Isegoria

Benedict Carey of the New York Times notes that some people protect their fragile egos by working on their excuses early — really early:

[G]enuine excuse artisans — and there are millions of them — don’t wait until after choking to practice their craft. They hobble themselves, in earnest, before pursuing a goal or delivering a performance. Their excuses come preattached: I never went to class. I was hung over at the interview. I had no idea what the college application required.

“This is real self-sabotage, like drinking heavily before a test, skipping practice or using really poor equipment,” said Edward R. Hirt, a psychologist at Indiana University. “Some people do this a lot, and often it’s not clear whether they’re entirely conscious of doing it — or of its costs.”

Psychologists have studied this sort of behavior since at least 1978, when Steven Berglas and Edward E. Jones used the phrase “self-handicapping” to describe students in a study who chose to take a drug that they were told would inhibit their performance on an exam (the drug was actually inert).
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In another experiment, participants who had a good excuse for their poor scores — distracting noises, pumped through headphones they wore during the test — were less motivated to prepare for a subsequent test than those who had no excuse. “The handicap allowed them to say, ‘All things considered, I actually did pretty well,’ ” Dr. McCrea said in a phone interview. “And there’s no drive to get better.”

The burn of embarrassment is, in some sense, the pilot light of motivation.

As a short-term strategy, self-handicapping is often no more than an exercise in self-delusion. Studies of college students have found that habitual handicappers — who skip a lot of classes; who miss deadlines; who don’t buy the textbook — tend to rate themselves in the top 10 percent of the class, though their grades slouch between C and D.

Those who succeed despite their flirtations with disorder typically grow increasingly fond of the handicap itself, whether drink or drugs or defying rules. “With success, expectations go up, and the behavior gets more extreme,” said Dr. Berglas, author of Reclaiming the Fire: How Successful People Overcome Burnout (Random House, 2001).

But the tactic doesn’t fool many people. In a recent study, James C. McElroy of Iowa State University and J. Michael Crant of Notre Dame had 246 adults evaluate the behavior of characters in several workplace anecdotes. The participants’ impressions of a character began to sour after the second time the person cited a handicap.

“What happens here is that if you do it often, observers attribute your performance to you, but begin to view it as part of your disposition, i.e., you’re a whiner,” Dr. McElroy wrote in an e-mail message. “But you can avoid this happening if someone else does the handicapping for you, and surprisingly enough, even if they do it often.”

That, too, is well known among the very best of excuse makers: for best results, recruit an apologist.

The important thing for some is, no matter the method, to avoid considering the alternative explanation.

Years ago, UC Santa Cruz psychology professor Elliot Aronson discovered the power of hypocrisy:

A quarter-century ago, the University of California at Santa Cruz found itself dealing with a public health crisis. An exotic and fearful disease called AIDS was spreading, and students were at risk. What was frustrating to officials was that the means to stop AIDS was simple and obvious: Students needed to either abstain from sex or, if they did have sex, use condoms.

Aronson, then a faculty member and now a professor emeritus at the university, decided to help out. Educating students was the obvious first step: Aronson and university officials put up advertisements on campus about the horrors of AIDS. They handed out pamphlets. They held conferences about the risks of unsafe sex.

“We tried to scare . . . them about why AIDS was such a terrible disease,” Aronson said. “In the early ’80s, it was a death sentence.”

Unlike many educators, Aronson wanted more than a good feeling about what he was doing; he wanted evidence that the education was working. He conducted surveys before and after the outreach efforts. Before the messages went out, about 17 percent of sexually active students were using condoms regularly. After all the scary messages, that number went up — to 19 percent.

The psychologist tried another tack. Some of the most effective persuaders in the world are not doctors, but marketers. If seductive marketing can get people to plunk down good money for baubles, surely it could get people to do something to save their own necks.

Aronson resolved to try to make condom use sexy. Students reported they were not using condoms because they saw it as an interruption to love-making: It was bathroom talk in the bedroom. Men declared that condoms interfered with their satisfaction. Aronson started looking for movies that depicted condom use in another light: prophylaxis as wild fun.

The psychologist scoured the adult movies available in Santa Cruz. Knowing glances followed the professor doing “research” in the backrooms of video stores.

Aronson wanted a five-to-six-minute clip of a normal-looking couple having sex with condoms, and enjoying it. But few pornographic movies fit the bill. They invariably veered into exotic scenarios: the guy wearing a Royal Canadian Mounted Police uniform, the midget and the obese woman.

“I spent the better part of a week watching the movies,” he said. “They were boring as hell. One porno film is a turn-on. Fifty porno films is hell.”

In frustration, Aronson decided to make his own sex movie. The Santa Cruz Shakespeare festival was featuring “Romeo and Juliet” that year, and the lead roles were being played by two gorgeous actors. Aronson told them about his project, and they agreed to help.

Aronson directed the movie in a single day. A young man and a woman are talking, and one thing leads to another. Most of the action takes place under a silk sheet; it’s what Aronson called R-rated rather than X-rated.

“She would say, ‘Do you have the stuff?’ and he would bring out a beautiful box with condoms,” Aronson recalled. “She opened a condom with her teeth — ripped it off — looking very sexy.”

“The main thing was to make the use of condoms seem sexy and attractive rather than something you interrupt the sex with. It was now part of foreplay.”

The results delighted the psychologist. After the movie was shown around campus, condom use soared to 60 percent. It was great news, except that the next survey, taken after two months, showed condom use back down at 20 percent.

Aronson recognized the problem: Marketers usually want you to make just a single purchase (a camera or a hot tub), whereas fighting AIDS required a long-term behavior change.

