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?

Know Thyself

How well do you know yourself? Are you confident in your thoughts on what does and doesn’t make you happy? These are questions I have pondered and thought about a lot (an unhealthy amount someone might say). If academic psychology has taught me anything, it is that often enough we don’t know why we do what we do and feel the way we do. Who would have thought that the colour of a girl’s scarf, the letters in our names or even wind speed could have profound effects on our behaviour and life?

The typical psychology study takes a very large group of people, manipulates something and then sees what happens. From this we have shown various interesting things. Recalling memories can make us feel happier, we assume attractive people are more trustworthy and a stressful relationship can be damaging to our health. But how do we use this information? One sensible suggestion would be to assume the findings probably apply to us as well. Generally all human brains and bodies share very similar chemistry and structure. But what do you do if you think you stand out from the crowd? Or can’t find a psychological study that is relevant to your interests. It’s quite obvious: study yourself.

This blog will hopefully reveal some fairly interesting psychology research and findings. It will also reveal how strange I am. As I conducted a psychological study on my own mood for 2 months. For the love of this blog, for 60 days, before going to bed at night I asked myself ‘how happy do you feel Eric?’ and made a rating on a scale. I then entered this into a database and also entered responses to a number of questions (for example ‘how many hours sleep did I get last night?’ ‘did I read a book today?’) before finally turning my computer off and starting to act normal again. I wanted to know what might make me happy and unhappy. So rather than searching through journals and papers I studied my weird self.

Obviously such a study has a number of weaknesses. Two pertinent ones are that 60 days isn’t a massively long time in the grand scheme of things, so making big conclusions would be difficult. More importantly, all results reported are correlational. This means that they only show that two things are related. Such a study cannot prove cause and effect. But, we can at least make suggestions about what the results mean by looking at studies with bigger groups of people and also by using some common sense and reasoning. So, to the results………

Excitingly a number of things appeared to influence my mood. Exercise being one of them. On days that I had exercised I tended to be in a significantly better mood than on days in which I skipped the gym. This is probably not surprising, for years we have been force fed the benefits of exercise for healthier hearts and thinner waistlines, but to also know that it may be making me feel a bit happier is also good news. And there is good reason to believe it may be beneficial. Steinberg et al (1997) found that after participants assigned to a weekly exercise programme experienced increased positive feelings and decreased negative feelings pre to post exercise session. The mood enhancing effects of exercise have also resulted in calls for it being prescribed as a treatment for depression. Longitudinal research by Paffenbarger et al suggests that regular exercise may be protective against depression. Looking at a population of American college males, analysis revealed that those that partook in regular exercise were far less likely to experience depression over a 25 year follow up period.

Another finding, although a little unexpected was that if I had been drinking the night before, my mood tended to be substantially lower the next day. Furthermore, analysis of my data showed that this couldn’t be explained through a lack of sleep, having been in a bad mood the previous day (hence, a possible decision to drink) or being less likely to exercise. The hangover seems like the most likely cause then. Yet, most of the time I wasn’t drinking enough to cause one. Research on alcohol and mood is quite mixed. Many studies have actually found alcohol to enhance mood over shorter periods of time or have no effect. Whilst others have found it increases the likelihood of experiencing depressed moods over longer periods.

Reading is often a great joy of mine. My data may even suggest that I should be partaking in this pleasure a lot more often. On days that I had read my mood was strongly elevated. This was confusing at first. However, as I tend to read shortly before bed, perhaps this finding makes a little more sense. I am 100% sure reading a book won’t be a new treatment for depression anytime soon, but as my reading exploits tended to be minutes before making my happiness rating, the positive feelings and enjoyment may still have been bouncing around inside.

