recent research

More from Kevin Lewis' blog:

• A chaotic environment makes us stereotype more.
• An economist builds a model to understand how creativity connects to geography.
• Justice depends on the time of day: judges make more favorable rulings right after their breaks.
• More brain scans comparing liberals and conservatives.
• Two studies explore why we find evil action so much worse than evil inaction.
• What we see depends on how we feel.
• Our personalities influence our politics - but only via the moral values we hold.
• Conservatives are more apt to hold negative stereotypes. (An older study also confirms that conservatives tend to accentuate to the negative - as does a recent study.)
• When we imagine cause and effect: we get "pseudoscience, superstition and quackery."
• When policies move from democracy to democracy.
• If you're a professional athlete (or in the navy), it pays to be good-looking.
• It's not just humans who wear their personalities on their faces.
• Ever notice when someone's pupils get larger? Probably not, but your amygdala knows.
  
• We're natural born cheaters, at least when our defenses are down.
• The benefits of being interested.
• How consistent is your identity? Depends on how powerful you are.
• Belonging to many groups is good for your health.
• Political participation is for the happy - in Germany too.
• The president's approval ratings are up. Or is it just a sunny day?
• Philosophically we're in tune with our "true" rather than "actual" self.
• Monkey see, monkey buy.
• Getting verbal and nonverbal persuasion to fit.
• The Commitment principle in action.
• Evidence that we sift out information that supports our previous views - this time when it comes to home child care or daycare.
• What's good for the gossip is good for the group.
• Why politicians get away with dodging the question.

recent research

The Kevin Lewis catch-up continues:

• A sense of choice makes us feel good about ourselves - but less empathetic toward others.
• Americans are getting more self-absorbed, as evidenced by pop music.
• Inequality makes us distrust each other - and recession makes us all distrust the government.
• Studying science doesn't make us believe any less in god.
• The best predictor of average IQ among US states? Infectious disease.
• More evidence that we're altruists not just to our kin - but to our closest social ties.
• Team mentality may not be good for politics, but it could help our personal well-being.
• Another reason (not) to have low self-esteem - nobody wants to hang out with you.
• Distrust of "others" goes far back in humans - all the way to Macaques.
• We haven't entered the pure echo chamber yet: events are still the main drivers of news (more so than advocacy groups and the government).
• College makes us better citizens, but less so for rich kids.
• Explaining a paradox: why collectivist societies are more apt to bribe.
• We vote for the good looking guy - especially if we watch TV and aren't politically active.
• The effect of political ads are short-lived.
• Leaders have to be just like everyone else - and have that vision thing.
• Evidence that politicians are more partisan than their constituents.
• Yup, we tend to watch and believe media we agree with - but we're are also persuaded by other viewpoints.
• Beware the worm! Simulcasting political debates and real-time public reaction distorts our political choices.
• Do you pick your party based on issues - or do you pick your issues based on party? Not clear.
• We don't like money in politics - but we're unwilling to pay for campaigns ourselves.
• We may actually learn something from political ads.
• Likely losers and online news users are less prone to confirmation bias.
• Reporters follow their leaders.
• Politicians taking credit for whatever they can.
• Europeans don't pay attention to pesky policy positions either.

And what I ran into along the way:

• Changing our perception of "distance" (in time, place or social connection) changes how polite we are.

recent research

More tip-offs from Kevin Lewis:

• Following the crowd pays off among traders.
• Preaching to kids about healthy eating won't get them to eat less junk, but showing them "aversive images" may do the trick.
• We're happier with our online relationships than with our real ones.
• Conservatives are liberals by nature. Put another way, it turns out conservatives are more intellectual than liberals.
• We like our choices to be simpler - except when we want them to be more complex. It all depends on our expectations.
• Don't believe in free will? It's not just an academic question.
• Laughter makes us morally non-judgmental.
• It's better to judge on output rather than process, at least when it comes to complex tasks.
• Confirmation bias may be a good bias to have.
• Anger and disgust may help us be more rational.
• We're more susceptible to framing effects at night.
• Where do our values come from? The amygdala.

self-propagating memes

James Gleick offers a brief history of "memetics," the science of how ideas spread, at Smithsonian.com.

Sadly the meme of memetics has been on the wane in recent years, largely because - compared to its cousin genetics - its code was infinitely messier and more difficult to parse. Genetics has an alphabet of four letters with all words (or codons) restricted to three letters. Even if you only looked at memes in the English language, you're talking 26 letters and almost half a million words.

Memetics, then, may have been stunted by the limits of data crunching power.

