Boing Boing » psychology

Conspiracy theorists aren't crazy

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Tue, 21 May 2013 13:24:04 +0000

I have a personal Facebook account, which I use to keep up with friends and family. Like many of you, I've also discovered that this gives me a peek inside the psyche of those friends and family — and one of the things that I saw was an interest (and sometimes belief in) conspiracy theories. It wasn't limited to the Right or the Left. And it definitely wasn't limited to people I love but consider a little "off", if you know what I'm saying.* Over and over, I saw perfectly rational, sane people, supporting and spreading ideas that, to me, seemed a little nuts.

And that made me curious: Where do conspiracy theories come from? The answer, according to psychologists and sociologists, is not "Glenn Beck's fevered imagination." In fact, the category "people who believe in conspiracy theories" can't even really be separated into The Other in a nice, neat way. If you look at the data, the people who believe in conspiracy theories are us. And those theories grow out of both historical context, our feelings about ourselves and the wider world, and the way that our brains respond to feelings of powerlessness and uncertainty. Here's a short excerpt from my most recent column for The New York Times Magazine:

While psychologists can’t know exactly what goes on inside our heads, they have, through surveys and laboratory studies, come up with a set of traits that correlate well with conspiracy belief. In 2010, Swami and a co-author summarized this research in The Psychologist, a scientific journal. They found, perhaps surprisingly, that believers are more likely to be cynical about the world in general and politics in particular. Conspiracy theories also seem to be more compelling to those with low self-worth, especially with regard to their sense of agency in the world at large. Conspiracy theories appear to be a way of reacting to uncertainty and powerlessness.

Economic recessions, terrorist attacks and natural disasters are massive, looming threats, but we have little power over when they occur or how or what happens afterward. In these moments of powerlessness and uncertainty, a part of the brain called the amygdala kicks into action. Paul Whalen, a scientist at Dartmouth College who studies the amygdala, says it doesn’t exactly do anything on its own. Instead, the amygdala jump-starts the rest of the brain into analytical overdrive — prompting repeated reassessments of information in an attempt to create a coherent and understandable narrative, to understand what just happened, what threats still exist and what should be done now. This may be a useful way to understand how, writ large, the brain’s capacity for generating new narratives after shocking events can contribute to so much paranoia in this country.

Read the rest

*This joke is totally going to get me into trouble. Dear friends and family: Trust me, you are not the one I'm referring to here.

Image: December 21st...., a Creative Commons Attribution No-Derivative-Works (2.0) image from clawzctr's photostream

Short documentary about the psychology of slot machines

Mark Frauenfelder — Fri, 10 May 2013 19:53:26 +0000

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."

Prevent divorce — with science!

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Fri, 10 May 2013 14:50:37 +0000

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.

How cognitive blind-spots compromise security systems

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 17:25:14 +0000

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.

One-Way Functions (via Schneier)

March community-building-and-tribal-unity/Madness

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 20:02:15 +0000

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.

Cats and optical illusions: Now with control experiments!

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 17:29:45 +0000

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!)

Are cats fooled by optical illusions?

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 23:50:07 +0000

The Rotating Snake Illusion is a fun image that makes your brain perceive motion where no motion actually exists. Psychologists understand the factors that make an illusion like this work (and work better) — for instance, breaking up and staggering the colored lines that radiate from the center of the circle creates a much stronger sensation of movement. But they don't know exactly why it works yet, according to Japanese psychologists Akiyoshi Kitaoka and Hiroshi Ashida.

And that brings us to this kitten video.

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.

So here's the challenge: Try it on your cat. You can print it off here. Then, report back here and/or post video responses to YouTube. Let's gather some data!

This is not exactly the soundest experimental methodology ever, but it sure would be interesting to see what happens.

Bang bang: Science, violence, and public policy

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 14:39:07 +0000

I was on CBC Radio 1's Day 6 last weekend, talking about some of the reasons why scientists can't answer key questions about guns — whether current gun policies do anything to reduce violent crime, for instance, or whether more guns cause less (or more) violence. In a related debate, you should also read the article on the science of video games and real-life violence that Brandon Keim wrote for PBS' NOVA. The truth is that this branch of science also has big problems connecting cause and effect and, as with gun policy research, the best kinds of experiments can't really be done for logistical and ethical reasons.

