Decision making: who holds sway?
By pearsonj123
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While it is true that some of Rene Descartes’ most famous works are his meditations on the separation of the mind from the body and senses, of arguably equal import is the method by which he came to his conclusions. The first rule Descartes (1637/1964) set for himself was “never to accept anything as true unless I recognised it to be certainly and evidently such”, and it is in this spirit that we must view the relationship between the human body and mind with regard to decision making. Furthermore, if this relationship can be clearly defined based upon the evidence available, I will seek to do so.
Decision making processes are rather broad and involve, for example, decisions made between several choices or judging the quality of some thing or person, and so on and so forth. Shall we, then, begin at the beginning? In 1946 Solomon Asch demonstrated the influence that small changes in presented information can have on the decisions people make when judging the character of another individual. Participants were asked, in the first of several experiments, to describe their impression of a person having heard they were: ‘energetic’, ‘talkative’, ‘warm/cold’, ‘ironical’, ‘inquisitive’, and ‘persuasive’. Group A heard the person described as ‘warm’, group B as ‘cold’, a manipulation that produced consistent differences in the impressions formed; for example, 91% of group A described the person as ‘generous’ compared to just 8% of group B. This striking difference was also evident for characteristics such as ‘good-natured’ and ‘popular’, and was regarded by the researcher as indicative of the importance of a warm vs cold dimension in directing the unconscious choices made in impression formation.
Despite stark and consistent contrasts in decision making brought on by manipulation of ‘warmth’ information, issues with this research limit the extent to which we might take the word of Solomon Asch as final. First and foremost it has, like many ‘classic’ psychology studies, been subject to recent failed replications. In a critical examination and replication of Asch’s (1946) research Nauts, Langner, Huijsmans, Vonk, and Wigboldus (2014) revealed that far from being the key characteristic in defining the impressions we form about another person, warmth was highly context-dependent; this despite work from others suggesting that the dimensions of warmth and competence account for 82% of variance in decisions and evaluations made about behaviour (Fiske, Cuddy, & Glick, 2007).
Second, the number of participants included in the Asch (1946) experiment is, I would suggest, insufficient; just 166 individuals - 90 in group A and 76 in group B - in a study whose findings were reported as being of great import and magnitude. The number of participants included in a study becomes more obviously tied to the validity of psychological investigation when we consider the influence on effect size, a measure of the ‘true’ strength of a certain phenomenon or the extent to which it is present in the general population. Statistically significant findings may, in a real-world sense, be non-significant if their effect size is trivial (Plomin, 2018). With smaller sample sizes we often see inflated effect sizes and, perhaps, estimations of the impact of a particular psychological effect (Kühberger, Fritz, & Scherndl, 2014). Following the results of quantitative research from Gignac and Szodorai (2016), whose recommendations have improved upon those of Cohen (1988) according to the authors, Asch falls short of the 190 participants needed to achieve just a medium effect size. The findings reported by Asch may, therefore, be entirely acceptable under the circumstances within which his data were collected, however they are less applicable to the endless decision making circumstances that occur in the real world.
There will undoubtedly be methodological issues in replication studies too, and there have been changes in how researchers are expected to conduct and report statistical analyses - since it is unlikely that effect sizes were regularly calculated in 1946 when Asch conducted his seminal research. However, the issues described above do, at the very least, suggest that while changes in the information presented to our bodily senses can alter decision making processes, this is not a constant and predictable relationship. Asch’s work is highly regarded and, subsequently, has directed many studies seeking to extend his findings. The continuation of investigations into the influence of the body on the mind’s ability to make decisions means that it is impossible to end this debate by simply directing the reader to issues identified in a single piece of, arguably, outdated research.
Two studies conducted by Williams and Bargh (2008) show the ongoing work seeking to expand upon the findings of the likes of Solomon Asch. The researchers hoped to comprehensively demonstrate the relationship between automatic thoughts brought on by sensory experiences of warmth, the decisions we make about others and how we behave towards them. In the first experiment, participants primed with warmth or cold by holding a cup of warm or iced coffee for a confederate were asked to rate another person who had been described as ‘intelligent’, ‘skilful’, ‘industrious’, ‘determined’, ‘practical’, and ‘cautious’. The authors observed that participants who held warm coffee rated the other person as warmer. In the second study, participants were asked to rate the effectiveness of a randomly assigned hot or cold therapeutic gel pack and then choose a reward for themselves or for a friend. Participants who had handled the cold pack were more likely to act selfishly and choose a reward for themselves. These findings were taken as evidence that warm tactile sensations cause individuals to judge others as warmer in general and to behave more altruistically too.
