Why do we feel pride? Is pride even something to be avoided?
This is a difficult question to answer, and Humintell congratulates Dr. Jessica Tracy for presenting a novel account of the emotion of pride in her acclaimed Take Pride: Why the Deadliest Sin Holds the Secret to Human Success.
In this book, Dr. Tracy finds that pride can serve as a powerful motivating factor, encouraging humans to feel good about themselves and their accomplishments in a way that drives them towards greater success. Importantly, she presents research demonstrating that pride and expressions of it are innate parts of human experience, rather than being learned from peers or developed by cultural factors.
If pride is innate, she argues, it likely has “an adaptive function” or a good reason for being developed. Dr. Tracy argues that this reason is to bolster motivation and a drive to succeed. She describes the phenomena of “authentic pride,” which involves feeling satisfaction for engaging in activities that strengthen one’s self-esteem and sense of individual identity. This form of pride encourages humans to continue pursuing these sorts of activities.
Dr. Tracy supported her conclusion with a series of studies, including an experiment conducted with university students. It turned out that students who had done poorly on exams and reported a lack of pride in their work were actually driven to study harder and perform better on subsequent tests. While analyzing the data, she found that this very lack of pride inspired them to work harder.
Years earlier, in 2008, Humintell’s own Dr. David Matsumoto worked with Dr. Tracy to demonstrate that pride in one’s accomplishments and its expression is universal among humans, a crucial argument in Dr. Tracy’s book.
In that study, Dr. Tracy and Dr. Matsumoto analyzed photos of one hundred Olympic judo competitors that had been taken just after they either won or lost a match. Interestingly, the sample included representatives of 37 nations, as well as Paralympic competitors who had been blind since birth.
After these competitors won the match, almost every single one showed signs of pride by tilting their heads back or expanding their posture. Notably, this occurred regardless of cultural background or the ability to see, suggesting strongly that this expression of pride is inherent in us as a species.
As Dr. Matsumoto said, “This is a phenomenon that is occurring in people all around the world, in people who are blind and never saw it happen… There is something wired in us to do that at that particular moment.”
However, Dr. Tracy cautions that pride is not always good. If a person is feeling proud, not because of personal satisfaction, but because their actions are lauded by peers, it can often turn into hubris. This form of pride is actually bad for human motivation, she explains, as it encourages people to enjoy the attention they derive from others, rather than work to improve self-esteem.
Dr. Tracy warns that hubris encourages us to perform for “the recognition, and the fame, and the praise.” Instead, we must learn to recognize whether our pride is “authentic” and derive satisfaction from our own self-fulfillment, rather than from external validation.
For more information, check out this blog on the universality of shame and this one on displays of dominance in sports.
As of August 2014, The ALS Association had received $31.5 million in donations compared to $1.9 million during the same time period (July 29 to August 20) the previous year (Deighton, 2014) and the Ice Bucket Challenge had over 2.4 million tagged videos on Facebook (Stampler, 2014). But how exactly was this social media fad so effective in influencing hordes of individuals to donate towards ALS research? A simple explanation could have been its timing. The challenge was fortuitously instigated at the start of the summer, getting underway in June 2014 and peaking in August 2014. Obviously, high summer is a more suitable time to perform the act of tipping an ice-cold bucket of water over the head than, say, December. However, timing alone could not possibly account for such a social media frenzy and the sheer magnitude of donations that came in. Perhaps psychology can shed some light?1. Perceptual Salience. Could the influence of the ice bucket challenge have had its roots in our perceptual processes? Attention research has shown that the kind of stimuli that capture our gaze is the appearance of new visual objects (Yantis, 1993; Yantis & Jonides, 1996) and objects that are interesting (Elazary & Itty, 2008). Indeed, the ice-bucket challenge presents viewers with both a novel and visually interesting stimulus:-a campaign of this kind had never been implemented before and the nature of the challenge was peculiar. Thus, the novelty and uniqueness of the challenge was likely implicated in it becoming almost hysterically popular with the consequence being the number of donations that came in. 2. Commitment and ConsistencyAccording to Cialdini, one of the most effective ‘weapons of influence’ is our “obsessive desire to be consistent and to appear consistent with what we have already done” (1984 p 37). Compelling evidence for this comes from psychologist Thomas Moriarty who staged thefts on Jones Beach in New York. This study revealed that participants who had previously committed to protecting a confederate’s belongings after being requested to do so were much more likely to intervene during the theft with behaviours including chasing and stopping the thief, restraining the thief physically or even demanding an explanation for the theft (Moriarty, 1975). However, this should not be surprising as psychologist have long understood the power of consistency in motivating human behaviour. For example, Leon Festinger’s (1962) “Effort justification” is one explanation as to why participants of the ice bucket challenge are likely to have donated. One of the most classic examples of effort justification is Aronson and Mills’s (1952) study on a group of young women who volunteered to join a discussion group on the topic of the psychology of sex. The women were placed in a mild-embarrassment condition which involved reading aloud sex-related words (e.g. prostitute or virgin), a severe-embarrassment condition which involved saying highly sexual words (e.g. f*ck or c*ck) and a control group who did not read sex related