![]() ![]() For starters, the research team found that if you simply ask participants to smile, rather than tricking them into smiling, the mood boost they show is 10 times greater (though, as you’d expect, it’s still relatively modest in absolute terms smiling is never going to cheer you up as much as winning the lottery, or watching your team win the Champions League). Once we begin digging deeper, though, the findings of the 2022 study get much more interesting – and start to cast light on issues beyond mere “replication”. (When, last month, I put it to Strack that these findings undermined his conclusions, he simply pointed to a “considerable number of studies in which the effect was demonstrated”, though it wasn’t clear which particular studies he had in mind, or why their findings should override those of the two recent mega-studies.) How small? Well, when happiness is measured on a seven-point scale, the increase shown by the pen-in-teeth participants worked out at 0.04 – effectively zero. Two large-scale international replications – one in 2016 and one in 2022, with altogether about 6,000 participants – found that the mood boost from holding a pen between your teeth was, at best, infinitesimally small. ![]() The replication crisis wasn’t kind to Strack’s study. Unsurprisingly, psychologists agreed upon the second option, and started worrying about how many of the field’s long-established findings would hold up to the scrutiny of replication – that is, if we did the same experiment again, would we get the same result? Of course, being able to replicate experiments and obtain the same result is one of the fundamental tenets of science, but one to which – to our shame – we psychologists have long turned a blind eye. Bem’s findings confronted researchers with a stark choice: either (a) seeing into the future is possible or (b) our criteria for evaluating psychology experiments are too lax. The crisis started not with Strack’s work, but with a series of studies by Daryl J Bem showing that – among other things – participants showed better-than-chance performance when asked to guess which of two curtains was hiding a pornographic picture. That is until 2011, when psychology unearthed its “replication crisis” and the Scheiße really hit the fan. Just as with a placebo pill, the more strongly you believe that smiling makes you happier, the more it doesįor the next couple of decades, Strack’s findings stood unchallenged. ![]() Strack seemed to have shown that – at least sometimes – our facial expressions determine our moods, rather than vice versa. Importantly, when they were asked afterwards whether they’d suspected anything fishy was going on, none of the participants showed any sign of realising that the pen-in-mouth cover story was simply a way to get them to smile. Sure enough, the participants who were smiling when they saw the cartoons rated themselves as more amused than the participants who were pulling a neutral (if slightly odd) expression. Half the participants were asked to hold the pen in their teeth (which forced their mouth into a smile) and half in their lips (which forced their mouth into a neutral pout) while they viewed a selection of cartoon strips. In the experiment, participants were given a cover story: that previous research using questionnaires had excluded participants who were unable to use their hands to fill in the form, and that this study would explore the feasibility of instead holding the pen in your mouth. It was here that psychologist Fritz Strack conducted a study that has since been cited almost 3,000 times and become a staple of psychology textbooks and New York Times bestsellers, including Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow. We’ll get to their work in a minute, but first I’d like to take you back to the German city of Mannheim in 1988. That, at least, is the implication of a new study by a pair of Stanford psychologists, Nicholas Coles and Michael Frank. But are any of these psychological tricks – or life hacks, as they are often called these days – actually true? The truth is, we don’t know and, in a very real sense, we can’t ever know, because of limitations that are inherent in the design of the relevant experiments – not just those on weight loss, mindfulness or social media, but just about all experiments in what we might call “lifestyle science”. “W ant to lose weight? Buy smaller plates.” “ Mindfulness at work: a superpower to boost productivity.” “ Leaving Facebook can make you happier.” That’s what the headlines and Ted Talks would have you believe. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |