Oversharing in the Age of Social Media

Self-disclosure is how we build strong relationships with others. By telling someone else about your inner world, you are showing that you trust them and can build a deeper connection with them, especially when they, in turn, show you their inner world back (which people are generally inclined to do, through a concept known as reciprocity). In fact, there are many explanations for why self-disclosure improve bonds - not just the trust it displays, it also often provides information that may show you have something else in common with someone (putting them more strongly in your in-group, which you are biased to evaluate positively). Sharing also increases the perception that a person is trustworthy. In fact, research has shown that people who self-disclose are evaluated more positively than people who withhold information, even when the information disclosed is really terrible (like failing-to-tell-someone-you-have-an-STD terrible).

The advent of Facebook and other social media sites provide many opportunities to share information about oneself, but as many have observed, it also provides an avenue to overshare. Now any thought you had, any activity you did, can be broadcast to all of your friends, or an even larger audience if a post is "public." And people use social media to share things with the world that they would never dare shout in a crowded room, even though it's basically the same thing (and arguably worse unless someone in that crowded room is recording the whole thing). But why? Researchers offer some answers, and they're pretty much what you would expect (if you know about social psychology):

Social scientist and author Sherry Turkle thinks we’re losing a healthy sense of compartmentalization. Last year, researchers at Harvard found that the act of sharing our personal thoughts and feelings activates the brain’s neurochemical reward system in a bigger way than when we merely report the attitudes and opinions of others. Meanwhile, Elizabeth Bernstein of the Wall Street Journal asked around and concluded that our newfound urge to disclose is partially due to not only the erosion of private life through the proliferation of reality TV and social media, but also due to our subconscious attempts at controlling anxiety.

“This effort is known as ‘self regulation’ and here is how it works,” she writes. “When having a conversation, we can use up a lot of mental energy trying to manage the other person’s impression of us. We try to look smart, witty, and interesting, but the effort required to do this leaves less brain power to filter what we say and to whom.”

Another crucial ingredient encouraging online exhibitionism is, as stated by [Russell W.] Belk, [chair in marketing at York University in Toronto], the “tension between privacy and potential celebrity.” For some people, the longing to be popular far outweighs the longing to be respected, and their social media accounts can verify this.

I would also add that many people don't think through the gravity of what they share online. They're in a situation where they can impulsively share whatever they want, but don't think through the potential consequences. For instance, I would assume most people know not to let all their friends take a picture of their credit card, while adding, "BTW, the code on back is...", and yet, there are countless people who have posted a picture of their credit card on their social media (along with, "The code on back is... Why is everyone asking me that?").

A few years ago, my mom posted an unedited picture of her passport online, because she was happy to finally have one. Since I get notifications when she posts something, and I know her username/password (guess who set it up for her), I was able to login and delete it only a few minutes after it was posted. My mom is one of the smartest, most logical people I know, who would absolutely know better than to let a stranger take a picture of her passport. I don't think she made the connection that posting it on social media is basically the same thing. (A public post, no less! We had a convo about privacy settings after that.)

And I think the reason for that is because we perceive social media as a toy, something for entertainment value. We know better than to do some of these things in the real world, because that's our life, but Facebook is just something we do for fun. So while Sherry Turkle above may say we're losing a sense of compartmentalization, I would argue we're too compartmentalized in how we perceive social media. We're creating a division between real life with real consequences and online life for play, failing to realize that our social media activity also can have real consequences: having your credit card info "stolen" (or rather, giving it away without realizing it), losing a job, being put on a no fly list, all things that have happened.

Several years ago, I did a study on the potential negative effects of Facebook on mental health. When people asked me if the point of my study was to tell people not to use Facebook, my response was this: Facebook is a tool. A tool isn't inherently good or bad. It's a matter of how it's used. A hammer can help you build a house (good) or smash your finger (bad). The problem isn't the hammer, it's how you used it.

