Some of my best friends are pawns

There are certain rules of conduct on which most ethical people would agree. It’s not nice to date the boss’s daughter just to get ahead in the company. Or marry her son. And no parent would approve of a child befriending another child just because he happens to own an Xbox 360 Elite. That would be like an adult warming up to a colleague simply because he happens to have season tickets for the New Orleans Saints.

All of these ethical lapses fall under the general category of using people, which we’re taught early on not to do. People are not instruments or tools to be wielded for our own purposes, pawns to help us achieve our personal goals.

Yet we do use people anyway, often in more subtle ways than these. Why is that? Why do these moral strictures fail much of the time? New and forgiving research suggests that the urge to use people may be deeply embedded in human nature. Indeed, seeing others as useful or not may be as fundamental as perceiving gender or race in navigating out social world.

University of Waterloo psychologist Grainne Fitzsimons is interested in the interplay of personal goals and stereotypes. We are all motivated by goals, from big ones like career success to more modest ones, like losing ten pounds—or simply getting to the train on time. In fact, we spend much of daily lives in pursuit of one goal or another. We also categorize people. We all do, whether we like it or not, simply because we need to find order in the world’s complexity. So we pigeonhole others as blue-collar or professional, conservative or liberal, Black or white or Asian, man or woman, young or old.

Given that personal goals and stereotyping are both so basic to our psychology, Fitzsimons reasoned, is it possible that our goals actually influence how we pigeonhole people? Or put another way, why would we not categorize others as instruments or tools if we see them as helping us get what we want in life? Working with psychologist James Shah of Duke, he designed an experiment to explore this possibility.

Here’s the gist of the study. They had a group of volunteers focus on a goal—say, staying fit and healthy. Then they had them pick three people who they felt could help them meet their goal; let’s call them Ian, Susan and Joe. They also listed three people who they did not perceive as helpful or useful in staying fit—not a hindrance but not instrumental either. We’ll call them Nancy, Ben and Lori.

The names are important because, later on, the volunteers read a series of sentences with these names embedded in them: “The cashier gave Ian his change.” “Ben was tired of arguing” And so forth. There was a pretense for this reading, but then the psychologists surprised the volunteers with a memory test, in which they had to supply the right names: “The cashier gave ____ his change.”

The researchers expected mistakes. Indeed, it was really the mistakes they were studying. They wanted to see if they were more likely to mix up people who they had categorized as useful with other people they saw as useful (confusing Ian with Susan, for example), as opposed to confusing useful people with non-useful people (Joe and Nancy, for instance). If they did the former—confusing instrumental people only with each other—that would suggest that were grouping anyone who served their purposes as alike. It would suggest that we have a mental category for “people-who-get-me-what-I-want.”

And that’s precisely what they found. As reported on-line this week in the journal Psychological Science, the controls—those who were not focused on the fitness goal—made random errors, confusing Ben with Ian with Nancy with Susie. But those who were intent on their personal health-and-fitness goal were much more likely to perceive and remember people categorically, according to their utility, their value in helping reach the goal. Not to put too fine a point on it: All instruments look alike.

This is humbling, but it does not mean we’re slave to our automatic stereotyping. Our neurons may be categorizing the boss’s daughter as a useful tool for achieving our career goals, but whether or not to be a cad remains a choice. Our ethical sensibilities can still trump that impulse to use people as pawns, but it helps to be mindful of our baser nature.

For more insights into the quirks of human nature, visit “Full Frontal Psychology” at True/Slant. Selections from “We’re Only Human” also appear regularly in the magazine Scientific American Mind.

"The Piece of Cake Heuristic"

Don’t bother searching your long-term memory. There is no “Piece of Cake Heuristic.” I just made that up. I made it up and capitalized the main words and threw in an obscure word and added quotation marks—all so you, the reader, might consider the concept intellectually important and worthy of your attention. After all, it has a name and it’s in print—so it must have some heft, right?

Well, maybe--or maybe not, according to new research. University of Chicago psychologist Aparna Labroo and colleagues wondered if simply naming an idea—an economic theory, a medical diagnosis, a legal precedent—might make it easier for the mind to process, and thus more accessible. They further speculated that this cognitive ease might shape judgments of importance. They gave this idea a jargony label (the “Name-Ease” Effect), and then tested it in the laboratory.

Labroo’s idea is consistent with much earlier work on mental effort: If ideas are easier to process for whatever reason, we tend to find them more familiar and comfortable. Vocabulary, pronunciation, even the typeface in which these sentences are printed—all these can affect cognitive palatability. Labroo wanted to see if official names might have the same force. The link to importance is a bit more complicated. We all believe ideas are important if they are memorable—after all, that’s why we remember them. But we also associate importance with difficulty: The tougher to grasp, the more important an idea must be. If it’s too easy to process, it must be trivial.

The psychologists wanted to sort out these competing ideas, and here’s one of several experiments they ran. They had a group of volunteers read a legal case concerning school prayer. They all read the same case description, but for some the case was given a name, Engel v. Vitale. Once they had all read the case, some of the volunteers were asked to recall the details of the case, while others were instructed to think about the meaning of the case. In other words, some completed a memory task while others completed a comprehension task. Then they all rated the importance of the school prayer case.

The researchers were exploring the interplay of effort, memory and understanding in judgments of importance—and the findings were intriguing. Knowing that the case was officially called Engel v Vitale made it seem more important—but only for those who were focused on remembering it. In other words, the name made the information easier to process, and attributing this ease to the case’s memorability gave it weight. The case name did the opposite for those who were actually trying to comprehend the case: It made the case seem too familiar, and thus run-of-the-mill and simplistic.

Labroo and her colleagues reran this experiment many times, with a variety of ideas: an economic principle (the Coase Theorem); a mathematical concept (the Weierstrass Theorem); a medical diagnosis (acromegaly); and a psychological concept (Optimal Distinctiveness Theory). They got the same basic results, no matter what the subject matter. The psychologists’ paper on the “Name-Ease” Effect was published on-line this week in the journal Psychological Science. You be the judge of its importance.


For more insights into the quirks of human nature, visit the “Full Frontal Psychology” blog at True/Slant. Excerpts from the “We’re Only Human” blog also appear regularly in the magazine Scientific American Mind.