recent research

The latest gems from Kevin Lewis' blog:

• It's harder for us to give biased advice when face to face with the advisee.
• A problem for international NGOs: our empathy is only triggered for people who are "like us."
• Don't be embarrassed about being embarrassed: people will like you more for it.
• How we read other people's minds depends on whether we think they're like ourselves or "others."
• And bilinguals may be better at intuiting others' beliefs than monolinguals.
• More evidence of the subconsciousness of bigotry: we avoid groups after receiving subliminal cues that they are a threat.
• Oxytocin: the love drug, but only if you're already "one of us."
• Our brains map out conflict in four typical ways.
• If we don't put our critical hat on immediately, we end up believing a lot of silly things.
• Politeness may be nice, but it also confuses.
• Why we think others will be happy to pay more than they actually do.
• Framing effects (that is, changing our perceptions and preferences by rewording information) are not temporary.
• Threats loom larger and closer in our minds - but can be diminished by increasing self-esteem.
• Why is right "right" and left "sinister"? It depends on whether you're left or right handed.
• Biased investigators don't get more true confessions - but they do get more false confessions.
• The biasing effect of hypothetical questions - and how it can be moderated.
• What editors have always known: editors may highlight public-affair news, but readers prefer the non-public affairs fare.
• All those cross-national studies about trust and "social capital" may be skewed by what the term "most people" means in different nations.
• Competitive elections and non-competitive elections are different animals - if we can learn anything from voter turn out and rain.
• The determining factor of whether or not we go to the polls may not be self-interest or even time on polling day - but how much political information we are able to consume.
• One other thing that nudges us to the polls: thanks for voting in the last one. As does providing election materials in ones native language.
• More evidence that voting is a socially motivated behavior.
• Making people vote sure enough gets more people to the polls - but otherwise doesn't change much.
• Pain makes us less communitarian and more capitalist.

Love in the filter bubble?

Personalization algorithms already tell us what movies to watch, news stories to read and tunes to listen to. It was only a matter of time, then, that they’d tell us who to love.

Matching algorithms aren’t new to online dating services. EHarmony, Chemistry and OKCupid have long served up compatible mates based on dozens, if not hundreds, of questions singles answer on their sites.

But a new dating app, StreetSpark, is venturing out internet-wide to pick up clues on who you’re likely to become enamored with. Love seekers on the site can plug into their Facebook, Foursquare and Twitter accounts to discover potential lovers with similar tweets, profiles and cafe haunts. (That, at least, is the concept. So far this single has yet to be sent a match.)

It’s like “traditional” online personalization but in reverse. Instead of telling you what you’ll like based upon your friends’ preferences, it tells you who you’ll want to be friends with based on what you like.

StreetSpark touts their service as giving “serendipity a helping hand.” Normally we have to wait for luck to bring us face to face with that special someone; StreetSpark provides us with a helpful homing device right in our smartphone.

It’s an odd usage of “serendipity,” though, which describes the phenomenon of making desirable discoveries by accident. If you instruct your iPhone to tell you when there’s a sympatico mate in your hood, bumping into them can’t really be described as “an accident.” Of course, the makers of StreetSpark are aware of that contradiction and are tongue and cheek in using the term.

But it’s more than a semantic quibble. Part of appreciating the beauty of “making discoveries by accident” is to understand that sometimes we don’t know what we’re looking for. If you’re a romantic, that can especially be true in the case of love. It’s not as if we have the profile of “the perfect guy” in our head and falling in love is just a matter of luck when you’ll run into that profile. The “accident” of love is when we meet someone who doesn’t fit our pre-conceived ideal and yet, mysteriously, we fall head over heals. In the process, if we’re truly lucky, we’re opened up to a new, exciting and unknown world.

re-posted from TheFilterBubble