This from Newsweek:
Memo to restaurant owners: if there are particular dishes you want more customers to order, list them on the right side of the menu…
Simply put, we associate the side of space where we’re clumsier with bad, stupid, dishonest, unhappy and other negative qualities, finds Daniel Casasanto of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands.
In a series of five clever studies, reported Aug. 1 in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, he had university students take tests probing their unconscious attitudes toward the left and right side of the world. In one, 219 students from Stanford University and the University of California, Riverside, were told that a cartoon character loves zebras but hates pandas (or vice versa). On a paper with two boxes side by side, they had to draw a zebra in one and a panda in the other. A majority (74 percent) of left-handers drew the “good” animal in the box on the left, while most (67 percent) of the right-handers drew the good animal in the box on the right. Digging deeper into the statistics, it turns out that right-handers were nearly six times more likely than lefties to place the good animal on the right and the bad animal on the left. “Right-handers’ responses were consistent with the mental metaphor Good Is Right, and left-handers’ with the mental metaphor Good Is Left,” says Casasanto.
In my favorite experiment, Casasanto showed 286 student volunteers pictures of “Fribbles” (aliens from the planet Fribbalia, of course) arrayed in two columns, side by side on a page. Between each pair was an instruction, such as “Circle the Fribble who looks more intelligent”—or more attractive, more honest, happier, less intelligent, less attractive, less honest, sadder. Of the participants who showed a directional preference, most left-handers (65 percent) attributed positive characteristics more often to Fribbles on the left, while most right-handers (54 percent) attributed positive characteristics more often to Fribbles on the right. Statistical analysis showed that righties were about twice as likely as southpaws to attribute positive characteristics to Fribbles on the right side.
There’s plenty more in the full piece, but why’ve I blogged about it on a political blog?
Partly because of its intrinsic interest, but also because it is but one example of a large volume of research in recent years that highlights how susceptible we are to very subtle cues. Sometimes the results are amusing. Sometimes they’re bizarre. Sometimes they’re problematic.
What is common about them is how often the decisions we make are influenced by factors many people would absolutely rubbish if presented to them cold: ” What? You mean I might think the photo of one PPC candidate looks more honest than another, just because of where it is on the page? Ha ha ha ha – you must be REALLY STUPID”.
(You think that caricature is unfair? Look back at some of the commentary across the internet in response to Lynne Featherstone’s proposal for anonymous job applications and you’ll find plenty of people who think it unthinkable that someone other than an out and out racist might have a subconscious bias against someone triggered by their name.)
Faced with such a range of subtle cues, where small details can have big impacts on people’s behaviour, there can be a sharp and tricky conflict between not wanting to micro-manage, but also knowing that it’s the micro-level effects which can have large impacts. Good policy making will require an understanding of both sides of that tension.
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4 Comments
While it’s certainly true that a lot of recent research has pointed to a significant number of subconcious factors that affect our decision-making, it’s worth taking on board that these factors become substantially less significant when the subjects have time to reason about their decisions. The experiments you mention involve making fairly quick superficial assessments of situations, in which subconcious factors are a far bigger factor.
In the case of determining which applicants should be invited to interview, one would hope that employers would spend more time deciding on this matter than the sort of quick flick-through of CVs that these sort of factors would affect.
This article does raise an interesting question that may be worthy for further research – are left-handed people more likely to be left wing?
Your response about subtle clues is interesting, but the research you link to feels bogus.
It seems to me which animal ends up in which box is simply a function of which animal you draw first. A right-handed person is more likely to draw in the left box first, so that they do not smudge the drawing when they draw the other animal. A left-handed person, conversely, would be more likely to draw in the right box first.
Maybe when asked to draw a good thing and a bad thing, between two-thirds and three-quarters of us draw the bad thing first, irrespective of our handedness. Maybe we are simply more likely to draw the thing we heard most recently first.
And the item about circling the more favourable from two Fribbles doesn’t say they are ever asked to circle the less favourable. Since the right hand Fribble is closest to the pen of the right handed person, I’d guess they are more likely to circle it, all other things being equal.
With the job applications and product descriptions, it doesn’t say how they indicated the items they preferred. But if they put a mark on either side of the paper, again it could simply be that given a choice between otherwise equal options in an experiment, we choose the one closest to our pen.
But perhaps I missed something.
I’ve always thought it odd that about 50% of my local party exec are left handed (inc me)!
Is is true that the further to the left you go the more stupid you appear.
Just look at Labour :oD