Sensation_The New Science of Physical Intelligence

by Thalma Lobel

  In spite of the predominance of e-mail, there are still many documents that are read as hard copies. The next time you are submitting a résumé, a paper, a proposal, or the like for evaluation, or sending a letter, consider giving the content some extra weight by using thick paper or presenting it in a heavy folder. You may distinguish it favorably from competitors’ entries.

  Although these days many petitions and surveys are conducted online, we are still approached fairly often on the street by people with clipboards and pencils who ask us to stop for just a minute to answer some questions or to sign a petition. Petitions deal with a range of issues, political, social, educational, and environmental, some more important to us than others, and some that are not important to us at all. Many people simply do not stop when approached by volunteers with clipboards. Those who do stop, however, may well decide whether to sign a petition or not, especially on an issue about which they do not have strong feelings, based on nothing more than the weight of the clipboard.

  We often carry weight, probably more than we realize: packages from the grocery store, heavy bags, and our children in our arms. Next time you reach a decision when you are carrying something relatively heavy, ask yourself whether you would have made a similar decision if you had been unencumbered.

  I carry a handbag that contains my computer, phone, wallet, and makeup, and a hairbrush and several papers I want to read and a book; and who knows what else. It is really heavy. When I step into my office, I set it aside, but while walking to the classroom and back to the office, I generally carry it with me. At the end of my lectures, students often approach me to bounce ideas off me or make special requests. I usually ask them to walk with me to my office and talk along the way. I wonder whether their ideas and requests seem more important to me when I carry the heavy bag than they would when I am sitting in my office, unencumbered.

  Studies on this topic have the potential to change how we look at our relationship to our environment. What we value as important has a holy place in our minds. We organize our entire lives around activities we think are important, and therefore it is harder to accept that we are illogical in our approach to them. While a heavy clipboard may not radically change our beliefs, it is unsettling to learn that they can be influenced at all! We need to become more aware of these subtle mental machinations so that our decisions can be more our own, and not influenced by simple factors such as weight.

  Confessions of a Heavy Heart: Physical Weight and Secrets

  I felt much better after I talked to him and got a load off my mind.

  I felt I had to unburden myself and reveal my secret.

  I was weighed down by keeping his secret.

  United States Air Force First Lieutenant Josh Seefried had a secret. His friends in the air force didn’t know he was gay, and they didn’t know how isolated and ashamed of hiding his sexual orientation Josh felt when he was occasionally asked if he had a girlfriend at home. Lieutenant Seefried kept his sexuality a secret for many years due to a U.S. military policy then in effect known as “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” which banned openly gay men and women from serving in the military from 1993 to 2011. He had kept this secret from his friends and colleagues because he knew that openly declaring his homosexuality would lead to his dishonorable discharge, and maybe even prosecution.

  In order to keep his secret, Lieutenant Seefried sought support from fellow gay and lesbian recruits via popular social networks under the pseudonym J. D. Smith. Realizing that many active-duty service members kept their sexual orientations hidden, Josh founded a support network called OutServe. There he promoted equality and the repeal of “Don’t ask, don’t tell.” J.D. was known in the popular news media, even appearing for interviews with his face obscured, but his true identity remained a secret for two years. On December 18, 2010, after the U.S. Congress decided to repeal the policy, Josh revealed that he was J. D. Smith. He told a CNN reporter that he could now go back to work “with that burden lifted off my shoulders and not have to worry about it anymore.”

  New research indicates that Lieutenant Seefried’s reference to his secret as a burden is more than a coincidental metaphor. Throughout our lives we keep personal and professional secrets. We all have secrets that are small and insignificant or enormously consequential. There are family secrets; painful, traumatic secrets, such as being abused or molested as a child; and illnesses that are kept secret. I’ve heard stories of breadwinners who get fired and keep it a secret from their spouses and children, pretending to go to work each morning.

  People keep secrets mainly because the consequences of revealing the secrets can be damaging to themselves or others. Some feel ashamed and keep a secret for fear of being ridiculed or discriminated against. Others might keep a secret because they do not want to be seen to deviate from social norms or hurt others.

  Keeping a secret, whether it is your secret or someone else’s, is a mental burden, a load on your mind. It requires that you always be on guard, so that the secret doesn’t slip out. Yet people often fail to keep secrets and sometimes decide to reveal their own. General wisdom holds that confessions are good for us; people feel better after they confess. Indeed, psychologists have found that carrying secrets for a long time is detrimental to one’s physical well-being. There are, however, many cases in which secrets must be kept or the people involved will be seriously hurt.

  People frequently report feeling as though a weight has been lifted off their chests after revealing a secret. Latin singer Ricky Martin posted a public statement on his official website in 2010 revealing that he was a “fortunate homosexual man.” He explained that he used to hide his sexual orientation as a result of pressure society imposed on him and wrote, “I was carrying within me for a long time things that were too heavy for me to keep inside.”