A final and controversial issue; my ex-girlfriend. Was she any good? Or was she just a massive bitch? For those ‘interesting’ people that believe in ‘the one’, like listening to The Lighthouse Family and call their partners ‘babe’ I have some bad news. If you have just broken up with a girlfriend/boyfriend and are currently crying at your computer whilst listening to The Smiths, I have some slightly better news. She didn’t seem to do very much at all (isn’t this always the case?). Having seen her the previous day didn’t result in a more positive mood. Having seen her earlier on in the day or knowing that I would be seeing her later on also had no effect on how happy I felt whatsoever. And who said romance was dead?

Conclusions

As this blog was all about me there are few implications for you. For me, there are many:

a) Exercise is pretty good.
b) I should be much happier about being single.
c) I have a lot of spare time on my hands.

I was quite wrong in my original preconceptions over what would shape my mood. Amongst others, my amount of sleep, eating unhealthily and amount of music listened to had little or no influence on my happiness rating.

Bad Times

As previously discussed in an earlier blog feeling good is normally what we want from life. Nobody wants to be in a bad mood and experience negative affect. It just isn’t a lot of fun. However, many misconceptions over what can cause us to feel happy or sad exist and although old wives tales sound good, they aren’t always accurate. Feeling down? What can turn that frown upside down? A nice sunny day with the birds singing? Thinking positively and telling yourself ‘You can achieve anything’?

Disappointingly research suggests that these two common notions are probably not going to make us feel that much better. Furthermore, dependent on the person one of them is likely to make you feel a whole lot worse. Generally we aren’t all that good at working out what does and doesn’t influence our mood. A case in point is the weather. A popular held belief is that when the sun is out and the birds are singing we tend to feel a lot happier, active and enthusiastic. A large scale by Denissen et al. 2008 examined how weather conditions may influence mood. The study involved over 1000 participants in Germany. Participants were recruited through various internet advertisements and completed the study over the internet. Each night (for 30 nights) participants would log onto a specially designed website and answer various questions. The questionnaires assessed a number of constructs. Positive affect (the amount of positive emotion one feels), negative affect (the amount of negative emotion one feels) and tiredness (you guessed it: how tired one feels).

Researchers then accessed weather data from the German weather institute matching participants post codes to the relevant weather reports from the area. Did the temperature, wind power or amount of sunlight have an effect on positive affect? Did the world literally and mentally glow more? Results from this study suggest not. Warmer and sunnier days did not tend to make individuals experience more positive affect. The good weather didn’t make individuals feel more active, inspired or determined. Additionally, previous studies have come to similar conclusions.

So if weather can’t make us feel better can it make us feel more afraid, anxious and distressed? Did weather have an impact on how bad our German friends were feeling? Yes it did. Lower temperatures, less sunlight and high wind speeds were associated with greater negative emotions and feelings. Finally, the data also suggested that fewer hours of sunlight resulted in greater feelings of tiredness. But it must be mentioned that these effects were only small but nevertheless significant. It would therefore appear that rather than looking forward to summer we should probably be worrying more about winter. More interestingly, could these small changes in mood shape what we do with our day? Could a cloudy gray morning influence you in choosing not to take a chance with a job application or controversial art exhibit?

Self help books are a vast and lucrative business. They tend to tell us not only do we have to feel good about ourselves, but we also have to tell ourselves this and believe it. Should you? I would be extremely sceptical about this. In an ingenuous article entitled ‘Self help statements: Power for Some, Peril for Others’, Wood et al. 2009 examined what the effects of such self help statements may be. The experiments tended to be quite simple; researchers assigned participants to either a self help statement condition or no-self help statement condition. Participants were required to continuously write down any thoughts or feelings that occurred during a 4 minute period. In addition to this, the self help statement group were required to repeat to themselves ‘I am a loveable person’ every time they heard a doorbell. The bell was rung every 15 seconds automatically. After this all participants completed a number of measures covertly assessing mood and their current positive/negative feelings about themselves. Prior to the experiment all participants had completed measures of self esteem (self esteem is essentially how positively you view yourself).

