Two Minds Blog

My students often propose studies with the following type of rationale: People who sleep poorly often feel depressed, and depressed people don’t sleep well, and when people aren’t sleeping well they have a number of other problems like pain, and difficulty exercising, and gaining weight. Therefore, I want to study the complex relationships between sleep, mood, pain, exercise, and weight gain.  The problem with this kind of question is that it doesn't propose any kind of causal path between one concept and another, leading to a lot of chicken-and-egg problems. The concepts may indeed be related, but the theoretical model that the researcher wants to test with his or her study is an undifferentiated mess. A research question that says "are there complex inter-relationships between A, B, and C?" can almost always be answered simply with "yes." In life, almost everything is related to everything else, and human behavior in particular is the product of many weak forc...

There's a 1999 article titled " converting the unconverted " by psychologist Punam Keller, which demonstrates that health behavior change strategies based on fear don't work. For instance, someone with high blood pressure who is told about the risk of heart disease is actually less  likely to take their medication the more strongly the potential health risks of untreated hypertension are emphasized. This is because fear creates cognitive dissonance , which naturally motivates people to resolve the perceived conflict between facts and behavior. The easiest way to do that is often to mentally discount the facts . The more a new fact provokes fear, the stronger the motivation someone will have to ignore it. An example of bad public health policy based on fear involves putting horrible pictures on cigarette packs . This strategy is used in many countries around the world, and involves photos of diseased lungs, blackened teeth, tracheotomy tubes, etc. to emphasize the heal...