Letters Remain

  • The Psychology of Terrorism

    Alienation, a belief that membership of a movement offers social and psychological rewards (e.g. adventure, camaraderie, a heightened sense of identity) and the need to take action rather than just talk: three psychological traits that together create part of the profile of those most “open to terrorist recruitment and radicalization”.

    In addition to profiles like that above and different theories about what can lead to radicalisation, this overview of the psychological research into terrorism also discusses terror management theory:

    Paradoxically, an unconscious fear of death may underlie much of the motivation behind terrorism and reactions to terrorism, maintains psychologist Tom Pyszczynski [et al.]. Pyszczynski developed “terror management theory,” which holds that people use culture and religion to protect themselves from a fear of death that lies on the fringes of awareness.

    Across dozens of studies, the team has induced thoughts of death by subliminally presenting people with death-related stimuli or by inserting a delay-and-distraction task between a reminder of death and people’s assessment of its effects. This subliminal prompting induces people to psychologically defend themselves against death in ways that bear little surface relationship to the problem of death, Pyszczynski’s team has found. These include clinging to their cultural identities, working hard to live up to their culture’s values and going to great lengths to defend those values. (Conversely, the investigators have shown that getting people to consciously contemplate their mortality increases their intention to engage in life-enhancing behaviors, such as exercise.)

    via Mind Hacks

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Healthy Food Boosts School Results

    In 2004 UK TV chef Jamie Oliver ran an experiment at a school in Greenwich, London for an upcoming show of his, Jamie’s School Dinners. By various means Oliver attempted to improve the eating habits of the school’s students and, by-and-large, succeeded. Tracking his progress–and that of the children–were two Oxford economists, Michele Belot and Jonathan James.

    The two noted how Oliver’s campaign had inadvertently created “a near-perfect experiment” and so began following the academic achievements of the children with much superior eating habits than their peers and the school as a whole.

    Five years later the experiment started to show results: specifically, that the eating habits of school children has a profound positive effect on their education.

    Their answer – a provisional one, since they are still refining the research – is that feeding primary school kids less fat, sugar and salt, and more fruit and vegetables, has a surprisingly large effect. Authorised absences, the best available proxy for illness, fell by 15 per cent in Greenwich, relative to schools in similar London boroughs. And relative to other boroughs, the proportion of children reaching Level Four* in English rose by four and a half percentage points (more than six per cent), while the proportion of children achieving Level Five* in Science rose by six points, or almost 20 per cent.

    * I freely admit my ignorance: I’ve no idea what these levels refer to. (And I’m not a fan of Jamie Oliver, if you were wondering.)

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Female Orgasm as Mate Screening

    Whereas Robinson suggests the evolutionary underpinnings of orgasm lie in the ‘Yes!’ factor of gene continuation, in How Women Got Their Curves and Other Just-So Stories: Evolutionary Enigmas David Barash and Judith Lipton believe it could be, at least for the potentially multi-orgasmic female, an “anti-infanticide insurance policy” that spurred women to mate successively with multiple males, or, more likely in the authors’ opinions, an evolutionary mechanism for monogamy (link to chapter five from the aforementioned book, titled The Enigmatic Orgasm).

    As Robin Hanson explains quite succinctly, female orgasm could be evolution’s way of allowing females to screen prospective mates—a method of enabling females to discover the most compatible and suitable males.

    First suggested by David P. Barash nearly three decades ago, the idea is that orgasm might be a way a woman’s body speaks to her brain, “telling herself” that she has been having sex with a suitable partner—that is, one who is not worried about being displaced by a competitor, who is self-confident and unhurried enough to be satisfying to her. […]

    Research on a large captive group of Japanese macaque monkeys is also suggestive. […] During 238 hours of observations in which 240 copulations were observed, female orgasmic responses occurred in 80 (33 percent). Of these orgasms, the highest frequency took place when high-ranking males were copulating with low-ranking females, and the lowest between low-ranking males and high-ranking females. […] Maybe, [female orgasm] is designed to be more than a little hard to get, adaptive precisely because it can’t be too readily summoned, so that when it arrives, it means something. […]

