What Happened to People’s Values During the COVID-19 Pandemic?

The COVID-19 pandemic changed most people’s day-to-day life. It seems like all our behaviors underwent a change, but what about the core aspects of who we are as individuals? Did our values change, too? Values are life goals, defining what we want to achieve, such as being kind to others, having independence, success, or the safety of one’s nation or loved ones. People usually know their values and stick with them over time. But what happened in the current crisis?

We repeatedly contacted over 1,000 Australians ranging from 18 to 75 years old. We asked them how important different values are in their life. Three of these times were before the pandemic, in 2017, 2018, and 2019. We contacted them again as the pandemic started, and then 8-9 months later. At these last two time points, we also asked how worried they were about getting the virus.

Values: The Goals That Guide Life Choices

Values direct thinking and behavior, even when a person does not directly think about them. We decide what to do, based on the priorities we place on different values. Past research found that people make daily decisions (e.g., where should I vacation?), as well as important life-changing decisions (e.g., should I immigrate? What to vote?), partly as a result of personal values.

We relied on the work of psychologist Shalom Schwartz, who grouped values into four categories:

  • Conservation values promote the preservation of the past, order, and resistance to change.
  • Openness to change values promotes an independent, creative, and explorative mind, and seeking change.
  • Self-transcendence values emphasize care for the welfare of others and nature.
  • Self-enhancement values emphasize the pursuit of one’s self-interest through ambition, success, and dominance.

People’s values were stable before the pandemic. Once the pandemic hit, values did change for all except self-enhancement, and here’s how.

Self-Transcendence Values

The values of caring for people and for nature remained stable at first. Later, by late 2020, they became significantly less important. This decrease occurred especially among people worried about their health. Maybe people focused on their own survival, and had no capacity left to worry about the environment, society, and even close others. Maybe also, social distancing created physical distance from others, which resulted in emotional distance—as said—“far from sight, far from heart.”

Conservation Values

The values of keeping safe and stable became more important at the beginning of the pandemic. Our respondents, and especially those who worried about their health, immediately started prioritizing safety and security, and traditions around one's family, culture, and religion. This new-found focus on conservatism may have helped to enhance compliance with instructions by the authority.

As the pandemic progressed, conservation values did not return to previous levels. This may be surprising, given that Australia had only a minor spread of the pandemic. This means the value changes may have long-term effects, even after the pandemic has passed. Possibly, social distancing itself maintained these value changes.

Openness to Change Values

Values like seeking adventure and enjoyment became less important early in the pandemic, most likely reflecting the necessary adjustments to a situation in which much variety and enjoyment were out of reach. But, a few months later, while people continued to downplay values that promote pleasure and enjoyment, values that prioritize independence and intellectual pursuits increased in importance. Existing routines that were now out of reach seem to have been replaced with more intellectual stimulation and activities. Maybe people started to apply critical thinking to more aspects of life.

COVID and Life Goals

Our study shows that during the COVID pandemic there were changes to much more than people’s daily routines. Basic goals and aspirations in life changed. These changes were quick, but lingered over time. These results may have substantial effects on the future of individuals and society. As we struggle to fight climate change, hunger, and poverty, the focus of individuals on personal, rather than social goals, may prove harmful over time. We are curious to know about values changes in countries that were hit harder by the pandemic than Australia, and especially what happens over even longer periods of time.


For Further Reading

Daniel, E., Bardi, A., Fischer, R., Benish-Weisman, M., & Lee, J. A. (2021). Changes in personal values in pandemic times. Social Psychological and Personality Science. doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/19485506211024026

Lee, J. A., Bardi, A., Daniel, E., Benish-Weisman, M., & Fischer, R. (2021). Our research shows COVID has made Australians more conservative and care less about others. The Conversation.  https://theconversation.com/our-research-shows-covid-has-made-australians-more-conservative-and-care-less-about-others-161500
 

Ella Daniel is a senior lecturer (associate professor) at the Department of School Counseling and Special Education, Tel Aviv University. Her research focuses on value development across the life span, and specifically among children and adolescents, and development of prosocial behavior.

Anat Bardi is a professor of social/personality psychology at Royal Holloway University of London. She studies human values and particularly value change, the nature of values, and effects of values on behavior.

