A Recipe for Motivation

By Wray Herbert

One of the most famous American cartoonists of the 20th century was Rube Goldberg, who was widely known for his “Goldberg Machines.” Each of these comical inventions depicted a complex set of “instructions” for completing what should have been a fairly simple everyday task. His Self-Operating Napkin, for example, required a dozen sequential steps involving a parrot, a cigar lighter, a rocket and a sickle, and of course various strings and springs and pendulums.

The cartoons were funny because they poked fun at some fundamental facts of human psychology. People will go to great lengths to avoid effortful tasks; it’s human nature. Just think about sticking to that new exercise regimen or taking a course in statistics. Yet it also doesn’t help to over-explain tasks, to make them more complicated than they need to be. Indeed the opposite may be true: Rube Goldberg’s convoluted “how-to” instructions may make us laugh, but they also leave us feeling exhausted. If that’s what it takes to use a napkin, why bother?

Psychologists are very interested in the complex interplay of effort, motivation and cognitive crunching--the ease with which we think about a task in our minds. Is it possible that the simplicity (or complexity) of how a task is described and processed—its fluid or difficult “feel”—actually affects our attitude toward the task itself, and ultimately our willingness to put our heads down and work?

Two University of Michigan psychologists decided to investigate this idea in their lab. Hyunjin Song and Norbert Schwarz wanted to see if they could motivate a group of 20-year-old college students to exercise regularly—not an easy task. They gave all the students written instructions for a regular exercise routine, but they used a simple but ingenious method to make the how-to instructions either cognitively palatable or challenging: Some got instructions printed in Arial typeface, a plain font designed for easy reading. Others got their instructions printed in a Brush font, which basically looks like it’s been written by hand with a Japanese paintbrush; it’s unfamiliar and much harder to read.

There are a lot of ways to make something mentally palatable, or not. You can used clear and simple language, or arcane vocabulary words; simple sentences or convoluted sentences with lots of clauses. The psychologists chose typeface because it’s easy to manipulate in the lab. After the students had all read the instructions, they asked them some questions about the exercise regimen: how long they thought it would take, whether it would flow naturally or drag on endlessly, whether it would be boring, and so forth. They also queried them on whether they were likely to make exercise a routine part of their day.

The findings were remarkable. Those who had read the exercise instructions in an unadorned, accessible typeface were much more open to the prospect of exercising: They believed that the regimen would take less time and that it would feel more “fluid” and easy. Most important, they were more willing to make exercise part of their day. Apparently, the students’ brains mistook the ease of reading about exercise for ease of actually doing the pushups and crunches, and this misunderstanding motivated them to actually think about a life change. Those who struggled through the Japanese brushstrokes had no intention of heading to the gym; the reading alone tired them out.

Song and Schwarz decided to double-check these results with another experiment, this one involving a completely unrelated activity: cooking. Again they used easy- and hard-to-read typefaces, but in this case the instructions were a recipe for making a Japanese sushi roll. After they had read the recipe, the volunteers estimated how long it would take them to make the dish, and whether they were inclined to do it. They were also asked how much skill a professional cook would need to prepare the sushi roll.

The results were basically the same as before. As reported in the October issue of the journal Psychological Science, those who read the cooking instructions in the mentally challenging script saw the task as time-consuming and requiring a high level of culinary skill; they weren’t apt to try it themselves. They in effect used the alien writing as a proxy for the actual task, and as a result ended up avoiding it. Those with the more digestible instructions were much likely to sharpen their knives and head for the kitchen.

Our brains employ all sorts of tricks and shortcuts to get us through the day, but it’s good to be wary of these automatic judgments. If unchecked, our tendency to confuse thoughts and actions can make dubious choices seem easier and more desirable than they ought to be, or they can discourage us from healthy habits and creative exploration. After all, most of the time using a “self-operating” napkin is just as simple as it appears to be.

For more insights into the quirks of human nature, please visit the "We're Only Human" weblog or listen to podcasts at www.psychologicalscience.org/onlyhuman. Selections also appear in the magazine Scientific American Mind and at www.sciam.com.