But when you're using a tool, it's important to know how to use it properly and safely. We might get that lesson from someone the first time we pick up a hammer. But no one gives us that lesson the first time we log on to Facebook. And maybe they should.

On Memory and Dogs

I've been a dog person pretty much my whole life. Growing up, we always had dogs and I can't wait to have a dog myself. Anyone who has had a dog has probably made more than one comment about their dog's memory. There are a variety of things your dog remembers: name, home, who you are, and so on. But when something negative happened in your dog's life, you probably also commented that s/he wouldn't remember it. But a new study suggests dogs may remember events after all.

As a quick recap, there are different kinds of memory. Semantic memory refers to knowledge and information; an example of a semantic memory for me is knowing the different kinds of memory. Episodic memory refers to events, things that have happened in your life; for me, an example would be remembering that I've written posts about memory before. The two are obviously connected, and influence each other. A memory of an event (episodic memory) may teach you a lesson or rule for living (semantic memory). And remembering that I've written posts about memory before (episodic memory) includes remembering the content of those posts (semantic memory).

The researchers examined episodic memory in 17 dogs using an unexpected recall task. If you know you're going to be expected to recall something, you "memorize" it, meaning committing it to semantic memory (also referred to as explicit encoding - you stored it because you know you'll need it later). But if you don't expect that you'll have to recall the information, when you are suddenly asked to recall it, you'll draw on your episodic memory (also referred to as incidental encoding - you stored it even though you didn't expect to need it). They tested this same phenomenon in dogs using a "Do As I Do" task:

Dogs were first trained to imitate human actions on command. Next, they were trained to perform a simple training exercise (lying down), irrespective of the previously demonstrated action. This way, we substituted their expectation to be required to imitate with the expectation to be required to lie down. We then tested whether dogs recalled the demonstrated actions by unexpectedly giving them the command to imitate, instead of lying down.

They found that dogs were able to imitate even when the command was unexpected, though their success rate decreased with longer recall periods (such as asking a dog to remember something from an hour ago - this is a test of memory decay, the loss of a memory as time since the event increases). So they were less able to imitate after a 1 hour delay, but some still could imitate.

Dogs may not be able to hold memories as long as humans can, but these results suggest that dogs can hold episodic memories: "To our knowledge, this is the first time that a non-human species shows evidence of being able to recall complex events (i.e., others’ actions) without motor practicing on them during the retention interval—thus relying on a mental representation of the action that has been formed during incidental encoding, as assessed by an unexpected test."

"Okay," you say, "my dog can remember events. So what?" George Dvorsky, over at Gizmodo, interviewed the study researchers, where they discuss that episodic memory is connected to self-awareness:

As noted, episodic memory has been linked to self-awareness, which is the ability to see oneself as an entity that’s separate and different from others. “So far no test has been successfully applied to study self-awareness in dogs,” Fugazza told Gizmodo. “We believe that our study brought us one step closer to be able to address this question.”

Writing, Personality Analysis, and No Good Very Bad Day

There are days when you feel on top of the world, where everything is going your way.

Today was not one of those days.

After a rough day, I came home to work on some writing. Before settling in, I caught up on recent tweets and found a link to this personality analysis that requires about 3500 words of writing by an individual. I thought it might be fun and make for an interesting blog post about examination of validity. I tried to open one of my writing files to paste it into the website.

And got multiple error messages. I tried every trick I could think of, but couldn't get the file to open.

TL;DR: The file is corrupted. I'm going to try to open it somehow. But for now, that writing appears to be lost. I have some handwritten notes I can draw from, but if I can't get into that file, most of what I've written is gone.

After dealing with that frustration (I'm not going to lie, there were tears), I decided to proceed with the personality analysis, using some previous blog posts.

Here's the summary it gave me:

You are unconventional, excitable and can be perceived as critical.

You are intermittent: you have a hard time sticking with difficult tasks for a long period of time. You are empathetic: you feel what others feel and are compassionate towards them. And you are proud: you hold yourself in high regard, satisfied with who you are.

