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Does being sad, or complaining, make you smarter?
I have yet to read this study but I found the summary intriguing:
Bad moods can actually be good for you, with an Australian study finding that being sad makes people less gullible, improves their ability to judge others and also boosts memory.
The study, authored by psychology professor Joseph Forgas at the University of New South Wales, showed that people in a negative mood were more critical of, and paid more attention to, their surroundings than happier people, who were more likely to believe anything they were told.
"Whereas positive mood seems to promote creativity, flexibility, cooperation, and reliance on mental shortcuts, negative moods trigger more attentive, careful thinking paying greater attention to the external world," Forgas wrote.
"Our research suggests that sadness ... promotes information processing strategies best suited to dealing with more demanding situations."
Furthermore:
The study also found that sad people were better at stating their case through written arguments, which Forgas said showed that a "mildly negative mood may actually promote a more concrete, accommodative and ultimately more successful communication style."
I thank Claire Hill for the pointer.
So all you sad people can cheer up now. Or not.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on November 3, 2009 at 05:36 AM in Science | Permalink
Comments
So perhaps the miserable lawyer is the effective lawyer.
Posted by: EJR at Nov 3, 2009 7:27:13 AM
I wonder if the causation runs the other way around here, where paying close attention to one's surroundings, being able to judge others accurately, and not being gullible tend to make people sad, rather than that being sad makes one better at these things. That seems fairly likely to me. (This is similar to the claim that depressed people tend to have much more accurate evaluations of their abilities than do non-depressed people. It seems plausible to me that for most people, having an accurate evaluation of their own worth and abilities can lead to being depressed.)
Posted by: Matt at Nov 3, 2009 7:53:23 AM
I agree with Matt.
Sadness, depression and honesty with self: correlation and causation? Causation in which direction?
btw Tyler and Alex - your book popups by GetGlue (in both the right and left hand columns) are very annoying. And anyone who clicks on them is giving the Amazon affiliate credit not to MR, but to adaptiveblue-20, which is GetGlue.
Posted by: anon at Nov 3, 2009 8:27:29 AM
I too agree with Matt. I've not read the study and one would hope that they controlled for it. Nonetheless the post is poorly witten, either way. You say "sad people.." and go on to cite the paper saying "midly negative mood can...". You say people, they say mood. Sad people is not the same thing as 'normal' people who happen to be in a sad mood. Which is it?
Posted by: Clinton at Nov 3, 2009 8:48:16 AM
I think this really is a restatement of the work on the difference between optimists and pessimist/realists. Sad persons are more pessimistic and realistic; optimists are happy.
Now, what is interesting on the optimism/pessimism research is: optimists are more successeful.
Why: because they are unrealistically perseverant; they don't quit when they realistically should and give the extra effort because they believe they will succeed.
Pessimists don't begin; realists get what they deserve and are observant of detail.
In fact, the studies show you want a realistic CFO, and an optimistic sales person.
Posted by: Bill at Nov 3, 2009 8:58:42 AM
John Stuart Mill already addressed the question of whether it is better to be an unhappy Socrates, or a happy pig. So this isn't a new idea.
Posted by: Ed at Nov 3, 2009 10:20:57 AM
One and all: cf. Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy. (NYRB published its welcome edition in 2001.)
Posted by: Edward Burke at Nov 3, 2009 11:15:53 AM
Optimists can be realists, too.
What's interesting about Bill's comment about the success rate of optimists is that if a realist would abandon an endeavor, but an optimist would persevere and succeed, then we can empirically conclude that the "optimist" position was in truth the more realistic one. If the "realist" position was truly realist, then the optimist would fail despite perseverance.
Posted by: IVV at Nov 3, 2009 11:55:44 AM
@IVV: Maybe the people who fail cease to be optimists (you can sort of see how they might) and so aren't counted in the statistics on successfulness of optimists? I don't know how those studies are conducted. Obviously if you measure attitude after success/failure has already occurred you have a big problem, but longitudinal cohort studies are expensive and time-consuming so it's always tempting to do something you can do with a quick questionnaire and a computer statistical package and let the media distort the results into something sensational.
people in a negative mood were more critical of, and paid more attention to, their surroundings than happier people, who were more likely to believe anything they were told
The implications for the financial crisis are obvious. Bull markets make investors happier, and therefore dumber. That's why it's hard to take away the punch bowl from all those happy people convinced that more punch (or leverage) is good for them.
Clearly, all future Fed chairs should be required to have some chronic condition that keeps their mood down to rationally non-exuberant levels. If necessary, drugs could be applied. If this succeeds for Fed chairs, it could also be applied to fiduciaries in general, to keep them from overexposing the interests of stockholders, etc., to happiness-based investment strategies.
Posted by: Chris at Nov 3, 2009 12:29:50 PM
This fits with what von Mises said in Human Action.
Posted by: GaryD at Nov 3, 2009 2:20:11 PM
The research on optimism is in a book by a psychology professor at Pennsylvania named Seligman. His book is entitled "Learned Optimism." I think the sadness objectivity would fit in his findings.
Posted by: Bill at Nov 3, 2009 9:00:15 PM
I'm no neuroscientist, but I recently read that bad moods release chemicals (anandamide and 2AD) that decreases short-term memory. Interestingly, similar to Matt's point of view, those with bad moods probably resulted from messing something up in the first place. A sudden short-term memory impairment certainly forces one to be more attentive.
Does this make you smarter? I guess you have to be the judge of what type of intelligence you want to improve. Is this a pointer to poor scientific research? Hard to answer without reading the paper:)
Posted by: brainwarped at Nov 3, 2009 9:23:46 PM
All this study proves is that data can be manipulated to mean anything..... this study sounds like a waste of money and time
Posted by: Carennedy at Nov 4, 2009 12:21:11 AM
This study has been proven countless times on the basement level of the Regenstein library by University of Chicago undergraduates for decades. Nothing new to see here.
Posted by: RPB at Nov 4, 2009 12:32:46 AM
I think you'll find that the presence of stoicism, forgiveness and acceptance in the lives of profoundly contended people and even the simple act of getting older suggest that this study may well be a ridiculous over-manipulation of raw data which could be used to prove almost anything.
You'll also find from studies of depression that unhappiness is often a self-generating state of mind that invents its own causes.
Posted by: emster at Nov 10, 2009 2:45:57 PM