Trusting Your Inner Negotiator

By Wray Herbert

My wife and I recently signed a treaty to end the protracted Thermostat War. It was hard-fought war at times. With the temperature in our apartment yo-yoing from sauna-like heat to the chill of a meat-locker, compromise seemed out of the question. Yet we did manage to come together in the end and agree on a peaceful compromise. We harbor no ill feelings.

We all negotiate compromises every day, on everything from salaries to children’s bedtimes. We make proposals, weigh offers, make cold calculations and factor in feelings and finally, somehow, settle on matters big and trivial. How do we manage this? How do two unique minds find just the right mix of rational deliberation and emotion to get to yes, and with surprisingly little drama?

Psychologists are very interested in everyday diplomacy, both for its practical value and for what it says about the negotiating mind. It was once believed that humans are “rational actors,” motivated purely by self-interest and maximum gain. But few psychologists buy this idea anymore, simply because there are too many examples of people not acting rationally or selfishly.

Many psychologists now believe that we rely on a variety of cognitive “rules of thumb” to help us with life’s decisions, including the give-and-take that makes up daily negotiation. According to this view, we don’t have the time or inclination to sort out every particular of every situation, so we focus instead on the essence, the “gist” of the matter: How does this arrangement, this deal, make me feel?

Columbia University psychologists Andrew Stephen and Michel Tuan Pham decided to explore the interplay of emotion and reason in everyday deal-making. They designed a series of laboratory experiments to see if people who trust their feelings (and those who do not) handle themselves differently in the art of negotiation.

To do this, they used a classic psychological test called the “ultimatum game.” In the ultimatum game, one person (the “proposer”) has a given amount of cash, which he is told to divide with a second person any way he likes. So, for example, he might choose to divide his $50 right down the middle, keeping $25 for himself, or he could choose to be more or less generous. The catch is that the second person must either accept the offer or reject it entirely, no negotiation allowed. If he rejects it, both walk away with nothing.

This requires trying to read another’s mind and heart. A pure “economic man,” a cold calculator, would ask: How little can I get away with offering him? What amount would he accept and what offer would insult him? It’s a computation. But what if you “feel” the deal rather than compute it? Would the outcome be different? To test this, the psychologists asked volunteers to think of a couple times in their past when the trusted their feelings, with good outcome; this was meant to prime their trust in their own emotions as a guide to decision making. Others were primed to distrust their feelings, and then they all played the ultimatum game as the “proposer.”

The results were intriguing. Those who were primed to “feel the deal” offered somewhat less money than the others. This may seem counterintuitive at first, but don’t confuse emotion with generosity. The lower offers indicate that they were actually less calculating and deliberate. That is, they were more focused on the “gist” of the offer itself, what felt good, rather than on computing the other’s possible reaction and the more distant probabilities of advantage and payoff. In short, the immediacy of the offer trumped the more complicated calculation.

The psychologists tried two other variations of the ultimatum game, one with more room for negotiation and one with less. And as they report in the October issue of the journal Psychological Science, they got basically the same result. When the volunteers were primed to trust their emotions, they saw the transaction as simpler and cleaner—rather than complex and abstract and cognitively demanding. The psychologists believe that emotional negotiators actually have an easier time visualizing the deal: They picture themselves offering someone $20 from their $50 pot and it feels “okay.”

Interestingly, the negotiators who were guided by their emotions did not fare worse than the others financially. Indeed, they ended up with at least as much and often more than their more calculating counterparts. So emotional decision making may be both simpler and more advantageous, whether the stakes involve cash or children’s bedtimes or the thermostat in a small apartment.

For more insights into the quirks of human nature, visit “We’re Only Human” at www.psychologicalscience.org/onlyhuman. Selections from the weblog also appear in the magazine Scientific American Mind and at http://www.sciam.com/.

Brrrr. It's Lonely Out There

By Wray Herbert

Sylvia Plath was only 24-years-old when she penned her brooding poem “Winter landscape, with rocks,” which ends this way: “Last summer’s reeds are all engraved in ice, as is your image in my eye; dry frost glazes the window of my hurt; what solace can be struck from rock to make heart’s waste grow green again? Who’d walk in this bleak place?” It would be six years before the young artist’s depression would drive her to suicide, but the pain of her isolation was already apparent in the cold, wintry metaphors of this poem.

