208 participants (66% female) … indicated at least one current desire on half (49.9%) of the occasions at which they were beeped and responded (N=10,558), reported at least one recent desire on 26.7% of occasions, and reported neither a current nor recent desire on 27.6% of occasions. The most frequent desires among the total of 7,827 desire reports were those rooted in basic bodily needs: desires to eat (28.1%), sleep (10.3%), and drink (8.6%); followed by desires for media use (8.1%), leisure (7.2%), social contact (7.1%), hygiene-related activities (5.9%), tobacco use (4.8%), sex (4.6%), work (3.0%), coffee (2.9%), alcohol (2.7%), engagement in sports (2.6%), and spending (2.2%; category “other”: 1.9%). …

53.2% of desires [were] rated as not conflicting at all, 14.7% as mildly conflicting, 12.4% as somewhat conflicting, 10.9% asquite conflicting, and 8.8% as highly conflicting. On average,desires were actively resisted on 42% of occasions and enacted on 48% of occasions. (more)

Writing about job loss improves one’s chance of reemployment. This sort of writing appears to be cathartic – people immediately feel better. More striking, at least in one study, is a sharply increased chance of getting a job. After six months, 53 percent of writers had found a new job, compared with only 18 percent of non writers. One effect of writing is that it helps you work through your anger so it is not displaced onto a new, prospective employer or, indeed, revealed to the employer in any form.

Here is the cited ’94 study:

Subjects in the study were 63 professionals (62 men, 1 woman), with a mean age of 54 years (representing of range of 40 to 68 years) and an average tenure of 20 years with their former employer, a large computer and electronics firm. Subjects had held engineering or other professional positions with the company. They were voluntarily recruited to the Writing in Transition Project from … an outplacement firm, following a large-scale layoff from their company. At the time of the study the length of unemployment was five months for all subjects. All [100] potential subjects were informed that the project involved a writing process that was expected to benefit them in their search process. Forty-one of [them] volunteered for the study and were randomly assigned to either the experimental writing (N = 20) or the control writing (N = 21) conditions. …

[We saw] a significant difference (… p = .018) between those who got jobs and those who did not. … The effects were not mediated by measures of heightened motivation. That is, subjects in the experimental condition did not receive more phone calls, make more contacts, or send out more letters than controls. … Most subjects had very powerful emotions about their termination experience. (more)

This suggests an easy way to increase employment, at least if the problem is employee attitudes. Digging more, I found this ’01 review, which seems to confirm the benefits of writing therapy. It all does seem a bit hard to believe, but stranger things have been true.

Added 31Dec: jsalvatier finds a good ’06 meta analysis:

One hundred forty-six randomized studies of experimental disclosure were collected and included in the present meta-analysis. Results of random effects analyses indicate that experimental disclosure is effective.

The zygomatic major [muscle], which resides in the cheek, tugs the lips upward, and the orbicularis oculi, which encircles the eye socket, squeezes the outside corners into the shape of a crow’s foot. The entire event is short — typically lasting from two-thirds of a second to four seconds. … Other muscles can simulate a smile, but only [this] peculiar tango … produces a genuine expression of positive emotion. … Most [psychologists] consider it the sole indicator of true enjoyment. …

College yearbook … Women who displayed [genuine] expressions of positive emotion in their 21-year-old photo had greater levels of general well-being and marital satisfaction at age 52. … Smiles of professional baseball players captured in a 1952 yearbook, … could explain 35 percent of the variability in [their] survival. … Compared to smiles taped during honest interviews, the nurses gave fewer genuine … smiles when lying. … Women smile more than men. …

A massive meta-analysis … from 162 studies and more than 100,000 participants … isolated three variables that influence sex-smiling disparities. … [1:] When people know they’re being watched … sex differences in smiling are greater. … [2:] When men and women share a task or role that follows rigid social rules — like those requiring flight attendants to smile and funeral directors to remain somber — the grin gap diminishes. … [3:] Embarrassing or socially tense situations cause females to smile more than males, but happy or sad situations have no such effect. …

[Researchers] observed the smiles of test participants told to share some of the fee they received from the study with a friend. When people were engaged in this sharing activity they exhibited more [genuine] smiles than during a neutral scenario. … Some were primed for exclusion through an essay task that required them to write about a time they were rejected. … Excluded participants showed an enhanced ability to distinguish [genuine] smiles from false ones … [and] a greater preference to work with individuals displaying genuine … smiles. (more)

Also consider one more data point: our happiest moments by far are during sexual orgasm, but we rarely (NSFW source) smile at such moments.

Signals can be socially wasteful, as some of each person’s gain from their signaling effort can come at the expense of others made to look worse by comparison. Yes our enjoying things makes their efforts less costly, but even so there are real costs that can be socially wasteful.