Across the studies the researchers found a strong trend of repeating the over the top typical self help phrase ‘I am a loveable person’ to make individuals with low self esteem actually feel worse about themselves. In comparison, for individuals with high self esteem the self help phrase repetition had a very small positive effect. The irony behind this of course is that it’s fairly likely that self help books attract those that aren’t all that happy with themselves. Thinking a little deeper it isn’t just self help books that might trigger the use of such statements. Friends and magazines advising to ‘think positively’ may cause this inadvertent back firing too.

Why did the researchers discover this unexpected finding? One explanation may be that self help statements direct some attention or thought toward exactly the opposite: why you aren’t such a loveable person. Yet, it is a tricky one to answer and the researchers couldn’t find any obvious explanation from their data

Implications

When colleagues declare they are feeling great because of the sunny weather outside bring them crashing back down to reality.
Blindly thinking positively isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Perhaps such instructions are sometimes just too unrealistic and hopelessly optimistic and thus remind us why we are forcing ourselves to say them.

If you are extremely fond of yourself then go crazy with self help statements. Based on Wood et al. you might feel even better.

Try not to let the weather get you down.

Instinct or Introspection?

Making decisions is often easy. One option will bring overwhelming joy whilst the other has nothing desirable about it whatsoever. But sometimes we can find ourselves simply unable to choose. Our automatic gut reaction is telling us one thing and our rational head is telling us something else. Many have previously lamented their choice of a healthier meal in a restaurant when initial instincts called out for the 1000+ calorie option. At the same time I am sure you’ve often been quietly pleased with yourself for having a right old think and eventually coming to an extremely good choice in retrospect. Knowing when to choose (and which to trust) between gut instincts or careful thought would be invaluable. I would like to say I could give you this invaluable information in the next 600-700 words, but I probably can’t. Although we can at least have a look at some research which should be a little helpful.

Our gut instincts serve us very well a lot of the time. Automatically deciding to remove a hand from a boiling hot pan, a momentary decision to run away very fast from a lion, the list goes on. But can we use them out of the jungle and away from danger? Can they be used to improve our choice of jam?
Jam; A highly controversial topic. Timothy Wilson and colleagues decided to use some to examine the relative merits of gut instinct reactions vs. careful thought and selection. The study was quite simple. The researchers provided participants with a number of jams and their task was to give the jams ratings so that they could be ranked. Little did participants know that the researchers had previously arranged for some ‘jam experts’ to rate the jams for their quality and taste.

Participants were split into two groups. One group was asked to analyse why they felt the way they did about the jams before making preference ratings (careful thought condition), whilst the other group of participants just made their preference ratings without engaging in consideration (automatic decision condition) of the jams pro’s and con’s. The big question is – who agreed with the experts more? The answer is the automatic decision condition. The activity of carefully thinking about the pros and cons and reasons why the jam was or wasn’t enjoyable greatly reduced participants ability to spot the good stuff from the bad. Other studies have found similar findings; thinking too much may even inhibit your ability to pick out art work for your home for example.

As you will have probably guessed it isn’t such a one sided affair. Gut reactions cannot always be trusted. Drunken texting is almost definitely testament to this. But alas, there is no research on this that I know of, so instead we will have a look at why we shouldn’t always trust gut reactions when pondering how an American football games will be and when worrying about missing a train. In two studies Morewedge et al. (2005) investigated how we can often rely upon gut reaction information when thinking about the future and how potentially undesirable consequences may stem from this. Previous research suggests that when thinking about the future we are reliant on our memories for similar events. However, when thinking about the past we often rely on stand out memories of experiences which aren’t always typical of the norm. This in turn can lead to making poor predictions about future experiences as you are basing it on a relatively small amount of biased information.

