The Psychologist August 2014

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psychologist vol 27 no 8

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Creative Britain Stephanie Taylor looks at how social psychology explains the phenomenon

Incorporating Psychologist Appointments £5 or free to members of The British Psychological Society

letters 558 news 566 careers 614 looking back 628

the end of dyslexia? 576 does executive coaching work? 582 ‘smarter thinking’ in sport 596 interview: Diane Halpern 602

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Creative Britain Stephanie Taylor looks at how social psychology explains the phenomenon

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The end of dyslexia?

576 Julian Elliott and Elena Grigorenko argue that the label is a cultural meme that remains unscientific and conceptually problematic 590

July 2014 issue 47,149 dispatched Printed by Warners Midlands plc on 100 per cent recycled paper. Please re-use or recycle.

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Does executive coaching work? … and if so, how? Nadine Page and Erik de Haan consider the evidence.

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Smarter thinking in sport Martin James Turner describes his use of rational emotive behaviour therapy with athletes

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New voices: Who am I and what can I achieve?

Carol Brown with the latest in our series

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ISSN 0952-8229

...debates

Cover Artwork by Hannah Scully – a Fine Art student at Newcastle Uni www.hannahscully.com © Copyright for all published material is held by the British Psychological Society unless specifically stated otherwise. As the Society is a party to the Copyright Licensing Agency (CLA) agreement, articles in The Psychologist may be copied by libraries and other organisations under the terms of their own CLA licences (www.cla.co.uk). Permission must be obtained from the British Psychological Society for any other use beyond fair dealing authorised by copyright legislation. For further information about copyright and obtaining permissions, e-mail permissions@bps.org.uk.

The publishers have endeavoured to trace the copyright holders of all illustrations. If we have unwittingly infringed copyright, we will be pleased, on being satisfied as to the owner’s title, to pay an appropriate fee.

letters 558 men and the mental health minefield; Scotland; EMDR; dyslexia; engaging with The Psychologist; and more

The Psychologist is the monthly publication of The British Psychological Society. It provides a forum for communication, discussion and controversy among all members of the Society, and aims to fulfil the main object of the Royal Charter, ‘to promote the advancement and diffusion of a knowledge of psychology pure and applied’.

Managing Editor Jon Sutton Assistant Editor Peter Dillon-Hooper Production Mike Thompson

Journalist Ella Rhodes Editorial Assistant Debbie Gordon Research Digest Christian Jarrett (editor), Alex Fradera

Associate Editors Articles Michael Burnett, Paul Curran, Harriet Gross, Marc Jones, Rebecca Knibb, Charlie Lewis, Wendy Morgan, Paul Redford, Mark Wetherell, Jill Wilkinson Conferences Alana James History of Psychology Nathalie Chernoff Interviews Gail Kinman, Mark Sergeant Reviews Emma Norris Viewpoints Catherine Loveday International panel Vaughan Bell, Uta Frith, Alex Haslam, Elizabeth Loftus

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the issue ...reports news birthday honours; autism and ADHD; All in the Mind mental health awards; super-recognisers; behaviour change; a special feature on the Facebook furore; and more

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society 604 President’s column; Lifetime Achievement Award; and Public Engagement Grants

...digests burnt-out student participants; children and written instructions; and who will benefit from CBT, in the latest from www.researchdigest.org.uk/blog

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...meets interview prominent US psychologist Diane Halpern talks to Lance Workman about creativity and critical thinking

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careers we talk to Roberto Forzoni about mindsets, music and magic; and Bronagh Hannon looks for light at the end of the tunnel in her arduous quest to become a clinical psychologist

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one on one with Tom Dickins, Professor of Evolutionary Psychology at Middlesex University, in the first of a revamped series

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...reviews The Psychology Book; Start the Week; Royal Victoria Hospital; The Men Who Made Us Spend; The Human Zoo; and more 622

I hope you and Stephanie Taylor will forgive me using her piece on creativity (p.590) as an excuse to blow our own creative trumpet.

This feels like the most exciting time I have experienced in almost 15 years with The Psychologist and the Research Digest. We have a new full-time journalist, and our Digest editor back in the saddle full-time.

It’s a creative and committed team, with a clear mission to make The Psychologist and Digest the daily authoritative voices in psychology.

But we can’t do this without the support of the Society membership.

We are grateful for the backing of our editorial advisory committee, led by new Chair Dr Catherine Loveday.

And every month we have our contributors, aiming to engage and inform with their personal and professional stories. Have a look at our revamped ‘One on one’ on p.632: the tweaks to the format would be nothing without Professor Tom Dickins’ thoughtful efforts. Engage with us, and we are pushed to new creative heights. The time is now: see www.thepsychologist.org.uk/ contribute and get in touch!

Dr Jon Sutton Managing Editor @psychmag

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...looks back Freud, the libido and oxytocin prompted by Freud’s early work, Ian Fairholm and Alex Lench seek an ambitious marriage of psychoanalysis and neurobiology

The Psychologist and Digest Editorial Advisory Committee Catherine Loveday (Chair), Phil Banyard, Olivia Craig, Helen Galliard, Rowena Hill, Victoria Mason, Stephen McGlynn, Tony Wainwright, Peter Wright

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Two years ago Go to www.thepsychologist.org.uk for our archive, including a special issue on time.

read discuss contribute at www.thepsychologist.org.uk

Big picture centre-page pull-out Lewis Reynolds’ frame, from a dementia project by Helen Gregory (University of Gloucestershire)

BIG PICTURE

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‘I’m no different’ Lewis Reynolds’ frame, words by Helen Gregory (University of Brighton). Photo: Gary Learmonth (Red Piranha Photography) Lewis argues that he is not defined by dementia: ‘It isn’t who I am.

It’s part of my situation.’ Rather than others feeling ‘sorry for you’, Lewis asks for ‘a sense of letting you be you, whatever the situation is, letting you experience this in your way’.

I have worked with Lewis on a dementia project, ‘I Will Tell You Something of My Own’, aimed at combating the stigma that still surrounds dementia. It explores personhood through poetry, song, photography and everyday objects, challenging the notion that people with dementia have lost both their humanity and their value to others.

We have produced 3D collages representing all aspects of the individuals’ lives, including, but not limited to, their experiences of dementia. Each frame is accompanied by an A4 page of text, written in collaboration with participants. These were displayed, alongside poems, photographs and songs, in a six-week exhibition last December.

