Cool Hunting: "During a visit to Las Vegas we had the opportunity to dig a little deeper with Bally Technologies' Director of Game Development, Brett Jackson. He offered some insight into the surprisingly complex innovation, psychology and design behind the slot machines that illuminate so many casino floors."
Back in 2002, psychologists studying how couples argued found four different behaviors that correlated strongly with future divorce. In fact, in a small sample of 80 couples, the combination of those behaviors could be used to predict who would divorce over the next 14 years with 93% accuracy. The good news: While these behaviors are all things that people probably do sometimes, it's the frequency of behaviors that matters ... and, better yet, they're all things that you can change. At PsySociety, Melanie Tannenbaum uses the amazingly spot-on example of Kim Kardashian and Kris Humphries to illustrate how unhealthy arguments can lead to relationship collapse. — Maggie
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Tanya Khovanova has a fascinating and illuminating story about the blind-spots that can leave security systems vulnerable. She describes a clever one-way function using real-world tools:
Silvio Micali taught me cryptography. To explain one-way functions, he gave the following example of encryption. Alice and Bob procure the same edition of the white pages book for a particular town, say Cambridge. For each letter Alice wants to encrypt, she finds a person in the book whose last name starts with this letter and uses his/her phone number as the encryption of that letter.
To decrypt the message Bob has to read through the whole book to find all the numbers. The decryption will take a lot more time than the encryption. If the book increases in size the time it takes Alice to do the encryption almost doesn’t increase, but the decryption process becomes more and more draining.
This example is very good for teaching one-way functions to non-mathematicians. Unfortunately, the technology changes and the example that Micali taught me fifteen years ago isn’t so cute anymore. Indeed you can do a reverse look-up online of every phone number in the white pages.
Then she explains how a student pointed out her own blind-spot that made the system trivial to defeat:
I still use this example, with an assumption that there is no reverse look-up. I recently taught it to my AMSA students. And one of my 8th graders said, “If I were Bob, I would just call all the phone numbers and ask their last names.”
In the fifteen years since I’ve been using this example, this idea never occurred to me. I am very shy so it would never enter my mind to call a stranger and ask for their last name. My student made me realize that my own personality affected my mathematical inventiveness.
As Bruce Schneier points out, the young student is demonstrating "security mindset," imagining an attack on a security system that works on the weakest flank.
At the Wall Street Journal, Eric Simmons writes about the psychology of March Madness, which is really the psychology of relationships and the deep emotional bonds underlying communities and tribes. When you cheer on the Wichita State Shockers in the Final Four, what you're really doing is introducing other people (and other groups) into your definition of self. — Maggie
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Last week, I posted about a YouTuber who thinks his he might have tricked his cat with an optical illusion that's based on very human psychology. He asked other people to test the illusion on their cats, just to get some more data points. Now, the psychologists who created the illusion have pitched in to help out, posting a modified version that doesn't elicit the sensation of motion. Show your cat both versions and see whether it's the paper she's trying to kill, or the "rotating" circles. (Thanks to Diana Issidorides!)— Maggie
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YouTube user Rasmus posted a video that he thinks might show his cat being tricked by the same sense of motion that catches the eyes of humans who look at The Rotating Snake Illusion. On the other hand, this just might be a cute video of a kitten attacking a piece of paper — which is known to happen.
A great post on Metafilter turned me on to "Twenty Four Standard Causes of Human Misjudgement," a classic 1995 speech by Charlie Munger (much cited, and transcribed here in PDF), in which Munger (a respected investor and partner to Warren Buffet) lays out, in plain language, the cognitive biases and blind-spots that he views as the root of much human misery.
Munger's thinking is greatly influenced by Robert Cialdini's classic popular psychology text Influence, a title that Munger credits with laying out many of the blind spots of both economics and psychology. Munger's thinking is collected in another book: Poor Charlie's Almanack: The Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger.
I converted the talk to MP3 and listened to it twice today. I think I'll return to it again -- this feels like one of those mind-dumps that contains so much to pore over that it might be a work of years.
The idea of grief being expressed in predictable emotional stages dates back to the 1960s, writes Claudia Hammond at the BBC. But recent studies in the last decade suggest that reality is seldom so neatly defined. Her story is an interesting history of the science behind a popular idea, but also makes me curious. Is there a value to the five stages of grief even if they aren't strictly 100% accurate? For instance, if it gets average people to accept their own emotions or to understand that grief can be expressed in different ways, is that valuable socially ... even if the exact framework isn't valuable scientifically? — Maggie
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Trypophobia — a fear that isn't, technically, a disorder, but is, most likely, a brilliant example of how easy it is to be influenced by the power of suggestion. This piece by NPR's Michaeleen Doucleff has me trying to remember what (if anything) I thought about the word "moist" before I first heard that it was a word most people found to be disgusting. — Maggie
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A review analysis of 13 studies — encompassing more than 13,000 individuals — found that there were more differences in personality, behavior, and preferences from one woman to another woman, and one man to another man, than there were between men and women as groups. In other words: The opposite sex isn't an alien life form. Men and women are both from Earth, not Mars or Venus. Diversity abounds, but you can't really classify those differences as "women are like this" and "men are like that". Instead, it's more like "this person is like this" and "that other person is like that". — Maggie
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How did you write your New Year's resolutions? I don't mean, like, the tools you used — pencil and paper vs. tablet and bluetooth keyboard. What I'm talking about is how you put the goals into words — how you described what it was you wanted to do.
There's more than one way to make a resolution.
A couple of weeks ago, I ran across a great example of this in an old sociology paper from 1977. Researchers had collected New Year's resolutions from two groups of 6th graders — one of average middle class kids, and another group made up of Amish and Mennonites.
The researchers meant to study differences in gender. They were trying to figure out how different cultural backgrounds affected behavior that we tend to associate with one gender or another. But in that data, they noticed something odd, something they couldn't easily translate into statistics. The Amish kids' resolutions were different from those of the "normal" children.
