October 15, 2005 | Volume 2, Issue 2
A Conversation with Jennifer Lerner
Figure 1: Dr. Jennifer Lerner
Dr. Jennifer Lerner is an experimental social psychologist who studies the influence of emotional and social/structural factors on judgment and choice. She is the Estella Loomis McCandless Associate Professor in the Department of Social and Decision Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University. Dr. Lerner received a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, and currently directs the Emotional & Decision Making Lab at Carnegie Mellon University.
You recently received a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) for your research on the role of emotion in judgment and decision making as well as disseminating behavior decision research to broader audiences such as students, the public and policymakers.
Much of your recent work has focused on the links between terrorism and fear. How do you feel your work can contribute to current National Security challenges?
Let me first say that I consider myself to be a basic scientist. My goal is to understand how the mind works. Although I am primarily focused on that, it occasionally it turns out that my research can be applied to certain policy problems. I think it's important to have on record that I don't aim to address politics, just as I don't aim to address medical decision making or other applications. My aim is to get the science right, which I think is important because there are subtle biases that can enter one's work when one aims to influence specific applied outcomes. Without careful scientific methods, these biases can compromise the integrity of one's research.
I've been studying the differences between fear and anger since I was in graduate school. I've been studying them because I believed that the dominant scientific model for emotional carry over to judgment was overly simple and sometimes wrong. The model was that if you are feeling negatively, you are going to have a pessimistic outlook; vice versa for positive feelings. So the assumption has been that all negative emotions are the same; that if you are feeling anger, fear, sadness or another negative emotion, you are going to think more pessimistically. Based on what we know about the cognitive and biological structures of fear and anger, we predicted that they would not have similar affects on risk perception, but instead they would have opposite effects and that's in fact what we found. The more fear people experience, the more risk they see in the world. Conversely, the more anger they experience, the less risk they see in the world. It is important to say that this is true regardless of whether people experience naturally occurring emotions, so some people just happen to be chronically angry, while other people may be chronically anxious. It's also true if you experimentally induce fear or anger with random assignment to conditions, and that is what we've done in our studies on terrorism.
We went and collected different newspaper articles from major media outlets such as the New York Times or CNN that we thought were geared toward fear or anger and we tested them. The articles we chose were from the same time point, so world events were constant. We picked articles such that one story provoked relatively greater anger and the other relatively greater fear. Then we randomly assigned the two conditions to a sample of citizens from across the country. The sample matched the U.S. population on all major demographic factors, so we could extrapolate our results to the U.S. population as a whole. We found that the people who read the fear based story subsequently saw all terrorism threats as more likely, while people that read the anger based story saw all risks related to terrorism as less likely. And, although we didn't do it in that particular study, in our follow up work, we have compared anger to neutral emotion as well as to happiness. People are not just optimistic relative to fear, they are optimistic in an absolute sense, they become as optimistic as happy people.
So, getting back to your initial question of how this refers to current events, it seems clear to me that the emotional tone of any risk communication is going to matter a great deal. In addition to the experiment that I just described about the media stories, we also measured people's emotional reactions within 10 days of the terrorist attacks. We found that the risks they perceived immediately after the attacks affected the risks they perceived two months later not only the risk they perceived for themselves, but the risks they perceived for the country. It's easy to imagine that a person can say "I'm feeling angry, so this isn't going to happen to me," but the emotional carry over was broader than that. Participants who felt angry shortly after the attacks perceived less risk for the country as a whole two months later. So, I think there is something about emotion that creates what we call an "appraisal tendency" or a "perceptual lens." When you have a lens of fear it creates an appraisal tendency to see things as uncertain, unpredictable and under situational, rather than under individual control; whereas with anger you see things as certain, predictable, and under individual control. We have data showing these mediational mechanisms that link emotion to perception.
Tell us why you think it is important for your research to reach these broader audiences.
I feel it is important for many reasons. First of all, we're increasingly a country that needs to be scientifically literate. Our society has changed, and it's changed to the point where now every citizen needs to be able to read the newspaper and evaluate whether or not the evidence is sound. For example if you are reading a survey or the results of an experiment, it's important to know whether, when the newspaper reports a causal statement, if they have an experimental design that allows them to test for causality, or if they have a correlational survey and the journalists themselves are implying that causality exists. And the latter happens all the time. For example, when I teach an introductory level class called "Reason, Passion, and Cognition," on my exams I often give articles from the New York Times that pertain to topics involving emotion and cognition and then have my students evaluate the article in terms of its scientific soundness and what questions they would need to know in order to evaluate whether the research is solid or not. And it is very easy to find such articles because questions of emotion and cognition are pivotal for law, such as when to use the insanity defense, it's certainly important in medicine and it comes up quite often in reports related to terrorism. So those are two reasons why I feel it is important: (1) I want to let people know that a set of sciences can give unbiased information on matters of national importance and (2) I want to teach citizens how to evaluate the quality of science.