In Lewis’s frame, the dog collar is one he wore for many years. He worked as a non-stipendiary minister, seeing this not as an occupation, but as ‘a calling’. He says, ‘I always feel a sense that I’ve retained a sort of faith.’ Although Lewis’s own faith is framed by Christianity, he argues that faith can take many different, equally valid forms: ‘I think everybody has a certain amount of faith in something.’ The rock, from a site known as ‘The Hill of Adolescence’ near the Sea of Galilee, is a solid connection to this faith: ‘I picked it up and I thought “Well, I haven‘t just picked this up. This comes from the actual country where Jesus was.” … In a sense I’m there, holding this. I’ve got something that belongs there, not just imagination.’ The cross is another concrete representation of Lewis’s faith. ‘If I need a bit of comfort, I feel the little cross.’ The tie represents Lewis’s time as a postman; the brushes and sketch pad his passion for creating art, particularly of rural settings.

The central photograph depicts Lewis and Mary’s Ruby Wedding anniversary. For Mary, this photograph gives ‘some idea of the depth and breadth of our number of friends’. Lewis constantly shifts the conversation to others, even when asked to talk about himself. The responses of others to dementia can threaten this connectedness and social support. Lewis expressed this beautifully: ‘If somebody came up to me and said, “I don’t know what to do about my dad or my brother.

The way he’s smelly, got spikey hair, drinking…”, I would say “Don’t ever think that you’ve got to separate yourself from them, because you don’t like what’s going through his life. Because to separate yourself is no good, to stay a friend is.”’

I For more information, see www.tinyurl.com/somethingofmyown

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The Facebook furore Our journalist Ella Rhodes considers a recent study by the social media giant, and the subsequent fallout.

The social networking site Facebook met with intense criticism in June and July after publishing a scientific study (see tinyurl.com/fbstudypdf). In 2012, the site manipulated its users’ News Feeds over a week to assess whether being shown fewer positive or negative stories from friends would affect the emotions of individuals. Did the research reveal anything meaningful, was it ethical, and why have many been ‘creeped out’ by it?

What did the study find?

The paper was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, with Adam Kramer from Facebook’s ‘Core Data Science Team’, as lead author. A huge sample of 689,003 participants was used, and the researchers found that if a user’s newsfeed was populated with fewer negative stories that user would be more likely to post positive updates themselves.

The opposite effect was seen when the visibility of positive stories was reduced.

The researchers concluded that ‘social contagion’ is possible without the need for non-verbal cues and social interaction.

Professor Peter Totterdell University of Sheffield) told The Psychologist that the study has added to our understanding in a number of ways. ‘The main claim of the study is that it provides experimental evidence of emotion contagion in a very large social network. The “experimental” part is important here because another paper that was published earlier this year in PlosOne [tinyurl.com/lx42ftl] by Coviello and colleagues – Adam Kramer is an author on both papers – also demonstrated the same phenomenon but it used a naturalistic design to show that the weather affects the emotional content of people’s Facebook posts, which in turn affects the emotional content of the friends’ posts even when their friends are living in different cities with different weather. The newer study uses an experimental intervention so it can make stronger claims about causality.’

Professor Totterdell, who wrote about emotional contagion in our June 2010 issue (tinyurl.com/totterd), said the study also showed that emotion contagion can occur non-verbally and does not need expressive mimicry to occur, both of which have been shown in previous studies, that it does not require a social

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interaction and that it is sensitive to the amount of emotional content transmitted.

He said: ‘For me, this last finding was the most interesting. The authors showed that reducing the emotional content of the events (in this case news events) that people experience made their friends less emotionally expressive. This occurred when both good and bad news was suppressed. It indicates that people’s behaviour is very attuned to the emotions of other people in their social world.’

The effects observed, although significant, were small: by the lead author’s own admission, ‘the result was that people produced an average of one fewer emotional word, per thousand words, over the following week’. But Professor Totterdell said they were still noteworthy: ‘Although the effect will be negligible for any individual, it is still reliable when many individuals are involved which means that a societal intervention is possible, and could potentially be enhanced with a stronger manipulation. It does reinforce though that emotion contagion is usually a subtle effect that competes with other influencing factors.’

The study’s methodology has also met with some criticism. The software used – the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count application (LIWC) – works by counting the number of positive or negative words in a status, but cannot pick up negation within a phrase. Therefore, according to John Grohol (tinyurl.com/kofafzc), it would mistakenly rate an update such as ‘I am not having a great day’ as positive simply because that phrase contains the word ‘great’.

But Professor Totterdell feels the methodology is ‘crude rather than flawed.

It will misclassify some things and thereby introduce noise into the data, which will also contribute to the small effect size. Sometimes this type of software is supplemented to look for particular word combinations. For

example, when people say “Happy Christmas” it doesn’t mean they are happy! I’m sure these techniques will become more sophisticated in future.’

Was the study ethical?

In response to accusations that Facebook set out to manipulate emotions without specific informed consent from individuals, the social networking site has pointed out that users tick a box on signup, which gives permission for Facebook to use their data for ‘internal operations’, including ‘research’ (although some have claimed that this clause was only added four months after the study: see tinyurl.com/ptxoyfk).

Chair of the British Psychological Society Ethics Committee Professor Kate Bullen (Aberystwyth University) and John Oates, Chair of the Research and Ethics Reference Group, published a letter in The Guardian (see tinyurl.com/ndzbfmc) which expressed ‘serious misgivings’ about the study, saying the study appeared ‘to contravene all four principles of research ethics as set out in the Society’s code of human research ethics and a recent set of principles agreed by most British learned societies involved in social science research.

It infringed the autonomy and dignity of individuals by interfering with the personal decision-making as to the posts that people wished to make to their chosen groups and, most importantly, by failing to gain valid informed consent from the participants. The scientific value of this study would seem to be low, since there is already a strong body of literature which confirms emotional contagion as a social process. The intervention was socially irresponsible, in that it clandestinely meddled in people’s social lives with consequences that are very likely to have had significant negative effects on individuals and groups.’

Some online commentators have pointed out that we are unable to determine whether any minors were included in the study, speculating that this could lead to lawsuits. In addition, the Information Commissioner’s Office, a UK regulator, has said it plans to question Facebook over the study. A spokesperson from the office told the Financial Times that it was too early to tell what part of the law the social networking site might have infringed.

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Facebook is not your friend So why do many commentators appear to share Professor Fiske’s ‘creeped out’ feeling? Why has the response from Facebook users tended to be one of shock and anger?

New Zealand-based Sarah Gumbley is in the final stages of her PhD researching our relationships with corporations online. Gumbley, who spent a year looking at the Facebook pages of a bank, an airline and a telecommunications company, told BBC Radio 4 programme The Digital Human in May (see tinyurl.com/m2tr9sd) that many corporations try to echo friendship norms to their users, therefore increasing disappointment when they act in a way users and customers don’t expect. ‘It’s maybe tying in to what Sherry Turkle was talking about when she was writing that people are expecting more from technology and less from their friends.’