That could very well change in the near future as super-computing makes processing terabytes of data easier every day. In fact, network theorists may have already emerged as the next generation of memeticians. Studies that track ideas spreading via Twitter, blogposts and FB keep cropping up. (Here's a recent example that used fancy statistical analysis on 580 million tweets.) It may not be long before we understand how ideas spread as well as we do viruses and genetic mutations.

our unscientific minds

This week in MotherJones, Chris Mooney does a bang-up job of summarizing many of the cognitive biases and tricks of the mind that keep us from having truly open minds - particularly when it comes to politics.

It's a worthwhile tour through "motivate reasoning," "confirmation bias," "rationalization," "reactance," and the power of social influence. Chris also gets my hearty thanks for pointing out that conservatives and liberals are both subject to bias; for better or worse, no ideological group has cornered the market on reason.

is the internet making us more ignorant?

Nicholas Carr is famous for trying to convince us that spending too much time online is making us dumber. I'm not won over by his arguments, but I have different concern: web surfing may make us more ignorant.

Okay, I'm probably not going to make any converts on this one. On the surface this seems like an absurd proposition. The internet has no doubt opened the floodgates of knowledge to anyone with a dial-up connection. Just being able to access Wikipedia makes the average high schooler as potentially erudite as a professor two decades ago.

But a study from the early 90s suggests that the combination of access to information and distractibility could make us more misinformed. That is if you accept there is misinformation on the web. (Ah, you do?) Daniel Gilbert, the Harvard prof known for his writings on happiness, was interested in edifying a centuries old philosophical debate about belief and doubt, with Descartes and Spinoza as its main spokespeople.

As Gilbert synopsizes: "Can people comprehend assertions without believing them? Descartes suggested that people can and should, whereas Spinoza suggested that people should but cannot." The idea is that before doubting - or disproving - information, you first have to believe it.

Gilbert was able to show that Spinoza was on to something by setting up a few tests that simultaneously gave people false information while distracting them with another task (clicking on a clicker when they saw a number 5). The subjects didn't have to do anything clever to figure out if the information was false - they were told any sentences they saw shaded red were untrue. Yet, when tested later they acted as if the red-shaded information was accurate. A control group of subjects, who were not distracted by the clicking task, however, were not affected by the misleading information.

So disbelieving first requires believing. That's a bit of a troubling concept in itself, but when you add in our ADD, hyper-distractible information consuming culture, one wonders how much information we're "believing" simply because we see it - and don't have time to process that it's false?

George Lakoff was probably aware of this phenomenon when he wrote "Don't Think of an Elephant." The moment we read a sentence online that "Claims that President Obama was not born in the US and so isn't legally our president are false, the idea that Obama was not born in the US is partially implanted in our brain. If the next moment we notice someone responded to our latest Facebook post or a re-surfaced viral video of Trump kissing Giuliani in drag catches our eye, our brain may not have the time to also register "Oh, and that birther idea about Obama is also false."

emotional reading disability

Social psychologists have long known that one way we "read" each others' emotions is by mimicking facial expressions. If your friend is angry at her boyfriend, as she tells you of his many transgressions, your brow will - subtly or outrightly - furrow and your jaw will clench as if mirroring your friend's ticked off mien. The muscle movements in your face will, in turn, signal to your brain that you are pissed off, putting you and your friend on the same emotional wavelength.

That is the essence of empathy.

So what happens if your muscles have a hard time moving?

Researchers recently looked at women with botox, the anti-wrinkle therapy that paralyzes your facial muscles, to see if they had a harder time sensing what others were feeling. Showing a group of botoxed women photos of people in varying emotional states, the wrinkle-free ladies were less able to detect the emotions in the photos than were a comparable group of un-botoxed women.

How much botox depletes our empathy is unclear. Presumably it hasn't affected Nicole Kidman's ability to act too measurably. But the study is a good reminder that the mind and body are closely intertwined - and if we're going to mess with one, we have to be aware of the consequences of the other.

recenter research

Still catching up with Kevin Lewis:

• Not that we can make it mean anything, but data crunchers show patterns of information flow on the internet.
• Presidents win out during divided government.
• Network theorists explain why Al Qaeda survives.
• More evidence that people don't change their minds when exposed to new, relevant information.
• Thinking of your childhood makes you a nicer person. So does thinking of your past immoral behavior. So does feeling like you're being watched.
• We like people with high status, but not people with power.
• You can't rush morality.
• We're all passive aggressive.
• Priming empathy: looking at details, helping to save a mouse and thinking about powerlessness will make you more empathetic.
• Moral indignation fades - in 10 minutes or less.
• Tipping off diners increases tips.
• Cleanliness is Conservativeness.
• What separates organ donors from non-donors: Ick.
• Keeping your options open is a double-edged sword.
• Why we overpay to avoid scary risks.
• Another example of our ever-inventive ways to justify bad behavior.
• We're bad at predicting our moral behavior - and not in the way this cynic thought.
• We regret what we didn't do more than what we did.

