Here - Surrey and Borders Partnership NHS Foundation Trust
Here - Surrey and Borders Partnership NHS Foundation Trust
Here - Surrey and Borders Partnership NHS Foundation Trust
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Editorial<br />
Let’s do some research<br />
June 2010 By Raj Persaud<br />
I was asked to write this by Dr Raja<br />
Mukherjee for our <strong>Trust</strong>’s new<br />
journal. <strong>Here</strong> it is…<br />
If we asked you to predict now whether<br />
you were going to perform some<br />
research <strong>and</strong> publish it, say in the next<br />
year, what would your answer be?<br />
Perhaps, from past experience you might<br />
admit that this is not likely. On the other<br />
h<strong>and</strong>, even if wasn’t particularly likely,<br />
you may also feel that gathering data is<br />
something that you ought to be doing,<br />
<strong>and</strong> given the social pressure <strong>and</strong><br />
management dem<strong>and</strong>s (me asking you<br />
publicly what your research plans are) you<br />
might impulsively declare, that yes<br />
research is something you are planning<br />
<strong>and</strong> intending.<br />
Now, here is the interesting research<br />
question – in merely asking you to<br />
predict the future – do we change it?<br />
Let’s say we ran an experiment where we<br />
divided a sample of the electorate into<br />
two groups, <strong>and</strong> for one, we asked them<br />
to predict whether they were going to<br />
vote or not, while we did nothing<br />
pertinent to the second group; they acted<br />
as a control. Now, if we followed these<br />
two samples up into the future, to<br />
examine what they eventually did in the<br />
privacy of the polling booth; the<br />
astonishing result is that being asked to<br />
predict the future...does change it.<br />
Those who are asked to forecast whether<br />
they are going to vote, tend to confirm<br />
they will, <strong>and</strong> to do so much more than<br />
would be expected from their past<br />
behaviour. They are responding to<br />
external expectation (<strong>and</strong> internal drivers<br />
of a similar nature) so they manage the<br />
impression they want to create of being<br />
responsible citizens, by predicting a<br />
behaviour they were in fact much less<br />
likely to perform in reality. Having<br />
foretold that they will take part in a<br />
ballot, they tend to go ahead <strong>and</strong> actually<br />
vote. Yet if they weren’t asked to predict<br />
the future, they were not particularly<br />
likely to do any casting at all.<br />
We can demonstrate this experimentally<br />
by comparing the group asked to predict<br />
the future with the control group, who<br />
were not asked to make predictions. This<br />
second group vote at the lower baseline<br />
rate of the general population, which is,<br />
not that much.<br />
Why does being asked to predict that<br />
you are going to vote, make it much<br />
more likely that you will?<br />
The short answer is that this particular<br />
psychological phenomenon, like most<br />
others, inspires many theories that<br />
attempt to account for it, but no one is<br />
exactly sure which is the truth. A seminal<br />
paper on this effect in the Journal of<br />
Consumer Psychology by Business<br />
Psychologists Eric Spangenberg of<br />
Washington State University <strong>and</strong> Anthony<br />
Greenwald of the University of<br />
Washington, pointed out that the trend<br />
could be used powerfully to manipulate<br />
large populations into behaviours they<br />
had previously little intention of<br />
performing.<br />
Spangenberg <strong>and</strong> Greenwald are<br />
probably the two world authorities on<br />
this intriguing ‘self-prophecy effect’ <strong>and</strong><br />
their paper entitled ‘Social Influence by<br />
Requesting Self-Prophecy’ showed how<br />
asking people to predict their own<br />
behaviour in the future was associated,<br />
on follow up, with spectacularly less<br />
cheating in tests, significantly more<br />
attendance at health clubs, <strong>and</strong> more<br />
voting.<br />
One theory is that we like to see<br />
ourselves as consistent creatures, <strong>and</strong><br />
having made a prediction of our<br />
behaviour in the future, not to confirm<br />
the prediction by performing the<br />
behaviour, would force us to confront a<br />
rather unpalatable truth; we are<br />
unreliable, inconsistent people who don’t<br />
know our own minds.<br />
4 <strong>Surrey</strong> <strong>and</strong> <strong>Borders</strong> Online Journal www.sabp.nhs.uk/journal