs, spending their time and energy on one life “problem” or another. They probably weren’t as aware of making choices as we are today, but they were nevertheless prioritizing things like romance, parenting, and social climbing.

So the constant challenge that all early humans faced was making the optimal energy tradeoff. The individual choices they made—and continue making today—were shaped by their supply of energy and time, their personal qualities, and their circumstances. Very attractive men, for example, might put a lot of their energy into mating rather than parenting, while people with bleak mating prospects might opt for career or nurturing others’ children.

And those who lack energy, or who perceive the future as short, might discount mating and parenting and career, and squander their limited energy now. Those are the live-for-today types, according to Buss: In that sense, what is often disparaged as a maladjusted personality marked by poor self-control might more generously be viewed as a realistic adaptation to what life throws at you. Carpe diem.

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

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In the 2003 movie The Last Samurai, Tom Cruise plays a former US Army captain named Nathan Algren, an alcoholic and mercenary who in the 1870s goes to Japan to work for the Emperor Meiji. The young Emperor is facing a Samurai rebellion, and Algren trains a ragtag bunch of farmers and peasants in modern warfare, including the use of rifles. When Algren is captured by the Samurai, however, he is gradually converted to their ways, and ends up fighting with the warriors in a losing battle against the Imperial Army he helped create.

The movie was both a critical and popular success, and why not? Lots of exciting swordplay, exotic costumes, and a fascinating piece of history that was probably unfamiliar to most Americans before the film was released. Indeed, it’s fair to say that many Americans have learned much of what they know about the westernization of Japan from watching films like The Last Samurai.

That’s probably not a good thing, because the film is full of historical errors. Most notably, it was the French and Dutch, not Americans, who played the key role in Japan’s modernization in the late 19th century, and the Algren character is loosely based on a French officer named Jules Brunet. What’s more, the movie conflates two decades of military history for the sake of simplicity, and presents a highly romanticized view of the Samurai warriors.

I know, I know. The Last Samurai is not a documentary, and people go to the movies to be entertained, not to be instructed in history. No argument there. But films like The Last Samurai are increasingly used in the classroom as well, as adjuncts to textbooks and lectures. Educators believe that the vividness of film can be a valuable teaching tool, enlivening and reinforcing students’ memories for otherwise dry historical text. But is that a good thing, if the facts are wrong? Are they doing more harm than good?

A team of psychologists has begun exploring these questions experimentally. Andrew Butler of Washington University in St. Louis and his colleagues decided to simulate a classroom where popular films are used as a teaching tool, to see if the practice improved or distorted students’ understanding of history. The Last Samurai was in fact one of the films they used in the experiment, along with Amadeus, Glory, Amistad, and a few others. All of the films contained both accurate and inaccurate information about the historical incidents they depicted.

The students watched the film clips either before or after they read an accurate version of the historical events. So with The Last Samurai, for example, they read a version that accurately identified the hero as French, not American, and was faithful to the actual timeline of Japanese history. In addition, some of the students received a general warning about the inaccuracy of popular historical films, while others got very specific warnings, about changing the hero’s nationality, for instance. The idea was to see which teaching method led to the most accurate comprehension of the events: reading or watching a movie or both, with or without the teacher’s commentary.

When the psychologists tested all the students a week later, the verdict for classroom movies was one thumb up, one thumb down. Watching the films did clearly help the students learn more—but only when the information was the same in both text and film. Apparently the vividness of the film—and simply having a second version of the same facts—did help the students create stronger memories of the material. But when the information in the film and the reading were contradictory—that is, when the film was inaccurate—the students were more likely to recall the film’s distorted version. What’s more, they were very confident in their memories, even though they were wrong. This happened even when the students were warned that filmmakers often play fast and loose with the facts.

So should films be banned from the classroom? Not necessarily, and here’s why. As the psychologists report on-line in the journal Psychological Science, a good teacher can trump a movie’s shortcomings. They found that when teachers gave the very detailed warnings about inaccuracies in the film version, the students got it. But those warnings had to be very precise, something like: Pay attention when you watch the film and you’ll see that the filmmaker has changed the nationality of the hero from French to American, which is not the way it was. With such warnings, the students apparently “tagged” the information as false in the minds—and remembered the accurate version when quizzed later on.

In this sense, the movie’s distorted version of history can be used as a teachable moment. Students learn the truth by identifying the mistakes and labeling them, so their take-away learning is: the film says this, but in fact it’s that. Not a bad way to learn, assuming the classroom teacher knows enough to point out what’s this and that.

