The Psychologist August 2014

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august 2014vol 27 no 8

Creative BritainStephanie Taylor looks at howsocial psychology explains thephenomenon

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

£5 or free to members of The British Psychological Society

letters 558news 566

careers 614looking back 628

Incorporating Psychologist Appointments

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Creative BritainStephanie Taylor looks at how socialpsychology explains the phenomenon

The Psychologist is the monthly publication of The British Psychological Society. It provides a forum forcommunication, 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’.

The end of dyslexia? 576Julian Elliott and Elena Grigorenko argue that the label is a cultural meme that remainsunscientific and conceptually problematic

Does executive coaching work? 582… and if so, how? Nadine Page and Erik de Haan consider the evidence.

Smarter thinking in sport 596Martin James Turner describes his use of rational emotive behaviour therapy with athletes

New voices: Who am I and what can I achieve? 600Carol Brownwith the latest in our series596

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

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 ChernoffInterviews Gail Kinman, Mark Sergeant Reviews Emma Norris Viewpoints Catherine Loveday International panel Vaughan Bell, Uta Frith, Alex Haslam, Elizabeth Loftus

Managing Editor Jon SuttonAssistant Editor Peter Dillon-Hooper Production Mike Thompson

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

ContactThe British Psychological SocietySt Andrews House48 Princess Road EastLeicester LE1 7DR0116 254 [email protected]

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

This feels like the most excitingtime I have experienced in almost 15years with The Psychologist and theResearch Digest. We have a newfull-time journalist, and our Digesteditor back in the saddle full-time.It’s a creative and committed team,with a clear mission to make ThePsychologist and Digest the dailyauthoritative voices in psychology.

But we can’t do this without thesupport of the Society membership.We are grateful for the backing ofour editorial advisory committee, ledby new Chair Dr Catherine Loveday.And every month we have ourcontributors, aiming to engage andinform with their personal andprofessional stories. Have a look atour revamped ‘One on one’ on p.632:the tweaks to the format would benothing without Professor TomDickins’ thoughtful efforts. Engagewith us, and we are pushed to newcreative heights. The time is now:see www.thepsychologist.org.uk/contribute and get in touch! Dr Jon SuttonManaging Editor @psychmag

the issue...reportsnews 566birthday honours; autism and ADHD; All in the Mindmental health awards; super-recognisers; behaviour change; a special feature on the Facebook furore; and more

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

...digests

...meets

...reviews

...looks back

Big picture centre-page pull-outLewis Reynolds’ frame, from adementia project by Helen Gregory(University of Gloucestershire)

Freud, the libido and oxytocin 628prompted by Freud’s early work, Ian Fairholm and Alex Lench seek an ambitious marriage of psychoanalysis and neurobiology

Two years agoGo to www.thepsychologist.org.uk

for our archive,including a specialissue on time.

burnt-out student participants; children and written instructions; and who will benefit from CBT, in the latest from www.researchdigest.org.uk/blog 574

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

interview 602prominent US psychologist Diane Halpern talks to Lance Workman about creativity and critical thinking

careers 614we 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

one on one 632with Tom Dickins, Professor of Evolutionary Psychology at Middlesex University, in the first of a revamped series

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

622

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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 YouSomething of My Own’, aimed at combating the stigma that stillsurrounds dementia. It explores personhood through poetry, song,photography and everyday objects, challenging the notion that peoplewith dementia have lost both their humanity and their value to others.We have produced 3D collages representing all aspects of theindividuals’ lives, including, but not limited to, their experiences ofdementia. Each frame is accompanied by an A4 page of text, written in collaboration with participants. These were displayed, alongsidepoems, photographs and songs, in a six-week exhibition last December.

In Lewis’s frame, the dog collar is one he wore for many years. Heworked 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 sortof faith.’ Although Lewis’s own faith is framed by Christianity, he arguesthat faith can take many different, equally valid forms: ‘I thinkeverybody 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 whereJesus was.” … In a sense I’m there, holding this. I’ve got somethingthat belongs there, not just imagination.’ The cross is another concreterepresentation of Lewis’s faith. ‘If I need a bit of comfort, I feel the littlecross.’ The tie represents Lewis’s time as a postman; the brushes andsketch pad his passion for creating art, particularly of rural settings.

The central photograph depicts Lewis and Mary’s Ruby Weddinganniversary. For Mary, this photograph gives ‘some idea of the depthand breadth of our number of friends’. Lewis constantly shifts theconversation to others, even when asked to talk about himself. Theresponses of others to dementia can threaten this connectedness andsocial support. Lewis expressed this beautifully: ‘If somebody came upto 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’tever think that you’ve got to separate yourself from them, because youdon’t like what’s going through his life. Because to separate yourself isno good, to stay a friend is.”’

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

‘I’m no different’Lewis Reynolds’ frame, words by Helen Gregory (University ofBrighton). Photo: Gary Learmonth (Red Piranha Photography)

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The social networking site Facebook metwith intense criticism in June and Julyafter publishing a scientific study (seetinyurl.com/fbstudypdf). In 2012, the sitemanipulated its users’ News Feeds over a week to assess whether being shownfewer positive or negative stories fromfriends would affect the emotions ofindividuals. Did the research revealanything meaningful, was it ethical, andwhy have many been ‘creeped out’ by it?

What did the study find?The paper was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, withAdam Kramer from Facebook’s ‘Core DataScience Team’, as lead author. A hugesample of 689,003 participants was used,and the researchers found that if a user’snewsfeed was populated with fewernegative stories that user would be morelikely to post positive updates themselves.The opposite effect was seen when thevisibility of positive stories was reduced.The researchers concluded that ‘socialcontagion’ is possible without the needfor non-verbal cues and social interaction.

Professor Peter Totterdell Universityof Sheffield) told The Psychologist that thestudy has added to our understanding ina number of ways. ‘The main claim of thestudy is that it provides experimentalevidence of emotion contagion in a verylarge social network. The “experimental”part is important here because anotherpaper that was published earlier this yearin PlosOne [tinyurl.com/lx42ftl] byCoviello and colleagues – Adam Krameris an author on both papers – alsodemonstrated the same phenomenon butit used a naturalistic design to show thatthe weather affects the emotional contentof people’s Facebook posts, which in turnaffects the emotional content of thefriends’ posts even when their friends areliving in different cities with differentweather. The newer study uses anexperimental intervention so it can makestronger claims about causality.’

