Studies show the way we remember and process information is greatly affected when we are in isolation.

Scientists have found the ‘Groundhog Day’ effect of lockdown affects our memory and cognitive ability.

While there’s a lack of data on the Australian lockdown experience, a study on Italians who were locked down for about two months last year found an increase in distractions and mind wandering was common.

Professor Brett Hayes from UNSW’s School of Psychology says that a study of 4000 respondents found 30 per cent had experienced some degree of change in their everyday cognition.

Some of the common everyday problems were memory problems, such as where you left your mobile phone, trouble in focusing your attention, and losing focus when trying to read a book or watching something online.

“Literally starting one job and without thinking about it, going off and starting a second job without finishing the first one,” the cognitive psychologist says.

“It was also worst for people who had emotional issues, who were feeling depressed, or stressed and anxious, they had more of these symptoms.

“But even for those without those issues, these cognitive issues were very common.”

How the brain lays down memories

The study suggests the reason why our everyday memory gets worse in lockdown is because we are living through a sort of Groundhog Day, which in turn makes it harder for our brain to lay down memories and retrieve them later on.

“What we know about human memory is that the context is really important. You might be doing a job at home, chatting to a friend, or watching a movie,” Prof. Hayes says.

“When we have those experiences, we might be focused on the main part of the experience, but our brain is actually encoding a lot of other things just incidentally, like where that’s happening, the location, where and when it’s taking place.”

He says our brain is sensitive to this background context, which helps us lay down our memories in a way that it’s easy for us to retrieve those experiences later on.

“So when the context is changing, which is does normally in everyday life when we are moving around and visiting different places in different times of the day, then it’s easy to lay down memories and recall them,” Prof. Hayes says.

“But when you are in lockdown, your opportunities to move around in the environment and engage in different activities are very limited.

“And when you do get into that Groundhog Day cycle, just variations on the same thing each day, that’s when the days do tend to start blurring into each other, because we have the same context for each day.”

This makes it harder for our brain to separate those experiences and that’s one of the reasons why we experience memory fog during lockdown, he says.

Recovery is quick when restrictions ease

A study on a two-month lockdown in Scotland last year tasked recipients with online tasks to test their memory, decision making and selective attention.

They found performance was poorer during lockdown, but once restrictions were eased, particularly the social isolation, they recovered quite quickly.

Levels of social interaction during lockdown were also correlated with cognitive performance.

“People who were able to maintain their online interaction more during lockdown did better at these tasks,” he says.

“So complete isolation is really very bad for our cognitive functioning, but if we can keep up that level of interaction to some degree with whoever is in our house or online, that seems to be good for our cognitive functioning.”

Researchers have also found that people who had conversations within the last three days were a bit more protected from cognitive issues during long lockdown.

Other studies are looking at how people’s options are limited in COVID and have pointed to the importance of having a bit of variation and exercise every day.

“From a memory point of view, if you are able to exercise outside the house, vary those exercise paths from day to day to just to allow a different context for your brain to encode those different days, if you want to be able to remember what you did from day to day a bit better,” Prof. Hayes says.

Change your exercise routine

Variations on exercises and activities in your house or apartment will also help you avoid the memory fog.

Prof. Hayes says there’s a close connection between good cognitive ability and physical activity.

“So keeping up regular exercise is good to try and keeping our memory and decision making in shape as much as you can during lockdown.

“There’s some evidence that even if you are really restricted – even doing something like playing Exergames (online exercise games) where you watch a screen and jump around, that does show some benefits.

“The nice thing is that you can play with your family and so there’s a social dimension as well.”

Online yoga and dancing were things that people reported as part of their activity which he says seemed to have a beneficial effect on cognition.

“While there hasn’t been time to conduct research on the long term effects of lockdowns on memory, the evidence so far shows that as restrictions are eased, these cognitive issues should improve,” he says.

Featured image: Overseas studies have shown it’s common to have a lack of concentration and to have problems remembering when in lockdown. Photo: Shutterstock.

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Reference: Gabriella Santangelo et al, Subjective cognitive failures and their psychological correlates in a large Italian sample during quarantine/self-isolation for COVID-19, Neurological Sciences (2021). DOI: 10.1007/s10072-021-05268-1

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Provided by UNSW

Study finds public anticorruption campaigns bolster leaders, even when such measures lack tangible results.

How do authoritarian regimes sustain their popularity? A novel study in China led by MIT scholars shows that anticorruption punishments meted out by government authorities receive significant support among citizens — who believe such actions demonstrate both competence and morally righteous leadership.