For more insights into the quirks of human nature, visit “We’re Only Human” at www.psychologicalscience.org/onlyhuman. Selections from the blog also appear regularly in the magazine Scientific American Mind and at Newsweek.com.

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When the Chrysler car company released its new model Dodge Coronet in 1967, the theme of its ad campaign was the “White Hat Special.” Some of the ads featured cartoon cowboys riding around “keepin’ the prices low,” while others had the ubiquitous “Dodge Girl” in her signature white Stetson, chirping: “Only the good guys could put together a deal like this.”

These ads didn’t need any elaboration. Madison Avenue knew the potential buyers had all been raised on film and TV Westerns, and knew the symbolism of white hats. Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, the Lone Ranger—cinematic heroes wore white hats, and bad guys wore black. It was all very simple.

Simple, but maybe not all that original. The colors white and black have carried layers of moral meaning since long before American’ infatuation with cowboys and automobiles, and some scientists believe that those associations may be automatic and universal and ancient. Indeed, blackness and whiteness may be wired into our neurons, and tightly tangled up with notions of sin and virtue and cleanliness and dirt.

Two University of Virginia psychologists recently decided to explore this provocative idea in the laboratory. Gary Sherman and Gerald Clore wanted to know if common metaphors may be more than mere rhetorical devices, if in fact they might be deep embodiments of moral thinking. They decided to test the link between white and virtue (and black and sin) as part of this larger question.

To do this, the psychologists adapted a reaction-time test from the 1930s, called the Stroop Test. Readers may know this from the Internet, where it circulates as a kind of parlor game. It’s the one in which the names of colors are printed in different colors—say the word blue in yellow ink—and you must very rapidly indicate the ink color rather than the meaning. It’s hard, because our mind wants to read the word—and slow reaction time is taken as a sign of cognitive disconnect or conflict.

In Sherman and Clore’s version of the Stroop, volunteers read not the names of colors but words with strong moral overtones: greed and honesty, for example. Some of the words were printed in black and some in white, and they flashed rapidly on a screen. As with the original Stroop, a fast reaction time was taken as evidence that a connection was mentally automatic and natural; hesitation was taken as a sign that a connection didn’t ring true. The researchers wanted to see if the volunteers automatically linked immorality with blackness, as in black ink, and virtue with whiteness.

And they did, so quickly that the connections couldn’t possibly be deliberate. Just as we unthinkingly—almost unconsciously—“know” a lemon is yellow, we instantly know that sin and crime are black; grace and virtue, white.

Why would this be? Well, one possibility is that the metaphor is more complex, embodying not just right and wrong but purity and contagion, too. Think of the metaphor “new fallen snow”: It’s not only white, it’s virginal and unadulterated, like a wedding dress. And blackness not only discolors it; it stains it, taints its purity. With this in mind, the psychologists ran another experiment, adding this idea of contagion, feeling morally dirty. They deliberately primed some volunteers’ immoral thoughts by having them read a story about a self-serving, immoral lawyer, and compared them to volunteers primed for ethical thinking.

The idea was that people who were feeling morally dirty would be quicker to make the connection between immorality and blackness on the moral Stroop test, which is exactly what they found. And what’s more, they found this with much looser definitions of morality and immorality—including words like dieting, gossip, duty, partying, helping, and so forth. In other words, those primed for misbehavior linked blackness not only with crime and cheating but with being irresponsible, unreliable, self-centered slackers.

This is pretty convincing in itself, but the researchers wanted to look at the question yet another way. If the association between sin and blackness really does reflect a concern about dirt and impurity, then this association should be stronger for people who are preoccupied with purity and pollution. Such fastidiousness often manifests as personal cleanliness, and a proxy for personal cleansing might be the desire for cleaning products. They tested this string of psychological connections in a final study, again ending with the Stroop test.

The results were unambiguous. As reported on-line in the journal Psychological Science, those who expressed the strongest desire for an array of cleaning products were also those most likely to link morality with white, immorality with black. But here’s the really interesting part: The only products with this power were Dove soap and Crest toothpaste, products for personal cleanliness; things like Lysol and Windex did not activate the sin-blackness connection. In short, concerns about filth and personal hygiene appear central to seeing the moral universe in black and white.

For more insights into the quirks of human nature, visit the “We’re Only Human” blog at www.psychologicalscience.org/onlyhuman. Selections from the blog also appear regularly at Newsweek.com and in the magazine Scientific American Mind.

