Letters Remain

  • The Psychology of Wine

    On Vines and Minds is an excellent summary of the history and psychology of wine (pdf/html).

    Some topics of note:

    • Music radically influences our purchasing habits: classical music increases the amount we’re willing to spend while characteristically French music sways us toward wine from that region (similarly for German music/wine).
    • Colour affects the brain’s response to odours; as demonstrated when an odourless red die was mixed with white wine, fooling ‘Masters of Wine‘ into explaining its ‘nose’ using terms reserved for red wines.
    • Describing a wine has a drastic effect on how we later perceive that same wine, as shown when non-experts matched experts in identifying wines during blind taste tests… unless they had to describe the wine between tasting sessions.
    • Perceived price influences the amount of pleasure we derive from wine: fMRI scans have shown more ‘real’ physiological pleasure when tasting a wine labelled as more expensive compared to others at lower prices (even though it was the same wine throughout the study).

    Another round-up of wine psychology—albeit a slightly less comprehensive one—comes from Freakonomics, where they point out that there is a zero (or even slightly negative) correlation between the perceived quality of a wine and its price when non-experts undergo blind taste tests. The article also notes:

    • This correlation is even stronger with champagne: a study showed a $12 sparkling wine from Washington was preferred nearly two to one to $150 Dom Perignon when the labels were removed.
    • People dislike a beverage if it contains a typically offensive flavouring, even though it actually improves the flavour: adding a small amount of balsamic vinegar to beer will slightly improve its flavour, but tell people it’s added before a tasting and few will prefer it to an untainted version; inform them after a tasting and they’re indifferent; don’t inform them at all and the majority prefer the tainted beer.
    • Hardy Rodenstock, one of the most infamous wine counterfeiters, fooled experts all around the world into purchasing fake 18th-century wine he claimed Thomas Jefferson once owned. His ruse was eventually uncovered by a private investigation financed by millionaire Bill Cock (who Rodenstock duped), using a horde of former FBI and MI5 agents. Interestingly, Rodenstock managed to dupe experts by “getting [them] shitfaced” (to quote the wine critic Robert Parker) prior to tasting the fake wine. (The story of the fraud is a lengthy—but fascinating—read.)

    Finally, these two complementary studies could make for an interesting business model (think: wine bar serving cheap yet expensive looking wine, loud music, food available):

    In conclusion you could say that this quote encapsulates everything you need to know about wine:

    Wine does not live in a vacuum and it is sampled and savoured in the context of our life experiences.

    P.S. Don’t forget the second cheapest wine syndrome.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Archive of Book Cover Designs and Designers

    The wonderful Archive of Book Cover Designs and Designers has a simple—yet important—raison d’être: “for the purpose of appreciation and categorization”.

    Already quite extensive, the archive is constantly growing through reader suggestions and is searchable by designer, photographer, author, and many more besides.

    The site’s footer also provides a wonderful directory of equally great sites and a list of ‘future enhancements’; one of which is typeface identification. I’m looking forward to that one.

    Lloyd Morgan

  • Consumer Bias: Middle Options and the Paradox of Choice

    A recent article from American Economic Review looks at the consumer bias in preferring the middle of three options, and the tendency to buy less when offered more.

    Numerous studies demonstrate that seemingly irrelevant factors influence people’s decisions. […] When three alternatives are available, the middle alternative is chosen more often than when it is paired with only one other option. […] In choice overload experiments, customers are less likely to make a purchase if more products are added to the choice set.

    […]

    In this paper, I develop a model where uninformed consumers learn payoff-relevant information by observing what goods are available. The tendency to select the middle option thus naturally arises when there are consumers who are unsure which option is best for them, but know their tastes are middlebrow. Choice overload comes as no surprise if excessive product lines reduce consumers’ information about which varieties are likely to suit them.

    Admittedly not the most revelatory of papers, but I find it difficult not to link to studies on consumer behaviour.

    via Overcoming Bias

    Lloyd Morgan

  • Psychology of Credit Card Minimum Instalments

    New research finds that the ‘recommended minimum instalment’ suggestions on credit card statements are more influential than previously thought:

    Mr. Stewart presented 413 people with mock credit-card bills of £435.76 (about $650) that were identical — except that only half mentioned a minimum payment of £5.42. Participants were asked how much they would pay.

    Among those inclined to pay the bill in full, the presence of the minimum payment hardly made any difference. However, those who wanted to pay just part of it handed over 43 percent less on average when presented with a minimum payment. In the real world, this would roughly double interest charges.

    I can’t help feeling that The Economist and the author of the original paper are taking a rather naïve view in believing that these recommended instalments are there for the benefit of the consumer.

    Surely a more realistic view would be that they are a ‘compromise’ between keeping a card-holder perpetually in debt (maximum profit) and preventing them from defaulting on the entire amount of credit (minimum profit)?

    via Freakonomics

    (I digress, but it’s worth noting that outside the UK many countries don’t have laws stipulating that these ‘minimum payments’ must cover the interest to be charged in addition to a percentage of the outstanding credit—in other words they are typically designed to keep the card-holder perpetually in debt!)

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Evolutionary Gems

    Given that the concepts and realities of Darwinian evolution are still challenged, albeit rarely by biologists, a succinct briefing on why evolution by natural selection is an empirically validated principle is useful for people to have to hand.