Professor Totterdell, who wrote aboutemotional contagion in our June 2010issue (tinyurl.com/totterd), said the studyalso showed that emotion contagion canoccur non-verbally and does not needexpressive mimicry to occur, both ofwhich have been shown in previousstudies, that it does not require a social

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

He said: ‘For me, this last finding wasthe most interesting. The authors showedthat reducing the emotional content ofthe events (in this case news events) thatpeople experience made their friends lessemotionally expressive. This occurredwhen both good and bad news wassuppressed. It indicates that people’sbehaviour is very attuned to the emotionsof other people in their social world.’

The effects observed, althoughsignificant, were small: by the leadauthor’s own admission, ‘the result wasthat people produced an average of onefewer emotional word, per thousandwords, over the following week’. ButProfessor Totterdellsaid they were stillnoteworthy:‘Although the effectwill be negligible forany individual, it isstill reliable whenmany individuals are involved whichmeans that a societalintervention ispossible, and couldpotentially beenhanced with a strongermanipulation. It doesreinforce though thatemotion contagion is usually a subtleeffect that competes with otherinfluencing factors.’

The study’s methodology has also metwith some criticism. The software used –the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Countapplication (LIWC) – works by countingthe number of positive or negative wordsin a status, but cannot pick up negationwithin a phrase. Therefore, according toJohn Grohol (tinyurl.com/kofafzc), itwould mistakenly rate an update such as‘I am not having a great day’ as positivesimply because that phrase contains theword ‘great’.

But Professor Totterdell feels themethodology is ‘crude rather than flawed.It will misclassify some things andthereby introduce noise into the data,which will also contribute to the smalleffect size. Sometimes this type ofsoftware is supplemented to look forparticular word combinations. For

example, when people say “HappyChristmas” it doesn’t mean they arehappy! I’m sure these techniques willbecome more sophisticated in future.’

Was the study ethical?In response to accusations that Facebookset out to manipulate emotions withoutspecific informed consent fromindividuals, the social networking site haspointed out that users tick a box on sign-up, which gives permission for Facebookto use their data for ‘internal operations’,including ‘research’ (although some haveclaimed that this clause was only addedfour months after the study: seetinyurl.com/ptxoyfk).

Chair of the British PsychologicalSociety Ethics Committee Professor KateBullen (Aberystwyth University) and JohnOates, Chair of the Research and EthicsReference Group, published a letter inThe Guardian (see tinyurl.com/ndzbfmc)which expressed ‘serious misgivings’about the study, saying the study

appeared ‘to contravene allfour principles of researchethics as set out in theSociety’s code of humanresearch ethics and a recentset of principles agreed bymost British learnedsocieties involved in social science research. It infringed the autonomyand dignity of individualsby interfering with thepersonal decision-makingas to the posts that peoplewished to make to their

chosen groups and, mostimportantly, by failing to gain

valid informed consent from theparticipants. The scientific value of thisstudy would seem to be low, since there isalready a strong body of literature whichconfirms emotional contagion as a socialprocess. The intervention was sociallyirresponsible, in that it clandestinelymeddled in people’s social lives withconsequences that are very likely to have had significant negative effects on individuals and groups.’

Some online commentators havepointed out that we are unable todetermine whether any minors wereincluded in the study, speculating thatthis could lead to lawsuits. In addition,the Information Commissioner’s Office, aUK regulator, has said it plans to questionFacebook over the study. A spokespersonfrom the office told the Financial Timesthat it was too early to tell what part ofthe law the social networking site mighthave infringed.

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

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Leading psychologist Susan Fiske,professor at Princeton University, editedthe paper. She told The Atlantic: ‘It’sethically okay from the regulationsperspective, but ethics are kind of socialdecisions. There’s not an absolute answer.And so the level of outrage that appearsto be happening suggests that maybe itshouldn’t have been done… I’m stillthinking about it and I’m a little creepedout too.’

Facebook is not your friendSo why do many commentators appear to share Professor Fiske’s ‘creeped out’feeling? Why has the response fromFacebook users tended to be one of shockand anger?

New Zealand-based Sarah Gumbley isin the final stages of her PhD researchingour relationships with corporationsonline. Gumbley, who spent a yearlooking at the Facebook pages of a bank,an airline and a telecommunicationscompany, told BBC Radio 4 programmeThe Digital Human in May (seetinyurl.com/m2tr9sd) that manycorporations try to echo friendship norms to their users, therefore increasingdisappointment when they act in a wayusers and customers don’t expect. ‘It’smaybe tying in to what Sherry Turkle wastalking about when she was writing thatpeople are expecting more fromtechnology and less from their friends.’

Gumbley said that one of the thingsthat surprised her while doing herresearch was how angry people becamewith corporations who did not providethem with a good deal or tailoredresponse to their comments: ‘People werereally angry with the corporate becausethey felt like they had been betrayedbecause they saw it as a friend, and whenthey didn’t get a good deal or felt like theywere being ripped off they felt like theywere being ripped off by a friend.’

Psychologist Dr Ciarán McMahon,Research and Development Co-ordinatorat the Royal College of Surgeons inIreland, told us that one concept at playin the public feeling betrayed byFacebook is what is known as‘telepresence’ – which refers to webdesigners’ and developers’ efforts to hidethe mechanics of the site’s delivery fromthe public. ‘They basically aim to engineerour experience of the site to be so flawlessthat when we interact with it, wepsychologically feel like we are in adifferent place entirely, along with all ofour friends and connections. What thisresearch shows is that Facebook is not aneutral, passive or value-free conveyor ofinformation – the wool has been removed

from our eyes about what actually goeson 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 ofour personal identity to Facebook, butour relationship with it is now so deepand ongoing that if we stopped to thinkabout it for a few minutes, we would beimmediately uncomfortable.

‘This is what this study has done –it has forced us to think about how muchof our personally identifiable informationwe have given away, and that makes usfeel incompetent in our self-protection.Hence, we repress and deny – in fact, inmuch of the commentary on this story I have seen lots of projection instatements like “Of course this ishappening, how could you not knowFacebook is experimenting?”.’

The fallout continuesIn an official statement, Facebook said:‘This research was conducted for a singleweek in 2012 and none of the data usedwas associated with a specific person’sFacebook account. We do research toimprove our services and to make thecontent people see on Facebook asrelevant and engaging as possible. A bigpart of this is understanding how peoplerespond to different types of content,whether it’s positive or negative in tone,news from friends, or information frompages they follow. There is nounnecessary collection of people’s data inconnection with these research initiativesand all data is stored securely.’

Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chiefoperating officer, described the study as‘poorly communicated, and for thatcommunication we apologise. We nevermeant to upset you.’ The journal itself hasissued an ‘editorial expression of concern’.

As we went to press, the reactioncontinued (the Society’s own ResearchDigest has collated more links attinyurl.com/ltea7lc), with somepsychologists coming to Facebook’sdefence. For example, in New Scientist,Tal Yarkoni wrote: ‘If you were toconstruct a scale of possible motives formanipulating user behaviour – with theglobal betterment of society at one end,and something really bad at the other end– I submit that conducting basic scientificresearch would almost certainly be muchcloser to the former than other standardmotives we find on the web… If the ideathat Facebook would actively try tomanipulate your behaviour bothers you,you should probably stop reading thisright now and go and close your account.’

read discuss contribute at www.thepsychologist.org.uk 571

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info For BPS awards and grant schemes,

see www.bps.org.uk/awards&grantsFunding bodies should e-mail news to Emma Smith on [email protected] possible inclusion

FUNDING NEWSThe Medical Research Council invitesapplications from neuropsychologists for its new investigator research grants inneurosciences and mental health. Theseprovide support for clinical and non-clinicalresearchers while they are establishingthemselves as independent principalinvestigators. Applicants must hold a PhD,DPhil or an MD, have between three and tenyears postdoctoral research experience andshould be in their first lecturer appointment,hold a junior fellowship or be in a seniorpostdoctoral position. Closing date: 1 October2014. I tinyurl.com/mwo3n55

The Leverhulme Trust invites proposals forits research programme grant on innovationfor sustainable living, which includespsychology and determining the drivers ofbehaviour change. Applications are invitedfrom UK universities, other institutions ofhigher and further education and registeredcharities. The scheme is also open toinstitutions of similar status in countrieswhere the provision of research funding isseriously limited. Closing date: 3 October2014. I tinyurl.com/35dhttl

The British Federation of Women Graduatesinvites applications for its emergency grants.These aim to support female graduatestudents who are faced with unforeseenfinancial circumstances that might preventthe completion of their year’s work. Grantsare one-off payments and are unlikely toexceed £2500. Closing date: 6 October 2014. I www.ffwg.org.uk

The Feminist Review Trust invitesapplications for its research grants fromfeminist scholars. The award is designed to support activities such as hard-to-fundprojects; pump-priming activities;interventionist projects that support feministvalues; training and development projectsand one-off events. The Trust is normallyunable to support MA, MSc or PhD students,with the exception of scholars fromdeveloping economies in exceptionalcircumstances. The maximum award amountis £10,000. Deadline for the next round ofapplications: 30 September 2014. I tinyurl.com/cgs68v



As adults, we’ve learned thatsimple text-based instructionsare usually trustworthy. If astranger tells us to turn nextleft for London, but we see a street sign that states theopposite, most of us wouldassume the stranger had madea mistake, and we’d follow thesign. Now researchers led byKathleen Corriveau haveinvestigated children’s trust in instructions delivered orally,versus those originating inwritten text. Their finding is that as soon as children haverudimentary reading skills, theytrust written text over spokeninstruction.

The research involved two differently coloured tubesleading to a cup beneath. Onetube was always blocked.Dozens of children aged three tosix had to decide in which tubeto place a marble, in the hope itwould reach the cup beneath, sothat they would earn a sticker.

To help them, the childrenreceived instructions from twopuppets. On each trial, onepuppet simply spoke theirinstruction (e.g. ‘I say blue.Choose the blue tube’) whereasthe other puppet opened anenvelope in which was writtenthe colour of the other tube (e.g.‘This says red. Choose the redone’). The children didn’t getfeedback on their performanceuntil the end of the study, sothey couldn’t use results tojudge which puppet to trust.

Regardless of age, thechildren who couldn’t yet readwere indiscriminate in whetherthey chose to trust the purelyoral advice, or whether to trust

Trusting to the letterIn the British Journal ofDevelopmental Psychology

It’s well known that psychology research relies too heavily on student volunteers. So many findingsare 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 onstudent participants – those who volunteer late in their university term or semester lack

motivation and tend to perform worse thanthose who volunteer early.

A little background about student researchparticipants. Psychology students oftenvolunteer for numerous studies throughout a semester [see tinyurl.com/qfs7ojr andtinyurl.com/prb7m6g]. Usually, they’recompelled to do this at least once in return forcourse credits that count towards their degree.Other times they receive cash or other forms ofcompensation. When in the semester they optto volunteer for course credit is usually down totheir discretion. To over-generalise,conscientious students tend to volunteer earlyin semester, whereas less disciplined studentsleave it until last minute, when time is shortand deadlines are pressing.

Nicholls team first recruited 40 studentparticipants (18 men) at Flinders Universityduring the third week of a 14-week semester.Half of them were first years who’d chosen tovolunteer early in return for course credits. Theother half of the participants, who hailed fromvarious year groups, had chosen the option toreceive $10 compensation. The challenge forboth groups of students was the same – toperform 360 trials of a sustained attention task.Each trial they had to press a button as fast aspossible if they saw any number between 1 and9, except for the number 3, in which case theywere to withhold responding.

At this early stage of the semester therewas no difference in the performance (based on speed and accuracy) of the students whovolunteered 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 inreturn for cash compensation. Now the researchers found a difference between the groups. Thoseparticipants receiving financial payment outperformed those who had volunteered in return forcourse credit. The latter group also showed more variability in their performance than theircourse-credit counterparts had done at the start of the semester, and they reported having lowermotivation.

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

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

In the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology

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avoiding parties to cope withsocial anxiety). In other words,the researchers explained, thisis the patient’s ‘ability to identifythoughts and feelings, andshare them in a non-defensive,focused way’. The second‘attitudes’ factor refers to,among other things, thepatient’s optimism about theoutcome of therapy, and theiracceptance that they must takeresponsibility for change.

The higher patients’ scoredon the first factor (their capacityfor participation in CBT), thegreater reduction they tended toshow in their illness symptoms,based on measures taken beforeand after the course of CBT.Attitudes towards therapy werenot correlated with symptomreductions, but we should bearin mind that this may bebecause the research focusedonly on those patients whocompleted therapy. Also, it maybe useful in future to measurehow patients’ attitudes changeduring therapy.

There are other reasons forcaution. The amount of variancein symptom change explained byboth suitability factors combinedwas statistically significant, buttiny – just .07 per cent. Also, thetherapists who administered thetherapy also recorded theirpatients’ improvements, sothere was scope for bias. Finally,more research is needed ondifferent forms of mental illnessbesides depression and anxiety.Nonetheless, this study makes a constructive contribution to a neglected area.