Twenty Four Standard Causes of Human Misjudgement

Cory Doctorow — Sun, 03 Mar 2013 04:54:18 +0000

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.

Five stages of grief: Do they exist? Does it matter?

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 12:57:12 +0000

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?

Create false memories at home for fun and profit!

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 17:23:20 +0000

Science journalist Stephen Ross Pomeroy uses real research to explain how you can trick your friends and loved ones into "remembering" events that never actually happened. Key tips: Don't get too intricate with the details (your mark will fill those in for themselves) and do focus on false memories that would have a strong emotional component.

How Reddit is making you afraid of cantaloupes

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Mon, 18 Feb 2013 20:54:59 +0000

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.

More evidence that men and women are more alike than different

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Wed, 13 Feb 2013 19:07:46 +0000

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".

Medicine or moralism: A psychotherapist questions "sex addiction"

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Mon, 04 Feb 2013 17:02:11 +0000

Can you actually be addicted to sex? Marty Klein doesn't think so. In an interesting article at The Humanist, he critiques the diagnostic criteria and common treatments behind this tabloid-ready psychological problem. …

The secret to feeling like you have more time available

Mark Frauenfelder — Fri, 25 Jan 2013 18:36:01 +0000

tldr; Increase your sense of awe. (Via Dan Pink)…

What your New Year's Resolutions tell us about the way you think

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Wed, 16 Jan 2013 19:11:41 +0000

It's a little late, but I kind of love these 2013 props made by PaperandPancakes on Etsy.

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.

Average kids in the 1970s wrote resolutions in a way that was pretty familiar to me, and probably to you. They focused on goals. One kid wanted to raise his rank in Boy Scouts. Another wanted to improve her swimming time by 10 seconds. Other kids wanted to get an "A" in a class, instead of a "B". There was nothing really surprising here.

And the Amish kids had similar goals in mind. The difference is that their resolutions weren't about the goals. They focused on the process of getting there. Instead of resolving to get a better grade, for instance, the Amish kids resolved to spend more time doing their math problems. What's more, the Amish kids made resolutions that were much more related to the experiences they were already familiar with. The middle class kids might resolve to climb a local mountain or learn to scuba dive. But the Amish kids's resolutions were focused on stuff like working faster at chores, so they all get done on time.

These might seem like relatively small differences, but when small differences so clearly form a delineation between two cultures, social scientists pay attention.

Hazel Markus is one of those people. She's a professor of behavioral sciences at Stanford and she told me that the 1977 study of New Year's resolutions reminded her of a study in a paper she published in 1999.

In that study, Markus and her team recruited two groups of people from the waiting areas at the San Francisco airport. The first group was made up of people who had been born in America, and who spoke English at home. The second group was made up of people who were born in Korea or China, they were citizens of those countries, and their primary language was Chinese or Korean. One at a time, each of these people was asked to fill out a survey. Afterwards, they were told that they could pick a pen as a thank-you gift, and were offered a selection to choose from.

Most of the pens were one color — orange, say — while one or two would be a different color — green. The participants made their choices individually, but there was a distinct pattern to the choices they made.

Seventy-four percent of the Americans chose the color that was least common. If there was one green pen and four orange, they went with the green. In the group from Korea and China, that tendency was completely reversed, with only twenty-four percent of them choosing the less-common color.

To Markus, this is representative of differences in culture. In multiple studies, she's seen evidence that Americans look favorably on uniqueness in a way that a lot of other cultures don't. Here, it's not just okay to be unique. Standing out is part of how we create public identities. It's actively encouraged.

That doesn't seem to be true in most East Asian cultures, she told me. There, people have more of a tendency to think about themselves and their identity in terms of relationships to other people and community. You want to be a part of something. You don't want to be the person who is trying too hard to be different.

Markus calls this a difference between individualism and collectivism. But she also said that you can't just simply draw a line and say Americans are like this and Chinese are like this. It's more complicated than that, because the preference for individualism varies a lot within American society.

And that brings us back to those Amish kids. Certain cultures within the US tend to be less individualistic, Markus said. And the Amish community is one of those.

"When you are aware of yourself as a part of a group, it's quite reasonable that you would see yourself in terms of tasks you're trying to accomplish," Markus said. "It's also reasonable that middle-class American kids would have more of a focus on outcomes. In their culture, you are supposed to become someone, do something, stand out."