    That’s from the introduction to 15 Evolutionary Gems (pdf): a document produced by the scientific journal Nature to “illustrate the breadth, depth and power of evolutionary thinking”. The ‘evolutionary gems’ are in three categories:

    • Gems From the Fossil Record
      • Land-living ancestors of whales
      • From water to land
      • The origin of feathers
      • The evolutionary history of teeth
      • The origin of the vertebrate skeleton
    • Gems From Habitats
      • Natural selection in speciation
      • Natural selection in lizards
      • A case of co-evolution
      • Differential dispersal in wild birds
      • Selective survival in wild guppies
      • Evolutionary history matters
    • Gems From Molecular Processes
      • Darwin’s Galapagos finches
      • Microevolution meets macroevolution
      • Toxin resistance in snakes and clams
      • Variation versus stability

    Lloyd Morgan

  • Darwin on Creationism

    Last week the news that Sir David Attenborough receives hate mail for failing to credit God in his documentaries was everywhere you looked. If you would like a recap, I previously discussed Attenborough’s rather graphic reason for disbelieving in a deity in Attenborough on Creationism back in November.

    One thing has come to light since, however: Charles Darwin’s eerily similar reasons for not explicitly believing in a Creator, as mentioned in a letter to Asa Gray in 1860:

    There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent & omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidæ with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice.

    Lloyd Morgan

  • Sharing More Than We Think

    Technology writer Nicholas Carr reflects on how what we share online imitates our persona much more than we imagine.

    Your online self […] is entirely self-created, and because it determines your identity and social standing in an internet community, each decision you make about how you portray yourself – about which facts (or falsehoods) to reveal, which photos to upload, which people “to friend,” which bands or movies or books to list as favorites, which words to put in a blog – is fraught, subtly or not, with a kind of existential danger. And you are entirely responsible for the consequences as you navigate that danger. You are, after all, your avatar’s parents; there’s no one else to blame. So leaving the real world to participate in an online community – or a virtual world like Second Life – doesn’t relieve the anxiety of self-consciousness; it magnifies it. You become more, not less, exposed.

    Carr notes that “in the Web 2.0 world we talk intimately, or at least familiarly, not just with people we actually know but with complete strangers” and comes to the conclusion that no matter how impersonal our online ‘sharings’ (blog posts, tweets, etc.), the aggregate ends up being “the foundation of a scary-deep self-portrait”—but a self-portrait of who is the question that is left unanswered.

    Lloyd Morgan

  • A Sampling of Mathematical Folk Humour

    Browsing through the Wikipedia entry for mathematical jokes, I noticed a reference to the intriguingly titled Foolproof: A Sampling of Mathematical Folk Humor (pdf) that appeared in Notices of the American Mathematical Society back in 2004.

    Many English-language mathematical jokes are based on word play involving standard mathematical concepts and terminology. In fact, many of the jokes involve food items, which may be a reflection of the fact that some mathematical concepts are hard to digest, or difficult to swallow:

    Q: What’s purple and commutes?
    A: An abelian grape.

    Lloyd Morgan

  • Psychology of Learning

    Tom Stafford—co-author of Mind Hacks—has written a series of posts on what psychologists know about learning. For anyone interested in education and personal development, these provide an interesting introduction to a few topics of note.

    Learning Makes Itself Invisible

    Once you have learnt something you see the world differently. Not only can you appreciate or do something that you couldn’t appreciate or do before, but the way you saw the world before is now lost to you. This works for the small things as well as the big picture. If you learn the meaning of a new word, you won’t be able to ignore it like you did previously. If you learn how to make a cup of out of clay you won’t ever be able to see cups like you used to before.

    The premise of the article (and especially the example given) puts me in mind of the previously mentioned phenomenon of sine wave speech.

    Learning Should Be Fun

    Rather than fun being a relief from learning, or a distraction from it, for most of our history, before school, learning had to be its own motivation. Brains that learnt well had more offspring, and so learning evolved to be rewarding.

    In lots of teaching situations we focus on the right and wrong answers to things, which is a venerable paradigm for learning, but not the only one. There is a less structured, curiosity-driven, paradigm which focusses not on what is absolutely right or wrong, but instead on what is surprising. A problem with rights and wrongs is that, for some people, the pressure of being correct gets in the way of experiencing what actually is.

    The Straight Dope on Learning Styles

    This is where we hit problems. Are learners either primarily visual, auditory, kinesthetic (as claimed in NLP)? Or are they primarily analytic, creative or pragmatic (as proposed by Robert Sternberg). Is the world made of Convergers, Divergers, Assimilators and Accomodators? Maybe instead we should use the Myers-Briggs categories of Sensers, Intuitors, Thinkers and Feelers?

    Faced with these possibilities an academic psychologist has a standard set of questions they would like answered: can you really divide people up into a particular set of categories?

    Lloyd Morgan

  • Geckos’ Toes, Wan der Waal’s and Walking on Ceilings

    Only having seen one gecko in my life I’ve given them little thought. One thing I am sure of, however, is that I didn’t expect the answer to how geckos manage to navigate walls and ceilings so dextrously to be as awesome as it is.

    The bottoms of a gecko’s feet are […] covered with millions of tiny foot-hairs on each toe, called setae, each about as long as the width of two human hairs (about 100 millionths of a meter). Each seta, in turn, is divided at the end into approximately a thousand tiny spatulae […] which are about 200 billlionths of a meter wide, which is smaller than the wavelength of visible light.

    It seems the geckos’ toes create so much surface area in this way, with such tiny endings, that they are able to make use of Van der Waal’s force – a weak attractive force which is present between molecules – to stick themselves to the ceiling.

    via Seed

    Lloyd Morgan