The findings help explain how authoritarian governments endure, not merely based on domination and fear, but as regimes generating positive public support over time.

“What we find is that not only does the punishment of corrupt officials increase the perception among citizens that there is a capable and competent government, but it also increases the belief that government authorities have moral commitments citizens care about,” says Lily Tsai, an MIT political scientist and co-author of a newly published paper detailing the study’s findings.

In the case of China, these anticorruption actions tend to consist of public punishments of lower-level local officials who have violated the law. It is not clear that such measures actually reduce corruption overall, but people are still influenced by public gestures involving crackdowns on malfeasance.

“It signals that there is someone in authority who is willing to create order and stability for the public,” Tsai notes.

The paper, “What makes anticorruption popular? Individual-level evidence from China,” has been published in advance online form in the Journal of Politics. The authors are Tsai, who is the Ford Professor of Political Science and MIT’s chair of the faculty; and Minh D. Trinh and Shiyao Liu, who are PhD candidates in political science at MIT.

Recession-proof support?

The study consists of a sophisticated public-opinion experiment conducted in China using “conjoint analysis,” a method that identifies how much relative influence different factors have on people’s views.

The researchers essentially conducted three iterations of a detailed public-opinion survey. Nearly 2,400 total participants, in both rural and urban settings, were presented with hypothetical profiles of pairs of government leaders and asked to evaluate their performances based on a range of supposed attributes and achievements — including their anticorruption activities. In these scenarios, the exact attributes and activities of the hypothetical leaders varied randomly, allowing the researchers to separate out the importance of anticorruption measures in the minds of citizens.

Other things being equal, in these hypothetical scenarios, survey participants preferred officials making higher-profile anticorruption efforts, up to 25 percent more often than other officials. The survey’s respondents placed more weight on the economic stewardship provided by government officials, but rated anticorruption activities as being about equal in importance to welfare provision and administering elections fairly.

More significantly, Tsai says, the experiment finds that public interest in anticorruption gestures exists independently of anything else in a government official’s resume.

“Independent of how well officials do at economic development, or providing social welfare, or implementing elections, anticorruption punishment can still be a very useful tactic for authorities who are seeking to bolster their public support,” Tsai observes.

Indeed, Tsai adds, the results have a somewhat ominous implication along those lines: “These findings could indicate anticorruption punishment is a useful way of recession-proofing public support.”

Making punishment visible

The authors also introduced several modifications to the structure of the conjoint analysis to learn why people support visible anticorruption measures. Their study finds two distinct reasons behind this support. First, those measures signal that the officials taking action have the capacity to take decisive actions. Second, anticorruption actions also signal that the values of officials are aligned with ordinary citizens — even when the same officials do not, say, administer local elections well enough to give voters a strong voice in selecting leaders.

“At least in the Chinese context, in both urban populations and rural populations in China, citizens see officials who punish other, lower-level officials for corruption as being more moral,” Tsai says. “They [think anticorruption officials] have the “’right intentions.’”

Moreover, Tsai adds, anticorruption gestures seem effective even in lieu of evidence that corruption might be consequently reduced. At least in political terms, staging a high-profile anticorruption campaign is what matters, more than quelling corruption.

“It’s in the interest of rulers to invest in anticorruption punishments even if that punishment does not decrease corruption,” Tsai says. “People have no data about how much corruption there is in government. What they can see more clearly are the incidents of punishment of corruption.”

In historical terms, Tsai adds, the results fit “a longstanding tradition in China where the rulers position themselves as the allies of ordinary people,” despite restricting individual liberties in many ways. That said, Tsai thinks the results describe a political dynamic that could be found in many nation-states, in many varieties: People will back leaders who support symbolic public punishments, conveying a message that the traditional social order will remain intact.

“People are often willing to sacrifice a lot for a sense of certainty,” Tsai says.

Featured image: Public anti-corruption gestures are an effective way for authoritarian governments to maintain public support, according to a study co-authored by MIT political scientist Lily Tsai.Credits:Image: Christine Daniloff, MIT, stock images

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Reference: Lily L. Tsai, Minh D Trinh, and Shiyao Liu, “What Makes Anticorruption Punishment Popular? Individual-level Evidence from China”, The Journal of Politics, 2021. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/715252

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Provided by Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The more crawling experience a baby has, the more likely they are to avoid falling into water, a University of Otago study shows.

Published in Infancy, the work is part of a longitudinal study into the effect locomotor experience has on infants’ avoidance of falling over sudden drop-offs.