Gumbley said that one of the things that surprised her while doing her research was how angry people became with corporations who did not provide them with a good deal or tailored response to their comments: ‘People were really angry with the corporate because they felt like they had been betrayed because they saw it as a friend, and when they didn’t get a good deal or felt like they were being ripped off they felt like they were being ripped off by a friend.’

Psychologist Dr Ciarán McMahon, Research and Development Co-ordinator at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, told us that one concept at play in the public feeling betrayed by Facebook is what is known as ‘telepresence’ – which refers to web designers’ and developers’ efforts to hide the mechanics of the site’s delivery from the public. ‘They basically aim to engineer our experience of the site to be so flawless that when we interact with it, we psychologically feel like we are in a different place entirely, along with all of our friends and connections. What this research shows is that Facebook is not a neutral, passive or value-free conveyor of information – the wool has been removed

from our eyes about what actually goes on in Facebook.’

Dr McMahon added that he thinks we react with sites such as Facebook in a state of denial or dissonance. He said: ‘We know that we have given up a lot of our personal identity to Facebook, but our relationship with it is now so deep and ongoing that if we stopped to think about it for a few minutes, we would be immediately uncomfortable.

‘This is what this study has done – it has forced us to think about how much of our personally identifiable information we have given away, and that makes us feel incompetent in our self-protection.

Hence, we repress and deny – in fact, in much of the commentary on this story I have seen lots of projection in statements like “Of course this is happening, how could you not know Facebook is experimenting?”.’

The fallout continues In an official statement, Facebook said: ‘This research was conducted for a single week in 2012 and none of the data used was associated with a specific person’s Facebook account. We do research to improve our services and to make the content people see on Facebook as relevant and engaging as possible. A big part of this is understanding how people respond to different types of content, whether it’s positive or negative in tone, news from friends, or information from pages they follow. There is no unnecessary collection of people’s data in connection with these research initiatives and all data is stored securely.’

Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, described the study as ‘poorly communicated, and for that communication we apologise. We never meant to upset you.’ The journal itself has issued an ‘editorial expression of concern’.

As we went to press, the reaction continued (the Society’s own Research Digest has collated more links at tinyurl.com/ltea7lc), with some psychologists coming to Facebook’s defence. For example, in New Scientist, Tal Yarkoni wrote: ‘If you were to construct a scale of possible motives for manipulating user behaviour – with the global betterment of society at one end, and something really bad at the other end – I submit that conducting basic scientific research would almost certainly be much closer to the former than other standard motives we find on the web… If the idea that Facebook would actively try to manipulate your behaviour bothers you, you should probably stop reading this right now and go and close your account.’

read discuss contribute at www.thepsychologist.org.uk

FUNDING NEWS The Medical Research Council invites applications from neuropsychologists for its new investigator research grants in neurosciences and mental health. These provide support for clinical and non-clinical researchers while they are establishing themselves as independent principal investigators. Applicants must hold a PhD, DPhil or an MD, have between three and ten years postdoctoral research experience and should be in their first lecturer appointment, hold a junior fellowship or be in a senior postdoctoral position. Closing date: 1 October 2014.

I tinyurl.com/mwo3n55 The Leverhulme Trust invites proposals for its research programme grant on innovation for sustainable living, which includes psychology and determining the drivers of behaviour change. Applications are invited from UK universities, other institutions of higher and further education and registered charities. The scheme is also open to institutions of similar status in countries where the provision of research funding is seriously limited. Closing date: 3 October 2014.

I tinyurl.com/35dhttl The British Federation of Women Graduates invites applications for its emergency grants.

These aim to support female graduate students who are faced with unforeseen financial circumstances that might prevent the completion of their year’s work. Grants are one-off payments and are unlikely to exceed £2500. Closing date: 6 October 2014.

I www.ffwg.org.uk The Feminist Review Trust invites applications for its research grants from feminist scholars. The award is designed to support activities such as hard-to-fund projects; pump-priming activities; interventionist projects that support feminist values; training and development projects and one-off events. The Trust is normally unable to support MA, MSc or PhD students, with the exception of scholars from developing economies in exceptional circumstances. The maximum award amount is £10,000. Deadline for the next round of applications: 30 September 2014.

I tinyurl.com/cgs68v

info

Leading psychologist Susan Fiske, professor at Princeton University, edited the paper. She told The Atlantic: ‘It’s ethically okay from the regulations perspective, but ethics are kind of social decisions. There’s not an absolute answer.

And so the level of outrage that appears to be happening suggests that maybe it shouldn’t have been done… I’m still thinking about it and I’m a little creeped out too.’

For BPS awards and grant schemes, see www.bps.org.uk/awards&grants Funding bodies should e-mail news to Emma Smith on emma.smith@bps.org.uk for possible inclusion

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How burnt-out students could be skewing research It’s well known that psychology research relies too heavily on student volunteers. So many findings are assumed to apply to people in general, when they could be a quirk unique to undergraduates.

Now Michael Nicholls and his colleagues have drawn attention to another problem with relying on student participants – those who volunteer late in their university term or semester lack motivation and tend to perform worse than those who volunteer early.

A little background about student research participants. Psychology students often volunteer for numerous studies throughout a semester [see tinyurl.com/qfs7ojr and tinyurl.com/prb7m6g]. Usually, they’re compelled to do this at least once in return for course credits that count towards their degree.

Other times they receive cash or other forms of compensation. When in the semester they opt to volunteer for course credit is usually down to their discretion. To over-generalise, conscientious students tend to volunteer early in semester, whereas less disciplined students leave it until last minute, when time is short and deadlines are pressing.

Nicholls team first recruited 40 student participants (18 men) at Flinders University during the third week of a 14-week semester.

Half of them were first years who’d chosen to volunteer early in return for course credits. The other half of the participants, who hailed from various year groups, had chosen the option to receive $10 compensation. The challenge for both groups of students was the same – to perform 360 trials of a sustained attention task.

Each trial they had to press a button as fast as possible if they saw any number between 1 and 9, except for the number 3, in which case they In the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology were to withhold responding.

At this early stage of the semester there was no difference in the performance (based on speed and accuracy) of the students who volunteered for course credit or for money.

There was also no difference in their motivation levels, as revealed in a questionnaire.

Later in the semester, between weeks 9 to 12, the researchers repeated the exercise, with 20 more students who had enrolled for course credit and 20 more who had applied to participate in return for cash compensation. Now the researchers found a difference between the groups. Those participants receiving financial payment outperformed those who had volunteered in return for course credit. The latter group also showed more variability in their performance than their course-credit counterparts had done at the start of the semester, and they reported having lower motivation.

These results suggest that students who wait to volunteer for course credit until late in the semester lack motivation and their performance suffers as a result. Nicholls and his colleagues explained that their findings have serious implications for experimental design. ‘A lack of motivation and/or poorer performance may introduce noise into the data and obscure effects that may have been significant otherwise. Such effects become particularly problematic when experiments are conducted at different times of semester and the results are compared.’