Ronald Fischer is a professor of psychology at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, and a fellow of the Royal Society, New Zealand. His work focuses on cultural and evolutionary dynamics, with a special interest in cultural differences in values, behavior, prosociality, and well-being as well as larger cultural dynamics within and across human societies.

Maya Benish-Weisman is an associate professor at the Paul Baerwald School of Social Work and Social Welfare at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her academic research focuses on how values affect prosocial behavior and aggression, and the psychological impact of immigration and ethnic identity, and she is interested in ways to enhance adaptive development among adolescents.

Julie A. Lee is a professor and director of the Centre for Human and Cultural Values at the University of Western Australia. Her research focuses on values theory, measurement, and application in consumer behavior and tourism contexts.

Improving and Affirming Our Personal Stories Can Make Us Happier, Healthier, and More Successful

Human beings are motivated to do many different things – which is both a blessing and a curse. Consider Maslow’s classic theory of human motivation. In the 1950s, Maslow suggested that people first fill their physiological needs and then move on to psychological needs.  This means you won’t worry as much as usual about your safety if you are starving.  Likewise, you won’t work very hard to build close connections to other people until you have filled both your belly and your needs for safety and security. The list of basic needs keeps growing.  In fact, recent research by Doug Kenrick and colleagues suggests that there are several basic needs that not even Maslow acknowledged. 

One problem with being motivated to do many different things is that some of the things we want right now get in the way of other things we want down the road.  Eating lots of ice cream fills a basic physiological need to consume delicious food.  But it does little to promote a healthy body weight.  Further, even when we know we want something, self-doubt and self-sabotage sometimes get the better of us. The singer Jackson Browne seems to have understood very well how hard it can be to create a better future for ourselves. As Browne put it, “while the future’s there for anyone to change, still you know it seems, it would be easier sometimes to change the past.” Can psychologists offer us any good advice about how to change our futures for the better?

Tim Wilson probably can. In his 2011 book, Redirect, Wilson offers readers a great deal of advice about how to create lasting changes.   Wilson offers many tips for getting what you want out of life.  I’ll just summarize just a couple. 

First and foremost, a thread that runs throughout Wilson’s book is the idea that the stories we tell ourselves are very important.  Unfortunately, these stories can sometimes be self-defeating.  For example, many college students believe that anyone who ever struggles academically – or who feels out of place in college – may not belong in college. In a 1982 study, Wilson and his colleagues identified a group of struggling college freshmen.  These were students that, as Wilson put it “were at risk of blaming themselves and thinking they weren't ‘college material.’” 

Half the students were just followed over time – as a control group.  The other half got a simple message.  They learned that a lot of students struggle in their first year of college. They further learned that struggling students merely need to adjust to college and improve their study skills. The experimenters reinforced this message with videos of real college students who reported having had exactly this “it will get better if I keep trying” experience.  This simple intervention had a lasting effect, increasing the future GPAs of the students who were invited to see their setbacks in college in a new light. 

More recently, studies have focused on the personal stories middle schoolers tell themselves over the course of a school year.  These studies show that reinforcing a student’s positive personal stories helps at-risk students perform better in school.  In two large studies of White and Latino middle schoolers, David Sherman and his colleagues had some of the students write about things they deeply valued.  At 4 or 5 key points in the school year, the students selected and wrote about three things they personally valued (chosen from a list of 11 popular values). As an example, a student might be given time in class to write about why she deeply valued being funny, artistic, and religious. (Other students did a very similar writing activity that focused on things they did not deeply value.)

In both studies, Latino middle schoolers who did the self-affirmation exercise – that allowed them to write about what they deeply valued – ended the school year with better grades than Latino students who did the control writing activity.  Among White students, who were generally at lower risk for academic problems, the values affirmation had no effect. Note that this simple and enjoyable exercise did not require any extra tutors, any new computers, or any parental assistance or reminders. Having at-risk students spend a total of about an hour doing something pleasant over the course of a school year increased their GPAs by about a third of a letter grade.  That’s a truly remarkable academic return on investment.     