But culture isn't just one thing, and it isn't static. What you learn about Amish kids in 1977 might not hold true today. What you learn about Amish kids and how they behave as a part of an Amish community might not hold true if those same kids spend a few years living outside that community.

You can see that effect in action in an article published last February in The Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, Eric Shiraev told me. He's a professor of psychology and international affairs at George Mason University and he wrote a textbook on cross-cultural psychology — the study of how our cultures affect the way we think and act.

The study he told me about compares the behavior of Facebook users to that of people using Renren, the Chinese equivalent of Facebook. The researchers found that users on Facebook tended toward posts that reflected individualism — posting about their own activities, posting pictures of themselves — while Renren users tended to display a more collectivist ethic. For them, social media was mostly about sharing. They shared links. They shared their friends' posts.

But the really interesting thing was that some people used both Facebook and Renren. "And when people switched platforms they changed their behavior," Shiraev said. "On Facebook, you become more individual. On Renren, you become more collectivist. The same person will do different things to adjust to different cultures."

In fact, Shiraev said, when you look at individuals the "cultural" differences that we see are often the ones that we expect to be there. We seek out the things in someone's personality that confirm our prior hypothesis about how they ought to behave because of where they're from. So if we think a Chinese person is going to be more collectivists and deferential to authority, we're more likely to notice the examples that verify that idea. Same thing for narcissistic, loud, boorish Americans.

But that doesn't mean it's totally useless to study cultural differences. While thinking that we know individuals because of their cultural background can lead us astray, we can actually find ourselves just as far off track if we don't pay attention to the different ways different cultures approach the same ideas.

Case in point: Happiness. In surveys of which countries are the happiest, Russia often ends up down at the bottom, Eric Shiraev said. But you can't assume every Russian you meet will be dour. And, maybe more importantly, you can't even assume that that survey really means Russians aren't happy, in general. That's because it's not culturally normal there to publicly admit to happiness.

"In Russia, it's supposed to be good luck to be grumpy and pessimistic," Shiraev said. "In the US when someone asks, 'How are you?', you say 'I'm fine'. In Russia, they expect you to say something nasty about yourself. It comes from a superstition against bragging."

What we can learn from psychopaths

Cory Doctorow — Mon, 07 Jan 2013 13:34:16 +0000

Scientific American excerpts a chapter from Kevin Dutton's book The Wisdom of Psychopaths: What Saints, Spies, and Serial Killers Can Teach Us About Success, describing a visit to a high-security ward at Broadmoor Hospital in England, seeking insight into the positive aspect of a psychopathic mindset:

Leslie's pragmatic endorsement of the principles and practices of what might otherwise be described as mindfulness is typical of the psychopath. A psychopath's rapacious proclivity to live in the moment, to “give tomorrow the slip and take today on a joyride” (as Larry, rather whimsically, puts it), is well documented—and at times can be stupendously beneficial. In fact, anchoring your thoughts unswervingly in the present is a discipline that psychopathy and spiritual enlightenment have in common. Clinical psychologist Mark Williams of the University of Oxford, for example, incorporates this principle of centering in his mindfulness-based cognitive-behavior therapy program for sufferers of anxiety and depression.
“Feeling good is an emergency for me,” Danny had commented as he'd slammed in his fourth goal for Chelsea on the Wii. Living in the moment, for him and many psychopaths, takes on a kind of urgency. “I like to ride the roller coaster of life, spin the roulette wheel of fortune, to terminal possibility.”
A desire to feel good in the here and now, shrugging off the future, can be taken to an extreme, of course. But it's a goal we could all perhaps do with taking onboard just a little bit more in our lives.

Wisdom from Psychopaths? (via Hacker News)

Previously: Which professions have the most psychopaths? The fewest?

Crowds aren't stupid. Crowds aren't smart. Crowds are people.

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Tue, 18 Dec 2012 17:16:10 +0000

We have this idea that physical crowds are stupid herds. Give them half a chance, and they'll form a stampeding riot mob driven by emotion. Look at history, though, and you'll see many examples of large groups of people being perfectly well-behaved. In fact, in disaster situations, like on 9/11, crowds can even organize themselves in practical ways to help others to safety.