One possible solution for researchers planning to compare findings across experiments conducted at different ends of a semester, is to ensure that they only test paid participants. Unlike participants who are volunteering for course credit, those who are paid seem to have consistent performance and motivation across the semester.

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Trusting to the letter In the British Journal of Developmental Psychology As adults, we’ve learned that simple text-based instructions are usually trustworthy. If a stranger tells us to turn next left for London, but we see a street sign that states the opposite, most of us would assume the stranger had made a mistake, and we’d follow the sign. Now researchers led by Kathleen Corriveau have investigated children’s trust in instructions delivered orally, versus those originating in written text. Their finding is that as soon as children have rudimentary reading skills, they trust written text over spoken instruction.

The research involved two differently coloured tubes leading to a cup beneath. One tube was always blocked.

Dozens of children aged three to six had to decide in which tube to place a marble, in the hope it would reach the cup beneath, so that they would earn a sticker.

To help them, the children received instructions from two puppets. On each trial, one puppet simply spoke their instruction (e.g. ‘I say blue.

Choose the blue tube’) whereas the other puppet opened an envelope in which was written the colour of the other tube (e.g.

‘This says red. Choose the red one’). The children didn’t get feedback on their performance until the end of the study, so they couldn’t use results to judge which puppet to trust.

Regardless of age, the children who couldn’t yet read were indiscriminate in whether they chose to trust the purely oral advice, or whether to trust

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the puppet who read the text instruction. By contrast, the children with some reading ability showed a clear preference to trust the puppet who read from the envelope, choosing the tube they recommended over 75 per cent of the time.

Two further studies cleared up some ambiguities. For instance, it was found that young readers prefer to trust a puppet who reads the instruction from text, than oral advice from a puppet who gets their information from a whisper in the ear: the young readers weren’t simply swayed by the fact the text puppet was drawing on a secondary source.

Young readers also trusted instruction from written text over information conveyed in a coloured symbol. This shows they’re specifically trusting of written text, not just any form of permanent, external information.

Corriveau’s team said their results showed that once children learn to read, ‘they rapidly come to regard the written word as a particularly authoritative source of information about how to act in the world’. They added that in some ways this result is difficult to explain. Young readers are exposed to a good deal of fantasy and fiction in written form, so why should they be so trusting of written instruction?

Perhaps they are used to seeing adults act on the basis of written information – such as maps, menus and recipes – but then again, pre-readers will also have had such experiences.

Is there something special about the process of learning to read that leads children to perceive written instruction as authoritative?

Who will benefit from cognitive behavioural therapy?

In the Journal of Clinical Psychology The rise of CBT has been welcomed by many as a safe, effective alternative to drug treatments for mental illness.

However, there are also fears that CBT has crowded out other less structured, more timeconsuming forms of psychotherapy.

The fact is, CBT doesn’t work for everyone. Precious resources could be better managed, and alternative approaches sensibly considered, if there were a way to predict in advance those patients who are likely to benefit from CBT, and those who are not.

Jesse Renaud and her colleagues administered a 10item scale – the Suitability for Short-term Cognitive Therapy, first devised in the 1990s – to patients who underwent CBT for depression or anxiety at the McGill University Health Centre between 2001 and 2011. The researchers focused their analysis on the 256 patients (88 men) who completed their course of therapy, which lasted an average of 19 sessions.

Renaud’s team looked for correlations between patients’ answers to the Suitability scale and found that the scale was really tapping two main factors – the patients’ capacity for participation in the CBT process, and their attitudes towards CBT. The first factor includes a patient’s insight into thoughts that pop into their heads (socalled ‘automatic thoughts’); their ability to identify and distinguish their emotions; and their use of safety behaviours to cope with their problems (e.g.

read discuss contribute at www.thepsychologist.org.uk

avoiding parties to cope with social anxiety). In other words, the researchers explained, this is the patient’s ‘ability to identify thoughts and feelings, and share them in a non-defensive, focused way’. The second ‘attitudes’ factor refers to, among other things, the patient’s optimism about the outcome of therapy, and their acceptance that they must take responsibility for change.

The higher patients’ scored on the first factor (their capacity for participation in CBT), the greater reduction they tended to show in their illness symptoms, based on measures taken before and after the course of CBT. Attitudes towards therapy were not correlated with symptom reductions, but we should bear in mind that this may be because the research focused only on those patients who completed therapy. Also, it may be useful in future to measure how patients’ attitudes change during therapy.

There are other reasons for caution. The amount of variance in symptom change explained by both suitability factors combined was statistically significant, but tiny – just .07 per cent. Also, the therapists who administered the therapy also recorded their patients’ improvements, so there was scope for bias. Finally, more research is needed on different forms of mental illness besides depression and anxiety.

Nonetheless, this study makes a constructive contribution to a neglected area.

‘Given that the patient’s capacity provides important information about whether or not a patient will derive benefit from CBT, clinicians who are concerned about limited resources and long wait lists are encouraged to undertake a suitability assessment prior to therapy,’ the researchers said, ‘to identify patients low in their General Capacity to Participate… and consider making referrals to alternative treatments.’

The material in this section is taken from the Society’s Research Digest blog at www.researchdigest.org.uk/blog, and this month is written by its editor Dr Christian Jarrett. Visit the blog for full coverage including references and links, additional current reports, an archive, comment and more.

Subscribe by RSS or e-mail at www.researchdigest.org.uk/blog Become a fan at www.facebook.com/researchdigest Follow the Digest editor at www.twitter.com/researchdigest

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work of social psychologists who have studied creativity from some very different starting points and theoretical positions, to draw out some of the insights that their work provides into the phenomenon of ‘creative Britain’ and the experience of contemporary creative workers.

Creative Britain Stephanie Taylor looks at how social psychology explains the phenomenon

How is it possible to increase the supply of creative people to meet a new demand for creative workers?

resources

If the image of an inspired creative individual (like a genius artist or big name designer) is only a ‘myth’, does it still carry any importance for contemporary creative workers?

Taylor, S. (2013). The lived experience of a contemporary creative identification.

In J.Chan & K. Thomas (Eds.) Handbook of research on creativity.

Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.

Amabile, T.M. (1983). The social psychology of creativity: A componential conceptualization.

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 45(2), 357–376.

Becker, H.S. (1982). Art worlds. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press.

British Council. (2013). Building a creative nation. Retrieved 3 December 2013 from

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ritain is creative, officially. In 2010 Britain had 106,700 creative enterprises, which contributed £59 billion to the national economy, according to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS, 2011). Another 50,000 creative jobs will become available by 2016, if a current British Council project meets its targets (British Council, 2013).