But why cold and wintry? What made this troubled young woman think of ice and frost when she wanted to depict the emotional bleakness of her life, her desperate sense of disconnection? Why not searing heat and punishing sunshine? What does loneliness have to do with the temperature?

If this seems like a silly question, it’s because we all make the same connection in our minds all the time, and it’s seemingly automatic. Just think of the clichés: the cold shoulder, a chilly reception, an icy stare. The idea of being alone—including social disconnection and rejection—appears to be inextricably tied to the sub-zero end of the thermometer.

Psychologists are curious about this metaphor, and others. Some believe that metaphors are much more than literary conventions, indeed that they are constellations of ancient and recent experience that we use to help us comprehend the complexity of our emotional lives. According to this view, metaphors are readily available because they are deep-wired into our neurons.

But how did they get there? Two psychologists at the University of Toronto decided to explore this question in the laboratory. Chen-Bo Zhong and Geoffrey Leonardelli wanted to see if our use of metaphor in thinking and judgment might be influenced by our most basic perceptions of the world—the information that enters the brain through the senses. Our ancient ancestors probably linked warmth and togetherness by necessity, as do infants still; bodily warmth often means comfort and survival. Might cold and isolation be similarly linked in the mind?

Here’s how the psychologists tested the idea. They divided a group of volunteers in two, and had half of them recall a personal experience in which they had been socially excluded—rejection from a club, for example. This was meant to “prime” their unconscious feelings of isolation and loneliness. The others recalled a happier experience, one in which they had been accepted into a group.

Then they had all the volunteers estimate the temperature in the room, on the pretense that the building’s maintenance staff wanted that information. The estimates ranged widely, from about 54 degrees F to a whopping 104 degrees F. That’s surprising in itself, but here’s the interesting part: Those who had been primed to feel isolated and rejected gave consistently lower estimates of the temperature, by almost five degrees. In other words, the recalled memories of being ostracized actually made people experience the world as colder.

The psychologists decided to double-check these findings a slightly different way. In another experiment, instead of relying on volunteers’ memories, the researchers actually triggered feelings of exclusion. They had the volunteers play a computer-simulated ball tossing game, but the game was actually rigged. Some of the volunteers tossed the ball around in a normal friendly way, but others were left out, just as an unpopular kid might be left out by other kids at the playground.

Afterwards, all the volunteers rated the desirability of certain drinks and foods: hot coffee, crackers, an ice-cold Coke, an apple, and hot soup. The findings were striking. As reported in the September issue of the journal Psychological Science, the “unpopular” volunteers who had been ostracized on the virtual “playground” were much more likely than the others to want either hot soup or coffee. Their preference for warmth, for “comfort food,” presumably resulted from actually feeling the cold in the cold shoulder.

It appears that physical sensations and abstract psychological experience are tightly intertwined, and that intertwining may explain the power and appeal of metaphor. But it may also illuminate the relationship between our very real moods and our perceptions of the world around us. Experiencing cold may actually act as a catalyst in mood disorders, the psychologists suggest, exacerbating feelings of isolation and loneliness

So it’s literally a cold, cruel world for some, which makes one wonder about Sylvia Plath’s suicide: The poet killed herself in London in February of 1963, in the middle of England’s coldest winter in hundreds of years.


For more insights into human nature, visit “We’re Only Human” weblog at www.psychologicalscience.org/onlyhuman. Selections from Wray Herbert’s blog also appear in the magazine Scientific American Mind and at http://www.sciam.com/.

Foraging in the Modern World

By Wray Herbert

I live in a town with hundreds of restaurants serving many of the world’s cuisines: Sushi bars, pizza parlors, pho, tapas, KFC, you name it. My family eats out a fair amount, and we know and appreciate all these tastes, so we could conceivably explore a different menu every outing. But we don’t. Some years ago we discovered a neighborhood café that we all really like, and that’s pretty much where we go. It’s our place.