Lead author Dr Carolina Burnay, of the School of Physical Education, Sport and Exercise Sciences, says the researchers tested babies’ behaviour around a tub filled with water, termed a water drop-off.

“The main difference between the babies that fell and those who avoided falling in the water was the amount of crawling experience they had.

“A very interesting result was that the amount of prior crawling experience they had informed their perception of the risk and behaviour even when they were already walking – hence it seems very helpful for babies to crawl and explore their environment,” she says.

The findings go against the contemporary tendency to “helicopter parent”.

“Caregivers should be aware of the important role crawling plays in infant development and the benefits of promoting crawling opportunities for their infants. By touching the floor and looking closely to it, infants learn to distinguish safe from unsafe surfaces to locomote and start avoiding falls, into the water or not.

“Over-protecting babies by limiting their opportunities to self-locomote does not keep them safe, instead, it delays their development of the perception of risky situations.”

Dr Burnay has also conducted a study into how babies interact with a slope leading to water.

The study, just published in Developmental Psychobiology, allowed babies to move into the water down a gradual slope, similar to a beach leading to the ocean. In this case, locomotor experience had no impact on babies’ behaviour – they were more likely to engage in risky behaviour on the slope compared to the drop-off.

“Before these studies, we knew statistics about drowning among babies, numbers like how many babies drown every year, how many drowning incidents occur in beaches or swimming pools, and what ages are the most represented in drowning statistics. This new approach is investigating how infants relate with bodies of water, when and how they start perceiving the risk and avoiding drowning.

“If we want to develop better strategies to prevent drowning among young children, we need to understand how they interact with bodies of water and how they learn to perceive the consequences that interacting with bodies of water can impose,” Dr Burnay says.

The study also highlights the risk slopes into bodies of water pose to babies. Parents and those working in water safety should have increased vigilance around such accessways and prevent infants’ access to them in aquatic environments.

Dr Burnay is continuing her studies into how babies interact with bodies of water and is seeking participants (crawlers or walkers aged under 18-months) for testing at Moana Pool in Dunedin.

The babies tested on the water cliff were from Portugal, while those tested on the water slope were from Dunedin. To determine if the different findings are the impact of cultural difference, she is testing babies in both situations.

Publication details:

Experienced crawlers avoid real and water drop-offs, even when they are walking
Carolina Burnay, Rita Cordovil, Chris Button, James L. Croft, David I. Anderson
Infancy

AND

Do infants avoid a traversable slope leading into deep water?
Carolina Burnay, Chris Button, Rita Cordovil, David I. Anderson, James L. Croft
Developmental Psychobiology

Featured image credit: istock

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Provided by University of Otago

People may like them because they produce evolved pleasurable responses.

KEY POINTS

• An analysis of 1700 books found that most follow just one of six emotional story arcs.
• A recent paper argues we like certain stories because they activate evolved cognitive mechanisms.
• People are interested in stories involving overcoming obstacles because they evolved to learn from others.
• People derive pleasure from seeing (fictional) others succeed, a mechanism that likely helped to promote cooperation.

What do Star Wars and Harry Potter have in common? In addition to having their own theme parks, quite a lot. Both feature orphaned protagonists who discover they have special powers and eventually go on to save the world. In fact, both stories follow a common template that can be found repeatedly in fiction, known as “the hero’s journey” or the monomyth.

In a previous post, I wrote about how true originality in creative work is rare. But what draws us to the same basic stories over and over again? Two recent journal articles offer a possible answer.

There are only about six basic stories

The first, published in 2016 by a group of researchers led by Andrew Reagan at the University of Vermont, analyzed about 1700 books downloaded from Project Gutenberg. The researchers used an AI method called sentiment analysis that assigns an estimate of the emotion expressed in a section of text. For example, the sentence “I’m super excited about my birthday tomorrow!” would be classified as highly positive. They constructed sentiment profiles of each book from start to finish to get a rough sense of their emotional arcs: Do they start happy and end sad, start sad and end happy, or something else? Then they used some statistical methods to see how many different profiles could be found in the set of books.

Most books fell into six basic categories, which they called:

1. Rags to riches (start sad, end happy)
2. Tragedy (start happy, end sad)
3. Man in a hole (start happy, get sad, end happy)
4. Icarus (start sad, get happy, end sad)
5. Cinderella (start sad, get happy, get sad, end happy)
6. Oedipus (start happy, get sad, get happy, end sad)

Somewhat surprisingly, even though rags to riches and tragedy stories were most common, man in a hole, Icarus, and Oedipus stories were slightly more popular, based on download numbers.