    What about faking orgasm? […] Orgasmic pretense might increase the man’s confidence regarding paternity of any offspring, building on his likely assumption that a sexually satisfied woman wouldn’t have sought to mate with someone else. […] [This] would diminish the likelihood that the man will engage in “mate guarding,” thereby facilitating a woman’s ability to engage in extrapair copulations. […]

    Rates of extrapair paternity are about 2 percent in many human populations and about 10 percent in traditional societies. … One study has found that women are significantly more orgasmic when paired with men who are more symmetric. […] [and] are more likely to experience ostensibly “high sperm retention orgasms” – that is, climaxes that occurred in close temporal proximity to the man’s.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Sex Without Orgasm Could Lead to Healthier Relationships

    One solution to the “widespread disharmony in intimate relationships” is to “change the way you make love”, promotes Marnia Robinson, suggesting that through ‘conventional sex’ we keep our dopamine and prolactin levels “uncomfortably high or uncomfortably low”. Instead, to ensure a stable relationship (through a more stable neurochemistry), we should practice ‘conventional orgasm’-free sex with our partners.

    The point is that conventional sex can play havoc with your neurochemistry. Your dopamine levels will be uncomfortably high or uncomfortably low.

    This is why the ancient Taoists and other sages throughout history have recommended making love without conventional orgasm. By avoiding the extreme highs that over-stimulate the nerve cells in the primitive brain, you also avoid the temporary lows that accompany recovery. You keep your dopamine levels within ideal ranges. This produces a sense of wellbeing, which promotes harmony in your relationship.

    Concluding with:

    Both low dopamine and high prolactin make your world look bleak—and increase your craving for better sex or new partners who would raise your dopamine levels (and set you on another addictive cycle of highs and lows). Together these neurochemicals probably account for the “end of the honeymoon,” which nearly all couples experience within a year of marriage. To heal the underlying problem, you may just have to change the way you make love.

    Robinson has written a more accessible version of this essay for The Huffington Post, saying

    As I learn more about the effects of sex on the brain, I realize it makes sense to take into account how recently, or intensely, we have climaxed. It appears that frequent, or especially intense, orgasm can create tolerance (a need for increasing stimulation to achieve future orgasms). It can also lead to satiety and habituation, which may show up as subconscious irritation, out of sync libidos, performance demands and insecurities. And it may promote the use of risky sexual enhancement measures as lovers try to overcome their built-in biological brakes with force. […] Perhaps we are pressuring ourselves to reach unrealistic benchmarks.

    Addendum: Being one who is particularly fond of charts and lists, I rather liked the author’s Feelings & Behaviours Associated with Various Dopamine/Prolactin Levels chart.
    Robinson’s essay, within the opening few paragraphs, mentions one of my all-time favourite and most discussed experiments conducted on rats.
    I wouldn’t mind getting Dr. Petra Boynton‘s opinion on all of this.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • How Congestion Pricing and Traffic Jams Help the Environment

    When us laymen think of ways to solve traffic congestion we typically think of two ways: congestion pricing to force those who are most price sensitive off the roads and on to public transport (which should be improved using the funds gained through said pricing), and adding capacity to the roads. But do these solutions really help: do congestion charges and additional capacity really affect overall driving habits and are they beneficial for the environment (do they increase public transport use)?

    Traffic jams can actually be environmentally beneficial if they turn subways, buses, car pools, bicycles and walking into more-attractive options. […] The traditional solution to traffic congestion is to create additional road capacity. But projects like those almost always end up making the original problem worse because they generate what transportation planners call “induced traffic”: every mile of new, open roadway encourages existing users to make more car trips, lures drivers away from other routes and tempts transit riders to return to their automobiles, with the eventual result that the new roads become at least as clogged as the old roads. […]

    In 1999, the Australian researchers Peter Newman and Jeff Kenworthy concluded that “there is no guarantee that congestion pricing will simultaneously improve congestion and sustainability,” and mentioned several ways in which congestion pricing can defy the expectations of its supporters, among them by causing motorists to “drive exactly as they always have if the congestion charge is covered by their firms (e.g., a majority of London’s peak-hour commuters have company cars and perks).”