I know that other people are different. We’re basically opting for certainty and predictability, where others prefer exploration and change. But why do people differ on this trait? What motivates some to constantly seek out the next best thing, the greener grass, while others of us are content to stick with what’s known and safe? How do we know there’s not a new and better favorite eatery just around the corner? Are we trading off curiosity and novelty for the luxury of not having to make a decision?

Psychologists are very interested in this question, and some believe it may reflect a fundamental difference in cognitive style, wired into our neurons. Think of it this way: Our ancient ancestors had to forage in the savanna for food and water, but there was no telling where they would find these resources. The environment was patchy, with a watering hole here and an antelope herd there, but no uniformity or predictability. So what was the best search strategy? Once you find a hunting ground with some antelope in it, do you set up camp and make it your own, or go looking for a better hunting ground, then a better one still?

Now fast-forward to modern times. Our challenges are perhaps more intellectual and abstract, but we still have to decide how to deal with an uncertain world. Faced with a problem or decision or choice, do we bear down and exploit one idea for all it’s worth, or move rapidly on from one solution to another to another? Or maybe we do both, depending on the problem, toggling back and forth depending on what works.

Indiana University psychologists Thomas Hills, Peter Todd and Robert Goldstone decided to explore these questions in the laboratory. They wanted to see if people do indeed have a consistent cognitive style for foraging, whether it’s for food or ideas. They also wanted to see if priming those ancient foraging neurons—triggering either exploring or exploitation instincts—influences the way people approach modern problems.

Since they couldn’t actually ask people to forage for food in the wild, they used some modern tools: a computer game and a board game. They had a group of volunteers use icons to “forage” in a computerized world, moving around until they stumbled upon a hidden supply of food or water, then deciding if and when to move on, continue the search, and in which direction, and so forth. The scientists tracked their movements.

But the volunteers explored two very different worlds: Some foraged in a “clumpy” world, which had fewer but richer supplies of nutrients. Others explored a “diffuse” environment, which had many more, but much smaller, supplies. The idea was to “prime” the optimal foraging strategy for each possible world. Those in a diffuse world would in theory do better giving up on any one spot quickly, and moving on rapidly, and navigating to avoid any duplication. Those in a clumpy world would be more likely to stay put, exploiting the rich lodes of nutrients rather than keeping up the search.

That was the first part of the experiment. Afterward, the volunteers participated in a more abstract, intellectual search task: the board game Scrabble. They didn’t actually play Scrabble, but they got letters as if they were going to play, and had to search their memory for as many words as they could make with those letters. As with the board game, they could also choose to trade in their letters for new ones, but in the experiment they could do it whenever they wanted to. The wholesale trading of letters is what the psychologists were actually observing: They want to compare the volunteers’ Scrabble strategies with their foraging strategies, to see if they stuck with the letters they were given—or rapidly abandoned one set of letters for another (more promising) set. In other words, would those who were mentally primed for a clumpy world see their Scrabble letters as rich clumps, worth sticking with, while those primed for a diffuse world quickly abandoned one set of letters for another?

The results were striking. As reported in the August issue of the journal Psychological Science, those whose neurons were primed for exploration in the wild, were also more restless and exploratory in Scrabble, while those primed for exploitation were more focused and persevering when they switched to the abstract mental challenge. Put another way, the human brain appears capable of toggling back and forth between exploration and exploitation, depending on the demands of the task.

But the psychologists also found that individuals were consistent in their cognitive style. That is, the most persevering foragers were also the most persevering Scrabble players, just as gadabouts in the food search tended to be gadabouts in intellectual matters as well. And presumably in life: They would probably be too antsy to settle for a “good enough” neighborhood café.

But dining out is trivial, and these findings have more serious implications related to other recent work on brain chemistry and cognitive disorders. Exploratory and inattentive foraging—actual or abstract—appears linked to decreases in the brain chemical dopamine. Similarly, many problems related to attention—including ADHD, drug addiction, some forms of autism and schizophrenia—have been link to such a dopamine deficit. It’s possible, the psychologists say, that computer foraging might reveal underlying cognitive style—either persistence or the lack of it. It’s even possible that such simulated foraging could have long-term effects on thinking style, and possibly even lead to therapies for such cognitive disorders. That’s something worth exploring.