Meanwhile, we tend to talk about virtual crowds — the kind that form online, or between physically distant members of a professional community — as smart. But if that's always true, why do these groups get caught up in financial bubbles and why isn't Twitter a more reliable place to pick up breaking news?

Physical crowds and virtual crowds are different things. But our stereotypes about them stem from a common problem. In both cases, we tend to treat "the crowd" as if it's a distinct entity — as if, at some point, individuals in a group stop being themselves and start to become limbs of a crowd creature. In my latest column for The New York Times magazine, I learned that that's not the way people work in real life. As Clark McPhail, emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, told me, "Crowds don't have a central nervous system."

Gustave Le Bon was one of the first people to write about crowds as entities separate from the people in them. His 1895 book, “The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind,” shaped academic discussions of human gatherings for half a century and encouraged 20th-century fascist dictators, including Benito Mussolini, to treat crowds as emotional organisms — something to be manipulated and controlled. (Perhaps a Le Bonian understanding of crowds makes us feel more comfortable about the atrocities of the 20th century.) But “The Crowd” was more a work of philosophy than of science, McPhail told me. Le Bon’s ideas were based on armchair analysis of past events, not on carefully documented studies of crowds in action. In the 1960s, sociologists began to study protests and public gatherings, and they realized that the things they believed about crowd behavior didn’t align with what took place in the real world.

Read the rest of the story

Image: Crowd, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from jamescridland's photostream

You can be a loser at the game of social ostracism

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 22:02:45 +0000

Now you can play Cyberball — a computer game that psychology researchers use to study the effects of social ostracism and hurt feelings. Normally, the game is played by test subjects who are hooked up to some kind of brain scanning system and who are told that they are playing against other test subjects in other rooms. In reality, they (and now you!) are playing against a computer program that is designed to exclude you and make you feel unwelcome. Why would someone design such a thing? For science! Of course. (Via Rowan Hooper)

Creepers gotta creep — for science

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Mon, 03 Dec 2012 15:35:08 +0000

In 1938, researchers at Bryn Mawr College published a paper on Egocentricity in Adult Conversations. In order to accurately record the pattern and content of conversations as they happened in real life, the researchers used several methods that would be considered ... sketchy ... today. Among them: Hiding underneath female college students' dorm beds.

Obedience and fear: What makes people hurt other people?

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 20:06:38 +0000

Stanley Milgram's "Obedience to Authority" experiments are infamous classics of psychology and social behavior. Back in the 1960s, Milgram set up a series of tests that showed seemingly normal people would be totally willing to torture another human being if prodded into it by an authority figure.

The basic set-up is probably familiar to you. Milgram told his test subjects that they were part of a study on learning. They were tasked with asking questions to another person, who was rigged up to an electric shock generator. When the other person got the questions wrong, the subject was supposed to zap them and then turn up the voltage. The catch was that the person getting "zapped" was actually an actor. So was the authority figure, whose job it was to tell the test subject that they must continue the experiment, no matter how much the other person pleaded for them to stop. In Milgram's original study, 65% of the subjects continued to the end of the session, eventually "administering" 450-volt shocks.

But they weren't doing it calmly. If you read Milgram's paper, you find that these people were trembling, and digging nails into their own flesh. Some of them even had seizure-like fits. Which is interesting to know when you sit down to read about Michael Shermer's recent attempt to replicate the Milgram experiments for a Dateline segment. Told they were trying out for a new reality show, the six subjects were set up to "shock" an actor, just like in Milgram's experiments. One walked out before the test even started. The others participated, but had some interesting rationales for why they did it — and a simple ingrained sense of obedience wasn't always what was going on.

Our third subject, Lateefah, became visibly upset at 120 volts and squirmed uncomfortably to 180 volts. When Tyler screamed, “Ah! Ah! Get me out of here! I refuse to go on! Let me out!” Lateefah made this moral plea to Jeremy: “I know I'm not the one feeling the pain, but I hear him screaming and asking to get out, and it's almost like my instinct and gut is like, ‘Stop,’ because you're hurting somebody and you don't even know why you're hurting them outside of the fact that it's for a TV show.” Jeremy icily commanded her to “please continue.” As she moved into the 300-volt range, Lateefah was noticeably shaken, so Hansen stepped in to stop the experiment, asking, “What was it about Jeremy that convinced you that you should keep going here?” Lateefah gave us this glance into the psychology of obedience: “I didn't know what was going to happen to me if I stopped. He just—he had no emotion. I was afraid of him.”