On the more specific side, for my research, I think it is very important for people to know that their own emotions are influencing their perceptions and that the emotions may not be influencing their perceptions in the way people think they are. For example, in the research that we do on how emotion affects economic decisions, we find that when we induce sadness, people are willing to pay more to get something than when they are in a neutral state. Also, people require less money to sell something than they would in a neutral state. But, when we ask people if what they are feeling is affecting their economic choices or the prices they set, they say no. Also, we have another set of results on the effect of disgust on economic decisions and in that case people are selling their possessions for less than they otherwise would without realizing it. In other words, emotions carry over from one situation to another even when people do not realize it and even when concrete economic consequences are at stake. In terms of the risk of terrorism, here emotions also carry over in meaningful ways. People are doing things that they otherwise would not do, or are not doing things that they otherwise would do a function of how the media implicitly primes specific emotions.
Let me say one more thing: a lot of my research is funded by the government, in particular the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, and as you know, government money comes from taxpayers. I feel no less than a deep obligation to talk to taxpayers about the results of our research. People often hear about special applied research breakthroughs, such as medical technologies, and a lot of that research is funded by private companies because it directly leads to commodities that will be sold in the marketplace. It is reserved for the role of the government to fund research that doesn't directly lead to commodities, but instead only advances our knowledge and may someday lead to huge breakthroughs. [Our research] doesn't necessarily always capture public interest, in part because we as professors don't know how to capture the public interest. So, I am working with the NSF and the White House as part of this award to specifically do more public addresses. My whole career has been teaching elite college students at Carnegie Mellon and Berkeley and I want my research to reach a broader audience. The White House has an office of Science and Technology Policy. As part of this award, I have had meetings there, in the executive office of the government, and they are arranging for me to give more public addresses.
Can you tell us how your research might change the decision making styles of leaders in the private and public sector?
I gave a talk at NATO headquarters on this research and there were people there from all of the NATO countries and from many non NATO countries. What I saw there is that we were having two kinds of impact. The first is that we are helping to solve some research questions that other people around the world have struggled with. For example, a common finding after disasters and terrorist attacks is that women perceive much more risk than do men. No one had ever provided a scientific explanation for this. Our research is credited on the NATO website as the first to provide one. We document that much as 80 percent of the variance between female to male risk perception is due to the different levels of fear and anger males and females experience. We can take that down another layer and say and the reason it matters is because of the specific automatic cognitive appraisals associated with fear or anger. We can take that down even one more level and say that there are different biological associations between fear and anger. For example, cortisol is the major stress hormone our bodies release and we just published a paper that shows that the less fear you display in your face, the lower your cortisol levels; the more fear you display, the higher the levels. The link between your facial display of emotion and your underlying cortisol levels is directly related to whether you appraise situations pessimistically or optimistically. So back to your question, it is great to go to these international meetings of researchers and show how our research can explain these differences between men and women on so many different levels.
It's unclear to me whether we are having a policy impact. But we may impact some public channels of risk communication. I delivered this talk in front of ambassadors and risk communicators from various countries. For example, the so called "Walter Cronkite of the BBC" was there; his job is to deliver the news to the U.K. We got to sit around a table, not much bigger than this, and discuss risk communication strategies. So, there are scientific and applied impacts and, in both cases, we are helping people understand how emotion and cognition interact so various practitioners can put that information to good use.
Now you implied that this [research] can be taken in directions I'm not so happy with and that's true. The Wall Street Journal runs a weekly science section and they devoted one week to our research about emotion and economic decision making. The first line of the article was something like, "Now I know none of you are going to use this to manipulate any consumers, so I'll tell you the results." It's on the media section of my website. Clearly, marketers can take our results that show that sad people are willing to pay more and try to create sad environments. It's not that hard to do, we've replicated them many times in my lab. We've replicated them with teenagers, with adults; it may hold across the age spectrum. My goal for results like that is to get the word out, so when people are feeling sad and they're at home shopping on the internet, they aren't the victims of their bad moods. One of the frustrations of science is that you can't control how your work is going to be used.
CMU is known for its arts and its sciences, and the Department of Social and Decision Sciences is a perfect example of the meeting of the right and left brains. How has the CMU community contributed to your success?
There is so much cross disciplinary work. To study emotion, I call on people in the English Department, they help write the emotion inducing stimuli that we use. I frequently call on my colleagues at the University of Pittsburgh who are neuroscientists; they help collect the central and peripheral nervous system components. So, we've got Humanities and English faculty contributing, Biologists and Neuroscientists. I commonly work with economists to develop economic decision making paradigms. Carnegie Mellon is an ideal environment for that because I need to work at all these different levels of analysis with these multiple disciplines feeding in.
As a woman in the field of science, what experiences have shaped how you make your career decisions?
In your opinion, what are the major obstacles women in the field of science have to face in choosing this career path? Do you have any specific role models, women or men, who have inspired you?