Thus, in one study researchers approached Harvard football fans outside their stadium shortly before a game. Some participants were asked to ‘describe a football game you’ve seen when Harvard won’ and others to ‘describe three games you’ve seen when Harvard won’ and then both groups were asked to predict how enjoyable they thought the game would be. The participants in the 2nd condition (reliant on several memories) made much more realistic predictions about how enjoyable the game would be in comparison to the participants in the 1st condition (reliant on one memory). Realistically every game isn’t going to be amazing and we sometimes forget this. When deciding whether or not to buy tickets for Saturday’s game we think back to a previous game, a really enjoyable one pops into our head (probably because it stands out more) and we are sold on the idea. We’ve based our behaviour on the first thing that springs to mind when we probably should have made more of an effort to consult our memories.

Similarly we can make this kind of error when thinking about bad things too. Missing a train is never fun but at the same time worst things have happened in life. Yet, as we are often reliant on stand out memories that spring to mind (that horrific time that a missed train resulted in you looking and smelling terrible for a job interview), we base our thoughts about the future on an extremely negative gut instinct. Thinking about other occasions in which we missed a train and the world didn’t come to an end makes things seem a lot more like they really will be; not that bad. In these instances a little more careful thought and consideration look like a really good idea.

Does this blog really clear up anything? I would suggest probably not. What we can be quietly confident about is: a) trust our gut instincts with jam and art and b) think a bit more when deciding whether or not to go to a football game or worry too much at the prospect of missing a train. What about careers, love or marmalade? The jury is still out, but perhaps a good rule of thumb is to use ones gut instincts with confidence but at the same time be ready to challenge them with introspection if they seem to be letting us down.

Implications

Avoid shopping for jam or art with a philosopher.

Expect a lot less from American football games and get ready to be pleasantly surprised by missing a train.

Gut instincts seem fine with jam, but what about when things get a little more serious? Be aware that there is a danger of over thinking and starting to add importance to factors that really aren’t that important, such as the number of x’s at the end a text message from a girl (or do they matter?).

I Can Make Me Feel Good

Feeling happy and being in a good mood is extremely enjoyable. The majority of us quite rightly base a lot of our decisions in life based on this principal. We probably choose to share our beds with our partners because being with them makes us happy (or at least we hope they it does. We avoid waiting in long queues and arguing because they quite often put us in bad moods. So how can I be happier? An awful lot of psychology research can have a tendency to point to our failings, mainly suggesting that humans are irrational and a bit weird. The good news is that there is also some research examining what makes people happy and unhappy and what influences our good and bad moods. Here we’ll have a look at a couple of things;

Memories and Gratitude.

Memories. We have an awful lot of them and frequently find ourselves recollecting both the good and bad times. The emergence of polariods, digital camera’s and then Facebook tagging has made this little hobby even easier. Such recollections are likely to have rather significant effects on our mood and as you might imagine, not everybody realises this. Gillihan et al. (2007) were interested in these possibilities and designed a very clever experiment to delve further. Researchers approached members of the public at a large train station in the US armed with 3 different questionnaires. Potential participants were told that the questionnaire would ask them about different experiences in life.

Each of the 3 questionnaires consisted of 19 questions that would prompt the recall of memories from participants’ lives. The ‘positive memories’ questionnaire consisted of a number of questions concerning positive memories; e.g. ‘What is the best present you have ever received?’ The ‘negative memories’ questionnaire consisted of a number of questions concerning negative memories; e.g. ‘When was the last time you had stomach flu?” and the third questionnaire, ‘neutral memories’ consisted of (as you may have guessed) neutral memories; e.g. ‘What time did you wake up this morning?’ At the end of every questionnaires participants were also asked to rate their current mood and what they thought the study was about. Before we get to the results, 326 people agreed to do this study with no payment or reward. Here we have either some lovely evidence of genuine kindness or slightly less optimistically we have evidence that 326 train commuters were extremely bored. Take your pick. As much as I want the former to be the true my money is on boredom.