words at all. All subjects then listened to a recording of a dull discussion about sexual behaviour in animals. When asked to rate the group and its members, the severe-embarrassment group’s ratings were significantly higher whereas control and mild-embarrassment groups did not differ. Aronson and Mills concluded that this was because those whose initiation process was more difficult (embarrassment equalling effort), had to increase their subjective value of the discussion group to resolve their subsequent cognitive dissonance. Stripping into one’s bathing suit, preparing a bucket of ice-cold water, asking one friend to pour the bucket over your head while another films it being poured all over you only for you to then upload it onto social media and to consequently challenge three other friends to do exactly the same thing in the name of ALS research is an effortful and uncomfortable process to say the least. Thus, it makes sense to assume the participants of the Ice Bucket Challenge – who persisted in this effortful task for ALS – donated for the same reason Moriarty’s participants chased the thief and Aronson and Mill’s participants rated their groups so highly – “to be and to appear consistent with what they had already done”.3. Public ImageA further explanation for the success of the ice bucket challenge could have been the communal and innately public nature of it. Psychologists are well aware of how desire to maintain a good reputation is also a powerful ‘weapon of influence’. Results from experimental economic games have shown that manipulating reputational opportunities affects prosocial behaviour and that opportunities for reputation formation can play an important role in sustaining cooperation and prosocial behaviour (Hayley & Fessler, 2005). The nature of the challenge allowed those taking part to publicly display social responsibility through charitable behaviour, and cooperation through accepting the challenge from a friend. Thus, desire to maintain a good reputation is likely to have contributed to the viral spread of the challenge and the magnitude of donations that came in. 4. Use of Role ModelsPerhaps one of the most powerful ‘weapon of influence’ utilised by this campaign was its involvement of celebrities. The influence of celebrities in the 21st century extends far beyond the traditional domain of the entertainment sector. They are important figures in campaigns for social change and the global internet is one of the major drivers of this phenomenon (Choi & Berger, 2010). Celebrities such as Oprah, Selena Gomez and Taylor Swift undertook the challenge. Perhaps more powerfully the challenge was not liable solely for celebrities but famous athletes, leading businessmen and influential entrepreneurs who too took part in the challenge. Lebron James, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg to name a few. For many, these individuals are important role models and research has shown how influential role models can be in dictating our behaviour. Role models can strongly influence purchase intentions and behaviour (Martin & Bush, 2000). An individual’s role model has even been implicated in the prediction of women’s career choices (Quimby & Santis, 2006). Thus, role models are looked up to by others and their actions are emulated by those admirers. The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge is evidence of this. For all those individuals on social media, seeing the singer or athlete they admire most donate and dedicate themselves to ALS was likely a very strong motivation to play a part in spreading the message and fundraising for the cause. But what became of it? As it turns out the funds raised from the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge helped identify a new gene associated with the disease the following year. Although only present in 3% of ALS cases, the NEK1 gene was found present in both inherited and sporadic forms of the disease which researchers believe will provide them a new target for the development of possible treatments (Cirulli et al., 2015). However small this breakthrough may seem, the ALS Ice Bucket challenge highlights two very important things: first, that working together we can bring about real change and awareness of social issues and second, never to underestimate the power of influence in dictating human behaviour. Aronson, E., & Mills, J. (1959). The effect of severity of initiation on liking for a group. The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 59, 177.Choi, C. J., & Berger, R. (2010). Ethics of celebrities and their increasing influence in 21st century society. Journal of business ethics, 91, 313-318.Cialdini, R. B. (1987). Influence (Vol. 3). A. Michel.Cirulli, E. T., Lasseigne, B. N., Petrovski, S., Sapp, P. C., Dion, P. A., Leblond, C. S., … & Ren, Z. (2015). Exome sequencing in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis identifies risk genes and pathways. Science, 347, 1436-1441.Deighton, J. (2014, August 20). Why the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge is a Social Media Blockbuster. Retrieved from http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/why-the-als-ice-bucket-challenge-is-a-social-media-blockbuster.Elazary, L., & Itti, L. (2008). Interesting objects are visually salient. Journal of vision, 8, 3-3.Haley, K. J., & Fessler, D. M. (2005). Nobody’s watching?: Subtle cues affect generosity in an anonymous economic game. Evolution and Human behavior, 26, 245-256.Moriarty, T. (1975). Crime, commitment, and the responsive bystander: Two field experiments. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 31, 370.Festinger, L. (1962). A theory of cognitive dissonance (Vol. 2). Stanford university press.Yantis, S. (1993). Stimulus-driven attention capture. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 2, 156–161.Yantis, S., & Jonides, J. (1996). Attentional capture by abrupt onsets: New perceptual objects or visual masking? Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 22, 1505–1513.Quimby, J. L., & Santis, A. M. (2006). The influence of role models on women’s career choices. The Career Development Quarterly, 54, 297-306. Stampler, L. (2014, August 15) This Is How Many Ice Bucket Challenge Videos People Have Posted on Facebook. Receieved from http://time.com/3117501/als-ice-bucket-challenge-videos-on-facebook/.
