Psychology

By guest blogger David Robson

Towards the end of the Disney film Aladdin, our hero’s love rival, the evil Jafar, discovers Aladdin’s secret identity and steals his magic lamp. Jafar’s wish to become the world’s most powerful sorcerer is soon granted and he then uses his powers to banish Aladdin to the ends of the Earth. 

What follows next is a lingering, close-up of Jafar’s body. He leans forward, fists clenched, with an almost constipated look on his face. He then explodes in uncontrollable cackles that echo across the landscape. For many millennials growing up in the 1990s, it is an archetypical evil laugh.

Such overt displays of delight at others’ misfortune are found universally in kids’ films, and many adult thriller and horror films too. Just think of the rapturous guffaws of the alien in the first Predator film as it is about to self-detonate, taking Arnold Schwarzenegger with it. Or Jack Nicholson’s chilling snicker in The Shining. Or Wario’s manic crowing whenever Mario was defeated. 

A recent essay by Jens Kjeldgaard-Christiansen in the Journal of Popular Culture asks what the psychology behind this might be. Kjeldgaard-Christiansen is well placed to provide an answer having previously used evolutionary psychology to explain the behaviours of heroes and villains in fiction more generally.

In that work, he argued that one of the core traits a villain should show is a low “welfare trade-off” ratio: they are free-riders who cheat and steal, taking from their community while contributing nothing. Such behaviour is undesirable for societies today, but it would have been even more of a disaster in prehistory when the group’s very survival depended on everyone pulling their weight. As a result, Kjeldgaard-Christiansen argues we are wired to be particularly disgusted by cheating free-riders – to the point that we may even feel justified in removing them from the group, or even killing them.

However, there are degrees of villainy and the most dangerous and despised people are those who are not only free riders and cheats, but psychopathic sadists, who perform callous acts for sheer pleasure. Sure enough, previous studies have shown that it is people matching this description whom we consider to be truly evil (since there is no other way to excuse or explain their immorality) and therefore deserving of the harshest punishments. Crucially, Kjeldgaard-Christiansen argues that a wicked laugh offers one of the clearest signs that a villain harbours such evil, gaining “open and candid enjoyment” from others’ suffering – moreover, fiction writers know this intuitively, time and again using the malevolent cackle to identify their darkest characters. 

Part of the power of the evil laugh comes from its salience, Kjeldgaard-Christiansen says: it is both highly visual and vocal (as the close up of Jafar beautifully demonstrates) and the staccato rhythm can be particularly piercing. What’s more, laughs are hard to fake: a genuine, involuntary laugh relies on the rapid oscillation of the “intrinsic laryngeal muscles”, movements that appear to be difficult to produce by our own volition without sounding artificial. As a result, it’s generally a reliable social signal of someone’s reaction to an event, meaning that we fully trust what we are hearing. Unlike dialog – even the kind found in a children’s film – a sadistic or malevolent laugh leaves little room for ambiguity, so there can be little doubt about the villain’s true motives. 

Such laughs are also particularly chilling because they run counter to the usual pro-social function of laughter – the way it arises spontaneously during friendly chats, for example, serving to cement social bonds. 

There are practical reasons too for the ubiquity of the evil laugh in children’s animations and early video games, Kjeldgaard-Christiansen explains. The crude graphics of the first Super Mario or Kung Fu games for Nintendo, say, meant it was very hard to evoke an emotional response in the player – but equipping the villain with an evil laugh helped to create some kind of moral conflict between good and evil that motivated the player to don their cape and beat the bad guys. “This is the only communicative gesture afforded to these vaguely anthropomorphic, pixelated opponents, and it does the job,” he notes. 

There are limits to the utility of the evil laugh in story-telling, though. Kjeldgaard-Christiansen admits that its crude power would be destructive in more complex story-telling, since the display of pleasure at others’ expense would prevent viewers from looking for more subtle motivations or the role of context and circumstance in a character’s behaviour. But for stories dealing with black and white morality, such as those aimed at younger viewers who have not yet developed a nuanced understanding of the world, its potential to thrill is second to none.

Kjeldgaard-Christiansen’s article is certainly one of the most entertaining papers I have read in a long time [get open access here], and his psychological theories continue to be thought provoking. It would be fun to see more experimental research on this subject – comparing the acoustic properties of laughs, for instance, to find out which sounds the most evil. But in my mind, it will always be Jafar’s.

—Social Signals and Antisocial Essences: The Function of Evil Laughter in Popular Culture

Post written by David Robson (@d_a_robson) for the BPS Research Digest. His first book, The Intelligence Trap, will be published by Hodder Stoughton (UK)/WW Norton (USA) in 2019.