Your choices are driven by a desire for connectedness.

You consider helping others to guide a large part of what you do: you think it is important to take care of the people around you. You are relatively unconcerned with taking pleasure in life: you prefer activities with a purpose greater than just personal enjoyment.

The fuller analysis is displayed in a dashboard style:

Though there is some truth here, some of the results definitely are not accurate. For one, saying I have trouble sticking to tasks for long periods... I hate to use the PhD card, but um, yeah, PhD - that's basically sticking to a task for a long time. I think the compassion and connectedness information is accurate, but wouldn't anyone self-apply that information? This description sounds kind of like a Barnum description - an analysis of a person that is vague enough to get just about anyone to agree it is accurate. Throw in a couple of negative traits, so it doesn't read so much as "You're awesome" to be suspect, and most people would agree to it.

For comparison, here's the results of a Big 5 personality test I took recently:

Extraversion 72
Extraversion reflects how much you are oriented towards things outside yourself and derive satisfaction from interacting with other people.

Conscientiousness 33
Conscientiousness reflects how careful and orderly an individual is.

Neuroticism 37
Neuroticism is the tendency to experience negative emotions.

Agreeableness 91
Agreeableness reflects how much you like and try please others.

Openness 82
Openness reflects how much you seek out new experiences.

So the openness characteristic lines up, but agreeableness is the opposite - a person who tries to please others is likely not critical. It is important to note that the Big 5 results are from a self-administered test, which can be affected by social desirability and biased responding, so it may not be truly accurate. On the other hand, the text analysis is "objective," not depending on my own responses. However, without knowing more about how it is done, I can't speak to its accuracy. But based on my own examination, I would say it's not.

Now to try to get at my corrupted file...

More on Head Songs and Earworms

In a past post, I talked about head songs (songs I wake up with in my head) and earworms. Since I'm listening to music much of the time, it makes sense that I also have some song stuck in my head.

I try to post my head songs on Facebook, though I sometimes forget. But I'd love to examine my past head songs and see if there's any kind of pattern (I'm a researcher, after all, and lover of data). I mean, where do they come from?

Today's head song I can explain. It's a track I listened to just yesterday, and also one of my favorite songs off of Sia's new album:

As is true with most of my head songs, it was the full track, with accompaniment, backup vocals, etc.

On the other hand, as I was walking in to work this morning, I got an inexplicable earworm - Baby Got Back by Sir Mix-a-Lot. And in true earworm style, it was just a snippet of the lyrics repeated: "Oh baby, I wanna get with ya, and take your picture."

Rather than post that song, which I know you've all heard, how about this great version, created from snippets of dialogue from movies:

Follow-up On Self-Regulation and New Year's Resolutions

January is over and February is quickly coming to an end. But as this blog post points out, it's never too late to make a resolution and set some goals. The post also discusses some research on self-regulation, finding that people who followed a weight management program for two months also saw improvements in their ability to complete other important tasks. This just drives home the point that self-regulation is a general skill and that learning this skill, even in one specific application, can have far-reaching improvements on other aspects of life.

At the same time, it is important to remember that self-regulation uses mental resources, and regulating one aspect - especially if it is very taxing to maintain - can limit how much you can regulate in other domains. It's all about balance.

"I'll Never Be That Good": Social Comparison, Discouragement, and Self Theories

We are constantly being evaluated. Not only at work or in school, but in nearly every aspect of life, we are being evaluated based on any number of characteristics: appearance, intelligence, ability, etc. Even when others aren't evaluating us, we're evaluating ourselves. In fact, self esteem is defined as a positive or negative evaluation of oneself: are we who we want to be? According to Maslow, once our basic needs are met, and we feel a sense of belonging with people we care about, self-esteem becomes an important focus in our lives - and only with self-esteem, confidence, and achievement can we reach the highest level in his hierarchy of needs: self-actualization.

