🧠The psychology of being selfish, rejecting facts and helping others
First off, we look at the psychology behind why we don't accept new facts.
Then an explanation of how mental illusions allow us to act selfishly.
A new study looks at how children become sceptical (and that they don't actually believe everything they're told).
And finally, the different ways payment affects willingness to help others, depending on your personality.
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Why we don’t accept new facts
Sometimes we don’t accept new information, even when the facts are clearly laid out. Why is that?
A new study suggests why that may be. And it’s down to a combination of loss aversion and the endowment affect.
Loss aversion says that we’re about twice as sensitive to loss as we are to gain. The endowment effect is connected to this. It’s that we value things more just because they are ours already.
And it turns out this applies to information as well as money and actual possessions.
More often than not, we assemble our information through searching it out online. The study suggests that this effort makes us value the information more.
So even when more comprehensive information becomes available, we don’t want to give up “our” information that we’ve made our own.
It turns out, as the study says that “unprecedented access to information complicates and potentially changes the way we value it”.
Photo by Tima Miroshnichenko
Why do we act selfishly?
Like optical illusions trick our eyes, moral illusions can affect our decision making ability, And we’re more selfish as a result.
That’s the finding from Kajsa Hansson, at Linköping University.
We tend to “tweak our morals” in certain scenarios for self benefit. The “moral wiggle room” that we give ourselves.
These situations tend to occur in competitive situations. “Our psychological mechanisms cause us to assess fairness differently, depending on whether we are successful or not.
“This is particularly the case when we lack information about the fairness of the situation. When the brain attempts to fill in missing information, it may create an image that does not match reality – in the same way as occurs for an optical illusion.”
So if we’re losing a game we may say the referee was biased or someone was cheating. Conversely, if we win, it’s because we played well. Which “may describe why successful people are inclined to believe the world is a meritocracy.”
She also finds that we are also reluctant to seek out information that - say - risks making us feel bad about decisions - and might force us to act unselfishly.
Photo by Timur Weber
How we become sceptical
Don’t believe the saying, It turns out children do NOT believe everything they are told.
A new study looks at how children learn and become more sceptical as they age.
Children learn in two ways. From what others tell them (especially adults) and also through their own observation and experimentation.
So when they are told something surprising - for example that a rock is in fact soft, not hard - they will conduct their own experiments to test the new fact.
The study revealed different motivations behind this depending on the age of the child.
Older children are skeptical and want to test what they’ve been told whereas younger children explore because they believed what they had been told and wanted to see the surprising event in action.
Photo by Monstera
Does payment affect people’s willingness to help?
Previous social psychology research has suggested that payment tends to make people LESS likely to help others.
For example to give blood. Perhaps because they are concerned others think they are only doing it for the money.
But a new study from the universities of Würzburg and Frankfurt suggests that it’s different for people with lower levels of empathy.
Their findings suggest that “a financial bonus increases the efficiency of decisions in favour of the other person in low empathic people, but not in high empathic participants”
But it did not actually make them more empathetic. It “only increased the efficiency of the concrete decision”
Photo by RODNAE Productions
As ever, if there's anything we can help with, do get in touch.
James, Patrick and Dan
We practically apply the science of the human mind for hard, commercial results
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