When Truisms Are True

by Suntae Kim, Evan Polman and Jeffrey Sanchez-Burks

New York Times
February 25, 2012

What ignites the engine of creativity? A popular metaphor in American business urges you to think “outside the box.” Folk wisdom advises that problem-solving is helped by thinking about something “on the one hand” and then “on the other hand.”

Is there any psychological truth to such metaphors for better thinking? Our research suggests that the answer is yes. When people literally — that is, physically — embody these metaphors, they generate more creative ideas for solving problems.

Recent advances in understanding what psychologists call “embodied cognition” indicate a surprisingly direct link between mind and body. It turns out that people draw on their bodily experiences in constructing their social reality. Studies show, for example, that someone holding a warm cup of coffee tends to perceive a stranger as having a “warmer” personality. Likewise when holding something heavy, people see things as more serious and important — more “weighty.”

However, until recently it was not known whether bodily experiences could help in generating new ideas and solutions to problems. Our research, which will be published soon in the journal Psychological Science, discovered that it can.

For example, we asked 102 undergraduates at New York University to complete a task designed to measure innovative thinking. The task required them to generate a word (“tape,” for example) that related to each of three presented clue words (“measure,” “worm” and “video”). Some students were randomly assigned to do this while sitting inside a 125-cubic-foot box that we made of plastic pipe and cardboard. The rest got to sit and think outside (and next to) the box.

During the task we tracked the number of correct responses suggested by the students. We found that those thinking outside the box were significantly more creative: compared with those thinking inside the box, they came up with over 20 percent more creative solutions.

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Shaping risk preferences across time

by Alison Booth, Lina Cardona Sosa and Patrick Nolen

Vox
February 20, 2012

Some blame women’s under-representation in high-level jobs on differences between the sexes in risk aversion and competition. But are these differences in behaviour hardwired or learned? This column describes a study that tackles this thorny question with a controlled experiment in single-sex and mixed classrooms in a British university. Women are found to become far less nervous about uncertainty over time with the men out of the room.

The majority of experimental studies investigating gender differences in risky choices find that women are less willing to take risks than men. This research is summarised in Eckel and Grossman (2008) and Croson and Gneezy (2009). However, these experimental studies investigating gender differences in risky choices typically do so only at a single point in time.

Why might there be gender differences?

Only recently have economists begun to explore why women and men might have different risk preferences. Broadly speaking, those differences may be due to either nurture, nature, or some combination of the two. For instance, boys are pushed to take risks when participating in risky or competitive sports while girls are often encouraged to remain cautious. Thus, the riskier choices made by males could be due to the nurturing received from parents or peers. Likewise, the disinclination of women to take risks could be the result of parental or peer pressure not to do so.

In recent research (Booth and Nolen 2012), we present a recent experimental study exploring why girls and boys might have different risk preferences. Using adolescent subjects from two distinct environments or ‘cultures’, we examine the effect on risk preferences of two types of environmental influences – randomly assigned experimental peer-groups and educational environment (single-sex or coeducational). The experimental subjects were UK students in years 10 and 11 who were attending either single-sex or coeducational state-funded high schools. We find that the gender composition of the experimental group, as well as the gender mix of the school the student attended, affected decisions on whether or not to enter a real-stakes lottery. But our experiment was conducted at one point in time, and did not track changes over time.

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