Premonition or Superstition

“A Computer expert who dreamed of scooping the Euro Millions jackpot has won £6.4million in the draw. Ryan Magee had a premonition last week he would win a share of a £96million stake on Friday – and was so certain he bought 11 tickets in four different towns on the day.” (Extract from metro online August 2008)

Ryan Magee would appear to be a very lucky man. Not only did he win the lottery but according to metro online he also has some form of supernatural/paranormal ability to see into the future. So what is going on here? I would suggest nothing paranormal, but a lot of other interesting things that can tell us a lot about how we think. To suggest that someone could see into the future, retrieve information and then act on it is rather far fetched and problematic. It would require us to completely re-think our knowledge of space, time and free will. Luckily there are a number of other explanations.

First of all we seem to have a natural problem handling very large numbers and working out probabilities. To the naked eye, what happened with Ryan Magee is far too much of a coincidence to be explained away by chance or numbers. He had a dream he was going to win the lottery and then goes and does it. But some very quick calculations can show us that it really isn’t that much of an impressive coincidence. If we guess that the average person has 3 dreams a night that he/she can recall then over a space of a week that is 21 dreams and over the space of a year it is around 1150. I have 601 friends on Facebook (nearer 6 actual friends). So between me and my Facebook friends we experience over an astonishing six hundred thousand dreams a year (600,000). We dream about things that go on in life all the time – sooner or later a coincidence will happen. It is inevitable.

Furthermore, we possess extremely selective memory systems. What stands out from the ordinary is more easily remembered than what doesn’t. Thus, all the seemingly realistic and wishful dreams of getting a raise, meeting a handsome dark stranger or winning the lottery that don’t come to fruition are quickly forgotten. The number of forgotten dreams that Ryan will have experienced that never ‘came true’ will be in the tens of thousands probably. A further consideration in this particular case is the idea of supposed ‘visions’ causing a self fulfilling prophecy. If we are told by a psychic at a gipsy fair that we will be meeting a new love this month, then there is a very realistic chance we will be on the look out for one and thus change our behaviour based on what that bizarre old hag said. Ryan went and bought a load of more tickets and in doing so increased the likelihood of him winning the lottery by over 1000%. If you believe something is going to happen then there is a decent chance you will start to behave in a manner that will make it a lot more likely.

A final interesting explanation for why it is all too often easy to jump to paranormal explanations is that we sometimes often struggle to understand how cause and effect work. A study by American parapsychologist Cox (1956) is a fine example. Cox tried to examine whether we could unconsciously sense danger and avoid it. Cox’s analysis interestingly showed that passenger rail traffic was significantly lower on days of accidents in comparison to days on which everything went tickityboo. A suggestion here is that some individuals were unconsciously ‘sensing’ the accident yet to occur and avoiding the train that day for whatever reason. But things aren’t this simple. A lot of other stuff could be going on to decrease the number of passengers using trains on days when there are accidents. Let’s look at the weather for example. Bad weather puts people off leaving the house and increases the chances of a rail accident. The problem is that if your attention is drawn towards two things that are superficially related we appear to have a tendency to jump to conclusions about cause and effect, without too much consideration of what else could be going on. Perhaps it can be traced back to it being fairly adaptive many millennia ago. To understand and navigate through our worlds we have to continuously infer cause and effect. It is key that we will readily attribute cause and effect – ‘eating that plant caused me to be sick’, ‘speaking loudly attracted that rather nasty looking animal’s attention’. But occasionally this mechanism will misfire as it isn’t perfect.

So, if we can’t trust self reports of these supposed premonitions, what should we do? Scientifically test for such ability is the obvious answer. Do I happen to know anybody that has done it? Yes. Yes I do. There are a few researchers that report odd results supporting the idea that this might actually go on. But luckily I have conducted and supervised a number of experiments testing this seemingly crazy idea. In the first experiment we asked participants to try and use any precognitive ability to guess which image from pairs of pictures would later be presented on the screen. Males, females, believers and non-believers all scored what we would expect through pure chance. In the second, participants kept dream diaries to examine whether the content of their dreaming could in any way predict the contents of a video clip they then watched the following day. Did our group of participants do anything that goes beyond chance expectation? Not really I am afraid. I’m sure that Ryan won’t lose too much sleep though.