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By Emma Young

According to the Mindset Theory, if you tell a child repeatedly that they’re smart, it makes them less willing to push themselves when they get stuck on an intellectual challenge, presumably because failure would threaten their self-image of being a “smart kid”. For this reason, effort-based praise – rewarding kids for “working hard” rather than “being smart” – is widely recommended (though it’s not the same for adults). But does a similar effect occur in the social sphere? What if you ask a child – as so many parents and surely teachers do – to “be a helper” as if it’s a category that you either belong to or you don’t? 

Earlier research has found that young kids are more likely to try to help others when they are asked to “be helpers” instead of “to help”. But as Emily Foster-Hanson and her fellow researchers at New York University note, “Setbacks and difficulties are common features of children’s experience throughout development and into adulthood,” so it’s important to examine the effects of category labelling – like “being smart” or “being a helper” – when things go wrong for the child. And in their new paper, published in Child Development, they find that setbacks are more detrimental to a child labelled “a helper” than a child asked “to help”.

The researchers recruited a total of 139 four- and five-year olds who were visiting the Children’s Museum of Manhattan and tested each of them alone in a private room in the museum. At the start, half of them were primed with a short introduction to think of themselves as “a helper” (for example, “when someone needs to pick things up, you could be a helper”) and the others to think of themselves as someone who could “help” (“when someone needs to pick things up, you could help”). 

Next, the researchers gave the children various theoretical helping scenarios to act out with puppets, one of which represented them, either “helping” or “being a helper” (the wording was varied in the experimenter’s script according to the child’s experimental group). Afterwards the children were quizzed about their attitudes towards helping and the results suggested that, after role-playing encountering a setback when helping (such as accidentally knocking over a cup of crayons when tidying them up), “helpers” had more negative attitudes toward helping than those who’d “helped”.

For a second study, on a fresh group of children, the researchers investigated the effect of real setbacks. These kids were set up to fail. In one scenario, for example, an experimenter prompted the child to help (or be a helper) by putting away a box that was on the table. If the child didn’t immediately go to do it, they got a succession of prompts, until they did. But the box had a loose bottom, and it was full of ping pong balls, which fell onto the floor when the child picked it up. In another example, a child was prompted to put away a toy truck, which had in fact been disassembled and then had the parts put back together so that it looked intact, but as soon as it was picked up, it fell apart. 

The researchers found that after experiencing these setbacks, the “helper” kids were less likely to voluntarily go and help in two other fairly demanding helping situations (such as going into another part of the room to put away bricks into bags) than the kids in the “helping” group. “This pattern is broadly consistent with the idea that children who had been told to ‘be helpers’ but then made mistakes were overall less motivated to help than the children who had been told ‘to help’,” the researchers write. 

The helper kids were, however, more likely to go on to voluntarily help with an easy task that involved bending down to pick up dropped crayons that they could then use. This was a low-effort task with a high degree of success. Perhaps they were taking advantage of a quick, virtually guaranteed way to restore a little of their dented “helper” image. 

The researchers also found that children asked to be helpers – and who subsequently chose not to help on either of the more effortful tasks – afterwards gave lower self-evaluations of their helping abilities than children in the “helping” group who had also declined to help with those tasks. This suggests that the helper group were now thinking in a black-and-white way about helper status and helping abilities. 

“These data indicate that categorical language can have detrimental consequences for children’s behaviour, even in non-academic domains and even when the categorical input is not evaluative in content,” the researchers write. (In these studies, no one talked about being a “good helper” and there was no evaluation of this behaviour.) 

Do these scenarios accurately mirror real life? After the setbacks, the experimenter always responded in a neutral fashion, saying without emotion, “Oh well, I guess I can put those away later”, for instance. A parent or a teacher might respond differently, telling the child not to worry, and pointing out that it was a really tricky task. Might these kinds of encouraging, comforting responses ameliorate or even eradicate the effects of a setback on future helping? Only further research will tell. 

Still, this work does, as the researchers write, “provide an important caveat to previous messages to parents and teachers about how to use language to encourage pro-sociality in early childhood.” 

—Asking Children to “Be Helpers” Can Backfire After Setbacks

Emma Young (@EmmaELYoung) is Staff Writer at BPS Research Digest

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By guest blogger Tomasz Witkowski

Psychology as a scientific field enjoys a tremendous level of popularity throughout society, a fascination that could even be described as religious. This is likely the reason why it is one of the most popular undergraduate majors in American and European universities. At the same time, it is not uncommon to encounter the firm opinion that psychology in no way qualifies for consideration as a science. Such extremely critical opinions about psychology are often borrowed from authorities – after all, it was none other than the renowned physicist and Nobel laureate Richard Feynman who, in a famous interview in 1974, compared the social sciences and psychology in particular to a cargo cult. Scepticism toward psychological science can also arise following encounters with the commonplace simplifications and myths spread by pop-psychology, or as a product of a failure to understand what science is and how it solves its dilemmas.