Williams and Bargh (2008) presented their results as a rather groundbreaking demonstration of how even the briefest interaction with a product can change our decision making behaviour. However, it seems that this work has followed on from that of Asch (1946) in more than just its direction of inquiry, since it has been subject to several failed replication attempts. Lynott et al. (2014) closely followed the procedure of Williams and Bargh’s therapeutic gel pack research in three separate laboratories, failing to replicate the effect in each or even when the three studies were considered as a whole. This failed replication is particularly important because of its large sample size, with data gathered from 861 participants across three research sites compared to the 53 participants used by Williams and Bargh. Given this discrepancy in sample size and the inflating influence limited numbers of participants can have on the magnitude of observed phenomena, it is clear that manipulations of warmth perception are not, when a sample size more representative of the general population is used, unequivocally tied to decisions made about the character of another person and how we behave towards them.
While the human experience of temperature appears not to have a clear and definite affect on decision making processes, casting doubt over the indivisible relationship between body and mind, clarity may be found in evaluations of influences that the state of the human body can have on the mind. Carney, Cuddy, and Yap (2010) proposed a body-feedback hypothesis based on an ‘as if’ principle, i.e. if the body is in a particular state the mind will respond as if it is in a congruent state. The researchers had participants assume either low-power or high-power postures before completing a risky decision making task, hypothesising that confident and powerful poses would induce a more confident and powerful mindset resulting in an increased tendency to engage in risky behaviours. High-power posers were, it was observed, more likely to engage in risky decision making and also exhibited a marked increase in testosterone levels compared to low-power posers whose testosterone levels decreased.
High levels of circulating testosterone have previously been associated with lower levels of risk aversion in women (Sapienza, Zingales, & Maestripieri, 2009), however Carney, Cuddy, and Yap (2010) reported that changes in testosterone levels and, therefore, in risk-taking behaviours were brought on by changes in body posture. These findings garnered notable attention yet, once again, we must consider their failure to replicate. Ranehill et al. (2015) conducted a conceptual replication of the original work, wherein a significant effect of power-posing on self-reported feelings of power but no effect on hormonal levels or behaviour was reported.
This supposed irreplicability was swiftly countered by Carney, Cuddy, and Yap (2015) who published a review of 33 successful replications, focusing on the differences between their work, these studies, and the failed replication from Ranehill and colleagues. These 33 successful replications became simply “successful” replications after an evaluation of this reviewed literature found the distribution of significance values of these replications was almost identical to those expected if the average effect size were zero (Simmons & Simonsohn, 2017). This to and fro resulted in Dana Carney - author of the original power-posing research - publishing a statement which, among other things, qualified that she does not think the embodied effects of power poses are real.
In what state, then, does this back and forth between studies and their failure to replicate leave our understanding of the relationship between the body and the mind with regard to decision making? Research demonstrating the influence of tactile sensations of warmth on judgements of human character, and the state of the body on the state of the mind may be superficially meaningful but largely incomprehensive, succumbing to issues of sample size and irreproducibility. Indeed, it seems that for every study confirming effects of unconscious/bodily influences on the mind’s ability to make decisions, there is a failed replication - or, indeed, a methodological issue to be ruminated on - which rules this study as indicative of little and less, suggesting the body and mind might not be so related after all. One might, therefore, because of the lack of an unequivocal demonstration of the inseparability of body and mind assume that no such relationship exists.
However, while the back and forth between confirmation and replication prevents any definite ruling, it is important to understand that replication studies and, indeed, their failing is a vital aspect of the self-correcting nature of scientific research. Popper (1959) recognised that for a scientific discovery to be called so, it must be reproduced under the same circumstances reliably. Should a theory be irreproducible a more appropriate one is developed, thus directing future research within an increasingly narrow field of the unknown.
Following these guidelines, the state of psychological inquiry into the body-mind relationship with regard to decision making appears relatively standard. Large claims made by authors about their original findings have been scaled back following failed replications. I would suggest that the phenomena described by the likes of Asch (1946), Williams and Bargh (2008), and Carney et al. (2010) do exist, but their magnitude and relevance to society were overstated, perhaps in response to a perceived pressure from publishing journals. There is little doubt that editorial practices with regard to psychology journals have traditionally been biased toward novel findings. Martin and Clarke (2017) reviewed these editorial practices in an examination of the published aims of over 1000 psychology journals, observing that just 3% of reviewed journals accepted replications. With such a hostile approach to the publishing of replication studies one can see why researchers might refrain from attempting them and why, consequently, the magnitude of psychological phenomena remain overstated. Only by carrying out more replication studies will the true effects of these phenomena be discerned (Button et al., 2013).
As stated previously, it is likely that the findings reported in the research described above
do exist to an extent. Yet it is unlikely that they reveal anything deeply meaningful about
the relationship between the body and the mind with regard to decision making processes.
Despite what may in fact be an inseparable relationship between the two, neither the body
nor the mind is entirely responsible for the other. Their association is dynamic (Carney et
al., 2010), with decision making processes and behavioural responses moulded and
informed by the entire situation that one finds oneself in.
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