Even with smiling. For example, we tend to be happier when we smile, and we smile more when we are around others. But I doubt we’d be better off if forced to be around others more often. Our smiles would come at a needlessly higher cost.

“Unskilled and Unaware of It“. … everyone’s favorite theory of those they disagree with, that they are hopelessly confused idiots unable to see they are idiots; no point in listening to or reasoning with such fools.

Here is a much better study; it goes a long way to disentangling the effects:

We study … 656 undergraduate students, tracking the evolution of their beliefs about their own relative performance on an IQ test as they receive noisy feedback from a known data-generating process. … Subjects (1) place approximately full weight on their priors, but (2) are asymmetric, over-weighting positive feedback relative to negative, and (3) conservative, updating too little in response to both positive and negative signals. These biases are substantially less pronounced in a placebo experiment where ego is not at stake. We also find that (4) a substantial portion of subjects are averse to receiving information about their ability, and that (5) less confident subjects are causally more likely to be averse. We unify these phenomena by showing that they all arise naturally in a simple model of optimally biased Bayesian information processing. (more; HT Dan Houser)

A status theory is that we most want to know about how impressed other folks might be if we had a product, and so want “quality” to focus on visible features. When price is invisible, we don’t want it included. This theory predicts that other invisible features will also not be included in quality.

Another theory is that we want “quality” to focus on features that we mostly agree are good. The more we disagree on the value of a feature, the less we want it included in “quality.” So if people vary enough in their value for money relative to other features, we won’t want price included.  This theory predicts that other features where preferences also vary greatly will not be included in quality.

A third theory is that we just mentally categorize what we pay for a product as not “part of” the product.” This theory suggests we’d also not include how quickly we could get the product shipped to us, or how easily it could be serviced, in its quality.

Any other theories to consider?

As with most lying or self-deception, homo hypocritus faces a serious implementation problem: how to keep the lies it tells separate from the “real” beliefs on which it acts. Since brains tend to be liberal with interconnections, there is a real risk of cross-talk between contradictory sets of opinions; lies may infect beliefs, and beliefs may infect lies.

I’ve previously discussed one solution: have the different sets of opinions apply to different topics. For example, hold socially-acceptable opinions on far topics, where the personal consequences of actions tend to be smaller, and keep more realistic opinions on near topics, where such consequences tend to be larger. Yes there’s a risk others may notice that you change opinions without good reason as items move from near to far or far to near, but that may be a relatively small price to pay.

A different solution is to have two distinct processing centers, each highly-connected internally, but with only modest between-center connections. One center would manage a coherent set of lies, while the other managed a coherent set of true beliefs. And in fact real brains have exactly this architecture! Left and right brains are highly connected internally, but only modestly connected to each other. Does the left brain manage a coherent set of overt opinions, while the right brain manages a coherent set of covert opinions? Consider:

1. In all vertebrates left brains tend to control routine behavior (e.g. feeding) while right brains tend to respond to unusual events (e.g. fight/flight).
2. Left brains tend to initiate actions, via positive feelings, while right brains tend to inhibit actions, via negative feelings.
3. Compared to other primates, left vs. right human brains differ a lot more in function.
4. The left human brain manages language’s literal quotably-overt syntax, vocabulary, and semantics, while the right brain handles language’s less-socially-verifiable tone, accent, metaphor, allegory, and ambiguity.
5. Split brain patients show that left brains are adept at making up respectable explanations for arbitrary right brain behavior.
6. Right brains tend to be used more in crafting lies, and they can read subtle emotion clues better.
7. Left brain damage tends to distort behavior in more obvious and understandable ways.
8. Left brains emphasize decision-making, fact retrieval, numbers, and careful sequenced acts like throwing, while right brains emphasize art, music, spatial manipulation, and recognizing of shapes, patterns, and faces.

It seems that in most animals, left brains tend to manage and initiate actions within the current mode, while right brains watch in the background for patterns and reasons to veto current actions and switch modes. In humans, it seems the current-action-sequencer brain half was recruited to focus more on managing overt rule-following language, decisions, and actions, ready to explain away any apparent rule-violations. The less-introspectively-accessible pattern-recognizing background-watcher brain half, in contrast, was apparently recruited to focus on harder-to-testify-on-and-so-more-easily-covert meaning, opinion, and communication, including art and music.

I’m not saying that overt vs. covert human beliefs map exactly to human left vs. right brains, any more than socially-useful vs. action-practical beliefs map exactly onto far vs. near beliefs. I’m just suggesting that human brain design took pre-existing animal brain structures, such as near vs. far modes and left vs. right brain splits, and recruited them to the task of managing the uniquely human task of hypocrisy: simultaneously espousing and evading rules. In particular, the left-right brain split become an important tool for minimizing undesirable leakage between the overt rule-following images we present to others, and the cover rule-evading actions and communication which better achieve our real ends.

