People Love Winning Streaks By Individuals More Than Those By Teams

By Emily Reynolds

When Usain Bolt or Serena Williams step out for their latest race or match, the world waits with bated breath. As some of the best athletes in the world, their unbelievable winning streaks have been met by almost universal acclaim — and plenty of people hoping that streak isn’t broken.

But according to Jesse Walker from Ohio State University and Thomas Gilovich from Cornell University, that investment and goodwill just isn’t the same when it comes to teams: we’re far less impressed by consecutive wins by groups of people than those by individuals. They call this phenomenon the “Streaking Star Effect” in their new paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.



In the first study, 207 participants read about the history and rules of Calcio Fiorentino, an obscure amateur Italian sport combining aspects of football, rugby and martial arts. Participants in the “team” condition were told the Milan team were the best in the world, winning six championships in a row; those in the “individual” condition read about Robert Moretti, the best player in the world, on the same streak. They then rated how much they would be rooting for either Milan or Moretti to win the championship and how much they would want the streak to come to an end.

Participants wanted to see Roberto Moretti continue his winning streak significantly more than they wanted the Milan team to do the same. Given that participants were American, they likely were not familiar with either the game or Moretti, suggesting that the results couldn’t be explained by a desire to see a beloved figure succeed.

The same results held in a second study using the similarly obscure example of a British quizzing competition. A third, in which the pool of competitors was exactly the same size for individuals and teams, showed that the Streaking Star Effect couldn’t be explained by the fact individual participants were likely to have beaten more competitors than teams would have.

The fourth study looked more closely at the underlying causes of the Streaking Star Effect. A total of 205 participants read about the National Association of Police Organizations, which gives awards each year to both individual police officers and departments. In the individual condition, participants read about an award given to the best homicide detective in the USA, and were told that Edwin Sorenson had won the award four years in a row. Participants in the group condition read about an award for the best homicide department in the country, learning that either the Kansas City or Los Angeles Police Department had, again, won four years in a row.

As well as answering the questions from the first three studies, participants also indicated how much they would feel awe, amazement and wonder if either Sorenson’s or the police department’s streak were to continue. To distinguish awe from other positive emotions, participants also stated how happy, amused and compassionate they would feel.

Again, participants were significantly more keen to see the individual (Detective Sorenson) extend his winning streak than the team (the police department). Furthermore, participants felt more wonder at the prospect of Detective Sorenson’s continued success and more positive emotion overall, suggesting that feelings of awe can lead to a greater desire to see an individual winning streak continue.

In a later study, participants were asked to explain why they felt either an individual or a team was on a winning streak. Success was more often chalked up to disposition or personal characteristics (rather than circumstances) for individuals than it was for teams. Greater dispositional attributions were also linked to increased feelings of awe. In other words, credit was given to an individual and their talents more than their situation, creating far more emotional attachment and investment than for team achievements, which tended to be attributed to circumstances.

A final study confirmed that the Streaking Star Effect holds even outside of sports: when a company’s success was attributed to an individual CEO, participants felt that the company deserved a greater market share than when it had been guided by a group of executives. This makes sense: companies like Microsoft and Apple have famously benefited from charismatic founders and CEOs, while those without a focus on an individual leader often hold less emotional resonance for the general public.

This final study hints at wider repercussions too, and in a follow-up survey the team found participants far less tolerant of wealth inequality when those at the top were described in group rather than individual terms: when individuals were perceived to be at the top, participants were more likely to believe they deserved it. Stretching beyond sport, the Streaking Star Effect may even, as Walker and Gilovich put it, change the way we think about “the rich and poor, the powerful and powerless”.

SOURCE:

https://digest.bps.org.uk/2020/09/14/people-love-winning-streaks-by-individuals-more-than-those-by-teams/#more-40296(accessed 14.9.20)

Struggling To Stick To A Workout Routine? Copying Your Friends Might Help

By Emily Reynolds

Keeping to goals or new habits is not easy — so much so that there’s a cottage industry of life coaches, motivational speakers and stationery companies offering you tricks, hints, motivational journals and other products apparently designed to keep you on the straight and narrow.

But there might be an easier — and considerably cheaper — way of doing things. Rather than trying to motivate ourselves alone, Katie S. Mehr and colleagues from the University of Pennsylvania argue in the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research, copying the strategies that our friends use may provide us with some much needed drive.



The team asked 1,028 participants, all of whom said they wanted to exercise more, how many hours they’d spent exercising in the previous week, before randomly assigning them to one of three conditions.

Participants in the “copy-paste” condition were asked to pay attention to how people they knew motivated themselves to work out, and were told they could ask them directly for strategies and tips. Those in the “quasi-yoked” control condition were told that the research team would “help [them] learn about an effective hack or strategy that motivates people to exercise” — no mention of friends. In another, simple control condition, there was no message.

