Ulterior Motives

How goals, both seen and unseen, drive behavior

by Art Markman, Ph.D.

Thinking about obstacles is hard but important

It is almost three weeks after New Years now, and so you may very well have broken the last of your New Year's resolutions by now. At the same time the United States waits expectantly and hopefully as we swear in our new President. So, what have these got to do with each other?

With both resolutions and new administrations, we start off with hope.

I went to see Clint Eastwood's Gran Torino the other day. This excellent movie is an example of what can be called a redemption drama. In movies of this type, a flawed character has a set of transformative experiences that causes them to act differently than they did at the start of the movie. Read More

Good Sex Is Good for Relationships

My evolutionary psychology colleagues have a fascination with what they affectionately call "human mating." Obviously, sex and sexuality is an important part of human experience, and it is important to have a theoretical framework for trying to understand sex differences in sexual strategies. Read More

Moral righteousness in trying times

Last week, I went to see Valkyrie at a local theater chain called the Alamo Drafthouse. One great aspect of the theater is that you can order food and drinks from your seat as you watch the film. In addition, for about 30 minutes before the film, they run quirky programming that is somehow related to the film you are about to see. Read More

Cleanliness is next to Godliness, or at least morality.

In the past few weeks, the news has been full of stories about Bernard Madoff, who spent years cheating business associates, friends, charities and investors out of billions of dollars in an elaborate scam. I must admit that when I heard about some of the charities that lost huge portions of their endowments to him, I experienced a feeling of revulsion and disgust. Read More

The right kind of resolution

As we approach a new year, it is common for us to take stock of our lives and think about things that we'd like to do differently in the coming year. Often, the resolutions we think about are negative resolutions. That is, we have some behavior that we currently perform that we'd like to stop. Read More

Seek and ye shall find: How unpredictability relates to exploration

A while back, I wrote a post about unpredictability in human behavior. I discussed the concept of probability matching in choice. A simple case of probability matching is one in which you are given a choice between two cups, only one of which will have an M&M in it. Read More

I regret what I did, and I regret who I did not become.

The research on regret suggests two ways to form New Year's resolutions. Read More

Your Habits Could Use Feedback...Now!

When I was in graduate school, I hung a dartboard in my apartment. When I needed a break from statistics or reading journal articles, I would throw darts for a while, and then return to studying. At first, I sprayed the darts all over the place, and left more than a few holes in the wall. Eventually, though, my skills got better. I could hit the triple 20 reliably. Read More

It seemed like a good idea at the time...

One of the more frustrating things as a parent is that your kids do things, and when you ask them why, they have no idea. You ask them, "What were you thinking?" and you get a blank stare, and if you're lucky, a shrug of the shoulders. As adults, we think we understand our own behavior, and so it frustrates us that our kids don't understand what is driving their actions. Read More

To Know Me Is To Like Me IV: The "Brazil" Theory of Consciousness

One reason that I write this blog is that I think most people know very little about their own minds. As a result, we rely on our folk psychology to give us intuitions about how we think. Folk psychology is the general term for the general set of beliefs hanging around in our culture for the way the mind works. Read More

To know me is to like me III: Subliminal advertising

When you travel for work, you end up on a lot of airplanes. Often, that means some polite conversation with the person sitting next to you. As a psychologist, that conversation is a dangerous one, because eventually I get asked what I do. Read More

To know me is to like me II: Accessibility

We would all like to think of ourselves as good decision makers. For truly difficult decisions, we may spend a lot of time deliberating. Yet, for many decisions (some of them quite important) we seem to have formed preferences even before we have really worked through the pros and cons of the decision. Read More

To know me is to like me I: Mere exposure

I was at a kd lang concert last week. She did a mix of songs from her new cd (which I had not heard yet) and older songs that I knew. The crowd reaction was typical. The new songs were beautiful, and people appreciated them. But when old songs started, the crowd really got excited.

That reaction is a great example of the mere exposure effect.

In order to get around the world, we make predictions about what other people do. We guess that a friend will remember to make a reservation for a lunch date next week. We assume that a spouse will pick up a bottle of wine to bring to a friend's party. We expect that our children will choose the same item from the menu at a restaurant that they always do. These predictions work well enough. Read More

Thoughts of death can be bad for your health

Despite lots of education about the potential dangers of certain behaviors, we don't do much to take care of our long-term health. We overeat, even at the risk of putting on dangerous amounts of weight and risking diabetes. We smoke cigarettes. We drink too much alcohol. We lie out in the sun and get a nice tan. Read More

Be careful drawing strength from the past!

