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UMW associate professor of psychology Dave Kolar studies first impressions. He says, 'Research supports that those first impressions are very important. When people see you performing a behavior, they assume it's you, not the situation.'
UMW professor David Rettinger (center) studies the psychology behind cheating in college classrooms. Here, he and some of his students have some fun with the subject.
Kevin McCluskey, associate professor of theater and dance at UMW, has a passion for puppets. Multitasking is ineffective and sometimes dangerous. Professor David MacEwen demonstrates in this five-activity spoof. |
In our second look at some of the research under way at the University of Mary Washington, we take you from the theater of the stage to the theater of the mind.
--Edie Gross
KEVIN MCCLUSKEY, PUPPETRY
At 14, Kevin McCluskey spied a marionette that he desperately wanted and resolved to earn the $40 it would take to buy it.
So when he found the puppet, nestled in its yellow box with the cellophane front, under the Christmas tree that year, he was ecstatic.
"I have never wanted anything in my life so badly," said McCluskey, who received the puppet from his grandmother.
He'd watched his first puppet show, "Peter and the Wolf," rapt and cross-legged on the floor of his elementary school's lunchroom. Now a teenager, he was pulling the strings.
He steadily added to his collection--a clown that could do tricks, a queen, a girl with braids--and performed for family members, neighbors and parishioners at his church.
"I was mesmerized by how magical it was," said the UMW theater professor. "Puppetry truly was my first love in all things theater."
Many look at puppets as merely dolls, he said, but they go well beyond child's play. Teachers, doctors and therapists have used puppets to reach their students and patients.
And theatrically, they've starred in a number of adult productions, including the Tony Award-winning Broadway musicals "The Lion King" and "Avenue Q." And let's not forget about Audrey II, the giant man-eating plant in the musical "Little Shop of Horrors."
"They can be quite powerful," said McCluskey, who helped students build an enormous puppet in 2005 for a UMW production of "Kindertransport."
"They're both frightening and empowering at the same time," he said. "They're frightening in that they're sort of possessed dolls come to life. They empower because they do things we can't do as humans."
DAVID MACEWEN, MULTITASKING
You may think you can safely drive and chat on the cell phone simultaneously, but you're courting disaster, according to research completed by UMW psychology professor David MacEwen and a team of his students.
"Multitasking as we think about it is impossible," said MacEwen. "Really, what people are doing is switching back and forth. The question becomes how well can you do it?"
Picture a box. What you're doing right this minute--presumably reading this article--is in that box. That's your working memory.
But two activities cannot occupy that box at the same time, MacEwen said. So if you want to pour a cup of coffee, you'll need to flush newspaper reading out of that box first, then reintroduce it once your drink is prepared.
To test the theory, a group of MacEwen's seniors had students play the same computer game simultaneously on two different computers. The first game, which featured bouncing balls, was relatively easy.
Students did OK on that test, largely due to a phenomenon called "chunking," where the brain takes two separate but simple tasks and treats them as one.
But with a more difficult game, like Tetris, the students' scores suffered. And when they had to switch up and back between the two different games, even though one was simple, their scores dropped even more.
"It doesn't matter what you interrupt a task with. If you interrupt a task, you're going to mess it up," MacEwen said.
Driving is a very practiced activity, so it's no surprise that a person would operate a car while talking on the phone, MacEwen said. But if something unexpected is introduced--an errant pedestrian, a sudden red light--while your box is filled up with a phone conversation, look out.
"If the conversation is interesting, everything you know about driving gets flushed out of the box and for a brief moment, sadly, dangerously, all the information about driving is gone," MacEwen said.
DAVID RETTINGER, CHEATING
It isn't their attitudes that inspire college students to cheat on tests.
It's their emotions--or lack thereof, according to experiments performed by UMW psychology professor David Rettinger and his students.
"I've been saying for years, 'We need to change people's attitudes if we want to change their behavior,'" Rettinger said. "Not so much."
For instance, students may believe that cheating is wrong. But if that attitude isn't followed by a particular emotional response, like guilt or fear of getting caught, they may just do it anyway.
How people make moral decisions has been studied principally by University of Virginia psychology professor Jonathan Haidt. Rettinger said he and his research team took some of Haidt's basic principles and applied them to college-level cheating.
In one experiment, the team exposed subjects to feelings of shame and guilt, then gave them the opportunity to cheat on a quiz--promising that the high scorer would receive an iPod.
Their emotional responses whetted, the overwhelming majority didn't cheat.
The research is important because it shows that simply teaching people right from wrong sometimes isn't enough, Rettinger said.
"If we want to get people to not cheat, we need to help them find a way to start having a different visceral response to cheating," he said. "Remind them when someone else cheats, they're the ones being cheated from because generally no one likes being cheated. You're changing the associations they have with a behavior they already know about."
DAVE KOLAR, FIRST IMPRESSIONS
The woman behind the counter doesn't know you overslept that morning, ironed a hole in your favorite shirt and then received a speeding ticket on your way to the DMV.
So when you growl and snap at her, your first impression comes across like your driver's license photo--lousy.
Psychologists like professor Dave Kolar call this the "fundamental attribution error," basically the tendency for people to ignore the situation when evaluating a person for the first time. Instead, the DMV clerk and any other strangers who encounter you that morning assume you're just a jerk--not a nice person having a rough day.
"Research supports that those first impressions are very important. When people see you performing a behavior, they assume it's you, not the situation," said Kolar. "We fail to recognize that sometimes the situations have fundamental importance."
Of course, when it comes to evaluating our own behaviors, we always take the situation into account.
But when assessing others, we focus more on other cues: facial expressions, eye contact, physical appearances and hairstyle.
That first impression then becomes a baseline for judging any future behavior. If you make a great first impression, people are more likely to cut you some slack on your bad days.
And that first impression doesn't have to be in person. Kolar tells students to be careful what they post on their Facebook and MySpace pages in case future employers are looking.
"We try to get across to students how important that first impression they're putting out to others is," he said.
Edie Gross: 540/374-5428
Email: egross@freelancestar.com
