Letters Remain

  • Moral Licensing and How Good Deeds Make Us Do Bad Deeds

    Be stingy with praise for moral behaviour, Robin Hanson suggests, as by doing so people will strive to be more moral to win more difficult-to-obtain praise.

    In support of this “stingy school of thought on moral praise”, Hanson points to studies of contradictory behaviour known as “moral licensing”: these studies show how small, seemingly moral acts prevent us from doing further good deeds and may actually increase the odds of us doing immoral deeds.

    It seems that we have a good/bad balance sheet in our heads that we’re probably not even aware of. For many people, doing good makes it easier — and often more likely — to do bad. It works in reverse, too: Do bad, then do good. […]

    From a theoretical perspective, the research has shown that “it’s like we can withdraw from our moral bank accounts,” [Benoît Monin, a social psychologist who studies moral licensing at Stanford University] said. “It’s a lens through which you see the rest of your behavior. But it may not even be conscious.”

    This seemingly contradictory behavior is all around us, but it is probably most apparent, and easy to lampoon, in the greening of America. […]

    People who bought green products were more likely to cheat and steal than those who bought conventional products. […] After getting high-efficiency washers, consumers increased clothes washing by nearly 6 percent. Other studies show that people leave energy-efficient lights on longer. A recent study […] showed that of 500 people who had greened their homes, a third saw no reduction in bills. […]

    Moral licensing behavior extends, in a different way, into dieting. […] People eat more chocolate while drinking Diet Coke than while drinking more sugary fare.

    via @Ando_F

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • A Beginner’s Guide to SEO

    SEOmoz has done a lot for my perception of SEO companies: before I became aware of them a number of years ago, I was wary of the entire sector (with good reason, many would say).

    To help us all understand the world of legitimate SEO a bit better and to provide a primer on how search engines work, SEOmoz has produced a thorough, beginner’s guide to search engine optimisation. The chapters:

    1. How Search Engines Operate
    2. How People Interact With Search Engines
    3. Why Search Engine Marketing is Necessary
    4. The Basics of Search Engine Friendly Design & Dev.
    5. Keyword Research
    6. How Usability, Experience, and Content Affect Search Engine Rankings
    7. Growing Popularity and Links
    8. Search Engine Tools and Services
    9. Myths & Misconceptions About Search Engines
    10. Measuring and Tracking Success

    via @Foomandoonian

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Language’s Influence on Culture

    I’ve written before about Lera Boroditsky’s fascinating research into how language affects thinking, and a recent article by Boroditsky in The Wall Street Journal covers similar ground, asking Does language influence culture?

    The answer, it seems, is yes:

    • Russian speakers, who have more words for light and dark blues, are better able to visually discriminate shades of blue.
    • Some indigenous tribes say north, south, east and west, rather than left and right, and as a consequence have great spatial orientation.
    • The Piraha, whose language eschews number words in favor of terms like few and many, are not able to keep track of exact quantities.
    • In one study, Spanish and Japanese speakers couldn’t remember the agents of accidental events as adeptly as English speakers could. Why? In Spanish and Japanese, the agent of causality is dropped: [“The vase broke” or “The vase was broken”], rather than “John broke the vase.”

    For some amazing examples of these traits in practice, the article describes many studies Boroditsky and her colleagues conducted that will make you rethink how much of our cultural differences may be down to our different languages.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Stephen King on Writing Successfully

    It took Stephen King ten minutes to learn how to have a successful and financially rewarding career writing fiction and he believes he can teach us the same in ten minutes, too.

    King–author of countless novels and the much-lauded book on the craft, On Writing–starts with a short story of his youth followed by twelve tips professing to teach us everything we need to know about writing successfully:

    1. Be talented: If you’re not talented, you won’t succeed. And if you’re not succeeding, you should know when to quit. When is that? I don’t know. It’s different for each writer. Not after six rejection slips, certainly, nor after sixty. But after six hundred? Maybe. After six thousand? My friend, after six thousand pinks, it’s time you tried painting or computer programming.
    2. Be neat
    3. Be self-critical
    4. Remove every extraneous word
    5. Never look at a reference book while doing a first draft: Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word.
    6. Know the markets
    7. Write to entertain: If you want to preach, get a soapbox.
    8. Ask yourself frequently, “Am I having fun?”: The answer needn’t always be yes. But if it’s always no, it’s time for a new project or a new career.
    9. How to evaluate criticism
    10. Observe all rules for proper submission
    11. An agent? Forget it. For now
    12. If it’s bad, kill it: When it comes to people, mercy killing is against the law. When it comes to fiction, it is the law.

