Test your ability to distinguish genuine smiles from fake ones at BBC Science. You’ll get your results when you’ve finished, plus a discussion of why most people do a bad job at spotting fake smiles.

To put your ability to read faces to a different challenge, check out “Let’s face it: test your understanding of facial expressions” from the Mediation Channel vaults.

You can also test the sex of your brain, or amuse yourself with a full array of other online psychological tests and surveys.

(Hat tip to Cognitive Daily.)

Photo credit: Sanja Gjenero.

We mediators play midwife to decision making. We patiently assist in an arduous and sometimes painful process while parties labor, struggling to make the right choices in difficult circumstances. We strive to ensure that those who weigh those choices are able to reach rational decisions based on accurate and complete information.

But just how rational are the decisions that people make, whether at the mediation table or anywhere else? How much control do any of us really exert over those choices?

A new book has some surprising answers and explains why it is that we are more susceptible than we realize to the vagaries of our own minds and vulnerable to the forces of emotions and social norms. Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions, written by Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist, the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Behavioral Economics at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, and a visiting professor at Duke University.

As much fun as the book (and of course more interactive) is the Predictably Irrational web site. Don’t miss the Demonstrations page with cool optical illusions and games you can test yourself with.

In a punchy headline, the ABA Journal sums up the message a U.S. Supreme Court justice has for his critics in “I’m Conservative, But Not Biased, Scalia Says … So Get Over Bush v. Gore“, a story about Scalia’s recent interview with the TV news magazine 60 Minutes.

As I read the story, I thought back on other controversial cases in which those critics questioned Scalia’s ability to be impartial. For example, there’s the infamous duck hunting trip with Cheney, when a case involving the Vice President was pending before the Court. Despite Scalia’s insistence that “I do not think my impartiality could reasonably be questioned”, folks who understood something about the subtle tools of persuasion weren’t so reassured. One of those tools, reciprocity, is what creates a powerful sense of obligation when we receive a gift from someone else.

What makes bias so pernicious is that all too often we are blissfully unaware of our own. I’m guessing that maybe all that certainty is simply evidence that Scalia has fallen victim to one of the most pervasive of cognitive errors, overconfidence bias, which explains why a large majority of us place ourselves in the statistically impossible top percentile when it comes to things like driving skills, intelligence, negotiating abilities, even humor. As two Cornell University researchers put it, most of us are unskilled and unaware of it (PDF).

Scalia is undoubtedly conservative. But unbiased? Given how blind we all are to our own biases, this makes a good case for settling before trial; it’s tough enough being at the mercy of our own cognitive errors. Why be at the mercy of those of the judge, too?

American magazine columnist Marilyn vos Savant once posed the following question, submitted by a reader:

Suppose you’re on a game show, and you’re given the choice of three doors. Behind one door is a car, behind the others, goats. You pick a door, say #1, and the host, who knows what’s behind the doors, opens another door, say #3, which has a goat. He says to you, “Do you want to pick door #2?” Is it to your advantage to switch your choice of doors?

A large majority number of readers answered that question with “No”. Many assumed that the host’s action in opening one of the three doors changes the probability of the remaining choices, so that there was now a 1/2 chance that the door you selected is a winner, meaning you should probably stick with your original decision.

The answer, surprisingly though, is yes, it is to your advantage to change your mind:

Yes; you should switch. The first door has a 1/3 chance of winning, but the second door has a 2/3 chance…

The winning odds of 1/3 on the first choice can’t go up to 1/2 just because the host opens a losing door. To illustrate this, let’s say we play a shell game. You look away, and I put a pea under one of three shells. Then I ask you to put your finger on a shell. The odds that your choice contains a pea are 1/3, agreed? Then I simply lift up an empty shell from the remaining other two. As I can (and will) do this regardless of what you’ve chosen, we’ve learned nothing to allow us to revise the odds on the shell under your finger.

This answer provoked enraged responses, many from mathematicians who were certain vos Savant’s answer was wrong. Even in the face of proof that she was correct, people insisted that it could not be so.

It’s fascinating to observe cognitive error in action as people fiercely refuse to change their minds, despite evidence to the contrary.

For a discussion of why this is so, read “Are You Smart Enough to Change Your Mind?” from 7P Productions, which links to the vos Savant article and to a fun interactive version of the Monty Hall problem, goats included, which includes an explanation of how the game works.

Joshua Correll, a member of the University of Chicago Department of Psychology faculty, in conjunction with his work with the Stereotyping & Prejudice Research Laboratory, has created The Police Officer’s Dilemma, a video game that tests the effect of racial bias on decisions to shoot.