More quotes:

The left hemisphere is specialized not only for the actual production of speech sounds but also for the imposition of syntactic structure on speech and for much of what is called semantics – comprehension of meaning.  The right hemisphere , on the other hand, doesn’t govern spoken words but seems to be concerned with more subtle aspects of language such as nuances of metaphor, allegory and ambiguity. (Ramachandran, quoted in TMHH p56)

No other [vertebrate] species consistently prefers the same hand for certain skilled actions. … The human brain is distinguished from the brains of the great apes by an extraordinary extent of lateralization of function. (more)

First, women who think they look younger after having their hair colored/cut show a decrease in blood pressure and appear younger in photographs (in which their hair is cropped out) to independent raters. Second, clothing is an age-related cue. Uniforms eliminate these age-related cues: Those who wear work uniforms have lower morbidity than do those who earn the same amount of money and do not wear work uniforms. Third, baldness cues old age. Men who bald prematurely see an older self and therefore age faster: Prematurely bald men have an excess risk of getting prostate cancer and coronary heart disease than do men who do not prematurely bald. Fourth, women who bear children later in life are surrounded by younger age-related cues: Older mothers have a longer life expectancy than do women who bear children earlier in life. Last, large spousal age differences result in age-incongruent cues: Younger spouses live shorter lives and older spouses live longer lives than do controls. (more)

The paper speculates that this might contribute to rising lifespans – are we overall healthier today because overall we look and act younger than our ancestors? More quotes:

People who earn less than $24,916 per year and who wear work uniforms (e.g., waiters, waitresses) tend to have poorer health (higher morbidity) than do people who earn less than $24,916 per year and who do not wear work uniforms (e.g., street and door-to-door sales workers). …. Individuals who earned more than $24,916 per year and who did not wear work uniforms (e.g., engineers) had poorer health than did their uniformed counterparts (e.g., chemists). … People of low socioeconomic status who wear uniforms may experience less job control (as rated by the employee) than those who do not wear uniforms. Wearing a uniform may be seen as a way of being controlled, which may override any effect the age cue could or could not have. In contrast, uniforms worn by people with higher earning potential may be seen more as a status symbol (e.g., doctors) compared with uniforms worn by people with lower incomes (e.g., janitors). …

The amount of progression of baldness was associated with coronary heart occurrence (risk rate = 2.4), coronary heart disease mortality (risk = 3.8), and all-cause mortality (risk = 2.4). … The optimal age at first birth for mothers’ long-run health occurs about … the age of 34 years. … Representing fluctuation from the base rate of 100, the [standard mortality ratio] was only 84 for wives with husbands 4–14 years younger, whereas it was 125 for women married to older men up to 14 years their senior. …

People are getting married and having children later, and more adults are going into higher education. Therefore, age norms are starting to change or are, at least, extending in accordance with societal trends. These changes may lead to changes in age-related cues, which may, in turn, affect health outcomes.

A psych study asked people to think of someone they felt guilty toward, or made them imagine feeling guilty toward someone (e.g., slacking off on a joint project, or being careless with something borrowed). Researchers then had these guilty folks divide up money between themselves, the victim, and a third party (e.g., a deserving charity or random person). Compared to controlled conditions, such people give more money to the victim, but at the expense of the third party, not themselves. When they consider such donation behavior in other people, it is not morally exemplary.

Quotes:

In a typical dictator game, one person decides how to divide a sum of money (or other resources) among oneself and another person without the other having any influence on the division of the resources. In our experiments, participants decided how to divide resources among themselves, the victim, and another person (the nonvictim), without the victim or the nonvictim having any influence on the division. … In all experiments we [found] that, compared with a control condition, participants in guilt conditions … offer more resources to the victim and fewer resources to other social partners without changing the amount of resources for themselves. In addition, Experiments 1– 4 systematically rule out alternative explanations of the effect and reveal conditions under which the effect is observed.

The blogsphere adores Kruger and Dunning’s ‘99 paper “Unskilled and Unaware of It“. … This paper describes everyone’s favorite theory of those they disagree with, that they are hopelessly confused idiots unable to see they are idiots; no point in listening to or reasoning with such fools.  However, many psychologists have noted Kruger and Dunning’s main data is better explained by positing simply that we all have noisy estimates of our ability and of task difficulty.