This study supports the idea that most stories are, at their core, pretty much the same. But it doesn’t explain why that is, or why people prefer certain types of stories. There’s no reason why someone couldn’t write a riches to riches story in which everyone is happy from beginning to end, but it seems intuitively obvious that that story would be pretty boring.

A new theory argues we were born to like certain stories

An article published this month by anthropologist Manvir Singh argues that what makes stories like Star Wars and Harry Potter so appealing is what Singh calls their “sympathetic plots.”

The sympathetic plot, which is shared by countless stories across cultures, has several core features that are not unlike those of the hero’s journey: A hero has a justifiable goal, faces an obstacle, overcomes it, and earns a reward for themselves or for others.

Singh argues that the reason sympathetic plots are so appealing is that they hijack evolutionarily developed mechanisms for social learning. One of the most valuable skills humans have that distinguishes us from other animals is the ability to learn from others: Rather than having to figure out how to fix a running toilet on your own, you can watch a couple of other people do it on YouTube and you’re pretty much up to speed. As a result, Singh argues, we’re fascinated when we see people encounter obstacles, and we feel some pleasure when we learn how they overcame them. Of course, learning how Luke Skywalker destroyed the Death Star is completely useless knowledge for us, but this social learning mechanism is so deeply ingrained, watching him do it produces the same pleasure response.

Consider an alternative explanation for why we like fiction: It allows us to put ourselves in the roles of the protagonists to simulate solving similar problems. But again, we’ll never need to know how to use The Force or fight goblins. Instead, Singh argues that the pleasure we experience hearing these stories is just a side effect of our interest in learning how people overcome obstacles in general, even fictional ones.

We’re happy when people we like succeed

Another relevant mechanism is what Singh calls “sympathetic joy”: We feel happy when others succeed. Some researchers believe that sympathetic joy evolved to help motivate cooperation: If helping others succeed will make you feel good, this ought to motivate you to help people and vice versa.

These two mechanisms can help explain why a riches to riches story would be so boring: no obstacles to overcome, no success to be had. In other words, it would fail to activate either mechanism.

What about tragic endings?

But not all popular stories follow the sympathetic plot template. Recall that some of the most popular story arcs identified in the analysis of Project Gutenberg books ended in tragedy (so-called Icarus and Oedipus stories). Stories like these would, at the very least, seem to fail to activate any sympathetic joy.

As Singh points out, these evolutionary mechanisms are not the only factors that affect how enjoyable a story is. People may be drawn to how thought-provoking a story is, whether it was written or filmed in a unique way, or whether the ending, while tragic, provided some sort of closure. That is, the existence of the social learning and sympathetic joy mechanisms can explain why so many stories are so similar, but their existence doesn’t mean that every story in history will conform to the sympathetic plot.

None of this of course means that you can write an award-winning novel by following a simple formula (as if rags to riches or “overcoming obstacles” are helpful formulas anyway). Instead, these articles suggest that successful writers have converged on a common storytelling structure that they fill with rich and compelling characters, events, and relationships. As I argued in my earlier post, it doesn’t really matter when we see something familiar in a new way because it can still be enjoyable. Clearly, this is true: People have been consuming essentially the same stories for hundreds of years.

Text and featured image credit: Alan Jern/wallpaperflare

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References

• Reagan, A.J., Mitchell, L., Kiley, D. et al. (2016). The emotional arcs of stories are dominated by six basic shapes. EPJ Data Sci., 5, 31.
• Singh M. (2021). The Sympathetic Plot, Its Psychological Origins, and Implications for the Evolution of Fiction. Emotion Review, 13(3), 183-198.

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Provided by Psychology today

KEY POINTS

• Most workers would prefer to work from home at least half of the time, surveys show, yet many employers are forcing employees back to the office.
• Cognitive biases, such as wanting to return to the status quo or envisioning a false consensus, may be hampering leaders’ decisions.
• Work-from-home functions well for the vast majority of people. A hybrid model with remote work for those who want it may be the best solution.

Due to strong employee resistance and turnover, Google recently backtracked from its plan to force all employees to return back to the office and allowed many to work remotely. Apple’s plan to force its staff back to the office has caused many to leave Apple and led to substantial internal opposition.

Why are these and so many other leaders forcing employees to return to the office? They must know about the extensive, in-depth surveys from early spring 2021 that asked thousands of employees about their preferences on returning to the office after the pandemic.