  So if our emotions are grounded in our physical sensations, is it possible that we experience secrets not only as emotional burdens but as physical ones as well? A group of researchers posited that those who keep important secrets will display behaviors that are similar to those of people who actually carry a physical weight.5

  Other experiments had demonstrated that people who carried heavy backpacks estimated a hill as steeper and a distance as greater than those who did not carry a weight.6 This makes perfect sense. Climbing a hill with a heavy backpack requires more physical effort, so naturally the hill seems steeper. It is usually very easy to travel from one room to another, but with a heavy parcel it can be quite difficult, and we may find ourselves counting every step. We then estimate the distance as farther than it really is or than we would otherwise perceive it to be. In order to examine whether keeping secrets has an influence similar to that of carrying a heavy weight, the researchers conducted four studies.

  In the first study, researchers asked participants to recall a secret. Half were asked to recall a meaningful and important personal secret and the other half a small personal secret. Participants were then asked to estimate the steepness of a hill in an ostensibly unrelated study. The results clearly demonstrated that those who thought about meaningful and important secrets estimated the hill as steeper. The important secrets were indeed perceived as physical weight and consequently influenced the people as an actual physical weight would have: the hills seemed steeper to those carrying a secret.

  In a second experiment, the researchers asked half of the participants to recall an important, meaningful secret and the other half a trivial secret. They then asked them to toss a beanbag into a container placed about nine feet away from them in order to examine their perception of distance. The idea behind this task was that if people perceived the distance as farther, they would overshoot. If they perceived the distance as closer, they would not toss the beanbag far enough. The researchers found that, like those who carry an actual weight, those who recalled an important secret perceived the distance as farther and therefore overshot the beanbag.

  In the third study, researchers focused on one particular secret, infide
lity. They recruited participants who had recently reported being unfaithful and asked them to what extent they were troubled by their infidelity and how much they thought about it. Researchers then asked participants to estimate how much effort and energy they would need to perform six common tasks. Half of the tasks required physical effort, such as climbing the stairs with groceries or helping someone move, and half required no physical effort, such as giving someone directions or change.

  The more participants said they thought about their infidelity and were bothered by it, the more effort and energy they estimated they would need to perform physical tasks. This difference was not found for tasks that did not require physical effort. In other words, the more people felt that the secret bothered them and was a burden, the more difficult they thought quotidian physical tasks would be. One could argue that people who are occupied with their secrets are not in a generous state of mind—not open to helping others—but these studies demonstrate that this was not the case. People who were keeping a secret were still willing to help others when the help did not demand physical effort.

  In their fourth experiment, the researchers asked thirty gay men to participate in a study dealing with self-presentation. They asked the participants to answer questions while they were being filmed. Half of the participants were asked to conceal their sexual orientation, while the other half were asked to conceal another trait, extroversion. The idea was that sexual orientation is a more important and meaningful secret than the fact that one is an extrovert. At the end of the experiment, participants were asked to help move books out of the laboratory under the pretense that the lab was being relocated. But really the researchers were measuring how many books each participant moved: the more books he moved, the more willing he was to make a physical effort. Those who concealed their sexual orientation moved fewer books than those who concealed their extroverted personalities. The more important, meaningful secret affected the participants like a physical weight.

  The Final Weigh-In: Lighten Up!

  People who carry secrets feel physically burdened and experience a sensation similar to constantly carrying a heavy weight on their shoulders. Big, consequential secrets, such as one’s sexual orientation, a traumatic experience, infidelity, and illness, weigh us down and feel like an actual physical burden.

  In order to ease the burden, the keeper of a secret may find it helpful to write in a journal, speak with a therapist, or confide in a close, trusted friend. Online support groups or other safe outlets can provide very necessary release, unburdening us while allowing us to maintain anonymity. The weight of secrets can be very hard to carry; these studies teach us that it is important to release those burdens because they physically affect us.

  Slow Down, Red Ahead: Red and Performance

  Who has not been moved by colors, by the changing blues of the sky, or the greens of the sea, or the hues of a lover’s eyes? It is fascinating to try to unpack the human experience of color. A physicist would tell you that color has to do with the wavelength and frequency of the beams of light reflecting and scattering off a surface. An ophthalmologist would tell you that color has to do with the anatomy of the perceiving eye and brain, that color does not exist without a cornea for light to enter and color-sensitive retinal cones for the light waves to stimulate. A neurologist might tell you that color is the electrochemical result of nervous impulses processed in the occipital lobe in the rear of the brain and translated into optical information. As a psychologist, however, I will tell you that color is a critical factor in your environment that stimulates and influences you in hundreds of ways every day.

  We all know anecdotally that color is important and that color is symbolic. We often use colors in metaphors, just as we use temperature, weight, and texture. An English phrase book is rich with colorful idioms such as tickled pink, yellow-bellied, in the red, green with envy, and gray areas. A Crayola crayon box bursts with creative names of colors such as Cadet Blue, Radical Red, Royal Purple, Shocking Pink, Screamin’ Green, and Unmellow Yellow. Our environment, with its colorful uniforms, flags, logos, and signs, affects the way we process certain feelings and emotions.