The 2012 London Olympics were claimed as a triumph not only for Team GB’s athletes but also for the creative workers who produced the spectacular opening and closing ceremonies – including designers, film-makers, choreographers, stage managers and costumemakers – as well as the many others involved in the development, promotion and successful presentation of the games.

All of these workers are part of Britain’s creative economy.

They belong to a sector, generally referred to as the cultural and creative industries, which has been celebrated for the last two decades as a growth area and generator of new jobs, in Britain and globally. There has been considerable academic interest in the rise of the sector, the reasons why creativity has become economically important and what exactly it means to be a creative worker in the 21st century. This article will look at some of the contributions of psychologists to these 2012 Olympics – a triumph for Britain’s creative workers discussions. It will review the

B

references

questions

In Britain, and in a new global creative economy, creative people are now valued as economic actors and potential agents of prosperity.

Social psychology offers insights into their experience and what makes them creative. It can also help to explain why there are more creative workers now, when they are in demand.

Social psychologists argue that creative behaviour is the outcome of people’s circumstances, interactions, collaborations and group relationships. Even what counts as a creative output will be socially defined. Of course, this social emphasis is at odds with the classic image of an inspired creative individual, such as a designer or artist working alone in the studio.

The value of creative people The rise of the creative sector in the late 20th and earliest 21st century in the UK, the USA and globally has been investigated by economists, sociologists and other academics. They have noted the ever-increasing need to invent new products in order to stimulate continuing demand from affluent consumers, and the greater significance of branding, marketing and advertising. The expansion of tourist markets is tied to the branding of places, including whole countries, and has also conferred a new importance on museums and ‘heritage’ attractions. In addition, the expanding knowledge and digital economies depend on innovation and design. In short, it has been argued,

http://creativeconomy.britishcouncil.o rg/Policy_Development/news/buildin g-creative-nation Brouillette, S. (2013). Cultural work and antisocial psychology. In M. Banks, R. Gill & S. Taylor (Eds.) Theorizing cultural work: Labour, continuity and change in the cultural and creative industries (pp.30–43). London and New York: Routledge.

Department for Culture, Media and

Sport, (2001). Creative industries mapping document. London: HMSO. Department for Culture, Media and Sport (2011). Creative industries economic estimates – December 2011.

Retrieved 3 December 2013 from www.gov.uk/government/publications /creative-industries-economicestimates-december-2011 Haslam, S.A., Adarves-Yorno, I., Postmes, T. & Jans, L. (2013). The

collective origins of valued originality: A social identity approach to creativity. Personality & Social Psychology Review, 17, 384–401.

Hesmondhalgh, D. & Baker, S. (2011).

Creative labour: Media work in three cultural industries. London and New York: Routledge.

John-Steiner, V. (2000). Creative collaboration. New York: Oxford University Press.

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all of these areas of economic activity require continuous inputs from an imaginative creative workforce.

Academics have noted a further set of circumstances in the late 20th century that contributed to the rise of the sector.

In a number of major Western cities, artists moved into run-down urban areas, seeking cheap studio space, for instance, in former industrial buildings. It was subsequently noticed, including by politicians and developers, that the presence of the artists tended to attract other people into the area, perhaps initially for entertainment and nightlife. The area would gradually became fashionable, then more affluent as other people settled, including middleclass residents. The artists had therefore, unintentionally, initiated gentrification and redevelopment. These urban success stories focused further attention on artists or creative people as economic actors and potential agents of prosperity.

It has been suggested that the new value of creative people was partly anticipated by psychologists in the USA in the middle of the 20th century. According to Sarah Brouillette (2013), they undertook the task of specifying the type of worker required for future economic development and prosperity.

Anticipating that industry would need innovators, they took as their model for the ideal future worker a Romantic image of the artist as a uniquely talented individual pursuing inspiration and a creative vocation.

The image itself has been described as a ‘myth’ (Becker, 1982) and probably derives from the biographical accounts of 19th-century

Littleton K. & Miell, D. (2004).

Collaborative creativity: Contemporary perspectives. In D. Miell & K. Littleton (Eds.) Collaborative creativity: Contemporary perspectives (pp.1–8). London: Free Association.

McRobbie, A. (2012). Be creative: Making a living in the urban culture industries. Retrieved 3 December 2013 from www.youtube.com/

European painters, which were devised by art dealers in order to encourage sales.

However, the image is well established and widely recognised and, Brouillette argues, influenced the psychologists’ depictions of the ideal new worker. This would be a creative non-conformist who defies social norms in search of fulfilment or selfactualisation and is able to live with uncertainty and ‘float for a time in a purposeless void without a distinct future’ (p.38). Although this is obviously not an account of a conventional good colleague or organisation person, it does describe a worker who can manage a freelance or portfolio career, moving from project to project in a new, flexible labour market, selling creative skills to whichever employers require them. Brouillette suggests that it became a new ideal in management theory, for instance in the work of ‘gurus’ like Tom Peters.

Individual talent?

Taken together, these various developments and influences can be seen to have conferred a new value on creativity. In one resonant description, it came to be seen as ‘the oil of the 21st century’ (Ross, 2008). The source of prosperity, to be tapped like an oil well, was supposedly the individual creative worker, as the imaginative source for new products and brands, the genius behind web developments, the producer of intellectual property and branding, and the driver of urban generation, among many other roles. In 2001 the Department for Culture, Media and Sport listed the creative industries as ‘advertising, architecture, the art and antiques market, crafts, design, designer fashion, film and video, interactive leisure software, music, the performing arts, publishing, software and computer services, television and radio’ and attributed their collective success to the ‘individual creativity, skill and talent’ of their workers (DCMS, 2001; emphasis added).

Yet the work of social psychologists, in the USA and in Britain, challenges this

watch?v=C-QMaaFITKM Perry, G. (2013). Playing to the gallery. The Reith Lectures 2013. Retrieved 3 December 2013 from www.bbc.co.uk/ programmes/b00729d9/episodes/ player Reynolds, J. & Taylor, S. (2005). Narrating singleness: Life stories and deficit identities. Narrative Inquiry, 15(2), 197–215.

Ross, A. (2008). The new geography of

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focus on individual creativity. One of the most widely cited is Teresa Amabile, who is among the US psychologists referred to

by Brouillette. Amabile (1983) studied observable behaviour, wanting to avoid ‘conceptual’ definitions of creativity. She proposed that creative behaviour is the outcome of favourable circumstances. The factors that produce or promote creative behaviours go beyond the individual and include education. Moreover, her ‘operational’ definition of creative behaviour is that it produces outputs or products that ‘appropriate observers’ agree are creative. These observers are informed and influential people in the relevant field, be it science or arts or a more specific activity like chess playing. Amabile therefore links creative behaviour to the social context that recognises and defines it as ‘creative’, and promotes it.