In my last post, I talked a bit about how you might overcome holiday temptations by thinking locally. Another strategy that people often try is to rely on strength drawn from past experience. Read More

More reason to Act Local: Avoiding the binge

The holidays are coming. Thanksgiving, Christmas, Chanukkah, Kwanzaa. They're all on the way. And with them come office parties, holiday parties, family gatherings, and stress. If you are trying to keep to a diet or to avoid alcohol, the holidays can be a real nightmare. Every party has a huge spread of food. Read More

A user interface for the economy

In the days before the US election, Congress got together to consider yet another economic stimulus package. Read More

A dollar is a dollar is a dollar…Right?

The purpose of money is to provide a uniform method for valuing things. It doesn't matter whether I have a crisp new $1 bill in my pocket, an old dollar bill, four quarters, or even a check made out to me for a $1. They all have the same value. This currency system allows us great freedom to buy and sell things and services. Read More

Dream global, act local

When you want to motivate someone to do something, you tell them to Dream Big, and to Reach for the Stars. That is, of course, important advice. It is hard to achieve greatness without ever dreaming of greatness. An important question, though, is how you should go about achieving that greatness after you have dreamed it? Read More

Choice and recession III: Fighting expectations

When you read the newspaper stories about the current decline in the financial markets, there are lots of quotes from people affected by the economic crisis. People have lost their homes, and suddenly must move from their own house to a smaller apartment. Corporations are trying to downsize to get more efficient, and older workers are being asked to step aside. Read More

Choice and recession II: Short-term thinking

The financial markets continue to slide. When the economic crisis first became evident in the Spring, Congress decided to act with a stimulus package in which they gave many families a $400 refund on their taxes. Now, for some families, that $400 meant that they could pay off bills and buy more food to feed their families. Read More

The power of yard signs III: Perceived control

I thought I was done writing about yard signs, but when I woke up this morning, all of the Obama signs in my neighborhood were gone. Some people had them by the street, and others by their houses. All of them were gone. This was a targeted neighborhood beautification project, though, because the McCain signs were all still standing. Read More

Choice and Recession I: The law of small numbers

It is often said that all politics is local. In many ways, that is because all decision making is local as well. For many years, the United States has used more oil than it produces and has sent great wealth to oil-producing nations. For many years, economists have warned about the dangers of borrowing more money for home loans than can be paid back. Read More

The power of yard signs II: Escalation of commitment

During the primary elections in the Spring, a friend of mine was walking around the neighborhood asking people to put a yard sign on their lawn in support of his favored candidate. By the end of the week, most of the neighborhood was dotted with yard signs. He was doing this 7 or 8 months before the general election. Why?

Yard signs are good advertising, of course.

I like to run a few times a week to get some exercise. I have a few routes through my neighborhood, and that has given me the chance to observe the pattern of proliferation of political yard signs. Austin leans Democaratic, and so the Obama signs outnumber the McCain signs. However, what is more interesting to me is that the signs tend to clump together. Read More

Ignorance is Bliss

I watched the Vice Presidential debate between Sarah Palin and Joe Biden with some interest last night. I have a general interest in politics, but it is also hard to turn off my interest in Psychology when watching these events. One thing that struck me was that Governor Palin clearly has brittle knowledge of world affairs. She did not know the name of the commanding general in Afghanistan. Read More

People are actually quite cooperative.

When we look around the world, we see signs of competition everywhere. The Presidential election is hotly contested, and there is a bitter rivalry between Democrats and Republicans. Stores compete for your business. Read More

What's it worth to you?

Here in Austin, we had a number of evacuees from Hurricane Ike in town. The local paper was full pictures of damage to the Gulf Coast. After the stories about the initial devastation, the papers start to put value on the damage. So, what do we know about the Psychology of value? Read More

Art Markman, Ph.D., is a cognitive scientist at the University of Texas whose research spans a range of topics in the way people think.

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About Ulterior Motives

Ulterior Motives is about the interface between motivation and thinking. Your goals have a huge influence on your behavior. The active goals that you have also influence your emotions, which in turn affect your preferences and thinking. The beauty of this set of topics is that it ultimately covers just about every area within cognitive science.