The thing about evaluation is that it requires some sort of comparison. We may compare ourselves to people we know, people we don't know (like celebrities), or even ideas of what we should or ought to be like. Who we choose to compare ourselves against may vary depending on how we're feeling. If we're feeling bad about ourselves, we may compare to someone worse off to give ourselves a boost. If we want to improve, we may compare ourselves to someone better off to motivate us to achieve more.

But what happens when we compare ourselves to someone much better than us - unattainably better? According to a recent study, we're likely to give up.

The researchers did two studies. In the first, they used real-world data from a massive open online course (free online courses, such as those you find on Coursera - they didn't state which course/provider they used because the proprietor preferred to remain anonymous). In order to receive a grade/certificate for the course, students were required to evaluate at least 3 essays written by other students (assigned at random). They found that students assigned to review higher quality essays were less likely to complete the course, and if they did complete, they tended to receive lower grades, than students assigned to review poorer quality essays.

In the second study, the researchers did an online experiment to try to understand why reading a high quality essay makes one more likely to give up. They gave participants an essay prompt from the SAT writing section and had them write an essay of 100 words or more. Participants then read and evaluated either two well-written essays or two poorly-written essays. They were asked whether they felt their essay was better than the two they read and whether they were capable of writing an essay better than the two they read, then answered questions about whether writing an excellent essay is relevant to how they feel about themselves (a concept called domain identification). Afterward, participants were given the option to write another essay for additional money. People who read the well-written essays were less likely to: think their essay was better, think they could write a better essay, and write the second essay. They also had lower domain identification scores.

Domain (de)identification is often used a proxy for discouragement. It's frequently used in stereotype threat research (something I've blogged about many times, and studied for my masters thesis). Stereotype threat occurs when a stereotype of a group impacts an individual group member's performance - such as a woman being reminded of the stereotype that women are bad at math right before she has to take a math test. One of the effects of reminding someone of a stereotype is that s/he will deidentify from that domain - such as deciding that being good at math just isn't important to her.

Of course, one important concept that wasn't examined in the study above (but has been examined somewhat in stereotype threat research) is self theories (or the long title: implicit theories of intelligence), a concept developed by Carol Dweck. People have different ideas about where ability comes from: they may believe ability is innate (you're born with it, "fixed") or they may believe ability results from hard work and study ("incremental").

It's actually a continuum, so people can fall between the two extremes, or believe that some abilities are innate while others are learned. The important thing about this theory is that it can explain motivation in the face of failure. People with a fixed view of intelligence will often give up when they fail, because they don't believe they can improve. People with an incremental view instead view failure as a sign to work harder, because they believe they can improve. With regard to women and stereotype threat, research suggests women are more likely to have fixed views.

It would have been interesting to see how self theories would impact the results of the second study. People with incremental self theories may have been more likely to try again on the second essay. Or they may have taken that feedback on their comparative ability and used it as motivation to improve their writing on their own.

Comparatively yours,
~Sara

On the Brain, Learned Helplessness, and Self-Improvement

As I was out to lunch today with a friend, I heard a TV show host once again bring up the old myth that you only use 10% of your brain. In the story, she was talking about what people will look like in 10,000 years. Spoiler alert: We have bigger eyes and darker skin. She mentioned that we'd probably also be capable of using more of our brains at that point.

The origin of the "10% myth" is debated, though the most likely source is psychologist William James, who talked about how humans only use a fraction of their potential mental energy. This statement was twisted somehow into the belief that we only use a fraction of our brain - not quite the same thing.

Why does this myth prevail despite its obvious falsehood? After all, if you really sit down and think logically about all the things your brain does (beyond conscious thought), the amount of body energy the brain uses, and the significant impact of insults to the brain (such as stroke or injury), you would have to conclude that we use much more than 10% of it.