Implications

1. Be very wary of weirdo’s with crystal balls.

2. Avoid journeys when it is raining or the carriages seem a little empty. Something bad might happen.

3.Take a bit of time to think through actual causes of effects in your life, rather than settling with what sounds alright. 

Dear Friend, please tell me how much to eat…

How much of that cake should I eat? How much of that broccoli should I serve myself? Neither are highly thought provoking questions and it is for this reason that such questions are actually quite interesting. There is an explicit assumption that we eat based on hunger and our body telling us what it needs. But the story isn’t so simple. Often factors in our environment will be making us do things we probably don’t want to do. Most people like company, but at the same time most people want to maintain a fairly slender build and not overeat. This blog discusses how the two don’t always go hand in hand, very much akin to dieting and cheesecake.

A wealth of research examining the psychology of eating behaviour suggests that we model how much we eat on what those around us are eating. A good example of such a study is that of Salvy et al. (2009). Here participants were invited to participate in a study that was cheekily labelled as an investigation of social interaction. Little did the participants know it was actually about food. Participants were either paired up with a friend or another participant and left at a table with a running tape recorder to discuss favoured past times. The researchers also conveniently left some bowls of snacks on the table.

The findings were pretty clear. The more one participant ate, the more the other did. Whether with a stranger or friend this finding was the same. If you eat more, so will I. Quite interestingly this was very much the case with female participants, but didn’t appear to influence males in the same way. What was going on? We don’t have the time here to go too far off topic. But previous research has actually found that males can also be prone to this social influence effect too.

Other studies have used some clever deception by getting one of the researchers to pretend to be the ‘other participant’ in the study. Therefore, the researchers can control exactly how much is being eaten by one party. Again, the more the fake participant eats the more our real participant eats. It is a striking effect. Such an effect is even observed when participants have been instructed not to eat for a day! In a study by Goldman et al. (1991), even when massively hungry if the confederate ate next to nothing our starving participants followed suit. Eating behaviour being massively driven by social cues ahead of signals coming from the depleted and hungry body.

Why such a big effect? One explanation is the need to use other’s behaviour as a guideline for what we should do. Nobody wants to come across as greedy or a bit weird. So eating similar amounts to our eating partners may in part help us out with this problem and reduce feelings of being different or an outsider. Yet, research by Roth et al. 2001 takes this social eating effect even further and shows social eating without any socialising! Here participants were left alone with a plate of cookies and asked to complete ratings concerning sensory qualities of the cookies. Before leaving the researcher told each participant to ignore a piece of paper on the table he had left there ‘by mistake’ which noted down how much previous participants had eaten. As you might expect this was either quite a lot of cookies or very few. And as you are right to guess, regardless of participant weight, hunger, gender or dieting status, the amount of cookies eaten was strongly influenced by a group of people that weren’t present and didn’t even exist.

If we all had friends that eat very little in social situations then surely we would be onto a winner? This seems like a logical explanation, but an awful lot of research suggests most of do eat quite a lot when with others. Psychologist John De Castro has done a huge amount of research tracking how the number of people present at a meal influences amount eaten. Usually this has involved participants keeping a stringent diary of their days activities, including when, what, where and whom they ate with. The general finding: the greater the number of meal companions, the greater the number of calories consumed. Individuals often eat as much as 40-50% more when eating in a group than when eating alone. Friends seem to come at a price.

So what I hear you say? Who cares if I eat a lot with my friends? You only live once. This is true. But as we all know – unhealthy eating and weight gain all come at a cost which is likely to reduce the longevity of our one shot at life. Furthermore, there is evidence that suggests that you really are what you eat (well at least in others eyes). When it comes to food we can forge some quite terrible stereotypes based on what others eat. For example, Vartanien et al. (2000) showed participants a video of a young female eating a small or large meal alone. The findings ? If participants saw the young lady eating a lot she was thought to be more manly and also messier. The latter trait is quite intriguing. One suggestion is that it is due to an association that people who eat less are more self controlled and thus tidier.

Some Thoughts

Think before you eat. What do you really want from this meal? Nourishment or social approval?