For more insights into the quirks of human behavior, visit “We’re Only Human . . .” at www.psychologicalscience.org/onlyhuman. Excerpts from the weblog also appear in the magazine Scientific American Mind and at http://www.sciam.com/.

The Corners of My (Stone-Age) Mind

By Wray Herbert

My first phone number was Prospect 67210. The quaint sound of that number is enough to tell you how long it has been bouncing around in my neurons. I also recall the street address that went with that phone number: 211 Elm Drive. I can vividly picture the grey Cape Cod house in my mind’s eye, and I believe I could even find my way around the neighborhood all these decades later.

I wonder why that would be. That chapter in my life is long gone, and it will never recur. I have never once actually used this information since I moved from my childhood home. What possible value could it have that I would still have it in my synapses? And why those particular details, when I have forgotten so much else?

Psychologists have spent a lot of time over the years describing what and how we remember, and there are volumes on how to improve memory. But little is known about the most basic question of all: Why remember? Why do we have memory at all? Purdue University psychologists James Nairne and Josefa Pandeirada decided to tackle this root question from a Darwinian perspective. They figured that memory, much like our kidneys and eyes and limbs, must have been shaped by eons of evolution. That is, it must have had some sort of survival value deep in the past. But why would nature have designed our “mnemonic organ” to work precisely the way it does? What’s the purpose of storing away the past?

The psychologists decided to explore these questions in the laboratory, starting with this premise: The only value of the past is in illuminating the present or predicting the future. It therefore makes sense to remember only those things that once helped solve “problems” related to the survival of the species: the location of food and water, signs of predators and potential mates, and so forth. It would also make sense to forget a lot of the rest, since the clutter of indiscriminate remembering would paralyze us.

To test this idea, the scientists had volunteers imagine spending a couple months alone in an unknown and uncivilized place, a grassland, without any useful tools for survival. Then they were given a list of words, which they were asked to rate for survival value. Because the words were randomly selected (stone, chair, meadow, and so forth), volunteers had to think a bit about whether each thing could conceivably have any usefulness: A chair might be a nice luxury, for example, but how might it be useful to a survivalist? How about a rock, or flowers?

The psychologists had other volunteers rate the same words for either pleasantness or for their relevance to moving abroad. Then they gave all the volunteers a surprise memory quiz, asking them simply to recall as many words from the list as they could. The results were memorable: Those who had imagined getting by in the wild remembered far more survival words, compared to the others’ recall of pleasant or moving-related words. These findings suggest that memory is indeed adaptive; that it has been “tuned” to information about evolutionary fitness.

Nairne and Pandeirada decided to look at these findings a different way. As described in the August issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science, they pitted survival memory against the best known tricks that memory researchers have for enhancing memory, in a head-to-head competition. This “who’s who” of memory devices includes forming a visual image of a word, creating an autobiographical memory related to a word, and simple effortful memorization. Again, they used a random list of words, and had volunteers use these various methods to process them. And again, simply thinking about words in terms of their survival relevance led to far greater recall than any of the other tried-and-true memory enhancement techniques.

So what does this say about how memory is organized in the brain? The scientists say it’s unlikely that the brain has a “survival module”; the concept of species survival is just too broad and amorphous. It’s more likely that evolution has engineered more finely tuned modules for recognition and storage of information—about predators, say, or poisons or nutrition.

Or safety and shelter, perhaps. Think about it: For a kid, what could be more important to survival than being able to find your way back home? It would make sense to burn those coordinates indelibly into the neurons. Which would explain why I could still reach home in an instant: Just dial Prospect 67210.

For more insights into the quirks of human nature, visit “We’re Only Human . . .” at www.psychologicalscience.org/onlyhuman. Selections from the weblog also appear in the magazine Scientific American Mind and at http://www.sciam.com/.

Mimicry and Membership

By Wray Herbert

I once attended an all-male college where the “Greek” system dominated residential and social life. Each year in the winter, most of the freshmen would “rush” a particular fraternity house, which was little more than a ritualistic way of declaring: "Take me please. I'm just like you.” The ones who were accepted would “pledge” themselves to the house. But many of the hopefuls were not accepted, and the rejects were often deeply disappointed.