‘Given that the patient’scapacity provides importantinformation about whether ornot a patient will derive benefitfrom CBT, clinicians who areconcerned about limitedresources and long wait lists are encouraged to undertake a suitability assessment prior totherapy,’ the researchers said,‘to identify patients low in theirGeneral Capacity to Participate…and consider making referralsto alternative treatments.’

the puppet who read the textinstruction. By contrast, thechildren with some readingability showed a clear preferenceto trust the puppet who readfrom the envelope, choosing thetube they recommended over 75per cent of the time.

Two further studies clearedup some ambiguities. Forinstance, it was found thatyoung readers prefer to trust a puppet who reads theinstruction from text, than oraladvice from a puppet who getstheir information from awhisper in the ear: the youngreaders weren’t simply swayedby the fact the text puppet wasdrawing on a secondary source.Young readers also trustedinstruction from written textover information conveyed in a coloured symbol. This showsthey’re specifically trusting ofwritten text, not just any form ofpermanent, external information.

Corriveau’s team said theirresults showed that oncechildren learn to read, ‘theyrapidly come to regard thewritten word as a particularlyauthoritative source ofinformation about how to act inthe world’. They added that insome ways this result is difficultto explain. Young readers areexposed to a good deal offantasy and fiction in writtenform, so why should they be sotrusting of written instruction?Perhaps they are used to seeingadults act on the basis ofwritten information – such asmaps, menus and recipes – butthen again, pre-readers willalso have had such experiences.Is there something specialabout the process of learning to read that leads children toperceive written instruction asauthoritative?

The rise of CBT has beenwelcomed by many as a safe,effective alternative to drugtreatments for mental illness.However, there are also fearsthat CBT has crowded out otherless structured, more time-consuming forms ofpsychotherapy.

The fact is, CBT doesn’twork for everyone. Preciousresources could be bettermanaged, and alternativeapproaches sensibly considered,if there were a way to predict inadvance those patients who arelikely to benefit from CBT, andthose who are not.

Jesse Renaud and hercolleagues administered a 10-item scale – the Suitability forShort-term Cognitive Therapy,first devised in the 1990s – topatients who underwent CBT for depression or anxiety at theMcGill University Health Centrebetween 2001 and 2011. Theresearchers focused theiranalysis on the 256 patients (88 men) who completed theircourse of therapy, which lastedan average of 19 sessions.

Renaud’s team looked forcorrelations between patients’answers to the Suitability scaleand found that the scale wasreally tapping two mainfactors – the patients’ capacityfor participation in the CBTprocess, and their attitudestowards CBT.

The first factor includes a patient’s insight into thoughtsthat pop into their heads (so-called ‘automatic thoughts’);their ability to identify anddistinguish their emotions; andtheir use of safety behaviours to cope with their problems (e.g.

Who will benefit from cognitive behavioural therapy?In the Journal of Clinical Psychology

The material in this section is taken from the Society’s Research Digest blog atwww.researchdigest.org.uk/blog, and thismonth is written by its editor Dr ChristianJarrett. Visit the blog for full coverage includingreferences 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

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Amabile, T.M. (1983). The socialpsychology of creativity: Acomponential conceptualization.Journal of Personality and SocialPsychology, 45(2), 357–376.

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

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

http://creativeconomy.britishcouncil.org/Policy_Development/news/building-creative-nation

Brouillette, S. (2013). Cultural work andantisocial psychology. In M. Banks, R.Gill & S. Taylor (Eds.) Theorizingcultural work: Labour, continuity andchange in the cultural and creativeindustries (pp.30–43). London andNew York: Routledge.

Department for Culture, Media and

Sport, (2001). Creative industriesmapping document. London: HMSO.

Department for Culture, Media and Sport(2011). Creative industries economicestimates – December 2011.Retrieved 3 December 2013 fromwww.gov.uk/government/publications/creative-industries-economic-estimates-december-2011

Haslam, S.A., Adarves-Yorno, I.,Postmes, T. & Jans, L. (2013). The

collective origins of valued originality:A social identity approach tocreativity. Personality & SocialPsychology Review, 17, 384–401.

Hesmondhalgh, D. & Baker, S. (2011).Creative labour: Media work in threecultural industries. London and NewYork: Routledge.

John-Steiner, V. (2000). Creativecollaboration. New York: OxfordUniversity Press.

In Britain, and in a new globalcreative economy, creative peopleare now valued as economic actorsand potential agents of prosperity.Social psychology offers insightsinto their experience and whatmakes them creative. It can alsohelp to explain why there are morecreative workers now, when theyare in demand.

Social psychologists argue thatcreative behaviour is the outcomeof people’s circumstances,interactions, collaborations andgroup relationships. Even whatcounts as a creative output will be socially defined. Of course, this social emphasis is at odds with the classic image of aninspired creative individual, such as a designer or artist workingalone in the studio.

Britain is creative, officially. In 2010Britain had 106,700 creativeenterprises, which contributed £59

billion to the national economy, accordingto the Department for Culture, Media andSport (DCMS, 2011). Another 50,000creative jobs will become available by2016, if a current British Council projectmeets its targets (British Council, 2013).The 2012 London Olympics were claimedas a triumph not only for Team GB’sathletes but also for the creative workerswho produced the spectacular openingand closing ceremonies – includingdesigners, film-makers, choreographers,stage managers and costume-makers – as well as the manyothers involved in thedevelopment, promotion andsuccessful presentation of thegames.

All of these workers are partof Britain’s creative economy.They belong to a sector, generallyreferred to as the cultural andcreative industries, which hasbeen celebrated for the last twodecades as a growth area andgenerator of new jobs, in Britainand globally. There has beenconsiderable academic interest inthe rise of the sector, the reasonswhy creativity has becomeeconomically important andwhat exactly it means to be a creative worker in the 21stcentury. This article will look at some of the contributions of psychologists to thesediscussions. It will review the

work of social psychologists who havestudied creativity from some very differentstarting points and theoretical positions, todraw out some of the insights that theirwork provides into the phenomenon of‘creative Britain’ and the experience ofcontemporary creative workers.