Read the rest in Michael Shermer's column at Scientific American

The crowd psychology of Grand Central Station

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Fri, 19 Oct 2012 03:26:34 +0000

New York's Grand Central Terminal, as it currently stands today, was built between 1903 and 1913. But it is the third Grand Central. Two earlier buildings — one called Grand Central Depot, and the other known as Grand Central Station (which remains the colloquial name for the Terminal) — existed on pretty much the exact same spot. But neither lasted nearly as long. The Depot opened in 1871, and was drastically reconstructed in 1899. The new building, the Station, only stood for three years before it began to come down in sections, eventually replaced by the current building.

That's a lot of structural shuffling, and at the Anthropology in Practice blog, Krystal D'Costa explains some of the history behind it. Turns out, the rapid reconfiguration of Grand Central had a lot to do with crowd control — figuring out how to use architecture to make the unruly masses a little more ruly. One early account that D'Costa quotes describes regular mad scrambles to board the train — intimidating altercations that could leave less-aggressive passengers stranded on the platform as their train left them behind.

The problem it seemed was that the interior of the depot did nothing to manage the Crowd—which could resume the same patterns of movement as they did on the street—and believe me, it was just as unruly out there. In the depot, where passengers were confronted with the unbridled power of locomotives, it was necessary to impose some sort of structure to the meeting: the Crowd had to be domesticated.

... A deadly collision in 1902 preceded public demand for an even safer, more accessible terminal. Warren and Wetmore won the bid for reconstruction, and the plan they produced included galleries, which added yet another transition area but, more importantly, rendered the Crowd into a spectacle. This design, which is the one visitors experience today, preserves the Crowd in a central area, providing raised balconies from which there are plenty of opportunities to people-watch. Being placed on display is not lost on the subconscious of the Crowd: what appears to be hustle and bustle are manifestations of many synchronizations happening at once. So what appears to be chaos to the casual observer is actually a play directed by design that makes the Crowd a key feature of the space even as it is minimized by the architectural elements that Grand Central Terminal is known for: the grand ceiling, the large windows, and the deep main concourse. These items add perspective to the Crowd and diminish its psychological power as an uncontrollable mass.

Read the rest of the story at Anthropology in Practice

Image: Grand Central Terminal, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from maha-online's photostream

Mystical experiences without significance

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 28 Sep 2012 22:23:12 +0000

Ed from Aeon sez, "The Scottish science fiction writer Ken MacLeod, (Intrusion, The Night Sessions) has a short essay in Aeon magazine exploring two strange sensations. Each one sounds like a mystical experience, but 'solves no problem, conveys no insight, and yet leaves me with an impression of significance'. Are they mere glitches in the mechanism by which his brain makes meaning? Are they rare or common? Do they mean anything?

"Aeon is a new online magazine about nature, culture, ideas and experience. One of its themes is finding new ways to grapple with spirituality, whatever it might be."

When I tell people about it they either look blank or say: ‘Oh! You mean you have that too?’ But it isn’t a bond between us, not a secret, just a peculiarity, an anomaly, perhaps as random a feature of our minds as the ability to roll one’s tongue is of our bodies. It solves no problem, conveys no insight, and yet leaves me with an impression of significance. It has an aftertaste, but no taste. That impression, that aftertaste, may be its empty secret: it may be a tiny glitch in the process by which our brains find meaning in sense.

Like someone is there (Thanks, Ed!)

A brain scan on ecstasy

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Wed, 19 Sep 2012 17:03:57 +0000

Under the supervision of a medical team, New Scientist's Graham Lawton took a dose of MDMA and then lay in an fMRI machine. You know. For science.

Lawton was a participant in a double blind, controlled, clinical study — meaning that he didn't actually know whether he was going to be taking ecstasy or Vitamin C when he went in ... and neither did the scientists who gave him the pill. That's because the researchers want to know whether and what differences show up between the functioning of brain under the influence of MDMA and one that's sober. Not knowing which type of brain they're looking at helps them avoid their own biases, or tendencies to "spot" a difference that doesn't actually exist simply because of what they expect a high brain (or a sober one) to be doing. Only after they've made their observations do the scientists find out which brains were which.

