Babies as young as eight months old want people who commit or condone antisocial acts to be punished, according to a new study led by a University of British Columbia researcher.
While previous research shows that babies uniformly prefer kind acts, the new study published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that eight month-old infants support negative behavior if it is directed at those with antisocial behavior – and dislike those who are nice to bad guys.
"We find that, by eight months, babies have developed nuanced views of reciprocity and can conduct these complex social evaluations much earlier than previously thought," says lead author Prof. Kiley Hamlin, UBC Dept of Psychology.
"This study helps to answer questions that have puzzled evolutionary psychologists for decades," says Hamlin. "Namely, how have we survived as intensely social creatures if our sociability makes us vulnerable to being cheated and exploited? These findings suggest that, from as early as eight months, we are watching for people who might put us in danger and prefer to see antisocial behavior regulated."
For the study, researchers presented six scenarios to 100 babies using animal hand puppets. After watching puppets act negatively or positively towards other characters, the babies were shown puppets either giving or taking toys from these "good" or "bad" puppets. When prompted to choose their favorite characters, babies preferred puppets that punished the bad characters from the original scene compared to those that treated them nicely.
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The researchers also examined how older infants would themselves treat good and bad puppets. They tested 64 babies aged 21 months, who were asked to give a treat to, or take a treat away from one of two puppets – one who had previously helped another puppet, and another who had harmed the other puppet. These older babies physically took treats away from the "bad" puppets, and gave treats to the "good" ones.
Hamlin, who conducted the research with Karen Wynn and Paul Bloom of Yale University's Dept. of Psychology, and Neha Mahajan of Temple University, says the findings provide new insights into the protective mechanisms humans use to choose social alliances, which she says are rooted in self-preservation.
Hamlin says the infant responses may be early forms of the complex behaviors and emotions that get expressed later in life, such as when school children tattle on kids who break the rules, the rush people feel when movie villains get their due, and the phenomenon of people cheering at public executions.
Hamlin says while such tendencies surely have many learned components, the fact that they are present so early in life suggests that they may be based in part on an innate foundation of liking those who give others their "just desserts."
Men may think about sex more often than women, but a new study suggests that men also think about other biological needs, such as eating and sleep, more frequently than women do.
And the research discredits the persistent stereotype that men think about sex every seven seconds, which would amount to more than 8,000 thoughts about sex in 16 waking hours. In the study, the median number of young men's thought about sex stood at almost 19 times per day. Young women in the study reported a median of nearly 10 thoughts about sex per day.
As a group, the men also thought about food almost 18 times per day and slept nearly 11 times per day, compared to women's median number of thoughts about eating and sleep, at nearly 15 times and about 8 1/2 times, respectively.
The college-student participants carried a golf tally counter to track their thoughts about eating, sleep or sex every day for a week. Each student was assigned just one type of thought to record. Before receiving the tally counter, they had completed several questionnaires and were asked to estimate how often they had daily ideas about eating, sleeping and sex.
Overall, a participant's comfort with sexuality was the best predictor for who would have the most frequent daily thoughts about sex.
"If you had to know one thing about a person to best predict how often they would be thinking about sex, you'd be better off knowing their emotional orientation toward sexuality, as opposed to knowing whether they were male or female," said Terri Fisher, professor of psychology at Ohio State University's Mansfield campus and lead author of the study. "Frequency of thinking about sex is related to variables beyond biological sex."
Correcting this stereotype about men's sexual thoughts is essential, Fisher noted.
"It's amazing the way people will spout off these fake statistics that men think about sex nearly constantly and so much more often than women do," she said. "When a man hears a statement like that, he might think there's something wrong with him because he's not spending that much time thinking about sexuality, and when women hear about this, if they spend significant time thinking about sex they might think there's something wrong with them."
The study appears online and is scheduled for publication in the January issue of the Journal of Sex Research.
The study involved 163 female and 120 male college students between 18 and 25 who were enrolled in a psychology research participation program. Of those, 59 were randomly assigned to track thoughts about food, 61 about sleep and 163 about sex. Most students were white and self-identified as heterosexual. The college-student sample compared it to previous research and involved an age group at which gender differences in sexuality are likely at their peak.
Before the thought-tracking began, the participants completed several questionnaires. These included a sexual opinion survey to measure a positive or negative emotional orientation toward sexuality (erotophilia vs. erotophobia); a sociosexual orientation inventory measuring attitudes about sex and tracking sexual behavior and levels of desire; a social desirability scale to measure respondents' tendency to try to appear socially acceptable; and an eating habits questionnaire and sleepiness scale. They also were asked to estimate how many times in an average day that they thought about sleeping, eating and sex.
Researchers then gave each student a tally counter device and told those assigned to the sexual thoughts condition to click the device to maintain a count their of thoughts about sex. They were told to count a thought about any aspect of sex: sexual activity, fantasies and erotic images, sexual memories and any arousing stimuli.
Others were instructed to use the device to record thoughts about eating that included food, hunger, cravings, snacking or cooking, and thoughts about sleep that included dreaming, sleeping, napping, going to bed or needing rest.
The questions about food and sleep were designed to mask the true intent of the study's focus on thoughts about sex, Fisher said. However, the results about these additional thoughts provided important information about differences in thinking among males and females.