According to William O’Donohue and Brendan Willis of the University of Nevada, these issues are further compounded by undergraduate psychology textbooks. Writing recently in Archives of Scientific Psychology, they argue that “[a] lack of clarity and accuracy in [psych textbooks] in describing what science is and psychology’s relationship to science are at the heart of these issues.” The authors based their conclusions on a review of 30 US and UK undergraduate psychology textbooks, most updated in the last few years (general texts and others covering abnormal, social and cognitive psych), in which they looked for 18 key contemporary issues in philosophy of science. 

Almost a quarter of the sampled textbooks explicitly and boastfully stated that there is no difference between psychology and other “hard” sciences such as chemistry and physics. Yet only one textbook discussed “methodological freedom” – the idea asserted by the philosopher-critic of science, Paul Feyerabend, that all scientific techniques are different. Only one textbook mentioned the issue of improper use of ad hoc hypotheses, a characteristic of pseudoscience. Similarly, there was only one reference to the ideas put forward by Feyerabend and Alan Gross that persuasion and rhetoric are a key part of science – i.e. that the scientific endeavour is not merely about “the dispassionate evaluation of evidence”. 

There were also just three mentions of such important issues as “evolutionary epistemology” (how knowledge accumulates), “social constructionism” (how social context shapes our scientific understanding), and “Kuhnian paradigms” (a discussion regarding Kuhn’s idea of paradigms, including that knowledge is only interpreted within a certain paradigm and how Kuhnian paradigm shifts occur), and the question of whether psychology is a pre-paradigmatic science or mature science. Only four textbooks contained any sort of discussion regarding whether or not the definition of science itself is a controversial topic. The roles of competing theories and evaluations in science were mentioned only six times.

“… [U]ndergraduate psychology students are not being provided a clear sense of what science is as well as its complexities,” the researchers concluded. “[The] data also generally suggest that students are being presented a simplistic notion of science as having a relatively straightforward and settled characterisation. Few texts mention that science is difficult to define, or that there are multiple proposed accounts of science. This is concerning, especially given the continual debate regarding psychology’s (and other social sciences) relationships to the natural sciences …” O’Donohue and Willis said. 

On the plus side, there was a far more exhaustive treatment by textbook authors of some meta-science issues (the question of how science should be practised). Most frequently – in 16 textbooks – there was discussion of the crucial role of theory in forming and testing hypotheses. Among other topics that O’Donohue and Willis looked for, those mentioned most frequently included the tentativeness of scientific facts and whether science is deductive or inductive (seven books argued for it being deductive, three against). However, only eight of the sampled books identified pseudoscience as a concern and discussed how to differentiate pseudoscience from legitimate science.

The new findings confirm other unfavourable assessments of the value of psychology textbooks, such as their involvement in spreading pop-psychological myths and liberal-leaning bias; giving a misleading view of intelligence; ignoring modern criticism of such famous studies as Milgram’s experiments, or the Stanford Prison Experiment; and being misleading about evolutionary psychology. 

A simplistic notion of science presented in undergrad textbooks is not only a problem for the image of our discipline in the eyes of the public. O’Donohue and Willis rightly point out that covering issues such as “logic, definition of knowledge, bias in science, how to evaluate theories and other topics that can apply to the informed citizen’s appraisal of important issues ranging from human contributions to climate change, to the legitimacy of research involving Big Pharma, to understanding whether evolution is ‘just a theory’,” are also relevant for the general goals of a liberal education. 

Unfortunately, the content of textbooks in undergraduate psychology suggest that they serve not only to instruct, but also to essentially indoctrinate students into a particular way of thinking. A pity that this new study and others have so far not answered the question of how much content has been omitted by authors because they disagree with it, and how much because they are ignorant of it. Perhaps this is a significant research problem that should be explored in the future? 

—Problematic images of science in undergraduate psychology textbooks: How well is science understood and depicted? [open access]

Image: 24th February 1930: Film actress Helen Ruth Mann reads a hefty book on Psychology. (Photo by Fox Photos/Getty Images)

Post written by Dr Tomasz Witkowski for the BPS Research Digest. Tomasz is a psychologist and science writer who specialises in debunking pseudoscience in the field of psychology, psychotherapy and diagnosis. He has published over a dozen books, dozens of scientific papers and over 100 popular articles (some of them in Skeptical Inquirer). In 2016, his latest book Psychology Led Astray: Cargo Cult in Science and Therapy was published by BrownWalker Press. He blogs at Forbidden Psychology.

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