    That story King shares ends with an anecdote related directly to tip four:

    Until that day in John Gould’s little office, I had been writing first drafts of stories which might run 2,500 words. The second drafts were apt to run 3,300 words. Following that day, my 2,500-word first drafts became 2,200-word second drafts. And two years after that, I sold the first one.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • The Advantage of Busywork: Happiness

    “We are happier when busy but our instinct is for idleness”, says Christopher Hsee, a researcher at the University of Chicago who has been studying the link between busyness and happiness.

    What this means is that work conducted merely to keep us busy (so-called busywork) can actually increase our happiness, despite what conventional wisdom suggests (Hsee’s study: Idleness Aversion and the Need for Justifiable Busyness).

    This ‘futile busyness’ is defined by Hsee as “busyness serving no purpose other than to prevent idleness” and is displayed perfectly in a study Hsee discovered showing this in action: at a Houston airport inundated with complaints, managers successfully improved passengers’ well-being by employing a clever bit of reengineering:

    A closer analysis of the problem […] revealed that the waiting time until luggage delivery consisted of two components: a 1-minute walking time from the aircraft to the luggage carousel and a 7-minute waiting time at the carousel […] As passengers disembarked from the aircraft and approached the carousel area, a certain fraction of them (those with hand luggage) proceeded directly to the taxi stand, boarded a taxi, and commenced their working day; those waiting at the carousel were afforded the opportunity for seven minutes of watching passengers who disembarked after them start their business day before them […]

    The solution to this problem was to deliberately reinsert delays in the system. The aircraft disembarking location was moved outward from the main terminal, and the most distant carousel was selected for delivery of luggage, so the total walk time was increased from one to six minutes. After this insertion of delay was successfully completed and the system was perceived to be more socially just, passenger complaints dropped to nearly zero.

    via The Browser

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • The Personal Business of Recommending Books

    For book recommendations, most of us rely on the suggestions of trusted friends and on word of mouth. This, at least, allows us to hold someone accountable for those inevitable poor recommendations. But what of ‘professional’ book recommenders (writers in publications, not algorithmic ‘recommenders’)?

    Laura Miller–author of the book recommendation Slate column, –looks at what she calls the fine art of recommending books.

    “You can’t recommend books to strangers without asking personal questions,” [editor of the Paris Review, Lorin Stein] told me. As he pointed out, what we want to read is often pegged to transitory moods. The same book may not thrill the same person at every point in his or her life. “I don’t think people read ‘for’ pleasure, exactly,” he went on. “Of course there is pleasure in reading. But mainly we do it out of need. Because we’re lonely, or confused, or need to laugh, or want some kind of protection or quiet — or disturbance, or truth, or whatever.” The recommender must take this into account.

    Miller also looks at the book recommending processes of The Morning News‘ Biblioracle (John Warner) and “the doyen of all professional book recommenders”, Nancy Pearl.

    Pearl suggests that there are four “doorways” that intrigue readers in the books they read: story, characters, setting and language. One or more of these doorways appeal to each type of reader and the task of the recommender is in matching the reader’s doorway preference with a book that delivers exactly that.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Oil Spills and Nature’s Resilience

    Faced with an oil spill of the Deepwater Horizon‘s magnitude, nature is resilient and well-adapted to cope with the consequences–that is, provided we don’t try to clean it using methods that will do more damage.

    Matt Ridley, author of The Rational Optimist (and many of my favourite popular science books), discusses what we should remember from previous oil spills, and what this means for the Gulf of Mexico in the face of yet another oil spill:

    First, be careful not to do more harm than good. When the Torrey Canyon was wrecked off Cornwall in 1967, spilling 120,000 tonnes of oil, the British government not only bombed the wreck (and missed with one bomb in four), but sprayed 10,000 tons of detergents, which were much more damaging to marine life than the oil itself, then bulldozed the oil and detergents into the sand on some beaches where it persisted for longer than if it had been exposed to the elements.