There are many other ways to help people edit or reinforce their personal stories in constructive ways.  For example, Jamie Pennebaker and his colleagues have asked college students to write about painful or traumatic experiences for about 15 minutes per night – typically for four nights.  This simple exercise allows most people to tell a new story about the painful event and gain a better understanding of it. In addition to improving emotional well-being, this simple writing activity has beneficial effects on people’s physical health.  That’s obviously another great return on investment.

Finally, As Tim Wilson notes, people often construct new stories about themselves when they engage in new behavior. This means that merely getting people to begin doing something they wish to do regularly (as Wilson puts it, “do good, be good”) can help people rewrite their personal stories.  (“Just getting on the track and walking a mile makes me think I can stick to an exercise program after all.”)  There is no magic bullet for making constructive changes to our lives.  But Wilson’s research – and his careful look at the modern research of many others – offers us reason to believe that getting what we want may be within our grasp after all.  In all of us, Wilson argues, there is a little engine that could.      

Note: If you wish to learn more about James Pennebaker’s writing activity and how you can use it in constructive ways in your own life, check out his user-friendly web site: https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/psychology/faculty/pennebak#writing-health


For Further Reading:

Pennebaker, J.W. (2004). Writing to heal: A guided journal for recovering from trauma and emotional upheaval.  Oakland, CA: New Harbinger Press.

Sherman, D. K., Hartson K. A., Binning K. R., Purdie-Vaughns V., Garcia J., Taborsky-Barba S., et al. (2013). Deflecting the trajectory and changing the narrative: How self-affirmation affects academic performance and motivation under identity threat. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 104, 591-618.

Wilson, T. D. (2011). Redirect: The surprising new science of psychological change. New York: Little, Brown. (Paperback version published 2014 with additional chapter).


About the Author

Brett Pelham is a social psychologist who studies the self and social cognition.  He is also an associate editor for Character & Context.

Why Social Change is Contagious

We witness many social changes over time—from changes in behavior such as the decline of smoking to shifts in people's hearts and minds on issues like gay marriage. But how does social change spread?

Our recent research, published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, suggests that social change can self-propagate: simply witnessing other people change their behavior leads people to question fundamental beliefs that hold them back from changing themselves. Specifically, seeing change in others makes people think that change is possible for themselves, that it is important, and that it is compatible with who they are.

In prior research, we found that people conform to “dynamic norms ”—information that many people are changing their beliefs or behavior—even when those new trends go against what most people do now. For instance, when people learned that others were increasingly making an effort to limit how much meat they eat, they were less likely to choose meat for lunch—even though the current norm is that most people in the U.S. eat meat for most meals.

This initial research suggested that dynamic norms catalyze social change. But what happens under the hood, psychologically, to promote change? Was it just that people enjoy jumping on the bandwagon? Or could seeing others change have a more profound effect on people’s beliefs about change?

Take smoking. Many smokers don’t attempt to quit because they don’t think they’ll succeed. But what if they learned that many people were changing and had already quit smoking? We found that smokers who learned about others’ successful efforts to quit were more likely to believe they could quit too, and that they could overcome obstacles like withdrawal symptoms. And this increase in confidence led to greater intentions to quit.

Next, we looked at a very different context: viewing screens from electronic devices late at night. It turns out our bedtime obsession with social media, late-night television, and Netflix can disrupt our sleep and cause health problems. Despite this, people often don’t think it’s important enough to change their viewing habits. But what if you learned that a growing number of people were starting to avoid late-night screen use? Would it seem more important then? Our participants thought so, and that increased their interest in reducing their own late-night screen use once they learned others were changing.

A third barrier that can get in the way of change is the perception that changing a particular behavior is inconsistent with who you are. For instance, some men might feel that identifying as a “feminist” is incompatible with being masculine. But our research showed that when male research participants saw information that men were changing and that more were starting to identify as feminist, the participants felt they had more in common with feminists and were more likely to support a key piece of feminist legislation aimed at reducing gender inequities in pay.

In these studies, dynamic norms seemed to affect people’s beliefs and behaviors because they challenged whichever psychological barrier to change loomed largest in each context. It was as if people thought, “since others are changing, then whatever my concern is about change must not be true.” Is that really how it works? Do dynamic norms have a special knack for changing the beliefs that prevent change?