The goal is to document was ecstasy does to the brain. Astoundingly, writes Lawton, nobody has ever done that before. And it matters, because some people think that drugs like ecstasy could be useful in helping people deal with psychological stress disorders. Not that the drugs would cure the disorder, per se, but that ecstasy could help people talk about their bad experiences more easily. Right now, there's not a lot of evidence supporting that idea, beyond some anecdotes. Studies like this help scientists figure out whether the anecdotes are pointing at a useful treatment tool, or just relating some personal experiences.

Read the story (and see a gallery of photos) at New Scientist

Via Jennifer Ouellette

When does bad news become funny?

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Tue, 18 Sep 2012 14:47:17 +0000

What makes the difference between successful satire or dark comedy, and jokes that make everybody hate you?

Obviously, some of this has to do with the personality and internal culture of the person or group you're talking to. For instance, some families use humor to deal with tragedy. For others, jokes at a funeral would be offensive. But there do seem to be some across-the-board rules of thumb at play, too.

At the University of Colorado Boulder, where the Humor Research Lab is a real thing (with a hilariously deadpan website and a strong commitment to punny acronyms), a team of scientists under the direction of psychologist/marketing researcher Peter McGraw have been studying human behavior to build a working theory of why we think stuff is funny.

All humor, according to McGraw's hypothesis, is based on moral violations — upending the social order or behavior we expect and think is "right". Humor happens when those violations are simultaneously noticed, but judged to be really not be that big of a deal. So when you're talking about inappropriate humor, the question becomes: How do you get your audience to see the moral violation as benign?

McGraw's team recently published a paper documenting the results of five different tests of inappropriate humor. Here's a clip from the Smithsonian news blog explaining how a couple of them worked:

First, they looked into the effect of psychological distance in terms of time by asking participants to describe events in their lives that either became more or less funny as time passed. Participants rated the event’s severity, and the researchers found that the more severe events became funnier over time compared to the more minor violations.

In a second experiment, participants reported a severe violation, like being hit by a car, as funnier if it happened several years go, while a mild violation, like stubbing a toe, was funnier if it happened very recently.

Basically, bad things become funny things when we find a balance between how bad the bad thing was, how long ago the bad thing happened, and how distant — physically, emotionally, and socially — the audience was from the event. Of course, that's where the subjectivity comes in. If you know your audience well, you're likely to do a better job of figuring out what will hit the sweet spot with them and what won't.

Read about all the experiments at Smithsonian.com

Read a full research paper explaining the McGraw group's basic hypothesis of humor

Via Colin Schultz

Interview with Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker about free speech

Mark Frauenfelder — Mon, 17 Sep 2012 20:56:21 +0000

[Video Link] Ted Balaker produced this video interview with Harvard experimental psychologist Steven Pinker, author of such books as The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature and, most recently, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined.

Pinker tackles everything from the fallacy of the blank slate to the psychology of indecent proposals and why he's catching flack for arguing that violence is decreasing.

In one particularly interesting bit he makes the case for defending the rights of dissenters as a way to help avoid "collective delusions," such as Hilter's Germany, Stalin's Soviet Union or the European witch hunts which tortured to death 150,000 woman who were suspected of causing ships to sink and crops to fail by casting spells.

Here's Pinker:

"You look at them retrospectively and you wonder, 'How could everyone have been so mad?' On top of being evil these ideas seem patently ludicrous. How can you have a collective delusion overtaking an entire society? And it looks like one of the answers is that if dissenters are punished and can anticipate they're going to be punished, then you might have a situation where no one actually believes something, but everyone else believes that everyone else believes it. Therefore no one is willing to be the little boy that says the emperor is naked. And this 'pluralistic ignorance' as it's sometimes called is easily implemented when you have the punishing or censoring of unpopular views."

How to build a better speed limit

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Fri, 07 Sep 2012 17:06:14 +0000

Sometime in November, Texas will open a stretch of toll road south of Austin where the speed limit will be 85 miles per hour.It will be the highest speed limit in America. (Montana used to have no speed limit at all during the day, but that changed in 1999.)