The value of creative peopleThe rise of the creative sector in the late 20th and earliest 21st century in the UK, the USA and globally has beeninvestigated by economists, sociologistsand other academics. They have noted the ever-increasing need to invent newproducts in order to stimulate continuingdemand from affluent consumers, and thegreater significance of branding,marketing and advertising. The expansionof tourist markets is tied to the brandingof places, including whole countries, andhas also conferred a new importance onmuseums and ‘heritage’ attractions. Inaddition, the expanding knowledge anddigital economies depend on innovationand design. In short, it has been argued,

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questions

Taylor, S. (2013). The lived experience of acontemporary creative identification.In J.Chan & K. Thomas (Eds.)Handbook of research on creativity.Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.

How is it possible to increase the supply of creative people to meet a new demand for creative workers?If the image of an inspired creativeindividual (like a genius artist or bigname designer) is only a ‘myth’, does it still carry any importance for contemporary creative workers?

2012 Olympics – a triumph for Britain’s creative workers

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Creative BritainStephanie Taylor looks at how social psychology explains the phenomenon

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all of these areas of economic activityrequire continuous inputs from animaginative creative workforce.

Academics have noted a further set of circumstances in the late 20th centurythat contributed to the rise of the sector. In a number of major Western cities, artistsmoved into run-down urban areas, seekingcheap studio space, for instance, in formerindustrial buildings. It was subsequentlynoticed, including by politicians anddevelopers, that the presence of the artiststended to attract other people into thearea, perhaps initially for entertainmentand nightlife. The area would graduallybecame fashionable, then more affluent as other people settled, including middle-class residents. The artists had therefore,unintentionally, initiated gentrification and redevelopment. These urban successstories focused further attention on artistsor creative people as economic actors andpotential agents of prosperity.

It has been suggested that the newvalue of creative people was partlyanticipated by psychologists in the USA inthe middle of the 20th century. According

to Sarah Brouillette(2013), theyundertook the taskof specifying the typeof worker requiredfor future economicdevelopment andprosperity.Anticipating thatindustry would needinnovators, they tookas their model forthe ideal futureworker a Romanticimage of the artist asa uniquely talentedindividual pursuinginspiration and acreative vocation.The image itself hasbeen described as a‘myth’ (Becker, 1982)and probably derivesfrom the biographical

accounts of 19th-century

European painters, which were devised by art dealers in order to encourage sales.However, the image is well established andwidely recognised and, Brouillette argues,influenced the psychologists’ depictions of the ideal new worker. This would be a creative non-conformist who defies socialnorms in search of fulfilment or self-actualisation and is able to live withuncertainty and ‘float for a time in apurposeless void without a distinct future’(p.38). Although this is obviously not anaccount of a conventional good colleagueor organisation person, it does describe a worker who can manage a freelance orportfolio career, moving from project toproject in a new, flexible labour market,selling creative skills to whicheveremployers require them. Brouillettesuggests that it became a new ideal inmanagement theory, for instance in thework of ‘gurus’ like Tom Peters.

Individual talent? Taken together, these variousdevelopments and influences can be seen to have conferred a new value oncreativity. In one resonant description, it came to be seen as ‘the oil of the 21stcentury’ (Ross, 2008). The source ofprosperity, to be tapped like an oil well,was supposedly the individual creativeworker, as the imaginative source for newproducts and brands, the genius behindweb developments, the producer ofintellectual property and branding, andthe driver of urban generation, amongmany other roles. In 2001 the Departmentfor Culture, Media and Sport listed thecreative industries as ‘advertising,architecture, the art and antiques market,crafts, design, designer fashion, film andvideo, interactive leisure software, music,the performing arts, publishing, softwareand computer services, television andradio’ and attributed their collectivesuccess to the ‘individual creativity, skilland talent’ of their workers (DCMS, 2001;emphasis added).

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

focus on individual creativity. One of themost widely cited is Teresa Amabile, whois among the US psychologists referred toby Brouillette. Amabile (1983) studiedobservable behaviour, wanting to avoid‘conceptual’ definitions of creativity. Sheproposed that creative behaviour is theoutcome of favourable circumstances. Thefactors that produce or promote creativebehaviours go beyond the individual andinclude education. Moreover, her‘operational’ definition of creativebehaviour is that it produces outputs orproducts that ‘appropriate observers’ agreeare creative. These observers are informedand influential people in the relevant field,be it science or arts or a more specificactivity like chess playing. Amabiletherefore links creative behaviour to thesocial context that recognises and defines it as ‘creative’, and promotes it.

Sociocultural psychologists extend the social emphasis further, proposing thatcreative behaviour itself is not individualbut relational or collective: creative outputsare inevitably produced throughinteraction and collaboration. Forexample, one influential writer in thisfield, Vera John-Steiner (2000), presentedstudies of the working practices of ‘famousnames’ in the fields of literature andscience, as well as art, to show that thesuccess attributed to a named individualwas actually dependent on a creativecollaboration such as a partnership.

Another US sociocultural psychologist,W. Keith Sawyer (2003), observed actorsin improvisational theatre as a model forcreative behaviour. There is no script oradvance rehearsal and no one person is incharge of the performance. It unfolds ‘live’and unplanned, in front of the audience, asthe actors respond to each other and to thedeveloping situation and storyline. Sawyerobserved that the success of theimprovisation depends on each actorworking as part of the group rather thanattempting to follow an individual plan.The creative output, the performance, isnot reducible to the contributions ofindividuals but comes from the group as a whole. It is an example of collaborative


creative work

Littleton K. & Miell, D. (2004).Collaborative creativity:Contemporary perspectives. In D.Miell & K. Littleton (Eds.)Collaborative creativity: Contemporaryperspectives (pp.1–8). London: FreeAssociation.

McRobbie, A. (2012). Be creative: Makinga living in the urban cultureindustries. Retrieved 3 December2013 from www.youtube.com/

watch?v=C-QMaaFITKM Perry, G. (2013). Playing to the gallery. The

Reith Lectures 2013. Retrieved 3December 2013 from www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00729d9/episodes/player

Reynolds, J. & Taylor, S. (2005). Narratingsingleness: Life stories and deficitidentities. Narrative Inquiry, 15(2),197–215.

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

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. NewYork: Basic Books.

Taylor, S. (2006). Narrative asconstruction and discursive resource.Narrative Inquiry, 16(1), 94–102.

Taylor, S. (2011). Negotiating oppositions

and uncertainties: Gendered conflictsin creative identity work. Feminismand Psychology, 21(3), 354–371.

Taylor, S. & Littleton, K. (2012).Contemporary identities of creativityand creative work. Farnham: Ashgate.

