You can be a loser at the game of social ostracism —

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) — Maggie •

Creepers gotta creep — for science —

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. — Maggie •

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!)

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

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?

Read the rest

[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."

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".

Read the rest

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

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) — Maggie •

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.

Read the rest

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

Compliance is a psychological thriller based on a true event in which a sociopath pretending to be a cop called a fast food joint and convinced the manager to do horrific things to a young employee. It sounds like the Milgram Experiment in the real world.

From the New York Times:

“Compliance” came into focus when [director Craig Zobel] learned about the 2004 case of a man who called a McDonald’s in Mount Washington, Ky., and persuaded the female manager to interrogate and strip-search a female employee. Mr. Zobel was amazed to discover that this story was part of a wider pattern; the culprit was a serial prankster, and similar incidents had been reported at other chain restaurants.

From the movie's YouTube trailer description:

[Video Link]When a police officer tells you to do something, you do it. Right?

Inspired by true events, COMPLIANCE tells the chilling story of just how far one might go to obey a figure of authority. On a particularly busy day at a suburban Ohio fast food joint, high-strung manager Sandra (Ann Dowd (Garden State) receives a phone call from a police officer saying that an employee, a pretty young blonde named Becky (newcomer Dreama Walker) has stolen money from a customer. Convinced she's only doing what's right, Sandra commences the investigation, following step-by-step instructions from the officer at the other end of the line, no matter how invasive they become. As we watch, we ask ourselves two questions: "Why don't they just say no?" and the more troubling, "Am I certain I wouldn't do the same?"

The second feature from director Craig Zobel (the man behind the 2007 Sundance hit Great World of Sound), COMPLIANCE recounts this riveting nightmare in which the line between legality and reason is hauntingly blurred. The cast delivers startlingly authentic performances that make the appalling events unfolding onscreen all the more difficult to watch -- but impossible to turn away from. Delving into the complex psychology of this real-life story, COMPLIANCE proves that sometimes truth really is stranger than fiction.

NYT: Oh, I Wouldn’t Do That, Would I? ‘Compliance’ Raises Questions About Human Behavior