"Since we looked at those other types of need-related thoughts, we found that it appears that there's not just a sex difference with regard to thoughts about sex, but also with regard to thoughts about sleep and food," she said. "That's very significant. This suggests males might be having more of these thoughts than women are or they have an easier time identifying the thoughts. It's difficult to know, but what is clear is it's not uniquely sex that they're spending more time thinking about, but other issues related to their biological needs, as well."
And when all those thoughts were considered in the statistical analysis, the difference between men and women in their average number of daily thoughts about sex wasn't considered any larger than the gender differences between thoughts about sleep or thoughts about food.
In raw numbers, male participants recorded between one and 388 daily thoughts about sex, compared to the range of female thoughts about sex between one and 140 times per day.
"For women, that's broader than many would have expected. And there were no women who reported zero thoughts per day. So women are also thinking about sexuality," Fisher said.
The questionnaire data offered some additional clues about the influences on sexual thoughts. When all participants were analyzed together, those measuring the highest in erotophilia – or comfort with their sexuality – were likelier to think more frequently about sex.
But when the analysis considered males and females separately, no single variable – erotophilia score, unrestrictive attitudes about sex or a lack of desire to be socially acceptable – could be defined as a predictor of how often men think about sex.
But for women, the erotophilia score remained a good predictor of more frequent sexual thoughts. On the other hand, women who scored high on the desire to be socially acceptable were more likely to think less frequently about sex.
"People who always give socially desirable responses to questions are perhaps holding back and trying to manage the impression they make on others," Fisher explained. "In this case, we're seeing that women who are more concerned with the impression they're making tend to report fewer sexual thoughts, and that's because thinking about sexuality is not consistent with typical expectations for women."
The participants' estimates about how often they thought each day about eating, sleeping and sex were much lower than the actual number of thoughts they recorded. This suggested to Fisher that previous research in this area – especially on thoughts about sex – was weak because almost all previous studies were based on participants' retrospective estimates about how often they thought about sex.
"There's really no good reason that our society should have believed that men think so much more about sex than women. Even the research done previously doesn't support the stereotype that men are thinking about sex every seven seconds," she said.
Fisher researched with undergraduate Ohio State-Mansfield students Zachary Moore and Mary-Jo Pittenger. Both have since graduated.
Provided by The Ohio State University
"Study debunks stereotype that men think about sex all day long." November 28th, 2011. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2011-11-debunks-stereotype-men-sex-day.html
Creative people are more likely to cheat than less creative people, possibly because this talent increases their ability to rationalize their actions, according to research published by the American Psychological Association.
"Greater creativity helps individuals solve difficult tasks across many domains, but creative sparks may lead individuals to take unethical routes when searching for solutions to problems and tasks," said lead researcher Francesca Gino, PhD, of Harvard University.
Gino and her co-author, Dan Ariely, PhD, of Duke University, conducted five experiments to test their thesis that more creative people would cheat under circumstances where they could justify their bad behaviour. Their research was published online in APA's Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
The researchers used recognized psychological tests and measures to gauge research subjects' creativity. They also tested participants' intelligence. Participants received a small sum for showing up in the five experiments. Then, they were presented with tasks or tests where they could be paid more if they cheated. For example, in one experiment, participants took a general knowledge quiz in which they circled their answers on the test paper. Afterwards, the experimenter told them to transfer their answers to "bubble sheets", – but the experimenter told the group she had photocopied the wrong sheet and that the correct answers were lightly marked. The experimenters also told participants they would be paid more for more correct answers, leading them to believe that they could cheat without detection when transferring their answers. However, all the papers had unique identifiers.
The results showed the more creative participants were significantly more likely to cheat and that there was no link between intelligence and dishonesty – i.e., more intelligent but less creative people were not more inclined toward dishonesty.
In another experiment, test subjects were shown drawings with dots on two sides of a diagonal line and asked to indicate whether there were more dots on the left or right sides. In half of the 200 trials, it was virtually impossible to tell whether there were more dots on one side or another. However, participants were told they'd be paid 10 times as much (5 cents vs 0.5 cents) for each time they said there were more dots on the right side. As predicted, the more creative participants were significantly more likely to give the more paid answer.
"Dishonesty and innovation are two of the topics most widely written about in the popular press," the authors wrote. "Yet, the relationship between creativity and dishonest behaviour has not been studied empirically. … The results from the current article indicate that, in fact, creative people who work in environments that promote creative thinking may be the most at risk when they face ethical dilemmas."
The authors concede some critical limitations in their work. Most notably, they created situations in which money tempted participants to cheat. They suggested that future research should investigate whether creativity would lead people to satisfy selfish, short-term goals rather than their higher aspirations when faced with self-control dilemmas, such as eating a slice of cake when trying to lose weight.
More information: "The Dark Side of Creativity: Original Thinkers Can Be More Dishonest," Francesca Gino, PhD, Harvard Business School, Harvard University, and Dan Ariely, PhD, Fuqua School of Business, Duke University, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, online.
Babies as young as eight months old want people who commit or condone antisocial acts to be punished, according to a new study led by a University of British Columbia researcher.