All of the surveys revealed strong preferences for working from home post-pandemic at least half the time for over three-quarters of all respondents. A quarter to a third of all respondents desired full-time remote work permanently. From 40 to 55 percent of respondents said they’d quit without permanent remote options for at least half the work week; of these, many would leave if not permitted fully remote work. Minority employees expressed an especially strong preference for remote work to escape in-office discrimination.

Yet many employers intend to force their employees who can easily work remotely back to the office for much or all of the work week.

Leaders frequently proclaim that “people are our most important resource.” Yet the leaders resistant to permitting telework are not living by that principle. Instead, they’re doing what they feel comfortable with, even if it devastates employee morale, engagement, and productivity, and seriously undercuts retention and recruitment, as well as harming diversity and inclusion. In the end, their behavior is a major threat to the bottom line.

The tensions of returning to the office and figuring out the most effective permanent post-pandemic work arrangements are the topic of my book, Returning to the Office and Leading Hybrid and Remote Teams: A Manual on Benchmarking to Best Practices for Competitive Advantage. This article focuses on the blindspots causing leaders to make bad decisions on these topics.

Why Are So Many Leaders Wary of Remote Work?

A large number of leaders want to return to what they saw as “normal” work life. By that, they mean turning back the clock to January 2020, before the pandemic.

Another key concern for many involves personal discomfort. They like the feel of a full, buzzing office. They prefer to be surrounded by others when they work.

Other reasons involve challenges specifically related to remote work. This includes deteriorating company culture and growing work-from-home burnout and Zoom fatigue. Other leaders cited a rise in team conflicts and challenges in virtual collaboration and communication. A final category of concerns relates to a lack of accountability and effective evaluation of employees.

Mental Blindspots Leading to Disastrous Telework Decisions

Why are these leaders resistant to the seemingly obvious solution: a hybrid model for most, with full-time permanent remote work for those who both want it and show high effectiveness and productivity? This is because of cognitive biases, which are mental blindspots that lead to poor strategic and financial decision-making.

Fortunately, by understanding these cognitive biases and taking research-based steps to address them, we can make the best decisions.

Many people feel a desire to go back to the world before the pandemic. They fall for the status quo bias, a desire to maintain or get back what they see as the appropriate situation and way of doing things.

A major factor in leaders wanting everyone to return to the office stems from their personal discomfort with work from home. They spent their career surrounded by other people. They want to resume regularly walking the floors, surrounded by the energy of staff working.

They’re falling for the anchoring bias. This mental blindspot causes us to feel anchored to our initial experiences and information.

The evidence that work from home functions well for the vast majority doesn’t cause them to shift their perspective in any significant manner. The confirmation bias offers an important explanation for this seeming incongruity. Our minds are skilled at ignoring information that contradicts our beliefs and at looking only for information that confirms them.

Reluctant leaders usually tell me they don’t want to do surveys because they feel confident that the large majority of their employees would rather work at the office than at home. They wave aside the fact that the large-scale public surveys show the opposite. For instance, one of the major complaints by Apple employees is a failure to do effective surveys and listen to employees.

In this refusal to do surveys, the confirmation bias is compounded by another cognitive bias, called the false consensus effect. This mental blindspot leads us to envision other people in our in-group — such as those employed at our company — as being much more like ourselves in their beliefs than is the actual case.

What about the specific challenges these resistant leaders brought up related to working from home, ranging from burnout to deteriorating culture and so on? Further inquiry on each problem revealed that the leaders never addressed these work-from-home problems strategically.

They transitioned to telework abruptly as part of the March 2020 lockdowns. Perceiving this shift as a very brief emergency, they focused, naturally and appropriately, on accomplishing the necessary tasks of the organization. They ignored the social and emotional glue that truly holds companies together, motivates employees, and protects against burnout.

That speaks to a cognitive bias called functional fixedness. When we have a certain perception of how systems should function, we ignore other possible functions, uses, and behaviors. We do this even if these new functions, uses and behaviors offer a better fit for a changed situation and would address our problems better.

Conclusion

The post-pandemic office will require the realignment of employer-employee expectations. Leaders need to use research-based strategies to overcome the gut reactions that cause them to fall victim to mental blindspots. Only by doing so can they seize the competitive advantage from using their most important resource effectively to maximize their retention, recruitment, morale, productivity, workplace culture, and thus their bottom line.

Text/Featured image credit: Gleb Tsipursky/gettyimages

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References

Tsipursky, G. (2021). Returning to the Office and Leading Hybrid and Remote Teams: A Manual on Benchmarking to Best Practices for Competitive Advantage. Columbus, OH: Intentional Insights Press.

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Provided by Psychology today