“Condoms are not fun to use, and we were trying to sell them something under false pretenses,” he said. “Most of the students gave it a shot and then stopped. I was stupid to think they would never catch on. You cannot make something fun that isn’t fun.”

Aronson put aside his camera and went back to what he knew best: psychology. He had studied under Leon Festinger, who had discovered a now well-known phenomenon, cognitive dissonance. The theory suggests that when people do things against their better judgment, they experience internal discomfort, much like hunger or thirst.

A smoker who reads about how smoking causes cancer experiences cognitive dissonance if she continues to smoke: She is knowingly doing something that will harm her. There are two ways to relieve herself of the discomfort. The first is to quit smoking. But that is difficult, so most smokers convince themselves that the links between smoking and lung cancer are not quite as strong as doctors assert.

“I convince myself the scientific data is not really all that good or my uncle Hymie smoked for 87 years and he is 95 now [or] the filter tip does trap all the cancer-producing agents,” Aronson said. “I find a way to sleep at night even though I am doing something incredibly stupid.”

The students at Santa Cruz were doing the same thing by engaging in unsafe sex: They were rationalizing away the risks. But what if there were a way to keep them from doing so? What if the students placed themselves in a position where they vociferously and publicly advocated to others the utility of condoms? If Aronson could make them spokespeople for AIDS prevention, he theorized, it would be very difficult for them to then act as if condoms didn’t really do much to stop AIDS or they were not really at risk. They would feel like hypocrites.

Aronson realized he had gotten things backward: Instead of his selling condom use to students, what he really needed was for them to sell AIDS prevention to him.

Aronson found a bunch of students at the health center. He said he needed them to make a video aimed at high school seniors about the risks of AIDS and the importance of using condoms. If they did a good job, they could save lives. After the students made up their own speeches and shot the videos, Aronson paid them $5 and asked them about their own condom use.

“We increased their awareness that they were not practicing what they were preaching,” he said. “Their nose is being rubbed in the fact that they are a hypocrite.”

At the same time, Aronson paid $5 to some students who had been given educational messages about safe sex.

As both groups of students headed out the door after being paid, Aronson arranged for them to pass a woman in a nurse’s uniform who was selling heavily subsidized condoms. He measured how much of their newfound $5 the volunteers spent buying condoms. He found that the video-making but hypocritical volunteers spent far more on condoms than those who had merely been given educational messages. Some of the students made to feel like hypocrites spent their entire $5 on condoms.

But did the effect last? Months later, Aronson arranged for the students in his experiment to be cold-called by a person taking a survey. The survey made no mention of the health center incident. Both three and six months after his intervention, Aronson found, 65 to 70 percent of students who had made videos about condom use and then had their faces gently rubbed in their own hypocrisy were using condoms every time they had sex.

“You can get better results from using hypocrisy than any other technique I know,” Aronson said. “You are never going to get 100 percent change, but the condom stuff is so powerful because we went from 17 percent to 70 percent for at least six months. It is not a magic bullet, but it is more magical than any other bullets we have in our arsenal.”

Kevin Lewis of the Boston Globe shares some surprising insights from the social sciences, like the more competitors, the less competition:

If you’ve ever had to take a test in a room with a lot of people, you may be able to relate to this study: The more people you’re competing against, it turns out, the less motivated and competitive you are. Psychologists observed this pattern across several different situations. Students taking standardized tests in more crowded venues got lower scores. Students asked to complete a short general-knowledge test as fast as possible to win a prize if they were in the fastest 20 percent completed it faster if they were told that they were competing against 10 people rather than 100. Students asked how fast they would run in a race for a $1,000 prize if they finished in the top 10 percent said they would run faster in a race against 50 people rather than 500. Similarly, students contemplating a job interview or Facebook-friending contest said they would be less competitive if they expected more competitors — even if “winning” only required finishing in the top 20 percent. The authors conclude that competitiveness was curtailed because the larger the group, the more difficult it is to compare oneself directly to others.

This seems to point to statistical innumeracy, really.

(Hat tip to Tyler Cowen, who also links to the original paper, Garcia, S. & Tor, A., “The N-Effect: More Competitors, Less Competition,” Psychological Science (forthcoming).)

Diamonds suggest comets caused killer cold spell just 13,000 years ago:

Doug Kennett of the University of Oregon and colleagues found the little diamonds at sites from Arizona to South Carolina and into Alberta and Manitoba in Canada.

They are buried at a level that corresponds to the beginning 12,900 years ago of the Younger Dryas, a 1,300-year-long cold spell during which North American mammoths, saber-toothed cats, camels and giant sloths became extinct.

The Clovis culture of American Indians also appears to have fallen apart during this time.

Bones of these animals, and Clovis artifacts, are abundant before this time. Excavations show a dark “mat” of carbon-rich material separates the bones and artifacts from emptier and younger layers.

Writing in the journal Science, Kennett and colleagues report they have evidence of the nanodiamonds from six sites across North America, fitting in with the hypothesis that a giant explosion, or multiple explosions, above the Earth’s surface cause widespread fire and pressure.

There is evidence these minerals can be found in other sediments, too, they said, and help explain the “black mat”.

“These data support the hypothesis that a swarm of comets or carbonaceous chondrites (a type of meteorite) produced multiple air shocks and possible surface impacts at 12,900 (years ago)” they wrote.

The heat and pressure could have melted part of the Greenland ice sheet, causing currents to change and affecting climate. Any impacts would have kicked up dust that would have shrouded the sun and lowered temperatures, endangering plants and animals.

It’s not quite Lucifer’s Hammer, but it’s close. You never know when we might have to reboot society.