Naturally, one of the big arguments against this is that higher speeds lead to more accidents. And there is some data to back this up. For instance, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety makes a pretty good case for lower speed limits in a Q&A posted on their site:

In 2010, a total of 10,395 deaths, or nearly a third of all motor vehicle fatalities, occurred in speed-related crashes. Based on a nationally representative sample of police-reported crashes, speeding – defined as exceeding the speed limit, driving too fast for conditions or racing – was involved in 16 percent of property-damage-only crashes and 20 percent of crashes with injuries or fatalities. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) estimates that the economic cost of speed-related crashes is more than $40 billion each year.

...The National Research Council attributed 4,000 fewer fatalities to the decreased speeds in 1974 compared with 1973...

A 2009 study examining the long-term effects of the 1995 repeal of the national speed limit found a 3 percent increase in road fatalities attributable to higher speed limits on all road types, with the highest increase of 9 percent on rural interstates. The authors estimated that 12,545 deaths were attributed to increases in speed limits across the U.S. between 1995 and 2005.

There is definitely a relationship between speed and safety. It's there consistently in individual studies and you see it when you start looking at lots of studies all at once, too. But the meta-analyses—research that compares and analyzes the results of many studies—also show that the speed/safety connection is probably more complicated than it first appears. Speed limits matter. But maybe we need more options to pick from than a simple, static "faster" or "slower".

People and the environment both have a big impact on the relationship between speed and safety. There are a couple of meta-analyses available to read for free online. Check them out, and you'll see how psychology and road conditions play a big role.

For instance, a 1998 publication from the Federal Highway Administration found that the type of road matters. If you raise the speed limit on a road where people are already driving slowly, it won't affect safety at all.

In general, changing speed limits on low and moderate speed roads appears to have little or no effect on speed and thus little or no effect on crashes. This suggests that drivers travel at speeds they feel are reasonable and safe for the road and traffic regardless of the posted limit. However, on freeways and other high–speed roads, speed limit increases generally lead to higher speeds and crashes.

Here's another weird fact that turns up in both the 1998 report and a paper published by the Transportation Research Board in 2001: You're actually safest when you're traveling with the speed of the traffic around you. Speed-related accidents tend to happen when people are traveling faster or slower than the other cars on the road.

In fact, the 1998 report says that most speed-related accidents happen because an individual is driving too fast for the conditions of the road—that's the current weather, the width of the specific road, and how fast other people are driving.

The conclusion that both reports come to: We don't necessarily need lower speed limits. What we need are speed limits that adjust to the current conditions and the specific needs of a specific road. A variable speed limit would reflect the reality that a lot of drivers already see and respond to, and it might be more easily accepted by the drivers who ignore one-size-fits-all speed limits today. Plus, the variable speed limit would allow the law to match up with what's actually safe. If traffic is flowing at an average of 60 mph, it doesn't make sense to have 70 mph posted—somebody is going to try to keep up with the speed limit and create an unsafe condition.

It's an interesting idea. So far, there's not a lot of good data available to show whether or not it actually reduces accidents and fatalities. Variable speed limits have been tested out around the world, but they remain rare and, in North America, are mostly relegated to stretches of rural highway in places with a history of extreme weather—for instance, a road in Tennessee that gets a lot of heavy fog.

But the basic story is that we need more data. To know whether or not variable speed limits actually make sense, we need them to be implemented in more places with more traffic.

READ MORE
• Synthesis of Studies on Speed and Safety - 2001 meta-analysis
• Synthesis of Safety Research Related to Speed and Speed Management - 1998 meta-analysis
• Driving Speed and the Risk of Road Crashes, A Review - 2006 meta-analysis that is behind a paywall
• Wikipedia on variable speed limits
• US Federal Highway Administration research on variable speed limits in construction zones

Image: Driving Cars in a Traffic Jam, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from epsos's photostream
Image: Speed Limit 35, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from 71966930@N00's photostream

The shape of your beer mug might help explain why you get drunk so fast

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Fri, 31 Aug 2012 14:44:49 +0000

In a recent study at the University of Bristol, young people drank beer faster when it was served to them in a curved, fluted glass. It's a small study, but the researchers think it could be a first clue toward understanding why we sometimes get more drunk than we meant to do. Researchers found it was difficult for people to judge volume of liquid in a curved glass, which might mean it's also harder to pace drinking. (Via Noah Gray)

Why are some doctors so emotionally distant? Maybe it's the economy.