When you launch the game, you are presented with a series of images of young men against various backgrounds. Some of the men hold guns, while others hold innocent items like cellphones or soda cans. Half of the men are black and half are white. You must shoot all armed men but holster your gun at the sight of those who are unarmed. The game tests whether the target’s race influences the decision to shoot. The results are chilling:

Participants shoot an armed target more quickly and more often when that target is Black, rather than White. However, participants decide not to shoot an unarmed target more quickly and more often when the target is White, rather than Black. In essence, participants seem to process stereotype-consistent targets (armed Blacks and unarmed Whites) more easily than counterstereotypic targets (unarmed Blacks and armed Whites).

To play the game, you can test yourself with the beta version. You may be shocked by the results.

(Via On the Ground.)

How perceptive are you? How accurately do you see the world?

With a quiz created by Jeremy Wolfe, Ph.D., of Brigham and Women’s Hospital Visual Attention Lab and Harvard Medical School, test yourself for change blindness — the perplexing difficulty that all of us have in perceiving alterations in the things that are right in front of our eyes.

As philosopher Henri Bergson once said, “The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.”

(Thanks to Stephanie West Allen for so kindly sending me the link to this story.)

According to the Boston Globe, brain scans reveal cultural differences in perception between Asians and Westerners:

Western culture, they have found, conditions people to think of themselves as highly independent entities. And when looking at scenes, Westerners tend to focus on central objects more than on their surroundings.

In contrast, East Asian cultures stress interdependence. When Easterners take in a scene, they tend to focus more on the context as well as the object: the whole block, say, rather than the BMW parked in the foreground.

To use a camera analogy, “the Americans are more zoom and the East Asians are more panoramic,” said Dr. Denise Park of the Center for Brain Health at the University of Texas in Dallas. “The Easterner probably sees more, and the Westerner probably sees less, but in more detail.”

You can test your own perceptions using the gallery of images that accompany this article.

This weekend I finished reading Steven Johnson’s The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic — and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World. A recounting of nineteenth-century London’s battle with cholera, it proved to be one of those books so riveting I could not bear to put it down.

It is at bottom an etiology of error — uncovering how mistaken beliefs about the causes of disease take hold, thrive, and persist, with disastrous consequences for public health. It considers important questions:

The history of knowledge conventionally focuses on the breakthrough ideas and conceptual leaps. But the blind spots on the map, the dark continents of error and prejudice, carry their own mystery as well. How could so many intelligent people be so grievously wrong for such an extended period of time? How could they ignore so much overwhelming evidence that contradicted their most basic theories? These questions, too, deserve their own discipline — the sociology of error.

This book delivers as well a message of optimism about intellectual courage and unblinkered vision — how two men struggled to cast off bad ideas and pursue better ones — ideas that ultimately led to the defeat of a deadly disease.

For anyone fascinated by human judgment and cognition, this book offers a reminder, rooted in history, of the importance of the second glance, of the ability to see anew.

They say you should believe nothing you hear and only half of what you see.

There’s nothing like an optical illusion to remind us of the truth of that aphorism. At Cognitive Daily you’ll find not only a great optical illusion but also an explanation of why we see what we see.

In addition, there’s a link to Arthur Shapiro’s Illusions and Demonstrations for Visual Research, the source for this particular bit of visual trickery, along with several others that delightfully fool the senses.

And for still more, visit a site I recently discovered, Akiyoshi’s Illusion Pages — which actually come with a health advisory.

Deepak Malhotra and Max H. Bazerman, professors at Harvard Business School and recognized negotiation experts, have published a paper available to the public for downloading that ponders the “Psychological Influence in Negotiation: An Introduction Long Overdue“. (Direct link to PDF download here.)

For anyone who studies or teaches negotiation, or negotiates frequently (and that, my friends, includes every single one of you — any time you’re trying to talk things through with someone else, you’re negotiating), this paper provides important information presented in an accessible and highly readable format.

This paper discusses the causes and consequences of the (surprisingly) limited extent towhich social influence research has penetrated the field of negotiation, and then presents a framework for bridging the gap between these two literatures. The paper notes that one of the reasons for its limited impact on negotiation research is that extant research on social influence focuses almost exclusively on economic or structural levers of influence. With this in mind, the aper seeks to achieve five objectives:

(1) Define the domain of psychological influence as consisting of those tactics which do not require the influencer to change the economic or structural aspects of the bargaining situation in order to persuade the target;

(2) Review prior research on behavioral decision making to identify ideas that may be relevant to the domain of psychological influence;

(3) Provide a series of examples of how behavioral decision research can be leveraged to create psychological influence tactics for use in negotiation;

(4) Consider the other side of influence, i.e., how targets of influence might defend against the tactics herein considered; and

(5) Consider some of the ethical issues surrounding the use of psychological influence in negotiation.

To consider how best to influence your counterpart at the negotiation table and counter in turn the influence they themselves wield, you’ll want to read more.

