Hack99.Spread a Bad Mood Around

Hack 99. Spread a Bad Mood Around

Have you ever found yourself in a confrontational mood for no reason? It could come down to what you've been reading.

We know our moods are affected by the world around us. It's easy to come home from a day at work when everything's gone wrong and stay grumpy for the rest of the evening. Then there are days when your mood is good or bad for no apparent reason at all. I've had miserable-mood days because I've finished a really great, but sad, novel in the morning and not even connected my mood with the book until that night. Thinking about mood like this, the regular way, makes us consider moods as long-timescale phenomena that we just have to live with, like the weather. Like the weather, moods in this frame seem impenetrable to understanding. Instead, it's good to take a different approach: how do moods begin? What's the smallest thing we can do that has an effect on our mood?

That's what this hack is about, showing that the words we encounter can make us ruder people in a matter of minutesand not words that are meant to elicit a strong emotional response or ones that are taken to heart, but ones in the context of an innocuous word puzzle.

10.8.1. In Action

Puzzles are an excellent way to get people to keep words in mind for a substantial time. One such puzzle is the scrambled sentence test. Given a scrambled sentence of five words, such as "he it hides finds instantly," you have to make as many four-word sentences as you can, as fast as you can.

John Bargh, Mark Chen, and Lara Burrows used this test style¹ and incorporated 15 words to do with impolite behavior: "aggressively," "intrude," "brazen," and so on. They also had polite and neutral versions of the test. The subjects were unaware there were different forms of the test at this time and also unaware of the real point of the experiment.

Each subject spent about 5 minutes doing the puzzle, but that (of course) wasn't the point of the experiment. The critical point came when a subject stepped out of the room to say he'd finished, only to see the person running the experiment engaged in conversation. The question was: would he interrupt? Only just over 15% of those who'd been puzzling over polite words interrupted within 10 minutes, while of those who'd been using words like "obnoxious," more than 60%four times as manyinterrupted in that same 10-minute period.

Participants who did interrupt also did so faster if they'd been using the words about impoliteness: they took an average of 5¹/₂ minutes to intrude versus more than 9 minutes for everyone else, even when you discounted the 85% of the politely primed group who didn't interrupt at all.

You can try a more subjective version of this procedure by using a technique called the Velten Procedure² to automatically induce moods in groups of people, then see if you can spot the difference. This technique uses, as developed by Velten in the 1960s, sheets of paper full of either positive or negative statements. So make a bunch of copies of two sets of statements (there are some samples online at http://www.dur.ac.uk/m.j.eacott/cogmem3.txt). The positive page should say things like "I am a worthwhile person," "I feel good about myself," and "People like me." The negative one should have phrases like "Nothing I do ever turns out right," "People feel contempt for me," and "I am a bad person."

Choose a sheet and read it to yourself for 5 minutes. By the time you finish, you really will feel happier or glummer. It's amazing how strong the effect is.

The effect is stronger still with a roomful of people. So, find such a room, and leave everybody with a positive Velten and tell them to read it to themselves for 5 minutes. When you come back, everyone should be jubilant. But try leaving another group the negative Velten. The atmosphere will be distinctly cold on your return. It goes to show the importance of social feedback in creating and amplifying mood.

In my final year of college, I made myself a "study Velten" to take to the library: "I like revising," "My concentration is in top form today," "Nothing will distract me from work today."

T.S.

10.8.2. How It Works

The experiment goes to show that only 5 minutes of manipulating wordsjust words, not personal commentary or difficult situationshas a noticeable effect on behavior. It's a variety of concept priming [Hack #81], in which reading words associated with a particular concept subtly brings that concept to mind, from where it enters your thoughts at some point in the future.

What's true for words bringing word concepts to mind is also true for face rubbing or foot jiggling [Hack #98] . Merely perceiving someone else performing the action activates the concept of that action in your brain, and it becomes more likely.

Bargh et al., with the scrambled sentence test influencing politeness, and the Velten Procedure, both show that there's a crossover between words and behavior. There's a commonality between how the meaning of impoliteness, written down, is represented in the brain, and the representation of the behavior of being impolite. Precisely how this works, we don't know, only that the effect can be observed.

Something to be aware of is that negative emotions are contagious (we already know that emotions are picked up just from observation [Hack #95] ), so a whole bad-tempered exchange can be triggered subliminally by something quite irrelevent.

Chen and Bargh³ did another experiment involving pairs of people playing a guessing game together. One of the pair had been subliminally shown pictures that would put her in a hostile mood.

In carefully controlled circumstances, tapes of the guessing game interaction were listened to, and the participants' behavior rated. Three things were discovered: people who had been subliminally activated as hostile (using pictures they couldn't consciously see) were indeed judged to be more hostile. The partners in the guessing game, encountering this hostility, themselves became more hostile. And finally, both participants judged the other as more hostile than they would have done if the subliminal exposure had not taken place.

All of this happens more or less automatically. Our moods are governed by what we encounter; if we're not looking out for it, we don't even get a say on whether to accept the influence or not.

10.8.3. In Real Life

Let's say you have a meeting scheduled at which you know you're going to have to put your foot down. There's no reason you shouldn't have a Make Me Angry application to subliminally flash angry faces on your monitor for 5 minutes beforehand, if you really want to step into that encounter in a bad mood. Is this any different from talking yourself up before a big meeting or game?

One specific detail of Chen and Bargh's experiment on contagious hostility should give us serious pause. To invoke the hostile mood, the experimenters used faces that activated a racial stereotype in the participants. Given we walk slower having considered the stereotype of the elderly [Hack #100], the fact that a stereotype can affect us deeply isn't a surprise, but that it's a racial stereotype is saddening. Chen and Bargh performed this experiment to show that this kind of racial stereotyping is a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you anticipate someone is going to be hostile, you become so yourself, and you infect the other person with that mood. Your stereotype is thus reinforced, without having any necessary basis in truth to begin with. It's alarmingly easy to push people into roles without realizing it and to find our own prejudices confirmed.

10.8.4. End Notes

1. Bargh, J. A., Chen, M., & Burrows, L. (1996). Automaticity of social behavior: Direct effects of trait construct and stereotype activation on action. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 71(2), 230-244.

2. Velten, E. (1968). A laboratory task for induction of mood states. Behavior Research and Therapy, 6, 473-482.

3. Chen, M., & Bargh, J. A. (1997). Nonconscious behavioral confirmation processes: The self-fulfilling consequences of automatic stereotype activation. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 33, 541-560.