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“Frank and Joe Hardy clutched the grips of their motorcycles and stared in horror at the oncoming car. It was careening from side to side on the narrow road.
“He’ll hit us! We’d better climb this hillside—and fast!” Frank exclaimed, as the boys brought their motorcycles to a screeching halt and leaped off.
“On the double!” Joe cried out as they started up the steep embankment.

Some readers will recognize the quick-witted motorcyclists here as the Hardy Boys, brothers and heroes of a long-popular series of kids’ mystery books. The amateur teenage sleuths do manage to escape the reckless driver in this scene, but the close call entangles them in a perilous adventure involving stolen jewels, false accusation, deathbed confession, and clever detective work. Good stuff.

These are actually the opening lines of The Tower Treasure, first published in 1927. I read this passage in the 1950s, and kids are apparently still getting sucked into the story even today. What is it about narratives like these that grab our attention? We may quickly move on to more sophisticated tastes in literature, but even a simple story such as this has power to grab our attention, engage our brains. But what’s the brain responding to exactly?

Psychologists are very interested in this question, and have some ideas. One theory is that we all have many “scripts” stored in our neurons. These scripts are derived from past experiences, and words activate these scripts, transforming the printed text into something more like a real-life experience. The opening scene from The Tower Treasure is actually rather spare in its language, yet for the reader it can be a rich encounter. We visualize a narrow road, perhaps one that we have actually known from somewhere. We feel our grip on the motorcycle handlebars, and hear the screech of the tires; we imagine leaping and the difficult pitch of the embankment and the effort of climbing.

At least that’s the idea, which a team of psychologists at Washington University in St. Louis decided to test in the lab. Jeffrey Zacks and his colleagues suspected that several different regions of the brain collaborate in the reading of a tale, each supplying a specialized script based on a particular kind of real-world experience. So, for example, one group of neurons might supply a story’s sense of space and movement (the careening car on a narrow road), while another might contribute the sensation of handling objects (clutching the grips), and still another, the characters’ goals (climbing to safety).

To test this idea, the scientists used a brain scanner to see what regions lit up during the reading of a story. They watched the brains of volunteers as they read four short narrative passages. Each clause in each story was coded for the script it should theoretically trigger: movement in space, sense of time passing, characters’ goals, interaction with physical objects, and so forth. The idea was to see if different parts of the brain lit up as the reader’s imagined situation unfolded.

And they did. The details of the brain anatomy aren’t important here, but clearly there are several different neuron clusters involved in story comprehension. For example, a particular area of the brain ramped up when readers were thinking about intent and goal-directed action, but not meaningless motion. Motor neurons flashed when characters were grasping objects, and neurons involved in eye movement activated when characters were navigating their world.

These findings, reported on-line in the journal Psychological Science, strongly suggest that readers are far from passive consumers of words and stories. Indeed, it appears that we dynamically activate real-world scripts that help us to comprehend a narrative—and those active scripts in turn enrich the story beyond its mere words and sentences. In this way, reading is much like remembering or imagining a vivid event.

It’s possible, the psychologists say, that not just reading but all thinking may be similarly embodied in stored, real-life experiences. In this sense, language may have been an adaptive strategy for efficient and vivid communication of experiences to others. Put another way, storytelling may have evolved as a tool of survival.

For more insights into the quirks of human nature, visit the “We’re Only Human” blog at www.psychologicalscience.org/onlyhuman. Selections from the blog also appear regularly in the magazine Scientific American Mind and at Newsweek.com.

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A curious thing happened among my friends during the Bush-Cheney years. Some, especially those who opposed the invasion of Iraq, disengaged from American symbols and traditions. They didn’t celebrate the 4th of July; indeed wouldn’t even watch a fireworks display or fly a flag. But others, also no fans of the war or the administration’s torture policies, did the opposite: They became more patriotic, or at least more public in their displays and declarations of loyalty to country.

I count myself in the second group, yet I admit to being perplexed by this phenomenon. Why would disappointment in one’s country inspire increased loyalty? Doesn’t it seem more natural to disavow the country as a protest against its unjust actions, or at least to disengage a bit?

Well, it turns out that loyalty is a complex and paradoxical emotion. Psychologists have been studying the interplay of social injustice, righteous anger and group allegiance, and it appears that loyalists are not simply apologists for anything and everything the group stands for. In fact, ramped-up loyalty may be a predictable step toward taking a firm and principled stand.