    Some have interpreted David Owen’s column to be anti-congestion charging: I don’t believe he suggests this, primarily because of his final paragraph, describing what he believes is the most effective congestion management program:

    A truly effective traffic program for any dense city would impose high fees for all automobile access and public parking while also gradually eliminating automobile lanes (thereby reducing total car traffic volume without eliminating the environmentally beneficial burden of driver frustration and inefficiency) and increasing the capacity and efficiency of public transit.

    It isn’t the solution; it’s part of the solution.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Poor Cyclists Key to Safe Roads

    Are poor cyclists and a laissez-faire attitude to enforcing road laws on them the key to safer roads? Are those that cycle on the wrong side of the road, pedal on the pavement and rush along one-way streets the wrong way one of the main reasons why the Netherlands has some of the safest roads in the world?

    After writer Caleb Crain converted from wayward biker to obedient cyclist (using two simple rules: Bike in such a way that even relatively inattentive drivers can be expected to see you and know what you’re going to do next, and Don’t be annoying to pedestrians) he read the following that made him question his new-found indignation toward bike salmon:

    I was therefore interested, and a little chastened, to read in Jeff Mapes’s Pedaling Revolution: How Cyclists Are Changing American Cities, that moral indignation about the adherence of bicyclists to traffic laws is absent from the Netherlands, the utopia of cycling, which has, Mapes reports, “the lowest per-capita vehicle death rate in Europe,” about a third that of the United States. Except for the requirement that bicycles on the road at night have lights, Dutch police do not enforce traffic laws on cyclists. Explains Mapes:

    The Dutch don’t see much sense in going after cyclists and walkers when the only people they are putting at risk are themselves. “It’s their choice,” shrugged [Amsterdam top traffic-safety official Jack] Wolters. … The statistics seem to bear him out. … One influential 2003 study, by researchers John Pucher and Lewis Dijkstra, found American cyclists were at least three times as likely to get killed as Dutch cyclists, while American pedestrians faced at least six times the danger of dying.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • On Meetings

    Contemplating how to lead without meetings , The Washington Post asks three equally qualified people for their views on them. Daisy Wademan Dowling, executive director of leadership development at an unnamed Fortune 500 company, responded with the following:

    The real reason leaders end up in too many meetings? Because it’s flattering: having your presence “required” at many meetings makes you feel important — it’s tangible proof of how much your people and your organization need you. But being in too many meetings every day wreaks havoc on your schedule and your ability to focus on bigger goals. I’ve seen too many corporate leaders sacrifice their own strategic vision — and ultimately, their own performance — because they’ve let themselves become hostage to Conference Room B.

    That comes via Robin Hanson of Overcoming Bias, adding,

    Much of business process functions to signal who is important and who is allied with whom, rather than to actually get stuff done. Huge efficiency gains await the organizations that can figure out how to expunge these parasites.

    Behavioural scientist Reid Hastie recently reflected about meetings and why they often are unproductive (via Kottke): it seems that one reason is our misperception of time.

    As a general rule, meetings make individuals perform below their capacity and skill levels.

    This doesn’t mean we should always avoid face-to-face meetings — but it is certain that every organization has too many meetings, and far too many poorly designed ones.

    The main reason we don’t make meetings more productive is that we don’t value our time properly. The people who call meetings and those who attend them are not thinking about time as their most valuable resource.

    Hastie offers three tips on conducting effective meetings:

    • The uninspired, Whoever calls a meeting should be explicit about its objectives.
    • The excellent, Everyone should think carefully about the opportunity costs of a meeting.
    • And the surprising, After productive or unproductive meetings, assign credit or blame to the person in charge.