By now, we’ve all seen them in one way or another. Whether it be in person (Halloween is approaching…), on our social media newsfeeds or in the media. Newspaper headlines read ‘Killer clown craze: 12 of the creepiest UK sightings’ (The Telegraph, 17th Oct), ‘Killer clown with machete threatens two girls in Suffolk’ (The Telegraph, 16th Oct), ‘Childline flooded with calls about killer clown craze’ (Daily Mail, 13th Oct). With the number of these ‘killer clowns’ growing exponentially, you’ve got to ask the question of what took this from a Halloween outfit to a craze confining communities to their homes.It may not come as a surprise that research has shown the media is strikingly successful in telling its audience what to think about. The more the media reports something, the more available that information is to us and the more frequently we think about it. The agenda setting theory, first proposed in 1922, outlines this effect. It is not surprising then, that killer clowns have become the topic of conversation with them consecutively filling newspaper headlines and their masks filling every scroll down social media. Could it be that this high exposure is what has caused the ‘craze’? Could it be that the volume of others putting on a mask is what is encouraging so many more to do the same? 
Figure One: The Theory of Planned BehaviourThe theory of planned behaviour suggests there are three components that lead to an intention to perform a certain behaviour (see figure one). Perceived behavioural control is simply the belief that you can control your behaviour. Perhaps the consequence of going out and scaring your community is too high; a risk of arrest, for example. But, thanks to the medias mass publications of clowns filling the streets, their perceived behavioural control is reassessed. An individual’s belief that they can to perform this behaviour grows, under the cover of a mask. Suddenly, a behaviour that seemed out of reach is not so anymore. This of course, ties in with social norms. Whilst it may have been considered unacceptable to go and scare your local community before, suddenly a lot more people doing it and it rapidly becomes a much more normative, and therefore an accepted behaviour to perform. Of course, it is the media that ensures we are aware of the growing number of clowns in our streets. The attitude towards the behaviour, in this example at least, is likely to build from the other components. The majority of us are probably horrified by these killer clowns, however, there are clearly individuals who have a more positive attitude to the craze. Or perhaps a more positive attitude of the behaviour has been formed as a result of the high exposure; it could be considered humourous rather than horrifying. According to the theory of planned behaviour, the combination of these three components lead to an intent to perform a behaviour. Although hard to get inside the head of a killer clown, you can see how putting on a mask, wig and wandering the local streets can suddenly be perceived as more acceptable; a belief that we possibly owe to media sources for sharing. This media exposure should boldly take its place in the diagram of the theory of planned behaviour, feeding into the three components that influence behaviour intentions (see figure two). 
Figure Two: Addition of Agenda Setting to Theory of Planned BehaviourThe role of the media treads a very fine line. The damaging effects of them sharing the latest craze can clearly be seen, essentially taking what could have been a few separate instances to the ‘killer clown craze’. But, how long would it take for us to begin to resent the media should they stop sharing the latest horrors? Would we not be outraged if we came face-to-face with a killer clown only to find we could have been warned to stay in our homes, if the media had published the latest instances it had been informed of? Regardless, this latest craze illustrates the strength of agenda setting theory, and the power the media has over us and our behaviours.ReferencesFrancis, J. J., Eccles, M. P., Johnston, M., Walker, A., Grimshaw, J., Foy, R., Kaner, E. F. S., Smith, L., & Bonetti, D. (2004). Constructing questionnaires based on the theory of planned behaviour. A manual for health services researchers, 2010, 2-12. Rogers, E. M., Dearing, J. W., & Bregman, D. (1993). The anatomy of agenda‐setting research. Journal of communication, 43(2), 68-84.