For learning more about mastering negotiation, in particular the power of influence and persuasion, Malhotra and Bazerman’s recent book, Negotiation Genius: How to Overcome Obstacles and Achieve Brilliant Results at the Bargaining Table and Beyond, serves as an excellent resource.

If you’ve ever been in an argument over what you thought you heard someone else say, the results of a recent study should come as no surprise.

They suggest that when you hear something, it may not sound the same to me.

From Scientific American Mind & Brain:

…Scientists at the University of Oxford are trying to understand how the ears and the brain work together. They fit ferrets with auditory implants, trained them to respond to sound, and then looked at the way their neurons reacted. It turns out that each ferret’s neurons in the auditory cortex responded to changes in gradual differences in sound ­ but each ferret responded differently.

The researchers say this is applicable to humans. They say this means that our brains are wired to process sounds depending on how our ears deliver that sound. So if you suddenly heard the world through my ears, it might sound quite different.

This explains a lot…

A friend recently sent me a link to the Edge World Question Center. Each year, Edge, a foundation that promotes inquiry into and discussion of intellectual, philosophical, artistic, and literary issues, poses a question to the world’s leading thinkers.

This year’s question, “What Have You Changed Your Mind About? Why?“, prompted many answers, to which I keep returning to explore.

It’s a good question, and one I’ve pondered often. Last March I asked, “Since when is changing your mind a bad thing?“:

There is no greater insult in America today than “flip-flopper”, a label anyone with political ambitions is eager to avoid. It’s as if the act of changing one’s mind as the result of reasoned self-reflection is somehow as shameful, as, say, lying about sex with an intern, rather than a mark of maturity and character.

Certainly anyone who changes their views with the prevailing wind as a matter of political expediency deserves our condemnation, as do those who fail to keep their promises, both political and otherwise.

But as a mediator I have to ask, what’s so great about consistency anyway? If you’re going in the wrong direction, what’s the problem with heading in a better one? When exactly did it get to be a bad thing to change your mind?

Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, in considering the question Edge posed, had this to say as he contemplated his own change of mind:

When a politician changes his mind, he is a ‘flip-flopper.’ Politicians will do almost anything to disown the virtue — as some of us might see it — of flexibility. Margaret Thatcher said, “The lady is not for turning.” Tony Blair said, “I don’t have a reverse gear.” Leading Democratic Presidential candidates, whose original decision to vote in favour of invading Iraq had been based on information believed in good faith but now known to be false, still stand by their earlier error for fear of the dread accusation: ‘flip-flopper’. How very different is the world of science. Scientists actually gain kudos through changing their minds. If a scientist cannot come up with an example where he has changed his mind during his career, he is hidebound, rigid, inflexible, dogmatic! It is not really all that paradoxical, when you think about it further, that prestige in politics and science should push in opposite directions.

What about you? Are you ready to exercise your reverse gear? Or, like Blair, do you deny owning one?

What have you changed your mind about?

How others see us may be very different from how we see ourselves.

But how to map the overlaps and gaps between their perception and our own? How can we see that self more completely?

Professional mediator and tech expert Tammy Lenski points us to a tool that can help us see that total picture: an interactive Johari window that allows users to map personality awareness with the aid of friends, family, and colleagues.

Interested in finding more online tools that test self-knowledge? Visit this post from the MediationChannel.com vaults: “Hidden agenda: online test reveals conscious and subconscious biases“, which links to several, including Project Implicit, which tests for implicit associations, and the Moral Sense Test, an ongoing study of moral intuition.

Anais Nin once said, “We don’t see things as they are. We see them as we are.”

Indeed, numerous studies have demonstrated how easily our senses can be fooled. We are susceptible to influences of which we are unaware, which can shape our perception and judgments. Consider, for example, the extraordinary optical illusion in a BBC video, “The Mind’s Eye”. As the narrator says,

It’s an astonishing example of how much our visual memories, our imaginations, can influence what is right in front of our eyes.

However, knowing our propensity for making these errors, we can be alert for them. Are you ready?

As a trainer of negotiation and conflict resolution skills, I love using optical illusions to demonstrate the fallibility of our perception. They alert us that our senses can be unreliable and susceptible to influence. And they remind us that it is always possible to see things differently. The ability to be alert to errors in thinking and judgment that any of us are prone to is of course essential to anyone who is negotiating or resolving a dispute.

Here are two optical illusions I was recently introduced to that I’ve incorporated into my training. Both of us these can be found at Michael Bach’s web site, 75 Optical Illusions & Visual Phenomena.

The first is Shepard’s “Terror Subterra”, a cool interactive illusion that demonstrates how perspective can bias us.

The second is Shepard’s “Turning the Tables”, an interactive illusion with tables that appear to be of different dimensions but are in fact identical, with the ability to test the visual effect for yourself. It’s extraordinary how knowing the truth doesn’t necessarily prevent us from making mistakes in our thinking.