Here is yet another needed correction:

Relative to high-performing students, the poorer students showed a greater overconfidence effect (i.e., their predictions were greater than their performance), but they also reported lower confidence in these predictions. Together, these results suggest that poor students are indeed unskilled but that they may have some awareness of their lack of metacognitive knowledge. (more)

Prior to the eighteenth century, laughter was viewed by most authors almost entirely in negative terms. … All laughter was thought to arise from making fun of someone. Most references to laughter in the Bible, for example, are linked with scorn, derision, mockery, or contempt. … Aristotle … believed that [laughter] was always a response to ugliness or deformity in another person. … Thomas Hobbes saw laughter as being based on a feeling of superiority, or “sudden glory”, resulting from some perception of inferiority in another person.

During the eighteenth century … [in] Europe, … ridicule became a popular debating technique for outwitting and humiliating one’s adversaries by making them laughable to others. … With the growing view of ridicule as a socially acceptable verbal art form and a desirable part of amiable conversation, the idea of laughter as an expression of contempt and scorn gradually gave way to a view of it as a response to cleverness and gamesmanship. … [New] theories … viewed incongruity as the essence of laughter. …

Reformers began to argue in favor of a more humanitarian form of laughter based on sympathy rather than agreession. This led to a need for a new word … and humor was co-opted to serve this purpose. In contrast, the word wit began to be used to refer to the more aggressive types of laughter-evoking behaviors. … Wit was associated with comedy based on intellect, while humor involved comedy based on character. … Wit was associated with the aristocracy and elitism, whereas humor was a more bourgeois, middle-class concept, associated with universality and democracy. … Wit was considered to be more artificial, … whereas humor was viewed as more natural. …

Over the course of the twentieth century, … the distinction between wit and humor gradually disappeared, and humor [became] … the umbrella term for all thing laughable. … All laughter came to be seen as essentially benevolent and sympathetic. …

From the seventeenth to the twentieth century, popular conceptions of laughter underwent a remarkable transformation, shifting from the aggressive antipathy of superiority theory, to the neutrality of incongruity theory, to the view that laughter could sometimes by sympathetic , to the notion that sympathy was a necessary condition for laughter. …

As recently as the 1860s, it was considered impolite to laugh in public in the United States. Even in the early twentieth century, some spheres of social activity (e.g., religion, education, and politics) were considered inappropriate for humor and laughter. Today … laughter … [is] actively encouraged in virtually all social settings. …

By the 1870s … to say that someone lacked a sense of humor was seen as one of the worst things that could be said about him or her. … Over the course of the twentieth century, the concept of sense of humor … becomes increasingly vague and undefined. … Saying that someone lacked a sense of humor came to mean that he or she was excessively serious, fanatical, or egotistical, and inflexible, temperamental extremist. The lack of a sense of humor was viewed as a defining characteristic of some forms of mental illness. … In the United States, [a sense of humor] came to be seen as a distinctly American virtue, having to do with tolerance and democracy, in contrast to those living in dictatorships, such as the Germans under Nazism, or the Russians during the Communist era, who were thought to be devoid of humor. After … September 11, 2001, many American commentators expressed the opinion that Al Qaeda terrorists, and perhaps even all Moslems, lacked a sense of humor. … Until quite recently, it was commonly assumed by many writers that women generally lacked a sense of humor. … By the end of the twentieth century, humor and laughter were … seen as … important factors in mental and physical health … Hospital clowns and comedy rooms became familiar sights in many hospitals.

(pp.20-25, The Psychology of Humor, Rod Martin, 2007)

More data on laughter:

Most people think of laughter as a simple response to comedy, or a cathartic mood-lifter. Instead, after 10 years of research on this little-studied topic, I concluded that laughter is primarily a social vocalization that binds people together. It is a hidden language that we all speak. It is not a learned group reaction but an instinctive behavior programmed by our genes. Laughter bonds us through humor and play….

Speakers we observed laughed almost 50% more than their audiences. … Banal comments like, “Where have you been?” or “It was nice meeting you, too” — hardly knee-slappers — are far more likely to precede laughter than jokes. Only 10% to 20% of the laughter episodes we witnessed followed anything joke-like. … Laughter was 30 times more frequent in social than solitary situations. … Laughter is also extremely difficult to control consciously.  ..

Females laughed 126% more than their male counterparts. … Men seem to be the main instigators of humor across cultures. .. Think back to your high school class clown — most likely he was a male. …  In … newspaper personal ads, … females were 62% more likely to mention laughter in their ads, and women were more likely to seek out a “sense of humor” while men were more likely to offer it. … The laughter of the female, not the male, is the critical index of a healthy relationship. … Laughter is self-effacing behavior, and the women in my study may have used it as an unconscious vocal display of compliance or solidarity with a more socially dominant group member. … [We] laugh almost exclusively at phrase breaks in speech. … A large-scale study … found optimism and sense of humor in childhood to be inversely related to longevity. (more)