New York University psychologists Heather Barry and Tom Tyler have been exploring this phenomenon in the laboratory, focusing on students’ loyalty to their university. In one study, for example, they used an elaborate procedure to measure the strength of students’ group commitment—that is, how important the university was to the individual students’ sense of identity. Once the students were sorted out according to their group allegiances, they were all asked to review the university’s grievance procedures. This was actually a laboratory ruse: In fact, some read procedures that seemed just and fair, while others read a version that clearly disrespected students’ rights, along with fellow students’ complaints about unfair treatment.

The psychologists wanted to see how the students would react to unfavorable revelations about their university. Would seeing their group in a bad light change their sense of loyalty? Would they remain team players, with a shared sense of common purpose? They measured this in two ways. First, they asked them a series of questions about their willingness to serve their schools and fellow students in selfless ways: Would they tutor another student if asked? Would they help a professor with some photocopying? That kind of thing. The researchers wanted to get a general measure of how cooperative and service-oriented the students were feeling. In addition, one of the experimenters deliberately dropped her pen during the experiment, to see which of the students were spontaneously helpful.

The findings were provocative. As reported on-line in the journal Psychological Science, the students who were the most devoted to their school to begin with were also the most cooperative and helpful when forced to confront the school’s failings. That is, those truest to their group redoubled their sense of service and commitment when faced with injustice. They didn’t criticize, nor did they distance themselves from the others in the group.

These results were immediate and short-term. The psychologists emphasize this, and find the results encouraging. It means that the group members’ loyalty is not so fragile that they jump ship with just a little disillusionment; they stay to help strengthen the group and correct its course. But this pumped-up loyalty is unlikely to last for long: If confronted with continued evidence of unfairness and injustice, many will stop compensating for the group’s shortcomings—and leave. What’s unclear is how long this will take—or how unjust a group must be before it squanders its members’ loyalty.

For more insights into the quirks of human nature, visit “We’re Only Human” at www.psychologicalscience.org/onlyhuman. Selections from the blog also appear regularly in the magazine Scientific American Mind and at Newsweek.com.

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Among my parenting memorabilia is an illustrated timeline my son made back in the second grade. It starts with his 1986 birthday on the left and proceeds through various milestones of his first years—first day of kindergarten, T-ball, and so forth—ending on the far right with another celebration at the ripe old age of seven. I treasure this.

But how did he know that life unfolds from left to right, and not the other way around? Certainly his teacher instructed him and his classmates to draw the timeline this way, but why? Why do we accept without question that left equals early while right equals late, far off in time? More fundamentally, why do we entwine time and space?

Psychologists suspect that this space-time continuum may be more than a social convention, an artifice that we all simply agree to. Perhaps the brain has wired our perceptions of space and time together for some reason. A team of researchers has been exploring this question in the laboratory, using an unusual pair of spectacles.

Psychologist Francesca Frassinetti of the University of Bologna and her colleagues wanted to see if deliberately distorting space perception would also distort perception of the passage of time. They had a group of volunteers look at an image on a computer screen for different intervals of time—say two seconds. Then a different image appeared on the screen, and the volunteers tried to keep it on the screen for exactly the same amount of time, using a controller. In other words, they tried to duplicate the interval of time they had just perceived.

Most of the volunteers were pretty good at this, but that wasn’t the point. After the initial test, all of the volunteers put on special glasses, called prismatic lenses. These glasses shifted the volunteers’ perception of the image horizontally, either to the left or to the right; that is, they would look at the image just as before, but it would appear to the left or the right. They were basically forced to shift their spatial attention. Then they all did the same time estimation task as before.

The results were clear, and a bit spooky. As reported in the June issue of the journal Psychological Science, when the glasses shifted the volunteers’ attention to the right, they overestimated time. Not to put too fine a point on it, time hurried by; it expanded in their minds. Similarly, shifting the brain’s focus to the left compressed time; time intervals seemed shorter than they were in fact.

This doesn’t explain why time’s arrow moves from left to right, but it does show that time’s on a horizontal line in the mind’s eye. And it does help explain something else about my son’s timeline. A lot of time and experience is compressed into a very small space early on in his young life, with each year taking up more space as he gets older. It makes intuitive sense that we would experience time as expanding into the future, where the exact dimensions of our experience are as yet unknown.

For more insights into the quirks of human nature, visit “We’re Only Human” at www.psychologicalscience.org/onlyhuman. Selections from the blog also appear regularly in the magazine Scientific American Mind and at Newsweek.com.

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