The Greek system embodies much that is sad and unflattering about human nature, especially the cruelty of exclusion and the often desperate need to belong. Psychologists are very interested in these dynamics, because they apply way beyond the frat house. Why is inclusion in groups and clubs so important to us, and what cognitive and emotional resources do we have to avoid rejection? Or to deal with rejection?

Psychologist Jessica Lakin of Drew University suspected that affiliation is so essential to human functioning that we have deep-wired strategies for gaining entry to life’s groups and clubs. But what are these strategies? One possibility, she theorized, is that people threatened with social isolation resort to automatic mimicry--a primitive, pre-linguistic form of beseeching the in-group and pleading: I'm really am just like you. She and her colleagues decided to explore this idea in the laboratory.

Lakin had a group of student volunteers play Cyberball, an arcade game loosely based on American football. The volunteers thought they were playing with and against other volunteers, but in fact a computer was controlling much of the play. The computer was programmed to “include” some players—that is, give them the ball about as much as everyone got it—and to “exclude” others. So basically, the volunteers came away from the game feeling either accepted or rejected by their fellow students.

When the Cyberball game was over, the scientists devised another ruse, which they videotaped. They had the students sit alone in a room for a bit and videotaped their natural foot movements. Some people apparently fidget more than others. Then a young woman entered the room to ostensibly take part in a shared task, but the task was fake and the woman was part of the experiment. Her real purpose in the room was to deliberately move her foot around, back and forth, up and down.

The idea was to see if the volunteers increased their own foot movements once the woman entered the room and began her deliberate movements. They wanted to see if the students who were feeling rejected after Cyberball did more unconscious aping than those who felt included. And that’s precisely what they found. As described in the August issue of Psychological Science, people apparently “recover” from rejection by unconsciously attempting, through mimicry, to affiliate with someone new. Hey, I’m just like you!

But the “someone new” in this study was basically the first person to come along. She didn’t do the actual rejecting. Lakin and her colleagues wanted to see if this unconscious mimicry is indeed indiscriminate, or if people use these rudimentary attempts at affiliation more strategically when (as in most of real life)they know who is rejecting them. So in a second experiment, only female volunteers played the Cyberball game, and they were rejected by either men or women; other female volunteers did not play at all. Then they all took part in the foot movement study as before.

The psychologists predicted that the women would feel rejection more acutely if rejected by other women, their “in-group,” and that these rejects would subsequently make a greater and more selective effort to win over another woman rather than a man. And that’s what they found. Even though the mimicry and supplication were completely outside of conscious awareness, they were strategically targeted at those in the in-crowd. Put bluntly, rejects didn’t kiss up to just anyone simply because their feelings were bruised. They had a clear goal: to belong to the group that didn’t want them.

It’s perhaps not all that surprising that the need for belonging is so fundamental to our nature. The “clubs” of our primordial ancestors were basically survivalist groups, and rejects didn’t last out on the savannah alone. But rejection is not often life-threatening these days, so the desperation appears not nearly so adaptive as it does unseemly.

The fraternities of my day had this especially perverse ritual called “post-rush.” Sometimes a house would not get as many new pledges as it had hoped, so a couple weeks later they would host beer parties and such to let the rejects try again. Here’s where the real pathos played out. Already excluded once from membership in the club, the also-rans would do anything they could to show that their rejection had been a mistake and they really did belong: they would laugh unnaturally, drink inappropriately, and vigilantly scan the room for any clue to how a real fraternity man acts. Everything short of outright yelling: Hey, I’m just like you!

For more insights into the quirks of human nature, visit www.psychologicalscience.org/onlyhuman. Selections from the blog now appear in the magazine Scientific American Mind and on the website http://www.sciam.com/.

"Well, that's just great."

By Wray Herbert

"Well, that's just great."

Quick, what does that sentence mean? Is the speaker acknowledging some good news, celebrating a joyful event that just took place? Do we take the sentence at face value? Or is it possible that the speaker really means something quite different, maybe even the opposite? Perhaps his pleasure is not genuine.