Mood appeared to be significantly affected by memories participant recalled. Participants that had recalled positive memories were in a better mood than those that had recalled neutral memories. Recalling negative memories placed participants in a more negative mood than remembering neutral memories. The message is, or appears to be – if you are feeling down then can a good think about some nice memories make you feel better. An interesting thought is whether or not such activities as manic camera snapping and Facebook tagging are being driven by these mood enhancing effects of memory. On some kind of unconscious level do we make a huge effort to capture happy moments or at least pretend moments are happy (painted on smiles at the ready) because of how these memories can later be used to regulate our moods?

These results are interesting but it is unlikely that the recall of a memory is going to have a long lasting effect. So what else can be done? According to a study by Froh et al. (2007) the answer is to start showing a little more gratitude. The researchers assigned 211 youths to one of three conditions. The three groups were instructed to spend a little bit of time each week getting expressive by partaking in one of three writing exercises. One group were instructed to write about 5 things they were grateful for, another group wrote 5 of their everyday hassles and the final group wrote about any 5 things that had happened in the last week. To the good news; counting ones blessings had some rather positive effects up to 3 weeks later. Compared to the other groups the gratitude group experienced greater optimism about life, life satisfaction and less negative affect immediately afterwards and then again 3 weeks later.

Although doing this every week may seem a bit odd and hippy-ish my recommendation is to embrace this little bit of oddness. The cost of spending a little time each week writing is enjoyable in itself. Throw in enhanced satisfaction and optimism about life down the line and everybody is a winner.

Application

Think of the good times.

Little Things Count

Part 2: A is for Accountant
In the last blog (that you hopefully read) I discussed research suggesting that the mere colour of a persons clothing can strongly influence whether members of the opposite sex desire to date and have physical relations with them. And of course most people would be likely to be completely unaware of this. Thus, sometimes in life we can be a little ignorant about what is causing us to feel the way we do. However, the question is, does this really matter? Finding a woman slightly more attractive just because she has a red scarf draped around her neck isn’t really that big in the grand scheme of things is it? One could argue that it is, especially if you end up marrying that woman because the effect of the red scarf added that little bit more attraction that made you so intrigued by her. But this is all a bit hypothetical.

Slightly more dramatically research does suggest that extremely subtle factors could have significant influence on what we end up doing with the rest of our lives. Pelham et al 2002 report a series of studies based on previously well established findings that most people tend to have a favourable view of themselves and thus tend to prefer people, places and things they associate with themselves. Based on this, other research has shown that we even tend to have a strong implicit preference for the letters in our own names. Gary seems like to the letter G more so than other letters, and Lucy exhibits behaviour which suggests she has a preference towards the letter L - but this isn’t where it ends.

Pelham et al. were interested in examining whether these preferences towards the letters in our own names can influence major life decisions. Consulting numerous public records, telephone directories, death certificates and professional directories the researchers unearthed some seemingly bizarre results. They found that people were far more likely to live in areas, have careers in and vote for politicians whose names resembled their own first names. Larry is far more likely to be a lawyer than he is a dentist. Whilst the number of dentists named Dennis is disproportionately large.

Additionally, during the Bush-Gore US election individuals whose last names began with B and G were far more likely to contribute to the election funds of the Bush and Gore parties respectively. Out of every woman that gave birth in the state of Texas in 1926, the number of woman later marrying men who shared the same maiden name was 40% above what we would expect by chance.

Collectively these studies appear to suggest that the letters in names have drawn individuals towards certain career choices, election candidates and marriages. And of course nobody knows this is going on. It must be said that it is highly unlikely Larry next door will all of a sudden realise he wants to become a lawyer after several years in hairdressing, as the effect is quite small. But what it does suggest is that the simple letters in names can shift people towards careers that they wouldn’t necessarily have chosen if their parents had opted for a different name. If Chloe had been a Sarah there’s a chance she wouldn’t be cleaning for a living.

It’s fascinating to think that such a small and seemingly meaningless can exert some influence on ones life and to be completely oblivious to it.

Applications

If you happen to know a Susie selling seashells in the Seychelles please forward the link to this blog and take perverse pleasure in watching her reaction.