One reason this myth may prevail is potential. Or rather, the desire of people to believe they have untapped potential. Believing that you can improve in some way is incredibly motivating. On the other hand, believing that you lack any potential can result in stagnation and inaction (even when you actually can do something).

Some of the early research in the concept of learned helplessness involved putting dogs in no-win situations. The dogs were paired (yoked) with another dog who learned a task. If the learner dog behaved incorrectly, it received a shock - but so did the helpless dog. So while the learner dog received cues that would warn of an impending shock, and could change its behavior to avoid the shock, the helpless dog did not and could not. When the helpless dog was put in the learner dog's place, it did nothing to avoid the shocks. The helplessness of its prior, yoked situation carried over into the learning situation, and prevented the dog from seeing how its behavior could affect the outcome. Later research has demonstrated humans can also exhibit learned helplessness, and this concept has been used to describe the behaviors of survivors of domestic abuse.

The desire for self-improvement, an outcome of the belief in potential, drives a great deal of our behavior. For instance, I learned that one of the most popular Christmas presents this year was the FitBit, a wearable device that tracks activity. I also received a FitBit for Christmas and have so far really enjoyed having it. Not only does it tell me what I'm already doing (number of steps, hours of sleep, and so on), it gives me data that can be used for self-improvement.

With New Year's upon us, many people will probably begin a path to self-improvement through New Year's resolutions. Look for a post about that (hopefully) tomorrow!

Potentially yours,
~Sara

In the Quiet Calm of the Mind

As I've mentioned before on this blog, I'm painfully self-aware - either from my background in theatre, or my current career in psychology & research, who knows? - and tend to think about and analyze my thoughts, actions, and feelings. This could be a blessing or a curse, and which of the two often depends on what I do with the information.

But occasionally, I stumble across something that makes me think, "Hmm, that's an interesting psychological phenomenon. How can I study that?" I don't always come up with a good study idea right away, but it's something I tuck into my back pocket for later.

Recently, I was nearly in a car accident. There was probably nothing special about this near-miss, but something very interesting hit me - figuratively, of course. I was driving to pick something up at the store, going east, and a car coming from the west hung a left in front of me without looking. I slammed on my breaks, thinking, "Gotta stop, gotta stop." I hit a patch of ice and began to skid. In that moment, I felt a sudden sense of peace, as I very calmly thought, "I'm going to hit him. There's nothing I can do about it. My passenger front will hit his passenger back. This is going to happen."

It wasn't freaking out, it wasn't, "Oh God, my cheap, old car is going to be totaled." Or "I hope this guy has insurance." It was a peaceful acceptance that, "This is going to happen."

I wonder if that happens in other situations. After you've fought like hell to stop whatever from happening, when you realize that your actions are probably not going to make a difference, you quietly accept that "This is how it is." I realized after that this feeling happened to me in another car accident, when a man in front of me braked suddenly and I rear-ended him. I think that's one reason the thud of a car accident sounds so deafening - because it follows that quiet calm. Thankfully, there was no damage to either car - it was a pretty slow rear-ending - and we both thanked the Lord we were okay and went about our business. He even gave me a hug. Nice guy.

Sorry, getting off the subject. As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, the accident didn't happen. The other car began to slow down - which is bad, because it means he would have stopped right in front of me - but thankfully, sped up and got through the intersection. We missed by mere inches. Perhaps it's because this was a near-miss that I noticed this sensation. If we had collided, the calm would have been followed by, "Thud" and "Well, better call the cops".

It was of course, after the accident didn't happen that my heart began to pound, as I thought, "Crap, that was really close!" That's when the freak-out occurred. But it was short-lived, given nothing really happened.

So what is driving this sensation? (Man, I am full of unintentional puns this evening.) Is it the "death instinct" Freud insists we all have, that at some point, when faced with our unavoidable demise or something like it, we accept or perhaps even welcome it? Is it an evolutionary holdover from our hunter-gatherer days where struggling with the predator/whatever was more likely to get us killed? What could it be?

Pensively yours,
~Sara