Well, the fact is we don’t know. The words are ambiguous. The speaker’s comment could be kind and authentic: Imagine his daughter has just announced that she made the school honor roll for the first time. But the speaker could just as well be stuck in rush-hour traffic, late for an important meeting. His comment in that case is probably not genuine at all, but sarcastic.

How can we tell which is which? How as listeners do we recognize and comprehend irony? And what makes us use sarcasm and irony in the first place, when we could just as easily be literal and unambiguous? Communication is risky enough without deliberately muddling things with hidden layers of meaning. What social purpose could such vagueness possibly serve?

Psychologists are very interested both in how we use ironic language, and how we see it for what it is. And there are lots of ideas. Some argue that ironic language is the language of failed expectations; it’s a fact of the human condition that things often don’t always turn out as planned, and language needs to capture and highlight that ironic sense of life. But when and how does that sense of life emerge, and when do we develop the social competence to recognize it?

One way to approach these questions is to look at language comprehension in children. Children have no life experiences to speak of, so it would seem that they should be innocent of life’s ironies. They should take every sentence they hear literally, unless they’re given some reason not to. So, to stick with the same example: If someone says, “Well, that’s just great,” kids should simply believe it. They shouldn’t be expected to probe for deeper meaning.

But do they? Psychologist Penny Pexman of the University of Calgary, Canada, decided to explore this question in the laboratory, to see just how quick and efficient kids really are at processing irony and sarcasm. She wanted to see how early in life this cognitive skill emerges. She also wanted to see if indeed kids go through a two-step process every time they are confronted with irony—taking the literal meaning first, then perceiving the hidden meaning as an afterthought.

It’s hard to study kids’ minds, especially the six- to ten-year-old minds in Pexman’s studies. She couldn’t really rely on the kids to report on their own thinking, so she had to devise special methods to probe their perceptions. Here’s an example of what she did. In one experiment, she trained kids to associate niceness with a smiling yellow duck, and meanness with a snarling gray shark. Then the kids watched puppet shows, in which the puppets made both sarcastic and literal remarks. Rather than ask they kids to interpret the remarks, she tracked their eye gaze, to see if they shifted their attention ever so slightly toward the shark or the duck after a particular remark.

The results, reported in the August issue of the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science, were intriguing. If kids were indeed processing every sentence as literally true to begin with, then their eyes would reveal that: That is, they would look automatically at the duck upon hearing, “Well, that’s just great.” But they didn’t. When that sentence was used ironically, their eyes went immediately to the mean shark. The irony required no laborious crunching: They processed the insincerity as rapidly as they processed the basic meaning of the words.

So ironic sensibility appears to be deep-wired into the neurons. But using and understanding irony also requires social intelligence. Both children and adults need hints that a comment is ironic as opposed to literal. These hints come in the form of facial expression, tone of voice, knowledge of the speaker’s personality, and so forth. All of these social cues are processed instantaneously, and integrated into a reliable sense of what's going on in another's head, his beliefs and intentions. Children with autism have difficulty doing this—that is, “theorizing” about what others are thinking and feeling. Interestingly, some autistic children also have difficulty appreciating irony and sarcasm, suggesting that the same brain abnormality may be linked to both deficits.

Pexman’s puppet experiments have revealed a fascinating subtlety about children’s emerging ironic sensibilities. She found that while even kids as young as six understand ironic criticism, they do not seem to "get" ironic praise. For example, if a young child misses a soccer goal, he has no trouble knowing that “hey, nice shot” is insincere and mean-spirited. But if he scores a difficult shot and a teammate yells “hey, lousy shot, man,” that’s a lot harder. It doesn't compute automatically. In other words, children appreciate hurtful irony but not warm irony.

Why would this be? Pexman believes it’s because most people have a general expectation that others will be nice to them, not mean; ironic language calls attention to the unexpected meanness. Which seems to suggest that kids develop a sardonic sense of life's travails very early on. Well, that’s just great.

For more insights into the quirks of human nature, visit “We’re Only Human . . .” at www.psychologicalscience.org/onlyhuman. Selections from the weblog also appear in the magazine Scientific American Mind and at the website www.sciam.com.