  The classic film The Wizard of Oz begins in black and white, but after the tornado picks up Dorothy’s house and transports it to another land, she opens the door and steps into a new world of color. In real life, too, we often see things anew after going through a dramatic challenge or crisis. The complexion—and complexity—of the world around us is always changing. Color is tied to identity. Republicans and Democrats claim red states and blue states. Where the Crips and Bloods gangs rule in some neighborhoods in Los Angeles, wearing the “wrong” color can get you killed. The threat of Communism in the 1950s was known as the “Red Scare,” and, in contrast, Les Bleus, the nickname of the French national sports teams, provides a unifying hue for a diverse nation. Color is the calling card of every sports team, from Celtic green to the purple and gold of the Los Angeles Lakers and the colors of the St. Louis Blues and the Cincinnati Reds. Fans identify their heroes and each other by the colors they wear on their backs.

  Some colors have different meanings in different cultures. The color orange is sacred for Buddhists; it is the national color of Holland; but for me, a daughter of citrus growers, it was simply the color of the fruit. I associated orange with trips to the grove with my father or outings to the packing house, where I watched workers pack thousands of oranges into crates. This simple association of orange with fruit changed, however, for almost all Israelis in 2005 when the Disengagement Plan was enacted to evacuate all Israelis from the Gaza Strip. Many of the settlers in Gaza strongly opposed the plan and had to be forcibly evicted from their homes by the Israeli army. At that time, the color the settlers adopted was orange. This color signaled a very clear political view, and this association between the color orange and the political view was so strong that other people who believed in the Disengagement Plan and disagreed with the settlers’ resistance stopped wearing orange. One of my friends who loved the color orange and had some orange shirts and pants gave these items away following the Disengagement, saying she could not wear them anymore. In another political action, Burmese Buddhist monks adopted the color orange for their peaceful protest against the military junta running their country’s government, which became known as the Saffron Revolution. On the other side of the globe, Catholic separatists of Northern Ireland view orange as the color of the Protestant oppressors, the Orangemen.

  Yet some colors, such as red, have near-universal associations. New experiments have revealed the surprising influence of colors in a wide range of behaviors. The studies I’ll describe show not only that the symbolism of color is deeply embedded in language but also that associations with color are much more complex than they seem at first glance.

  In the Red

  Red is not just any color. It is the color of our deepest, most visceral emotions. In many cultures, it represents passion and danger, threat and lust. Red is so intense that we feel its power intuitively. You notice the reddest of red lipsticks even at the most crowded party. Even when speeding, you will usually spot a stop sign in time to screech to a halt.

  Throughout history, we humans have associated red with aggression. We talk about raising a red flag to alert coworkers to trouble in a project and about seeing red when we refer to the psychological state of anger or irritation. And as scientists have discovered, the color red affects our sexual behavior, our physical performance, and even our performance on mathematical and verbal tests.

  Red and IQ Tests

  Our society is obsessed with tests that are meant to measure our abilities. Mathematical and verbal tests make up the SAT, which determines where you will go to college. Tests are also sometimes given to job candidates. Although we adults might not remember the tests we took (or we would prefer to forget them), our children and grandchildren are constantly subjected to tests to measure vocabulary, spelling, and the understanding of relationships between words, as well as
tests to assess knowledge of algebra, geometry, and calculus.

  Besides our ability, skills, and knowledge, however, other factors, such as color, influence our performance on these tests. We are usually aware of the influence on our performance of factors like our own fatigue or disruptive noise. But consider an old riddle, which had to be spoken: “What is black and white and red all over?” The old answer, from an age when news was printed in black and white on paper, was, of course, a newspaper: red being pronounced the same as read. But the new answer is a test that someone has done poorly on.

  Many studies have shown that women’s performance on mathematical tests is impaired when participants are reminded of their sex simply by being asked before taking the test to indicate it on a test booklet.1 A similar phenomenon occurs when African Americans are asked to indicate their race at the beginning of a test: their performance on mathematical tests decreases.2 These studies demonstrate that the simple act of reminding individuals that they belong to a certain group (females or African Americans) that has been stereotyped as “not good at math” is enough to decrease their performance on a test—even for students who have strong math skills. Yet participants were absolutely unaware of the influence of the stereotype on their performance. This phenomenon is known as stereotype threat. Just as stereotype threat can negatively affect performance without our awareness, so can the color red.

  A team of American and German researchers headed by Andrew J. Elliot set out to explore this connection between the color red and performance on achievement tests.3 They conducted several experiments, some in the United States and some in Germany. In the first experiment, they invited seventy-one American undergraduates to participate and tested each participant individually. The experimenter told the students that they would be given an anagram test, in which they would be required to unscramble rearrangements of letters (like belta) into words (like table). The anagrams were neither particularly easy nor especially difficult. After a practice test, participants were randomly divided into three groups.