To answer this question, we went back to late-night screen use. We had participants read an op-ed in which we experimentally varied which belief loomed largest as the reason people didn’t give up screens at night. Some participants read an article that stressed a lack of ability (screens are addictive); others read an article that emphasized a lack of perceived importance (Americans just don’t care); and others read an article that highlighted an incompatibility with their identity (only ‘weirdos’ avoid looking at screens at night). Then some participants learned that many people were changing this habit.

Strikingly, these participants were less concerned with the specific barrier that the op-ed highlighted: After learning that others were changing their late-night screen use, what had seemed impossible, unimportant, or not-for-me became, respectively, possible, important, and for people like me.  This is why social change is so potent: whatever psychological barrier to change people are most concerned with can start to crumble when they witness other people changing.

From climate change to money in politics to racial injustice, the world faces many problems. And often, change isn’t easy: change can seem impossible, insufficiently important, or incompatible with who we are. Yet research on dynamic norms should give us hope. If we can find even the beginnings of positive change and highlight these, we can remedy psychological barriers to change and move forward on societal problems.


For Further Reading

Sparkman, G., & Walton, G. M. (2017). Dynamic norms promote sustainable behavior, even if It is counternormative. Psychological Science, 28(11), 1663–1674. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797617719950

Sparkman, G., & Walton, G. M. (2019). Witnessing change: Dynamic norms help resolve diverse barriers to personal change. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 82, 238–252.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2019.01.007


About the Authors

Gregg Sparkman is a Postdoctoral Scholar at Stanford University who studies social influence and social change. 

Greg Walton is the Michael Forman University Fellow in Undergraduate Education and Associate Professor of Psychology at Stanford University. Much of his research examines psychological “wise” interventions to help people flourish.

Recapping the 2023 Presidential Plenary: How Norms Change – Part 2

In this piece, we are continuing from last month's recap of the SPSP 2023 Presidential Plenary on Social Norms, with talks from Drs. Guy Elcheroth and Cristina Bicchieri. Read on for the recaps and check out Part 1 here!

How Norms Change Faster: Social Creativity in Times of Crisis – Guy Elcheroth, University of Lausanne

A large part of the study of human behavior focuses on change, from perceptions and beliefs to norms and behavior. In his talk, Dr. Elcheroth offers a perspective that change during challenges contexts is different from the change that occurs during times of relative peace. Difficult times (think world wars, pandemics, etc.) herald rapid changes in the daily lives and behaviors of people. These disruptions often occur at a pace and scale with which people are often radically unfamiliar and can be difficult to understand. It seems that the most consequential changes are the hardest to comprehend or predict.

Common-sense intuitions cannot always help us in the case of non-linear, rapid change, such as when the pace of previous change is different from the pace of future change. Once a feedback loop is established in this case, the relative importance of the root cause of the change diminishes. However, traditional research methods used to study change, like regressions and assumptions of stable relationships between predictor and outcome, are built on such assumptions. This has led to social psychological research studying popular uprisings from a point of view removed from the people at the center of it. They are instead rooted in researchers' own positions and ideologies, leading to suppositions that collective situations can escalate rapidly and contagiously, leading to a breakdown of values and humanity. However, modern research on collective behaviors disputes this conclusion.

Dr. Elcheroth chairs the The Pluralistic Memories Project, which studies collective memories in conflict zones in order to understand how communities can remain resilient to the exploitation of past trauma. Studying three communities that endured political violence (Sri Lanka, Berundi, and Palestine), researchers found evidence of stories testifying to the resilience, creativity, and solidarity of communities amidst crises (see Figure 1 below).

Pyramid-shaped diagram showing themes identified through coding 200 testimonies

Figure 1. Themes identified through coding 200 testimonies (Pluralistic Memories Project)

Perceived social norms can act as vehicles of rapid social change, the type that will be essential for combatting adverse climate change and global ecological breakdown. In a meta-analysis of social norm interventions for environmental conservation, researchers found that people systematically use less energy and material resources after learning that such behavior is normative. Similarly, public support for social distancing rules in the UK increased faster after the government imposed a strict lockdown. These examples suggest that perceived norms may act as a catalyst for rapid social change for the greater good.