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creativity. Sawyer is particularly interestedin the business and commercialapplications of such creative collaborationsand has researched examples of thesuccessful use of creative groups incommercial companies in order to developnew products (Sawyer, 2007).

In Britain, other socioculturalpsychologists, including Karen Littletonand Dorothy Miell (2004), have exploredcreative collaborations in the context of theclassroom, looking at children workingtogether in groups. The approach hasopened further avenues for investigationand application, such as the ways in whichthe collaborative creative processes can beenhanced and outputs improved throughthe use of ‘tools’, ranging through pen andpaper to newer technologies such aselectronic whiteboards.

In a different tradition, socialpsychologists have recently developed amodel of creativity based on social identityand self-categorisation theories. AlexHaslam and colleagues (2013) argue thatthe relationship between the individualand the (potential) ingroup is central tocreativity and creative processes. Thegroup becomes an audience for itsmembers’ work and also provides a set of norms, such as the principles of an artmovement like surrealism. The individualis motivated to producecreative work thatadvances the group’sinterests, by followingand extending thevalued norms of thegroup. These may bedistinct from widersocial norms andindeed are likely tochallenge them, sinceart is seldom conventional.

Despite its different theoreticalunderpinning, the work of Haslam et al.resembles Amabile’s in that it drawsattention to the ways in which creativity is recognised and defined socially, andtherefore variably. What counts as ‘creative’can change, for example from one societyor historic period to another. There areparallels here with the definitions of artoffered by an influential US sociologist,Howard S. Becker (1982) and, morerecently, the 2013 Reith Lecturer, theBritish potter, Grayson Perry (2013).Becker and Perry both propose that thedifferences between ‘art’, as either processor output, and ‘craft’, or ‘not art’, or justordinary work, are not absolute but areestablished over time by the variouspeople, including audiences, who make up what Becker calls an ‘art world’. Inshort, art, like other creative work, is notproduced in a vacuum but depends on

other people, for the process of its makingand also for its recognition and definition.

Towards a creative BritainWhat are the larger implications of thesevarious social psychology studies ofcreativity? What can they contribute to an understanding of the phenomenon ofcreative Britain? The first point is that thesocial psychological studies challenge theconventional association of creativity withindividual genius or special talents.Instead, a premise of their differentresearch approaches is that the capacity to create and innovate is widely shared, if not universal, and utilised in many lifeand work activities. Moreover, byproposing that creative behaviour is theoutcome of people’s circumstances, as inAmabile’s model, or their interactions,collaborations and group relationships,the various studies suggest that it can befostered: people can be made morecreative, for example through educationand through encouragement for thecollaborations and groups that mightstimulate creative outputs.

Extending these ideas, we mightsurmise that this fostering will beparticularly likely to take place at a timewhen creativity is highly valued, for its

(assumed) economicefficacy. All of thesepoints can to helpexplain why creativityand creative work havebecome more prominentin Britain. In addition, if creativity is sociallydefined, it seems likely

that the same economiccontext will promote its

recognition. For example, activities mightbe labelled as ‘creative’ that had previouslybeen given more mundane labels. Studiesof Britain’s creative sector have noted thisexpansion of the reference of creativity. It is no longer limited to the traditional‘elite’ activities of say, painting, sculpture,classical music, but now encompassesmany new activities, as the 2001 list ofcreative industries indicates.

These are not the only psychologicalstudies that can contribute to ourunderstanding of the contemporaryphenomenon of Creative Britain. In aseries of projects conducted from 2005 to2008, Karen Littleton and I employed anapproach based in narrative psychologyand critical discursive psychology toresearch the experience of contemporarycreative workers in Britain (Taylor, 2011;Taylor & Littleton, 2012). Our interest wasin their interpretations of themselves, theirwork and their life possibilities. A premise

of our narrative-discursive approach is that people are always positioned withinthe constraints or limited possibilities ofestablished social and personalinterpretations. The approach assumes afluid, incomplete process of identificationin which people draw on the knowledgeand values made available by theirinterknit personal and professionalcontexts, ongoing and previous, in order to make claims about who they are, andwho they want to become (Taylor, 2006).Established ideas and images, like theRomantic image of the artist, haveimplications 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’screative economy in large part originatedin and depends upon its art college system(McRobbie, 2012), and the 2001 listindicates how closely the creativeindustries are tied to the arts. Our researchparticipants worked in a huge variety ofspecialisms, many, like digital design,photography and fashion, beyond thetraditional elite activities of fine art.Although the participants entered creativecareers through their study in art colleges,they were at different career points. Theyranged from current students to peoplewho were many decades beyond theirdegree studies.

Analysing their accounts of themselvesand their lives, we found that ourparticipants invoked two different imagesof the creative worker. One was a personconnected into a contemporary creativeworld, utilising contacts and networks,continuously engaged in ongoingcommunications with other creatives andwith audiences to stay in touch with the(urban and global) field and its latestdevelopments. In its emphasis onconnection and working with others, thisimage echoed sociocultural theories ofcollaborative creativity.

The second image, unsurprisinglygiven the art college context in which theparticipants were recruited and the largerart college connections of the sector notedabove, was the Romantic one of theindividual artist or creative maker. Whatwas perhaps less predictable was the extentto which this image shaped theparticipants’ accounts of their work andcareers. For example, they talked of thecreative process as one of discovery,requiring an orientation of perpetualopenness to possibility. In their accounts,creative work requires total involvement or immersion, to be prioritised over otheraspects of life. They characterise their

“In a climate in whichcreativity is seen to beeconomically important,more jobs and workers willbe defined and recognisedas creative”



creative work

work as an open-ended and even playfulexperiment, or a quest to be followed foran unforeseeable time, rather than anactivity amenable to goal-setting and timemanagement. Similarly, they emphasisethat a creative career does not have apredictable forward narrative topromotion, recognition and rewards, likean ‘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 thatsuch ideals of creative practice are difficultto achieve. It was consistent with theRomantic image that they appeared toaccept that their chosen working liveswould require an indefinite largecommitment with limited reward. Theyalso accepted an inevitable conflict withthe succession of personal life stagesassociated with ‘a dominant coupledomnarrative’ (Reynolds & Taylor, 2005), suchas courtship, partnering and becomingparents. Many of them talked about thedifficulty or even impossibility ofsustaining long-term relationships orsupporting children.