Sociocultural psychologists extend the social emphasis further, proposing that creative behaviour itself is not individual but relational or collective: creative outputs are inevitably produced through interaction and collaboration. For example, one influential writer in this field, Vera John-Steiner (2000), presented studies of the working practices of ‘famous names’ in the fields of literature and science, as well as art, to show that the success attributed to a named individual was actually dependent on a creative collaboration such as a partnership.

Another US sociocultural psychologist, W. Keith Sawyer (2003), observed actors in improvisational theatre as a model for creative behaviour. There is no script or advance rehearsal and no one person is in charge of the performance. It unfolds ‘live’ and unplanned, in front of the audience, as the actors respond to each other and to the developing situation and storyline. Sawyer observed that the success of the improvisation depends on each actor working as part of the group rather than attempting to follow an individual plan.

The creative output, the performance, is not reducible to the contributions of individuals but comes from the group as a whole. It is an example of collaborative

work: Power to the precarious?

Theory, Culture and Society, 25(7–8), 31–49.

Sawyer, R.K. (2003). Group creativity.

Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Sawyer, R.K. (2007). Group genius. New York: Basic Books.

Taylor, S. (2006). Narrative as construction and discursive resource.

Narrative Inquiry, 16(1), 94–102.

Taylor, S. (2011). Negotiating oppositions

and uncertainties: Gendered conflicts in creative identity work. Feminism and Psychology, 21(3), 354–371.

Taylor, S. & Littleton, K. (2012).

Contemporary identities of creativity and creative work. Farnham: Ashgate.

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creativity. Sawyer is particularly interested other people, for the process of its making in the business and commercial and also for its recognition and definition. applications of such creative collaborations and has researched examples of the Towards a creative Britain successful use of creative groups in What are the larger implications of these commercial companies in order to develop various social psychology studies of new products (Sawyer, 2007). creativity? What can they contribute to In Britain, other sociocultural an understanding of the phenomenon of psychologists, including Karen Littleton creative Britain? The first point is that the and Dorothy Miell (2004), have explored creative collaborations in the context of the social psychological studies challenge the conventional association of creativity with classroom, looking at children working individual genius or special talents. together in groups. The approach has Instead, a premise of their different opened further avenues for investigation research approaches is that the capacity and application, such as the ways in which to create and innovate is widely shared, the collaborative creative processes can be if not universal, and utilised in many life enhanced and outputs improved through and work activities. Moreover, by the use of ‘tools’, ranging through pen and proposing that creative behaviour is the paper to newer technologies such as outcome of people’s circumstances, as in electronic whiteboards.

Amabile’s model, or their interactions, In a different tradition, social collaborations and group relationships, psychologists have recently developed a the various studies suggest that it can be model of creativity based on social identity fostered: people can be made more and self-categorisation theories. Alex creative, for example through education Haslam and colleagues (2013) argue that and through encouragement for the the relationship between the individual collaborations and groups that might and the (potential) ingroup is central to stimulate creative outputs. creativity and creative processes. The Extending these ideas, we might group becomes an audience for its surmise that this fostering will be members’ work and also provides a set particularly likely to take place at a time of norms, such as the principles of an art when creativity is highly valued, for its movement like surrealism. The individual (assumed) economic is motivated to produce efficacy. All of these creative work that points can to help advances the group’s “In a climate in which explain why creativity interests, by following creativity is seen to be and creative work have and extending the economically important, become more prominent valued norms of the more jobs and workers will in Britain. In addition, group. These may be be defined and recognised if creativity is socially distinct from wider defined, it seems likely social norms and as creative” that the same economic indeed are likely to context will promote its challenge them, since recognition. For example, activities might art is seldom conventional. be labelled as ‘creative’ that had previously Despite its different theoretical been given more mundane labels. Studies underpinning, the work of Haslam et al. of Britain’s creative sector have noted this resembles Amabile’s in that it draws expansion of the reference of creativity. attention to the ways in which creativity It is no longer limited to the traditional is recognised and defined socially, and ‘elite’ activities of say, painting, sculpture, therefore variably. What counts as ‘creative’ classical music, but now encompasses can change, for example from one society many new activities, as the 2001 list of or historic period to another. There are creative industries indicates. parallels here with the definitions of art These are not the only psychological offered by an influential US sociologist, studies that can contribute to our Howard S. Becker (1982) and, more understanding of the contemporary recently, the 2013 Reith Lecturer, the phenomenon of Creative Britain. In a British potter, Grayson Perry (2013). series of projects conducted from 2005 to Becker and Perry both propose that the 2008, Karen Littleton and I employed an differences between ‘art’, as either process approach based in narrative psychology or output, and ‘craft’, or ‘not art’, or just and critical discursive psychology to ordinary work, are not absolute but are research the experience of contemporary established over time by the various creative workers in Britain (Taylor, 2011; people, including audiences, who make Taylor & Littleton, 2012). Our interest was up what Becker calls an ‘art world’. In in their interpretations of themselves, their short, art, like other creative work, is not work and their life possibilities. A premise produced in a vacuum but depends on

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of our narrative-discursive approach is that people are always positioned within the constraints or limited possibilities of established social and personal interpretations. The approach assumes a fluid, incomplete process of identification in which people draw on the knowledge and values made available by their interknit personal and professional contexts, ongoing and previous, in order to make claims about who they are, and who they want to become (Taylor, 2006).

Established ideas and images, like the Romantic image of the artist, have implications for this identity work, including for the life narratives people can plausibly construct for themselves.

Our research began in art colleges, mostly in London as Britain’s main ‘hub’ city within the global creative economy.

There have been claims that Britain’s creative economy in large part originated in and depends upon its art college system (McRobbie, 2012), and the 2001 list indicates how closely the creative industries are tied to the arts. Our research participants worked in a huge variety of specialisms, many, like digital design, photography and fashion, beyond the traditional elite activities of fine art.

Although the participants entered creative careers through their study in art colleges, they were at different career points. They ranged from current students to people who were many decades beyond their degree studies.

Analysing their accounts of themselves and their lives, we found that our participants invoked two different images of the creative worker. One was a person connected into a contemporary creative world, utilising contacts and networks, continuously engaged in ongoing communications with other creatives and with audiences to stay in touch with the (urban and global) field and its latest developments. In its emphasis on connection and working with others, this image echoed sociocultural theories of collaborative creativity.