How might perceived norms shift collective action behaviors in conflict settings? In a study conducted with Palestinians in the West Bank and Jerusalem, Dr. Elcheroth and colleagues found that the closer communities lived to Israeli military infrastructure and surveillance (e.g. the separation wall, checkpoints, or military barracks), the less likely they were to support cooperative forms of collective action (e.g. negotiations), although support for confrontational forms of collective action was unchanged (e.g. boycott). Could this impact of surveillance on collective action be explained by communication norms at the community level? Yes—participants' perceptions of the extent to which complex, alternative narratives of the conflict fit with local communication norms mediated the relationship between proximity to military infrastructure and the kind of collective action they supported.

These findings show that shifting social norms have the potential to accelerate social change because they orient behavior when stakes are high and values uncertain. They also have a self-reinforcing capacity and are sensitive to cues from public policy. In order to understand them better, we must be innovative in our research by employing multilevel study designs, non-linear modeling tools, and pursuing transdisciplinary collaborations.

Norm Dynamics – Cristina Bicchieri, University of Pennsylvania

How do we use "norm nudging" to change behaviors? Norms are supported by empirical expectations (what we expect others to do), normative expectations (what we expect others to approve/disapprove of), and conditional preferences. Norm nudging uses social information to induce change, under the assumption that the social information will change social expectations, thus fueling behavior change. However, there are mixed results for this method, where effects are often short-lived and sometimes fail altogether.

One of the reasons for the failures in norm nudging is the asymmetry of inferences that people draw from the social information they are given. However, not much attention has been paid to this factor and therefore we know little about how people draw inferences from social information. We know that people draw inferences about individuals (e.g. beliefs, attitudes) from social information about individual people—called social inference. However, making norm inferences about an overall group based on social information about a few people is difficult.

Dr. Bicchieri and PhD student Jinyi Kuang examined inferences that participants drew when presented empirical or normative information about 23 different behaviors. Dr. Bicchieri and Kuang found that for positive behaviors like driving below the speed limit, people made stronger normative inferences from empirical information. If participants are told most people pay taxes on time, for example, they infer that most people think it is right to do so. However, this is not the case when making empirical inferences from normative information. For instance if participants are told most people think it is right to pay taxes on time, they do not infer that most people do. This double asymmetry effect was flipped for negative behaviors like bribing public officers.

For some of the 23 behaviors examined, Dr. Bicchieri and Kuang found a double asymmetry effect. Others demonstrated only positive behavior asymmetry, while the rest showed no asymmetry. Possible explanations for the asymmetry outliers could be baseline expectations, frequency of the behavior, observability of behaviors, and social consequences (both objective and perceived). For behaviors having strong social benefit, there is a tendency to infer strong approval from empirical information and weaker prevalence from normative information (asymmetry). On the other hand, for behaviors with low positive social benefit, the inferences from empirical and normative information did not significantly differ (no asymmetry). In other words, when a behavior has low social consequences, participants believe that the prosocial behaviors of others are a genuine reflection of normative attitudes.

Taken together, to launch successful norm nudging efforts, researchers and practitioners must consider the characteristics of the behavior, perceived social consequences of the behavior, and assess the kind of norm inferences that will be drawn from information about the behavior, before designing messages that influence said behavior.

We thank Drs. Elcheroth and Bicchieri for sharing their findings and insights with convention attendees!

 

How the Science of Human Behavior is Reshaping U.S. Government

Back in September, President Barack Obama signed an executive order that marked a major turning point in the role that behavioral science plays in helping the federal government achieve policy goals.

The order, which directs federal agencies to incorporate insights from behavioral science into their programs, may turn out to be one of the most important acts of his second term. That's certainly the view of Cass Sunstein, a Harvard legal scholar and coauthor of the bestselling book on behavioral economics, Nudge.

Considering that during the last year alone Obama got Iran to agree to limit its nuclear program and inked the biggest trade deal in decades, that’s a high bar to meet. But in fact we’re already beginning to see why this may turn out to be true.

Common sense pays

Obama's executive order coincided with the release of the inaugural report by the White House’s one-year-old Social and Behavioral Sciences Team (SBST). The report documents the successes (and failures) of the team’s initial efforts to transform policymaking through a better understanding of how and why people act as they do.