From the annals of "Someone paid for this study?"

• Abstract Expressionists are better painters than children and animals.
• Your right profile is more serious-looking than your left.

more recent research

Catching up with Kevin Lewis' excellent blog:

• When it comes to global warming, we think locally.
• Self-deception bites in the long run.
• Even NFL draft-pickers are irrational.
• When a project's close to completion, we lie about how well it's going.
• When stressed, we flock to the familiar.
• We usually over-predict our emotions in response to potential happy or sad events, but in the 2008 elections Obama supporters under-predicted their happiness.
• Free will? Nope, just randomness.
• Neurological evidence that rather than our preferences dictating our choices, our choices dictate our preferences.
• One reason more is not better: if we don't feel we had enough time to weigh our options we assume we made a poor choice.
• More brain scans showing that we like things more once we've chosen them - partly because we associate our choices with our self-identity.
• It's difficult disliking the majority: prejudice - at least against atheists - is reduced when atheists are perceived to be prevalent.
• Anger makes us masochists.
• Adolescents think their peers partake - or abstain - from drugs just like them.
• We're more racist when our ego's insecure.
• We're more civic minded when in a diverse setting.

When academics become so enthralled with their research that they lose common sense:

• We can reduce homophobia and other prejudices by increasing people's belief in the afterlife.

Can social media save the planet?

That's the question my friend Neil asked on Facebook this morning. I, of course, had an answer, which I reproduce here:

"I half agree with Jonathan (who argued that Social Media is just a tool and that humans have to use it in order "avert global catastrophe"). I wouldn't downplay the significance of "tools." Humans don't really change - we're still the same mix of selfish and selfless genes we had centuries ago. But technology/tools do change and, in doing so, change us; first by making us richer and so less focused on bare survival and more concerned with the greater good (seee Maslow/Inglehart); second, by allowing us coordinate to work together toward that greater good (see Jonathan above).

"But what I think Jonathan leaves out is the danger of connectivity. Nine times out of ten, when humans work together they usually do so in positive or neutral ways (thus the "progress" of humankind - see Wright's NonZero). But every once in a while when we band together on a large scale we can create some pretty horrific messes, either through shortsightedness (financial crisis) or outright evil (pick your genocide). The frightening thing about Social Media is that it allows for mob hysteria on a global scale. When a nation loses its collective mind, only a sliver of humanity is affected. Today social media has the potential of leaping national firewalls and, although the chances are slim and far off, of wreaking global havoc. In short: social media will likely save the planet, unless it destroys it first."

safety fun

Apropos of today's earlier post. This time a use of "Fun Theory" to teach travelers safety tips (or maybe take advantage of viral marketing?).

making democracy fun?

I was talking yesterday to my dear friend Orna, a gorgeous and mischievous Israeli police officer, about my interest in democracy and human behavior when she tipped me off to a new theory on how to solve the world's problems: the Fun Theory.

A quick google search this morning showed the theory is primarily a campaign of Volkswagen. You may be familiar with their viral video of Stockholm residents bouncing up a subway staircase that's been converted into a piano keyboard. As their website explains, the Fun Theory is "the thought that something as simple as fun is the easiest way to change people’s behaviour for the better."

I've long been curious about the power of fun. I first got thinking about how you can motivate people to do what you want (learn, participate, work, etc) by turning an activity into a game when I heard about how Google tags photos for its image search. You can imagine the feat of labeling the billions of images on the web. Google does so through free labor. The Google Image Labeler is a game (that you can play too) in which teams of players win points when they type in the same word to identify a picture. The brainchild of Luis von Ahn, who has pioneered other "Games with a Purpose," the Labeler is pretty ingenious. It's an addictive game which taps our competitive spirit and simultaneously creates more relevant tags for Google search (two people agreeing on a tag increases that tag's accuracy).

How many other tasks could we collectively tackle using the Fun Theory? And, more to my interest, how could we use the principle of fun to improve our democracy?

A first step may be to better define what "fun" is. I'm certain there's been real research in this area, but let me toss out an initial guess. Fun can tap into any of three drives we all share: a natural curiosity and desire to figure things out; competitiveness; and self-expression. The last two are similar in that they rely on our social instinct to look good/smart/talented in front of others, but the first is a purely private desire and explains the hours we whittle away on Solitaire and Tetrus.

Once we get a better handle on fun the next question is how we could use it to strengthen our democracy. Could we get citizens more informed about candidates' policy preferences, motivate them to vote, encourage them to hold politicians to account and spur them to get more involved in community efforts? Those are questions that'll take a lot of work answering - but are certainly worth the effort. My sincerest gratitude to Orna for asking them in the first place.