The second image, unsurprisingly given the art college context in which the participants were recruited and the larger art college connections of the sector noted above, was the Romantic one of the individual artist or creative maker. What was perhaps less predictable was the extent to which this image shaped the participants’ accounts of their work and careers. For example, they talked of the creative process as one of discovery, requiring an orientation of perpetual openness to possibility. In their accounts, creative work requires total involvement or immersion, to be prioritised over other aspects of life. They characterise their

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What counts as ‘creative’ can change… from one society or historic period to another

work as an open-ended and even playful experiment, or a quest to be followed for an unforeseeable time, rather than an activity amenable to goal-setting and time management. Similarly, they emphasise that a creative career does not have a predictable forward narrative to promotion, recognition and rewards, like an ‘age-stage’ pathway. Their assumption, instead, is that success will come, if at all, as an unpredictable and life-transforming ‘big break’.

The participants acknowledged that such ideals of creative practice are difficult to achieve. It was consistent with the Romantic image that they appeared to accept that their chosen working lives would require an indefinite large commitment with limited reward. They also accepted an inevitable conflict with the succession of personal life stages associated with ‘a dominant coupledom narrative’ (Reynolds & Taylor, 2005), such as courtship, partnering and becoming parents. Many of them talked about the difficulty or even impossibility of sustaining long-term relationships or supporting children.

However, despite these difficulties, they presented their work in highly positive terms. In particular, they emphasised its difference from old or ‘ordinary’ work, which they tended to characterise in terms of routine and mindless drudge, like a caricature of a factory production line. They rhetorically distanced themselves from ‘ordinary’ jobs, being ‘trapped’ in the nine to five, from lives which follow a predictable trajectory and from ‘having to’ retire at 60 or 65. They described their work in highly personalised terms, as matched to their

interests, the unique product of their personal identities and experience, and a source of fulfilment and self-actualisation.

They repeatedly referred to their ‘love’ of their work and suggested that in this they also differed from ordinary workers.

On one level, these positive accounts are surprising. The creative sector has been widely criticised for the predominance of precarious employment (short-term, project-based) and low pay, and also for its inequalities (e.g. women and black and other minority ethnic workers are underrepresented in almost all the creative industries). How, then, should we interpret the participants’ accounts in the face of these difficulties? Are their positive claims to be taken at face value, or are these workers deluded, conniving in their own exploitation by accepting poor employment conditions?

In a discursive approach, it is important to consider the functions of people’s talk, and part of our research was to consider our participants’ accounts in these terms. It is relevant here that for a number of decades (roughly equivalent to the period of the rise of the creative sector), sociologists have noted negative trends in work and employment generally.

It has been suggested that workers in all fields experience less security and less control over their work. Employment is more likely to be short-term. Fewer people can look forward to a job for life or even a predicable career trajectory. In these circumstances, Creative Britain and our research participants’ accounts of their creative work and working lives acquire a new significance. In apparent defiance of the negative general trends, the creative

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creative work

workers assert the specialness of their work and their own centrality to the work process. With its emphasis on personalisation, the Romantic image of the creative maker apparently encourages them to unite their lives and their work, even in the face of employment uncertainties.

They reconcile themselves to precarious employment and future uncertainty by reclaiming career continuity through their personal commitment to their work, often dating it right back to a childhood interest.

Their accounts construct, retrospectively, a narrative of personal development and destiny, presenting their careers as vocations rather than coolly rational choices. The personal biography becomes evidence of a vocation and therefore validates the career choice, however conventionally unsuccessful it may be in terms of providing secure or lucrative employment. In short, these accounts cannot solve the problems of contemporary work more generally but can be seen to function to re-interpret and remedy some of its difficulties and conflicts in ways which make sense of the workers’ own lives.

The phenomenon of Creative Britain continues, beyond the Olympics and in spite of the global financial crisis. In a climate in which creativity is seen to be economically important, more jobs and workers will be defined and recognised as creative, and creativity is likely to be fostered. Social psychological studies indicate how it can be facilitated by the kinds of contacts and collaborations that are more available in urban contexts.

A narrative-discursive analysis of creative workers’ own interpretations suggests the influence of the Romantic image of an individual creative maker who endures hardships for the love of the work and the hope of eventual fulfilment or selfactualisation. A creative occupation is not always the best work, or even good work (Hesmondhalgh & Baker, 2011), but creativity can bring new satisfactions even to difficult circumstances. This finding is especially significant because creative work has been claimed as a model or exemplar for the future of work more generally. The experience of creative workers may offer insights into how more and more people in Britain will be able to manage their lives and their careers.

Stephanie Taylor is at Psychology, Social Sciences, The Open University stephanie.taylor@open.ac.uk

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Defeating aliens with critical thinking Diane Halpern tells Lance Workman about her efforts to improve work–life balance and increase creativity

ou’ve had a very productive career, Y publishing widely from handedness to gender differences in cognition to developing critical thinking skills. I’d like to explore all of these, but how did you start out?

When I first went to college at the University of Pennsylvania – we’re going back a long ways – I actually started in engineering. I was interested in how things work. In my freshman year I was doing mechanical engineering and I wrote an article for the student magazine about breakthroughs in the mechanics in birth control devices. This really suggested I was studying the wrong area! At the time my then boyfriend, who later became my husband, was taking a psychology course and I sat in on a lecture and loved it. That started me off – I was hooked.

Once you transferred into psychology were there any major figures that influenced you?

One prominent early tutor was Henry Gleitman. He was a well-renowned psychologist but he was also an actor.

He was involved in community theatre and he brought acting into the classroom in a way that made you think there was nothing more important in the world than studying psychology. Many years later I had the chance to get to know Henry on a personal level – and I was able to tell him how much he had influenced me.

In 1995 you were one of a number of psychologists that responded to the controversial Bell Curve book that suggested cognitive differences between ethnic groups. Was this something you felt strongly about?

The idea of group differences in intelligence in relation to race and ethnicity is something that has been misunderstood and misused. So I was very pleased to be involved in a rejoinder that pointed out some of the things that we felt the Bell Curve got wrong. Just recently I was involved in a group that updated that intelligence paper. It was

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my great honour to be the only person who was on both papers. Both were really about how we conceptualise intelligence and differences here as honestly and as accurately as we can, and point out where we felt others had made mistakes.

You are known for research into gender differences in cognition. Are there robust differences between the sexes, and if so where did they come from?

These are complicated questions and I’m always loath to give a two-minute answer to something that is so complicated.

There are some differences – some are large and some are small. And for some the contribution of biology is not zero.

In other words, there is a biological contribution. But our environment certainly alters biology just as our biology alters how we construct our environment.

The differences that we find today are not deficiencies – nor are they immutable.

We have seen some of the size of the differences change in as little as a decade.

Some people are uncomfortable with such ideas. Do people get moral and empirical arguments mixed up here?

Absolutely, we have a sense of fairness.

People don’t like group differences of any sort – it seems unfair, un-American and un-British to suggest such things to many people. And it’s true that socialisation processes are largely responsible – we certainly socialise girls and boys differently. People are often more comfortable attributing differences to socialisation processes – but there are data that suggest there are biological contributions as well. And indeed there are those who seek to misuse biological data to support sex-role stereotyping.