It may seem like common sense that when you’re designing programs designed to serve people, you ought to include insights from experts in human behavior. But common sense doesn’t always come easy. Although behavioral insights are commonly used by companies in the private sector, introducing them into the federal government – particularly in a systematic and scientific way – can be very difficult.

But as Sunstein correctly points out, these insights have the potential to reshape government, making it more efficient and effective, increasing citizens' welfare while preserving their ability to make their own choices. That’s the early lesson from the UK’s so-called Nudge Unit, which reports that it has earned back more than 20 times its original investment in two years by improving tax collection, curbing student dropout rates and moved more people off of benefits and into work.

The same thing is now starting to happen on this side of the Atlantic.

Bounded rationality

Until recently, most economists held firmly to a worldview that assumed that people are rational utility maximizers. That is, they always behave rationally and go about their lives making fully informed decisions.

That can be a useful simplification in trying to understand how markets function and how economies work, but people don’t actually behave that way.

When we ignore the limitations of human rationality and the systematic errors those limitations produce, we end up designing policies that are logical but don’t end up working well for the people they’re supposed to serve.

That’s not to say that people are irrational fools, only that human beings have limitations – or as Herb Simon (winner of the 1978 Nobel Prize in Economics) put it: our rationality is “bounded.” Thus significant insights can be gained if we can explore the systematic ways that people’s behavior fails to rise to economists’ rational standards.

The behavioral science approach improves the effectiveness of public policy by recognizing these limitations and helping people overcome them, sometimes with approaches as simple as sending a reminder text message, altering the time an email is sent or changing the default setting on a printer from single- to double-sided.

The goal of behaviorally informed policy is to make it easier for people to make good decisions, while preserving their ability to freely choose.

Small tweaks, big results

The White House team, created and led by Maya Shankar, a cognitive neuroscientist, partnered with an array of government agencies including the Departments of Defense, Education and Agriculture, to turn behavioral insights into more effective policy. As she puts it:

It’s not enough to simply design good federal programs. We have to make sure that those programs effectively reach the very people they are designed to serve. Behavioral science teaches us that even small barriers to accessing programs, whether it is a complicated form or burdensome application process, can have disproportionate negative impacts on participation rates.

The trials documented in the report generally aimed to streamline access to existing government programs and improve efficiency. The focus was on projects in which minute, low-cost changes built on very basic psychological concepts could lead to immediate, quantifiable improvements in outcomes and produce large shifts in behavior.

In one such effort, the team worked with the Department of Defense to increase enrollment in a retirement program for service members. The SBST modified emails sent to members who weren’t enrolled, more clearly describing the steps required to sign up and emphasizing the benefits of saving even just a little bit each month. As a result, the number of service members who enrolled in the program increased by 67%.

Generally the team tried to identify areas in which there was a breakdown in the effectiveness of policies that could potentially be improved with behavioral insights. And although the interventions were based on existing findings in fields like psychology and behavioral economics, the SBST rigorously evaluated the outcomes using randomized controlled trials, allowing them to evaluate which ones produced their intended effect and how strong those effects actually were.

Other projects were a little more ambitious in the behavioral insights employed, although they still made only minimal tweaks to the way policies were implemented.

For instance, federal vendors – who pay a small fee of 0.75% to the government based on self-reported sales – were asked to sign at the beginning of their declaration form attesting that they were providing accurate information. Compared with vendors who did not sign (the existing status quo), those who signed reported slightly more sales (US$445 on average). Although that may seem modest, the intervention was virtually costless and generated $1.59 million in revenue in the third quarter of 2014 alone.

Success through failure

Despite the impressive success of many of the trials in SBST’s first wave of interventions, perhaps even more encouraging were its failures.

Not all behavioral insight-driven interventions will work – that is, after all, why it’s critical to rigorously evaluate them. But it is in how failures are handled that will determine the team’s ultimate success. Notably, the SBST’s report was as candid about failures as successes.

One project involved trying to reduce the overprescription of certain drugs by informing doctors that they were prescribing them more than their peers. The technique has been successful in other contexts, such as curbing homeowners' energy consumption by merely letting them know they used more than their neighbors. But with the doctors it had no discernible effect on prescription rates.

Although it can be tempting (and sometimes politically expedient, particularly in the short term) to highlight success and sweep failures under the rug, it’s critical that we understand what works and what doesn’t, so that we don’t repeat our failures and we can learn from them.