However, despite these difficulties, they presented their work in highly positiveterms. In particular, they emphasised itsdifference from old or ‘ordinary’ work,which they tended to characterise in termsof routine and mindless drudge, like acaricature of a factory production line. Theyrhetorically distanced themselves from‘ordinary’ jobs, being ‘trapped’ in the nineto five, from lives which follow a predictabletrajectory and from ‘having to’ retire at 60or 65. They described their work in highlypersonalised terms, as matched to their

interests, the unique product of theirpersonal identities and experience, and asource of fulfilment and self-actualisation.They repeatedly referred to their ‘love’ oftheir work and suggested that in this theyalso differed from ordinary workers.

On one level, these positive accountsare surprising. The creative sector has beenwidely criticised for the predominance ofprecarious employment (short-term,project-based) and low pay, and also for its inequalities (e.g. women and black and other minority ethnic workers areunderrepresented in almost all the creativeindustries). How, then, should we interpretthe participants’ accounts in the face ofthese difficulties? Are their positive claimsto be taken at face value, or are theseworkers deluded, conniving in their ownexploitation by accepting pooremployment conditions?

In a discursive approach, it isimportant to consider the functions ofpeople’s talk, and part of our research wasto consider our participants’ accounts inthese terms. It is relevant here that for a number of decades (roughly equivalentto the period of the rise of the creativesector), sociologists have noted negativetrends in work and employment generally.It has been suggested that workers in allfields experience less security and lesscontrol over their work. Employment ismore likely to be short-term. Fewer peoplecan look forward to a job for life or even a predicable career trajectory. In thesecircumstances, Creative Britain and ourresearch participants’ accounts of theircreative work and working lives acquire a new significance. In apparent defiance of the negative general trends, the creative

workers assert the specialness of theirwork and their own centrality to the workprocess. With its emphasis onpersonalisation, the Romantic image of thecreative maker apparently encourages themto unite their lives and their work, even inthe face of employment uncertainties.They reconcile themselves to precariousemployment and future uncertainty byreclaiming career continuity through theirpersonal commitment to their work, oftendating it right back to a childhood interest.Their accounts construct, retrospectively, a narrative of personal development anddestiny, presenting their careers asvocations rather than coolly rationalchoices. The personal biography becomesevidence of a vocation and thereforevalidates the career choice, howeverconventionally unsuccessful it may be in terms of providing secure or lucrativeemployment. In short, these accountscannot solve the problems ofcontemporary work more generally butcan be seen to function to re-interpret and remedy some of its difficulties andconflicts in ways which make sense of the workers’ own lives.

The phenomenon of Creative Britaincontinues, beyond the Olympics and inspite of the global financial crisis. In aclimate in which creativity is seen to beeconomically important, more jobs andworkers will be defined and recognised as creative, and creativity is likely to befostered. Social psychological studiesindicate how it can be facilitated by thekinds of contacts and collaborations that are more available in urban contexts.A narrative-discursive analysis of creativeworkers’ own interpretations suggests theinfluence of the Romantic image of anindividual creative maker who endureshardships for the love of the work and the hope of eventual fulfilment or self-actualisation. A creative occupation is notalways the best work, or even good work(Hesmondhalgh & Baker, 2011), butcreativity can bring new satisfactions evento difficult circumstances. This finding isespecially significant because creative workhas been claimed as a model or exemplarfor the future of work more generally. Theexperience of creative workers may offerinsights into how more and more people in Britain will be able to manage their livesand their careers.

Stephanie Tayloris at Psychology, SocialSciences, The [email protected]

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

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between mind and brain and between the differences we find in the brain andhow these are somehow responsible forbehaviours. We know that one of thechief architects of the brain is experienceand education. I think we need to rethinkthe old nature–nurture dichotomy. Natureand nurture are not two independentmain effects. It is really a much moreinteractive, circular process. Ourexperiences change our biology, theychange the hormones we secrete, theychange our brain structures and this, inturn, changes how we interact with theenvironment.

You are interested in creativity. Is thereanything we can do to improve ourlevel of creativity?Absolutely! Most of my work is in criticalthinking and I think of creativity as oneaspect of critical thinking. They are notseparate. All we need to do is tell a groupof students that we want a creative project– try this if you are teaching right now.Give your students the freedom to becreative. You tell them that creativity isvalued, and you suddenly get much morecreative projects. It’s really that simple.People do incredible creative projectssuch as, rap songs about psychology,teaching a dance as a way of enhancingmemory and even baking a brain cakewith ingredients that represent parts ofthe brain inside. I think it is a sad mistakethat we aren’t doing more of this andallowing our students to be creative.

You are also interested in work–lifebalance. In 2005 you co-authored abook called From Work– Family Balanceto Work– Family Interaction: Changingthe Metaphor.This book gave me the opportunity tocombine my research on work and familyinteraction and gender differences. My co-authors and I looked at why so fewwomen are in top positions of leadership.One reason is of course because womenhave primary care responsibilities. A morerecent book with Fanny Chung is Womenat the Top: Powerful Leaders Tell Us How toCombine Work and Family. We examinedpowerful leaders with care responsibilitiesand how they manage to combine theirwork and family responsibilities. You can’thave equality at work unless you haveequality at home. I would add that mostwomen work outside the home – andwomen in general have less money to hireadditional help and less flexibility inscheduling tasks. The topic of combiningwork and family involves everybody fromthe CEO of an organisation to the personwho sorts the mail. Men and women bothwant to be successful at work and good

You’ve had a very productive career,publishing widely from handedness

to gender differences in cognition todeveloping critical thinking skills. I’dlike to explore all of these, but howdid you start out? When I first went to college at theUniversity of Pennsylvania – we’re goingback a long ways – I actually started inengineering. I was interested in howthings work. In my freshman year I wasdoing mechanical engineering and I wrotean article for the student magazine aboutbreakthroughs in the mechanics in birthcontrol devices. This really suggested I was studying the wrong area! At thetime my then boyfriend, who later becamemy husband, was taking a psychologycourse and I sat in on a lecture and lovedit. That started me off – I was hooked.

Once you transferred into psychologywere there any major figures thatinfluenced you?One prominent early tutor was HenryGleitman. He was a well-renownedpsychologist but he was also an actor. He was involved in community theatreand he brought acting into the classroomin a way that made you think there wasnothing more important in the world thanstudying 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 ofpsychologists that responded to thecontroversial Bell Curve book thatsuggested cognitive differencesbetween ethnic groups. Was thissomething you felt strongly about?The idea of group differences inintelligence in relation to race andethnicity is something that has beenmisunderstood and misused. So I wasvery pleased to be involved in a rejoinderthat pointed out some of the things thatwe felt the Bell Curve got wrong. Justrecently I was involved in a group thatupdated that intelligence paper. It was

my great honour to be the only personwho was on both papers. Both were reallyabout how we conceptualise intelligenceand differences here as honestly and asaccurately as we can, and point out wherewe felt others had made mistakes.