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Wed, 29 Aug 2012 16:54:22 +0000

I've got a good doctor, and one of the reasons I like him as much as I do is his "bedside manner"—the shorthand we all use for describing whether or not medical professionals are able to connect with their patients emotionally. But pulling off a good bedside manner isn't just about being kind and empathetic, it's also about time. Part of why I think he had good bedside manner is that he spends time talking to me when I go in for an appointment. He answers questions. He asks about my life. He takes the time to empathize, even if, sometimes, that means that a problem that could have been dealt with in 5 minutes became a 20 minute appointment.

It's hard to make people feel valued and cared about if you've only got a couple of minutes to see them before you have to move on to the next person. Unfortunately, packing as many patients into a day as possible is more efficient in a business sense. A 2005 study of 11 doctors found that they spent an average of 13.3 minutes on each patient—if you combined both face-to-face time and time spent working directly on the patient's case outside the exam room. The next year, anesthesiologist Peter Salgo wrote an op-ed in the New York Times about the pressure put on doctors by hospital administration to see as many patients as possible and move them on through with conveyer-like efficiency.

Now there's a new study that suggests the pressure to behave in a business-friendly way makes doctors more likely to have a brusque bedside manner.

What is behind the chronic compassion deficits of some doctors, managers, police officers, school counselors, and other "bad news bears?" Why do they express so little appropriate emotion and invoke such costly wrath? Andrew Molinsky, a professor of organizational behavior at Brandeis University, set out with researchers at Wharton and Harvard business schools to answer such questions. They found a wealth of scholarly research indicating that, in general, people feel and behave less generously when reminded of the pressures of the business world.

the researchers suggest that exposure to business world terms activates a profit-and-loss morality that unconsciously deadens a person’s emotional responsiveness and diminishes that person’s ability to conduct sensitive conversations.

You can read the rest of Rebecca Coffey's write-up on this study at Psychology Today.

The study itself is behind a paywall, but you can see the summary online: "The Bedside Manner of Homo Economicus"

Image: Electronic Stethescope, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from taedc's photostream

The neurobiology and psychology that connect summer vacation with your morning run

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Thu, 23 Aug 2012 16:58:22 +0000

Time is relative. Remember how each day in grade school (especially summer days) seemed to last for an eternity? Ever notice how it seems to take forever to travel a new route on your bike, while the return trip along the same path is done in the blink of an eye?

Turns out, both of those things are connected and they have important implications for the nature of memory. There's a great summary of the science on this up at The Irish Times. It's written by William Reville, emeritus professor of biochemistry at University College Cork.

The key issue, according to Reville, is that the amount of information your brain can store during a given time period isn't really dependent on the length of that time period. You could store up a lot of new information during 10 minutes of a really interesting lecture. You might store only a little new information during 10 minutes of walking your dog along a path you know very well.

The higher the intensity, the longer the duration seems to be. In a classic experiment, participants were asked to memorise either a simple [a circle] or complex figure . Although the clock-time allocated to each task was identical, participants later estimated the duration of memorising the complex shape to be significantly longer than for the simple shape.

... [H]ere is a “guaranteed” way to lengthen your life. Childhood holidays seem to last forever, but as you grow older time seems to accelerate. “Time” is related to how much information you are taking in – information stretches time. A child’s day from 9am to 3.30pm is like a 20-hour day for an adult. Children experience many new things every day and time passes slowly, but as people get older they have fewer new experiences and time is less stretched by information. So, you can “lengthen” your life by minimising routine and making sure your life is full of new active experiences – travel to new places, take on new interests, and spend more time living in the present.

I think this also has some implications for my exercise routine. I am well aware that my ability to run any distance at all is heavily dependent on psychological factors. I am not one of those people who likes to go running in new places, along unfamiliar trails, because it has always made me feel like the distance was much, much longer — and, consequently, leads me to stop running and start walking sooner than I actually have to. I've had a lot more luck running on tracks and elliptical machines—situations where it seems to be easier for me to get into a zone and lose track of time. When I run that way, it's my physical limitations that matter, not my psychological ones.

Of course, I know a lot of people who feel exactly the opposite. Maybe, for those people, running in a routine situation, like a track, makes them start to think more about their day or what's going on around them, and processing all that information makes the workout seem longer. I'm not sure. But this is awfully interesting.

Read the rest of William Reville's piece at The Irish Times

Via Graham Farmelo

Image: RUN Hills Pullover in action!, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from lululemonathletica's photostream