There is no doubt that all of our advances in brain and neuroscience have re-shaped how we think about all areas of psychology. But there is considerable misuse here. I wrote a journal article several years ago titled, ‘Mind the gap’ which is a term that will be familiar to British readers – in this case the gap is

between mind and brain and between the differences we find in the brain and how these are somehow responsible for behaviours. We know that one of the chief architects of the brain is experience and education. I think we need to rethink the old nature–nurture dichotomy. Nature and nurture are not two independent main effects. It is really a much more interactive, circular process. Our experiences change our biology, they change the hormones we secrete, they change our brain structures and this, in turn, changes how we interact with the environment.

You are interested in creativity. Is there anything we can do to improve our level of creativity?

Absolutely! Most of my work is in critical thinking and I think of creativity as one aspect of critical thinking. They are not separate. All we need to do is tell a group of students that we want a creative project – try this if you are teaching right now.

Give your students the freedom to be creative. You tell them that creativity is valued, and you suddenly get much more creative projects. It’s really that simple.

People do incredible creative projects such as, rap songs about psychology, teaching a dance as a way of enhancing memory and even baking a brain cake with ingredients that represent parts of the brain inside. I think it is a sad mistake that we aren’t doing more of this and allowing our students to be creative.

You are also interested in work–life balance. In 2005 you co-authored a book called From Work– Family Balance to Work– Family Interaction: Changing the Metaphor.

This book gave me the opportunity to combine my research on work and family interaction and gender differences. My co-authors and I looked at why so few women are in top positions of leadership.

One reason is of course because women have primary care responsibilities. A more recent book with Fanny Chung is Women at the Top: Powerful Leaders Tell Us How to Combine Work and Family. We examined powerful leaders with care responsibilities and how they manage to combine their work and family responsibilities. You can’t have equality at work unless you have equality at home. I would add that most women work outside the home – and women in general have less money to hire additional help and less flexibility in scheduling tasks. The topic of combining work and family involves everybody from the CEO of an organisation to the person who sorts the mail. Men and women both want to be successful at work and good

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parents and caregivers. One of the main findings is that there are tremendous benefits for men if they are more involved in their children’s lives.

an American academic?

It certainly was. I was a Fulbright scholar and I got to teach in Moscow State University. I was there two years after the end of communism. It was a time when everything they had learned was turned around for the people there. A time of great change.

One thing I’m personally interested in is handedness and abnormal patterns here (I have mixed handedness). Is this a rare phenomenon and is it true that There must have been differences left-handers have increased risks?

Mixed hand use is not that unusual – you between the Russian psychologists probably do some things with one hand and the way you do things in America?

Absolutely! It was not long after the end and other things with the other. What of communism and it was a time of big would be unusual is if you changed these transitions. I liken it to when my children preferences for the same task, such as were young and played the opposites sometimes writing with each hand, game. You know the opposite of instead of the more usual mixed hand everything they said becomes true – you pattern such as writing with one hand say you’re not hungry when you really and throwing a ball with the other. are, you roll on the floor laughing about I did some early work with Stanley something sad, and so on. That’s what it Coren on this – he really is one of the was like when communism ended. most knowledgeable people in the world Everything people had been taught got on the topic of laterality and handedness.

The idea that left-handed people have a shorter lifespan does appear to stand up quite well. It’s partly because they have more accidents, largely because the world is engineered for right-handed use. We also have to take into account the fact that more males than females are lefthanded and they have a shorter life expectancy. Finally, there’s a small statistical association between lefthandedness and being gay.

This may have affected our Diane F. Halpern is Dean of Social Sciences at Minerva findings because we did that Schools at Keck Graduate Institute and McElwee work when a lot of gay men Family Professor of Psychology had reduced life expectancy due to AIDS. Handedness is an interesting phenomenon that turned around – like capitalism, that is affected by, for example, circulating suddenly became a good thing. It was sex hormones during fetal development. a hard change. I did a book with a But there are other factors involved also. colleague in Russia where we compared Identical twins are most often discordant post-communist and Soviet psychology for handedness – probably due to with US psychology. We both got to crowding in the uterus work in Bellagio, Italy, on Rockefeller You have been president of the Fellowships. What stood out for me was American Psychological Association. that my Russian colleague kept wanting That must have been a big job! to put things together that didn’t seem to Yes, due to the scale of the APA – it is go together for me. I had to understand much bigger than the BPS for example! the politics of contemporary Russia to Also, like psychologists, APA is understand his proposed grouping. Until everywhere – the APA is involved in I understood that the breakaway republics colleges in hospitals in the military – from the Soviet Union were part of in virtually every organisation. There prejudice, I could not understand why is almost no place where the APA is these topics would be grouped together not involved in the US. conceptually. Because we don’t have breakaway states in the US – although In the early 1990s you spent some Texas comes close sometimes – I had to time teaching in Russia – that must understand someone else’s history and have been an unusual experience for viewpoint to understand why that made

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sense for him. But I’m always pleased to experience psychology in other cultures.

I have taught in many places around the world, like Turkey, Mexico, Canada and of course Russia, because I really do believe that if you want a psychology of all people then you need to travel and get into the classroom in different places.

Recently you developed a computerised game to help develop scientific reasoning and critical thinking.

That’s right – it’s a computerised game that I developed with two colleagues, Art Graesser of the University of Memphis and Keith Millis of Northern Illinois University and it has a big team behind it.

Operation ARA, which is the name of the game, teaches critical thinking by involving young people in reacting to an alien invasion. The aliens are invading the planet and are turning us into mindless consumers with no science. Your first task as a player is to join something called the ‘Federal Bureau of Science’.

For the first module you have an interactive textbook that was written by an alien. It’s written in natural language and you respond in natural language. In the second module you play a game – a jeopardy-like game that you play with an avatar. There is an interspecies love interest. There are also twists and turns and there is a green plot. In the third module you have to identify whether someone is an alien or human. Tutoring is based on your performance. So if you do well you tutor the animated avatar, if you are middling then the avatar tutors you and if you do poorly then you mostly watch the avatar. You get to save the Earth by identifying whether an individual is a human or an alien and in the process you learn about science.

That sounds like quite a game! As I said at the beginning, you have achieved a great deal in your career.

Are there any ambitions that you would still like to fulfill and is anything you feel strongly needs to be pursued?

There’s so much! I’m very much dedicated to trying to help people think better. I think the internet and mass media in general have made bad information more easily available.

A legitimate-looking website, for example, can often turn out to be a racist hate website. I increasingly think we need to be sure the general public understands why we need data, what constitutes good data and what you can do with it. That’s one of the things I’m still striving to achieve.

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