    Here are some further tips on how to prepare for a meeting with venture capitalist Brad Feld. I believe these tips can be generalised and broadly applied:

    • Search the web for me.
    • Figure out the one thing you want to communicate with me.
    • Don’t make our meeting an endless stream of Planet Feld references.
    • Have one thing in your head that you think I can learn from you.
    • Don’t ask me to sign an NDA.
    • Pay attention to time.
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    Lloyd Morgan

  • The Inefficacy of Learning Styles

    Learning styles, you’ve heard of them before: visual, kinaesthetic or auditory learners; left and right brainers; activists, reflectors and analysts.

    However learning styles are “theoretically incoherent and conceptually confused” concluded a 2004 study from the UK’s Learning and Skills Development Agency—an agency set up by the UK government to “improve the quality of post-16 education and training”, saying:

    We should stop using these terms. There’s no scientific justification for them.

    The studies were never published because of inconsistencies between the scientific evidence and government policy (ahem), but the article above discusses it and offers the following, excellent conclusion:

    We do students a serious disservice by implying they have only one learning style, rather than a flexible repertoire from which to choose, depending on the context. Learning-style instruments vary markedly in quality and some (eg Allinson and Hayes’s CSI or Entwistle’s Assist) could be used to start a dialogue with students about their learning, assessment and the purposes of education.

    However I want to challenge the notion that we discover something worthwhile about our students’ learning by asking 12, 20 or even 80 questions, all devoid of context. Instead we need to face up to the complexities involved in teaching and learning, which cannot be “delivered” like pizzas. Students need knowledgeable, vocationally qualified and caring teachers, who can enter into a dialogue with them about how to become better learners, as well as what it means to be a painter or nursery nurse.

    via @bfchirpy

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Time Needed to Form a Habit

    How long does it take to form a habit? By studying 96 people as they each attempt to start a new habit, the answer comes out as between 18 to 254 days, with a mean of 66.

    Some good news and caveats:

    • Missing a single day did not reduce the chance of forming a habit.
    • A sub-group took much longer than the others to form their habits, perhaps suggesting some people are ‘habit-resistant’.

    What this study reveals is that when we want to develop a relatively simple habit like eating a piece of fruit each day or taking a 10 minute walk, it could take us over two months of daily repetitions before the behaviour becomes a habit. And, while this research suggests that skipping single days isn’t detrimental in the long-term, it’s those early repetitions that give us the greatest boost in automaticity.

    I’m not sure why, but I find it interesting that there seems to be an upper limit on automaticity.

    via Mind Hacks

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • The New Rules of The Fold

    In 1996, while discussing the importance of the inverted pyramid style of writing, usability expert Jakob Nielsen wrote that “users don’t scroll”. From there the idea of The Fold as an integral part of web design came into being.

    But, as Nielsen himself has said, the Internet has evolved and “as users got more experience with scrolling pages, many of them started scrolling”. That’s not to say that the fold is no longer of any importance, just that the rules have changed.

    Looking at eye tracking data—the current gold standard for design and usability testing—design agency cxpartners has come up with some new rules (with examples) for dealing with the fold in web design:

    1. Less is more – don’t be tempted to cram everything above the fold. Good use of whitespace and imagery encourages exploration.
    2. Stark, horizontal lines discourage scrolling – this doesn’t mean stop using horizontal full width elements. Have a small amount of content just visible, poking up above the fold to encourage scrolling.
    3. Avoid the use of in-page scroll bars – the browser scrollbar is an indicator of the amount of content on the page. iFrames and other elements with scroll bars in the page can break this convention and may lead to content not being seen.

    Jeff Attwood of Coding Horror looks at how this advice can actually be applied.

    It’s not only a basic rule of writing, it’s also a basic rule of the web: put the most important content at as close to the top of the page as you can. This isn’t new advice, but it’s so important that it never hurts to revisit it periodically in your own designs.

    In treating user myopia, it’s not enough to place important stuff directly in the user’s eyepoint. You also need to ensure that you’ve placed the absolute most important stuff at the top of the page — and haven’t created any accidental barriers to scrolling, so they can find the rest of it. The fold is far less important than it used to be, but it isn’t quite as mythical as Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster quite yet.

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    Lloyd Morgan