In some cases, interventions will fail because they’re fundamentally flawed, possibly because what worked in a carefully controlled lab environment gets washed out by the noise of the real world, or possibly because the intervention simply doesn’t work in a given context. In those cases, the interventions should be scrapped or replaced by other approaches.

But in other cases, a failed intervention is just a beginning. Squarely facing failure is the first step toward designing an intervention that works. Researchers can discover what the problems were and what makes the intervention work in some cases but not in others. This sort of learning will not only improve policies, it is also an enormously important contribution to the collaboration with the academic community.

Applying basic research in the real world

Although social psychology has its roots in tackling real-world problems, in recent decades its engagement with public policy has waned and applied work has become less prestigious than basic science.

But the two types of research – rigorously controlled laboratory research and evaluating outcomes in the field – can be symbiotic. There are encouraging signs that social psychologists and other behavioral scientists are moving in that direction.

At the White House, for now, the focus is on tweaking existing programs. As the evidence for the SBST’s programs continues to accumulate, the hope is that behavioral insights become as central in policymakers' thinking as economic ones, helping us build effective policies from the ground up.

The Social and Behavioral Sciences Team has done an impressive job so far in using small, inexpensive changes to make federal policies better serve citizens.

The psychologist Barry Schwartz, who penned an op-ed in the Atlantic in 2012 calling for a Council of Psychological Advisors, summed it up well when he said: “It’s fantastic to actually have an agency in government who takes psychology seriously. There’s a long way to go before it becomes a sister to the Council of Economic Advisers, but if it proves itself to be helpful, I can imagine it.”


Dave Nussbaum, Adjunct Assistant Professor of Behavioral Science, University of Chicago

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

When People Change their Beliefs about Change

From proverbs to Pinterest, the world seems to be brimming with messages that convey a simple truth about humanity: that people can’t truly change. Oh wait, no. That people can change. Because we all know that leopards can’t change their spots. Well, unless they’re turning over a new leaf. This basic tension between notions of change and stability is even reflected in a song from the Disney Movie “Frozen,” claiming in one line “We aren’t saying you can change him, ‘Cause people don’t really change” yet in another line affirming that “Everyone’s a bit of a fixer upper.”

In light of all of these contradictory cultural messages about change, how do we make sense of the information we encounter about ourselves – and others – over time?

Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck and her colleagues have compellingly demonstrated that people tend to have a favorite go-to belief or implicit theory about change. Can hard work make you smarter, or do you have a certain level of braininess no matter what you try? Is your basic morality – or personality for that matter – set in stone, or can it be altered? Entity theorists believe these traits can’t truly be changed; incremental theorists are confident that attributes are malleable. Even though these implicit beliefs are really just “all in our head,” they affect how we interpret the world, and have dramatic effects on learningmotivation, and judgments.  

Even though it makes sense that people develop these habits of thinking about change or stability, intuitively I can think of cases where my own theories flip-flop. I’m an incremental theorist much of the time, but even though I firmly believe that people can change, I’ve heard myself give the exact opposite advice to a friend who was reconsidering a not-so-deserving ex. Suddenly, I was all about leopards not changing their spots – maybe because this alternate viewpoint better supported my argument.

The idea that people selectively appeal to evidence to support their position isn’t a new one. Ziva Kunda theorized that we often engage in motivated reasoning – that we’ll preferentially seek evidence, search memory, or appeal to causal theories that stack the deck in favor of the conclusion we wanted to come to all along. My colleagues and I wondered if people’s allegiance to implicit theories of change might be subject to change themselves, especially when shifting them could help support a goal.

Beliefs about change and stability matter for how we interpret information about people over time: to what extent is the past a good predictor of future behavior? There’s not always a right answer to that question – but sometimes we definitely have a preferred answer.

For example, imagine you were advising the owner of a bike shop. A likable fellow, Jack applies with the right qualifications. However, you learn that Jack served time for theft in his early 20s. He has been out of jail for five years. Should you hire him? If Jack is a stranger, your habitual belief in the old adage “once a thief, always a thief” may determine your reaction. Now, imagine that the person in Jack’s position was someone you care about– your brother perhaps, or your son. Then, even if you normally think of moral character as set in stone, you may decide – at least for a while – that people can change and deserve second chances.