Being a young person who wants to have a family and wants to have children biologically, it is incredibly difficult to start a lab, a family, and a scientific career all at the same time. I think it is like a night and day experience for women versus men at this juncture. In other words, I am not someone who thinks that sex differences are irrelevant.
There's a new study in the Chronicle of Higher Education that shows that 20 percent of professors are women. And I have to say that in many fields, there is a documented difference in career attainment between men and women. As a social scientist, I have long understood that difference to be a product of the "chilly climate" and of the subtle biases that people have. We know that there are implicit biases where we all want to mentor people who look like ourselves and things like that. I naturally think that I personally don't fit that profile, but then everyone thinks that they don't fit that profile, yet we all mentor people who look like ourselves. So, I have always understood that difference in terms of the social environment. Until I got pregnant. And then, I lay on the floor vomiting for five months, literally, and I had to be hospitalized regularly. I just threw up five or six times a day. I was too sick to read email or anything like that; I couldn't brush my teeth for months because if I opened my mouth wide enough to fit the toothbrush, I'd throw up I kid you not. So, I lay on the floor and looked at my husband and said, "Forget the 'chilly climate' hypothesis, now I understand the difference between male and female career attainment." No man has to take months and months off work before the baby arrives. And there is documented evidence that the best thing for a baby, once it does arrive, is breast milk. And you really do need to take time off if you are going to follow that advice. So, for me, it was a huge amount of time that I took off. And I am a hard driving, ambitious person. Anyone who knows me will tell you that. And I just lay on the floor for months. So, are there challenges? (laughs) Yes, not everyone has that kind of experience. But most women at least are completely exhausted. And more women are breastfeeding, and that is a whole other challenge – a wonderful one but still a challenge. The recommendation is to breastfeed for the first six months, but the surgeon general said if you can breastfeed even longer, that is better. Now, some of these conferences last five days, and I'll just give you the nitty gritty: it is very hard to pump [breast milk] for five days. Most women can't pump for five days without running into medical complications. So I tried that at a conference and ran into complications and said the next conference I decided to bring the baby. And bringing the baby to a conference is expensive, because you have to have quality child care. There are so many more obstacles than I ever imagined. So, I used to think that women just didn't get called on enough in class. Now I don't think any of that matters nearly to the extent that having a family does. It's incredibly difficult. I'm just lucky that I have a history of coping with health problems, so I'm used to tough times, and I'm lucky that I have an army of dear friends ready to help me. I am also extremely assertive, so I went to my department head and asked for a special policy to bring my baby to the conferences. This is probably more of an answer than you wanted, but again, I think it has to get out there. I don't think that most male colleagues would ever imagine that there are such issues. I'm sure a lot of my male colleagues want to have more women in the field. They are not prejudiced people; some of them are as dear, as supportive, and as warm as anyone could imagine. But the fact remains, there are no tenured women in my department whereas there are at least 12 tenured men, depending on how you count joint appointments. In other words, no women vote on the most important decision granting tenure. So, clearly something needs to happen in the system in order to help women make it through the pipeline.
You mentioned being assertive, what other personal characteristics helped you to be successful?
My advice is this: Find one senior woman at your university to whom you can talk with complete honesty. It makes a huge difference, even if that woman is in a different field. For me, that woman is Linda Babcock. To know that there is one other woman who made it is so important. There are some unspoken things that another female faculty member can understand uniquely well. The other night, for example, I was at a reception for my endowed chair and I was sitting in the front, and my daughter was crying because she wanted to sit with me but she couldn't because I was engaged in professional responsibilities at the moment. Linda immediately jumped up and took my daughter out of the room to play. There are a hundred things like that where having a senior, trusted, female colleague makes the difference. I didn't need to ask Linda to do that. She already knew that a 1 year old wouldn't be happy seeing her mommy unless she could be in her mommy's arms. Linda probably also knew that I could not concentrate if I thought that my daughter were upset.
On a more professional level, Linda has helped me learn to negotiate. You are probably familiar with her book, Women Don't Ask. When I arrived, I was really reluctant to ask for things and she helped me to overcome that in order to promote my research and respond to a number of outside offers. Especially for women, it's important to get help with financial negotiations because we systematically undervalue ourselves.
In recent years, we've seen the trend of MBA and MPA programs incorporating organizational behavior into their curriculum. How would you propose your research be incorporated into management programs and training?
Princeton and Berkeley both have a similar requirement and I think it is a great trend. I think it would be a great core component of an MPA because it makes decision makers aware of the role of emotion, and aware of their biases. Economics has a lot to say about how to change behavior, but it doesn't do a lot on the individual level. But the field of decision science the blend of psychology and economics takes the descriptive research on how people actually do make decisions with the prescriptive research of economics about how they should make decisions, and puts them together. And I think that is a much more solid ground on which to base public policies and decisions.
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