You are known for research into genderdifferences in cognition. Are thererobust differences between the sexes,and if so where did they come from?These are complicated questions and I’malways loath to give a two-minute answerto something that is so complicated.There are some differences – some arelarge and some are small. And for somethe contribution of biology is not zero. In other words, there is a biologicalcontribution. But our environmentcertainly alters biology just as our biologyalters 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 thedifferences change in as little as a decade.

Some people are uncomfortable withsuch ideas. Do people get moral andempirical arguments mixed up here?Absolutely, we have a sense of fairness.People don’t like group differences of anysort – it seems unfair, un-American andun-British to suggest such things to manypeople. And it’s true that socialisationprocesses are largely responsible – wecertainly socialise girls and boysdifferently. People are often morecomfortable attributing differences tosocialisation processes – but there are data that suggest there are biologicalcontributions as well. And indeed thereare those who seek to misuse biologicaldata to support sex-role stereotyping.There is no doubt that all of our advancesin brain and neuroscience have re-shapedhow we think about all areas ofpsychology. But there is considerablemisuse here. I wrote a journal articleseveral years ago titled, ‘Mind the gap’which is a term that will be familiar toBritish readers – in this case the gap is

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Defeating aliens withcritical thinking Diane Halpern tells Lance Workman about her efforts to improve work–lifebalance and increase creativity

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parents and caregivers. One of the mainfindings is that there are tremendousbenefits for men if they are more involvedin their children’s lives.

One thing I’m personally interested inis handedness and abnormal patternshere (I have mixed handedness). Is thisa rare phenomenon and is it true thatleft-handers have increased risks?Mixed hand use is not that unusual – youprobably do some things with one handand other things with the other. Whatwould be unusual is if you changed thesepreferences for the same task, such assometimes writing with each hand,instead of the more usual mixed handpattern such as writing with one handand throwing a ball with the other.

I did some early work with StanleyCoren on this – he really is one of themost knowledgeable people in the worldon the topic of laterality and handedness.The idea that left-handedpeople have a shorter lifespandoes appear to stand up quitewell. It’s partly because theyhave more accidents, largelybecause the world isengineered for right-handeduse. We also have to take intoaccount the fact that moremales than females are left-handed and they have ashorter life expectancy. Finally,there’s a small statisticalassociation between left-handedness and being gay.This may have affected ourfindings because we did thatwork when a lot of gay menhad reduced life expectancydue to AIDS. Handedness is aninteresting phenomenon thatis affected by, for example, circulating sex hormones during fetal development.But there are other factors involved also.Identical twins are most often discordantfor handedness – probably due tocrowding in the uterus

You have been president of theAmerican Psychological Association.That must have been a big job!Yes, due to the scale of the APA – it ismuch bigger than the BPS for example!Also, like psychologists, APA iseverywhere – the APA is involved incolleges in hospitals in the military – in virtually every organisation. There is almost no place where the APA is not involved in the US.

In the early 1990s you spent some time teaching in Russia – that musthave been an unusual experience for

an American academic?It certainly was. I was a Fulbright scholarand I got to teach in Moscow StateUniversity. I was there two years after theend of communism. It was a time wheneverything they had learned was turnedaround for the people there. A time ofgreat change.

There must have been differencesbetween the Russian psychologists and the way you do things in America?Absolutely! It was not long after the endof communism and it was a time of bigtransitions. I liken it to when my childrenwere young and played the oppositesgame. You know the opposite ofeverything they said becomes true – yousay you’re not hungry when you reallyare, you roll on the floor laughing aboutsomething sad, and so on. That’s what itwas like when communism ended.Everything people had been taught got

turned around – like capitalism, thatsuddenly became a good thing. It was a hard change. I did a book with acolleague in Russia where we comparedpost-communist and Soviet psychologywith US psychology. We both got to work in Bellagio, Italy, on RockefellerFellowships. What stood out for me wasthat my Russian colleague kept wantingto put things together that didn’t seem togo together for me. I had to understandthe politics of contemporary Russia tounderstand his proposed grouping. Until I understood that the breakaway republicsfrom the Soviet Union were part ofprejudice, I could not understand whythese topics would be grouped togetherconceptually. Because we don’t havebreakaway states in the US – althoughTexas comes close sometimes – I had tounderstand someone else’s history andviewpoint to understand why that made

sense for him. But I’m always pleased toexperience psychology in other cultures. I have taught in many places around theworld, like Turkey, Mexico, Canada andof course Russia, because I really dobelieve 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 acomputerised game to help developscientific reasoning and criticalthinking.That’s right – it’s a computerised gamethat I developed with two colleagues, ArtGraesser of the University of Memphisand Keith Millis of Northern IllinoisUniversity and it has a big team behind it.Operation ARA, which is the name of thegame, teaches critical thinking byinvolving young people in reacting to analien invasion. The aliens are invading theplanet and are turning us into mindless

consumers with no science. Your firsttask as a player is to join somethingcalled the ‘Federal Bureau of Science’.For the first module you have aninteractive textbook that was writtenby an alien. It’s written in naturallanguage and you respond in naturallanguage. In the second module youplay a game – a jeopardy-like gamethat you play with an avatar. There is an interspecies love interest. Thereare also twists and turns and there is a green plot. In the third module youhave to identify whether someone is an alien or human. Tutoring is based

on your performance. So if you do wellyou tutor the animated avatar, if you aremiddling then the avatar tutors you and if you do poorly then you mostly watchthe avatar. You get to save the Earth byidentifying whether an individual is a human or an alien and in the processyou learn about science.

That sounds like quite a game! As I said at the beginning, you haveachieved a great deal in your career.Are there any ambitions that you wouldstill like to fulfill and is anything youfeel strongly needs to be pursued?There’s so much! I’m very muchdedicated to trying to help people thinkbetter. I think the internet and massmedia in general have made badinformation more easily available. A legitimate-looking website, for example,can often turn out to be a racist hatewebsite. I increasingly think we need tobe sure the general public understandswhy we need data, what constitutes gooddata and what you can do with it. That’sone of the things I’m still striving toachieve.


interview

Diane F. Halpern is Dean of Social Sciences at MinervaSchools at Keck Graduate Institute and McElweeFamily Professor of Psychology

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The Psychologist August 2014

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