It's all a mind trick

If you are a Psychology student, when you took your introductory module you would probably have had to go for many Psych experiments to make up the numbers for the projects of the Year 4 students or Lab students. Even if you're not a Psych student perhaps you have also gone for some paid psych experiments.

I will include some experiments in here because they are quite interesting, they are in blue so you can skip over them if you don't want to read them, though I highly recommend you to.

It's quite a long post, so you can just not read it if you don't want to. If you want to, click to read on after the page break -

In the experiments that you went for, do you remember that there will always be something in the Participant Information (the instructions) that goes something like: 

These are not the instructions but it was funny so I'm including it.

"You are free to pull out of the experiment at any point of time", 

"Now that you have read what you are supposed to do, you can decide not to participate if you don't want to, you will not be penalized in any way" 

and also after the experiment there is sometimes a 

"If you would not like your results to be submitted, to let us know, it is ok... etc"

Today I had a revelation - They are pulling Psychology mind tricks on us!!

Let me explain...

(all definitions and experiments are from Baumeister& Bushman - Social Psychology and Human Nature, 2011)

First, there is this thing called a 'Panic Button effect', which is "a reduction in stress or suffering due to a belief that one has the option of escaping or controlling the situation, even if one doesn't exercise it."

(skip this blue section if you are lazy to read, it's just the experiment that demonstrated it)

The Panic Button effect

In an early demonstration of this effect, participants were exposed to highly aversive noise stress - blasts of loud noise, delivered at random intervals for irregular lengths of time - while they were trying to solve puzzles. This noise stress had been previously shown to make it harder for people to perform their tasks; invoking frustration and stress and lower concentration.

All participants had a button on the table in front of them - in reality, this button was not connected to anything and pressing it would have no effect. To some participants, however, the experimenter told them that pressing the button would turn off the noise. He told these participant that they could do so if it became too stressful or hard to bear, though this would spoil the experiment, so they should not press it if possible. 

No one pressed the button.  Yet the participants who had this 'panic button' available to them did not show all the problems and impairments that the stress had caused. They seemed to have derived considerable comfort just from knowing it was there.

That line in our Participant Info sheet - "you are free to pull out of the experiment at any point of time' is meant to simulate a 'panic button'! Knowing that you have the option to stop at any point of the experiment will reduce our stress and and make us more likely to complete the experiment! Sneaky eh. But that's not the most sneaky, read on.

Then there is this theory called the cognitive dissonance theory, the theory that inconsistencies in our attitudes and behavior produce psychological discomfort, leading people to rationalize their behavior or change their attitudes. This Dilbert cartoon very succinctly and humorously illustrates this theory:
(just click it if it doesn't load)

Related to this is the whole issue of choices. If we were forced to do something, we would just do it without changing our attitude towards it. However, if we were given an option, such as in the Participant Info sheet : "Now that you have read what you are supposed to do, you can decide not to participate if you don't want to" ,  we would clearly not back out since we have already committed to it (related to another Psych effect! 'lowballing')  so we would continue to participate.

And when we continue to participate, regardless of what stupid task we are asked to perform, we would still think we like it and hence we would try to do it well!

Another interesting experiment that illustrates this change in attitude because we are trying to reduce cognitive dissonance (or psychological discomfort)

The worm-eating experiment

An experiment randomly assigned participants to 2 conditions - in one condition, the participants were told that their task was 'weight discrimination', to determine by sight which of a pair of 2 metals were heavier. In another condition, participants were told their assigned task was to eat a worm. 

The lab was set up with a plate with a worm and a fork, napkin, and glass of water. The participant was left alone for a while, to allow time to get used to the idea.After some time, the experimenter returned and said that they had made a mistake. Instead of being assigned the original task, they were supposed to do the other task (e.g. metal task supposed to do worm, worm task supposed to do metal)
Among the participants who had been told they were assigned the weight discrimination task at first and then were given the choice to eat a worm instead, all (100%) said "NO!" and stuck with the emotionally neutral weight discrimination task. 

However, for those who had expected to eat the worm and were given the chance to switch to the weight discrimination task, only 20% of them switched. This may seem surprising, but some post-experiment questionnaires revealed that changed attitudes helped mediate the choice. Most of these people had changed their views by increasing the belief that (a) I am brave, (b) I deserve to suffer, or (c) eating a worm isn't so bad. Those who failed to change any of these beliefs were the 20% that switched over.

And of course ""If you would not like your results to be submitted, to let us know, it is ok... etc" can be explained similarly to the previous line, that because we have already changed our attitudes, we won't say no to this. PLUS, this further reinforces the effect, giving us yet another final choice if we want to pull out. (which we won't so we will really think we liked the experiment or did our best or something)

And I don't know if you realized it, but I've also tried to do the same thing on you with the page break at the start :D 

Happy 2 more days of recess week!