Two days later, participants completed a second survey, describing what strategies they planned to use in the next week to exercise more. More specifically, those in the copy-paste condition were asked to summarise the strategy they’d copied from a friend, while those in the quasi-yoked condition were provided with one of 358 exercise strategies another participant had copy-pasted in a pilot study.

Finally, a week after the second survey, participants in all conditions were asked how many hours they had spent exercising in the last week and how motivated they had felt to exercise on a scale of one to five.

Those in the copy-paste condition — that is, those who had copied their friends’ fitness strategies — spent significantly more time exercising than those in the simple control (55.8 more minutes on average) and quasi-yoked control condition (32.5 more minutes). They were also more motivated to exercise.

What made copy-paste prompts so effective? To figure this out, the team also asked participants nine questions about the strategies they used, such as how useful, new or appealing the strategies were, and how committed they felt to them. The team found that, compared to the quasi-yoked condition, those in the copy-paste condition found the strategies more useful, were more committed to them, and had more social interactions with others who exercise — and these differences could explain why these participants in turn spent more time exercising.

This makes sense: general advice about exercise or habit-forming may not particularly resonate with someone, while finding appealing strategies from one’s own social circle could be more personally relevant. Further research could look at the nature of the strategies participants “copied and pasted” from their friends: is the motivation of seeking and applying strategies from friends enough to keep somebody interested in their new habit, or do particular types of strategy work better or worse?

Whether copy-paste strategies would work in the long-term is also not yet clear — it’s easy to start a new lifestyle with good intentions and high levels of motivation, but not so easy to keep it up. If you’re looking to change a habit, however, you could do a lot worse than looking to a friend for advice.

SOURCE:

https://digest.bps.org.uk/2020/06/11/struggling-to-stick-to-a-workout-routine-copying-your-friends-might-help/(accessed 16.6.20)

Here’s How Long-Distance Runners Are Different From The Rest Of Us

By Emily Reynolds

For many, running a marathon is seen as the ultimate amateur athletic achievement; for others, it’s just the start. Ultramarathon runners often take on courses of incredibly impressive length, running 50 or 100 kilometres at one time or over several days.

Clearly this is physically demanding, and only those in seriously good shape will be able to take on such challenges — ultramarathon running involves stress on muscles and bones, blisters, dehydration, sleep deprivation and mental and physical fatigue, so it’s really not for the faint of heart.

But what about the psychological traits that make someone suitable for long-distance running? What kind of person can withstand this kind of physical stress, and how? A new study in the Australian Journal of Psychology takes a look.

Gregory Roebuck from Monash University and colleagues recruited 20 ultrarunners and 20 control participants aged between 18 and 70; runners were matched with non-runners by gender and age. Participants were asked about their exercise behaviours and running experiences before completing a number of questionnaires. These included a 25-item scale designed to measure resilience (with participants rating how much they agreed with statements such as “I am able to adapt when changes occur”), and two questionnaires that looked at emotion regulation — the ways a person moderates or expresses their emotion. Finally, a 155-item questionnaire looked at a range of personality traits across domains like well-being, achievement, stress reaction, and, aggression.

Next, participants took part in an emotion regulation task, viewing 36 neutral images (e.g. a sofa or chair) and 36 negative images (e.g. a bloody medical scene). Before viewing each image, participants were asked to either respond naturally to it (a “look” trial) or attempt to not have a negative reaction to it (a “decrease” trial), before rating the strength of their emotional response. Heart rate and skin conductance were measured during this section of the experiment.

Ultrarunners scored significantly higher on the resilience questionnaire than non-runners, and were more likely to indicate they used positive reappraisal when regulating their emotions — in other words, they were better able to reframe a situation with a positive angle. This may be down to the need to maintain high levels of motivation during races, attaching positive meaning to negative events in order to keep running.

There was also a physiological difference between ultrarunners and non-runners in the emotion regulation task, with ultrarunners showing reduced skin conductance and heart rate even when viewing unpleasant images. However, they didn’t show any differences in their ability to decrease their response to negative images.

There was one measure on which ultrarunners scored lower, however — affiliative extraversion, which measures how socially warm people are, which the team puts down to the high levels of solitude involved in long-distance running. There was no significant difference in any of the other measures.

The results suggest that ultrarunners are pretty similar to the rest of us — with some important differences. While it’s clear that ultrarunners are indeed more resilient than non-runners, and use different emotion regulation strategies, the direction of those relationships is not yet clear. It could be that training for ultramarathons makes people more resilient, or, on the other hand, it could be that people with higher levels of resilience are more likely to be attracted to the pastime.

It would be interesting to further explore how ultrarunners motivate themselves through many hours of pain and effort. Because even though most of us will never run 100 kilometres in one go (and may have no desire to, either), understanding how to tolerate pain, and cope with physical and mental fatigue, is a lesson we all could benefit from.

SOURCE:

https://digest.bps.org.uk/2020/04/22/heres-how-long-distance-runners-are-different-from-the-rest-of-us/#more-39510(accessed 23.4.20)