EEG experiment proves that money can buy happiness (first-ever scale to measure pleasure)

by Monica Diana Bercea

NeuroRelay
January 29, 2013

As we’re all so busy rushing through life, it’s easy to miss the moments of pleasure. Neuroscientists have revealed how everyday pleasure rank against each other and it’s official: money CAN buy happiness, reveals first ever pleasure scale. Winning £10 was all it took to dramatically increase people’s feelings of pleasure. Following closely behind this was the level of pleasure generated by affection. As for playing with puppies and kittens, puppies generated the highest feeling of pleasure in all participants, proving the belief that dogs really are a man’s best friend. As for chocolate, the test also proved just a tiny taste is all it takes to generate a significant pleasure boost.

Recording people’s brainwaves while they were placed in different situations, neuroscientists from Birkbeck University have calibrated the first-ever scale to measure pleasure. Using MyndPlay EEG (electroencephalography) headsets to measure an individual’s brain activity, neuroscientists were able to create a scale enabling them to place a numerical value on the level of pleasure people gain from different experiences. Rating between -100 (most displeasurable) and +100 (most pleasurable) and based on intensity and duration of brain activity, various emotions such as affection, play, good fortune, visual stimulation and achievement were tested.

Women were found to find life more pleasurable, recording an average of 66.4 on the pleasure scale, while men fell behind at 58.2. In addition, men were revealed as most affected by winning money, scoring as high as 90.1 when they were surprised with £10, while women were less impressed, scoring 79.3.

Here is how researchers made the first ever scale for pleasure:

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University of London-Birkbeck College Press Release

The Irrational Consumer: Why Economics Is Dead Wrong About How We Make Choices

by Derek Thompson

Atlantic
January 16, 2013

A new paper reviews how psychology, biology, and neurology are ganging up on economics to prove that, when it comes to making decisions, people are anything but rational.

Daniel McFadden is an economist. But his new paper, "The New Science of Pleasure," shows the many ways economics fails to explain how we make decisions -- and what it can learn from psychology, anthropology, biology, and neurology.

The old economic theory of consumers says that "people should relish choice." And we do. Shopping can be fun, democracy is better than its alternatives, and a diverse and fully stocked grocery store ice cream freezer is quite nearly the closest thing to heaven on earth. But other fields of science tell a more complicated story. First, making a choice is physically exhausting, literally, so that somebody forced to make a number of decisions in a row is likely to get lazy and dumb. (That's one reason why stores place candy near the check-out aisle: They suspect your brain is too zonked to resist.) Second, having too many choices can make us less likely to come to a conclusion. In a famous study of the so-called "paradox of choice", psychologists Mark Lepper and Sheena Iyengar found that customers presented with six jam varieties were more likely to buy one than customers offered a choice of 24.

If you've read the work of Dan Ariely or Daniel Kahneman, you know exactly how far from perfectly rational we are when faced with a decision. Many of our mistakes stem from a central "availability bias." Our brains are computers, and we like to access recently opened files, even though many decisions require a deep body of information that might require some searching. Cheap example: We remember the first, last, and peak moments of certain experiences. So when we make a choice about how to spend a certain amount of time -- say, by going to Six Flags -- we forget that most of the time at an amusement park is spent waiting around doing nothing. Instead, we remember the thrill of the roller coaster. (This has been previously used to explain why people sometimes go back to disappointing old romantic partners, but that might be for another article.)

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Read the Paper

Gender Differences in Doing Favors

by Daniel Akst

Wall Street Journal
January 11, 2013

If the question is, “Can you do me a favor?” the answer is a lot more likely to be yes if the request is made of a woman.

That’s the implication of two studies conducted by six self-described “overcommitted ‘semi’-workaholic women” and presented at the recent annual meeting of the American Economics Association. In one study, MBA students were asked to recall agreeing to a favor on the job at a time when they preferred to say no. The female participants did the favor even though they were five times likelier to report having felt worn out, perhaps because they were also twice as likely to have been worried about the consequences of saying no.

In a second study, this one involving altruistic behavior in small groups, female undergraduates were 50% more likely to comply with an implicit request for a favor than were male students. The willingness of women to do favors in the workplace may lead them to become overburdened with low-skill tasks, making promotion less likely, the researchers said.

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Cerebral circuitry

by April Dembosky

Financial Times
January 3, 2013

I am flying. No plane, no wings, just me soaring over rooftops with a mild flip in my belly as I dip closer to the grid of city streets. I lean to the right to curve past a skyscraper, then speed up and tilt left to skirt by a tree. There has been an earthquake and I am looking for a lost child who is diabetic and needs insulin.

This is not a dream. I am awake, wearing my normal clothes – no cape or leotard – standing squarely on both feet in a room of the virtual reality laboratory at Stanford University.

About 70 test subjects have done the same simulation, half of them flying in a virtual helicopter, the other half granted the virtual superpower of flight. Half from each group have a mission: find and save the lost child.

After the simulation, head gear returned to a hook on the wall, a researcher reaches for her clipboard to ask a few questions. She accidentally knocks over a tin of pens. In sociology studies, this is a classic trick for measuring altruistic intent. The test subjects who flew Superman-style rushed to help clean up the spill. They responded four seconds faster and picked up two more pens on average than the helicopter passengers.

“If you are flying, you feel very powerful, so the sense of having power made people more generous, more altruistic,” says Robin Rosenberg, a clinical psychologist in San Francisco who helped design the study, accepted for publication in the e-journal Plos One. “It could also be that the desire to be helpful was directly related to conscious or unconscious associations to Superman,” she adds.

Many new technologies begin with such virtuous goals of making the world a better place and its citizens better people. But many come with hidden costs that take time to surface. Now that mainstream internet sites such as Google, Facebook and Amazon are all in close reach with a few touches of the smartphone in your pocket, the human side-effects of being constantly connected are starting to emerge.

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See also

Brazilian student auctions virginity

CNN
January 2, 2013

A Brazilian student set off a firestorm in her hometown by putting her virginity up for auction.

 

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How To Make Better New Year’s Resolutions

by Ray Fisman

Slate
December 31, 2012

It’s that season again, when we resolve to accomplish a list of goals in the coming year. Not infrequently, these are the goals that we were resolved to accomplish during the preceding year.

If you were to ask Princeton psychologist Eldar Shafir or Harvard economist Sendhil Mullainathan for a better New Year’s strategy, they’d likely suggest that the best resolution you can make is to do fewer things in 2013. The researchers argue that when busy people get busier, it leads to ignored deadlines, a cluttered desk, and a vicious cycle of falling further and further behind. Amid the disorder, a lot of bad decisions get made, and the best means of escape from this cycle may be a moratorium on new obligations.

Shafir and Mullainathan are leaders in the field of behavioral economics, which aims to apply insights from psychology to the study of economic decision-making. In their recent work, summarized in the forthcoming book, Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much, they use behavioral economics to explain why conditions of scarcity—whether of time or money—often lead people to make bad decisions.

Mullainathan and Shafir describe the problem of managing money as being akin to packing a suitcase. Someone with plenty of time has a near-empty suitcase. It requires little attention or effort to decide whether to go to a movie on the spur of the moment. By contrast, those with crowded schedules have a full suitcase: Adding a new item means removing something that’s already been packed. Deciding how to rearrange your metaphorical suitcase takes time and energy and can lead to stress and sleepless nights. Indeed, the shortage of space itself can be responsible for bad decisions that, in turn, only make the problem worse.

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