In a recent paper (Leith, Ward, Giacomin, Landau, Ehrlinger & Wilson, 2014), we tested the idea that people might temporarily alter their beliefs about change and stability when a different perspective served their motives. First, we know people are often motivated to protect their egos in the face of failure. We threatened people’s feelings of competence by giving them (false) feedback on a test, telling them they’d failed. A comparison group was told they’d done especially well on the test. We then asked people how much they agreed with statements like “Your intelligence is something about you that you can’t change very much.” Although people in the two testing conditions didn’t differ from one another in their beliefs about intelligence at the start of the session, after getting their score, those who failed were much more likely to start leaning toward the view that intelligence is, in fact, changeable. It’s easier to handle failure when it’s temporary and alterable rather than enduring.

Although people are notoriously motivated to protect and defend the self, it’s not the only time they show their biases. People’s reasoning also gets lopsided when they start talking politics. For instance, voters have to evaluate political candidates by taking into account information about their current, recent, and often distant past. When voters confront the dirt dug up from their favorite candidate’s past, do they activate different beliefs about change than they do when they contemplate the skeletons in the opponent’s closet? To test this we first approached voters shortly before the last Canadian Federal election, when political hackles were naturally raised. Inspired by the content of the attack ads circulating at the time, we compiled a set of unflattering statements that each of the two leading candidates had uttered in the distant past – an average of 10 years earlier. Liberal and Conservative voters read either questionable quotations from the Liberal or the Conservative candidate. Once again, people showed a lot of flexibility in their views of change: the past missteps of their favored politician were forgiven by appealing to a belief in people’s essential malleability. On the other hand, people ensured that past mud continued to “stick” to disliked candidates by highlighting how people’s core characteristics really cannot change.

In real life, people’s beliefs about the nature of change inform their views on crime and punishment, rehabilitation, and recidivism. Once again, though, we wondered how stable those beliefs really were. In a final study, we asked American adults – about half of whom were parents – to review the case of a previously convicted child sex offender who was paroled after showing evidence of rehabilitation. We asked half of our respondents to imagine that the offender would soon be moving to a community 200 miles away; we asked the other half to imagine the offender was moving into their own neighborhood. We thought that parents who contemplated a child sex offender moving nearby would be driven by the urge to protect their family. Regardless of their habitual beliefs, this group of highly threatened parents shifted to endorse the belief that people, at the core, really don’t change. Importantly, the more they came to believe that people can’t change, the less they accepted evidence that this former offender had been rehabilitated. We recognize that this topic is fraught with legitimate ethical complexities about recidivism, public safety, and rights of the former offender, especially in light of the concrete entity assumptions inherent in the National Sex Offender registry. This research can’t directly comment on the wisdom of the registry; however, it can demonstrate a process by which emotional threat can influence policy decisions. Rather than relying on empirical evidence of rehabilitation or actual recidivism risks, people under threat may reframe a debate by shifting their underlying beliefs about whether rehabilitation is even possible.

As Dan Sperber and Hugo Mercier have argued, “Reasoning was not designed to pursue the truth. Reasoning was designed by evolution to help us win arguments.” Our evidence suggests that one way people may win arguments (with themselves or others) is by selectively appealing to culturally-available beliefs about change and stability in ways that allow them to either disregard the past or affirm its enduring nature. How much does this matter? Short-term at least, it seems to matter a lot. People who even temporarily believed that attributes can change were more likely to agree to retake a test, to forgive a political candidate, and to acknowledge the possibility of criminal rehabilitation. Even temporary fluctuations in people’s beliefs, then, could alter in-the-moment learning, voting, and policy decisions. And conceivably, if these motivated shifts happen often enough, they could form the basis of some of the enduring theories that we come to hold about the nature of change.


Leith, S., Ward, C., Giacomin, M., Landau, E., Ehrlinger, J., & Wilson, A. E.  (2014). Changing theories of change: Strategic shifting in implicit theory endorsement. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,107, 597-620doi: 10.1037/a0037699


Anne Wilson is a social psychologist at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. Her research focuses on self and identity, psychological time, and motivated social cognition.