    The mistake was repeated in 1989, when the Exxon Valdez spilled about 40,000 tonnes in Prince William Sound. Thousands of volunteers were sent out to wash rocks with hot water, which helped kill lots of microbes that would otherwise have eaten the oil.

    Speaking of microbes, do not underestimate nature’s powers of recovery. After most big oil spills, scientists are pleasantly surprised by how quickly the oil disappears and the marine life reappears. […] The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says on its website: ‘What scientists have found is that, despite the gloomy outlook in 1989, the intertidal habitats of Prince William Sound have proved to be surprisingly resilient.’ A scientist who led some of the research into the Exxon Valdez says that ‘Thoughts that this is going to kill the Gulf of Mexico are just wild overreactions’. […]

    This rapid recovery was also a signature of the last big Gulf rig spill, the Ixtoc 1 disaster off Mexico in 1979. Although the number of turtles took decades to recover, much of the rest of the wildlife bounced back fairly rapidly. […] The warm waters and strong sunshine of the Gulf of Mexico are highly conducive to the chemical decomposition of oil by ‘photo-oxidation’, and are stuffed full of organisms that actually like to eat the stuff – in moderation.

    Ridley also notes how wind farms kill “far more rare birds per joule of energy produced than oil does” and that the wind farm at Altamont Pass in California kills more birds each year that the Deepwater Horizon spill did (≈ 1,300).

    via The Browser

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Privacy and Identity on the Internet

    Jeffrey Rosen, law professor at George Washington University (GWU), has called the current incarnation of the Internet “a digital world that never forgets” in a recent piece on privacy for the The New York Times.

    It’s an astute article looking at the idea of segmented identities, the search for a way to safely control our online identities, and some interesting speculation on digital reputations and their possible importance in the future.

    Of particular interest to me are two studies Rosen weaves into his story on how privacy on the Internet influences our lives and how we can be nudged to become more privacy aware:

    According to a recent survey by Microsoft, 75 percent of U.S. recruiters and human-resource professionals report that their companies require them to do online research about candidates, and many use a range of sites when scrutinizing applicants — including search engines, social-networking sites, photo- and video-sharing sites, personal Web sites and blogs, Twitter and online-gaming sites. Seventy percent of U.S. recruiters report that they have rejected candidates because of information found online, like photos and discussion-board conversations and membership in controversial groups.

    and:

    According to M. Ryan Calo, who runs the consumer-privacy project at Stanford Law School, experimenters studying strategies of “visceral notice” have found that when people navigate a Web site in the presence of a human-looking online character who seems to be actively following the cursor, they disclose less personal information than people who browse with no character or one who appears not to be paying attention.

    via @finiteattention

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Foreign Accents Make Statements Less Trustworthy

    Due to the principles of processing fluency (also known as cognitive fluency, discussed here many times before), we know that information that is easier to process is perceived to be–among other features–more familiar, pleasant, truthful and less risky.

    A recent study has shown that this is also true for foreign accents: statements spoken by non-native speakers are perceived to be less trustworthy, even if their accent is mild:

    Non-native speech is harder to understand than native speech. We demonstrate that this “processing difficulty” causes non-native speakers to sound less credible. People judged trivia statements such as “Ants don’t sleep” as less true when spoken by a non-native than a native speaker. When people were made aware of the source of their difficulty they were able to correct when the accent was mild but not when it was heavy. This effect was not due to stereotypes of prejudice against foreigners because it occurred even though speakers were merely reciting statements provided by a native speaker. Such reduction of credibility may have an insidious impact on millions of people, who routinely communicate in a language which is not their native tongue.

    via Mind Hacks

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Using Charity to Increase Voluntary Payments

    If a business is experimenting with voluntary pricing (‘pay-what-you-want’ pricing), to increase sales and profits give a portion of voluntary payments away to charity (and advertise the fact, naturally).

    That’s the conclusion from a study by researcher Ayelet Gneezy comparing a number of pricing plans involving–in various combinations–voluntary payments, fixed prices and charitable donations:

    At a theme park, Gneezy conducted a massive study of over 113,000 people who had to choose whether to buy a photo of themselves on a roller coaster. They were given one of four pricing plans. Under the basic one, when they were asked to pay a flat fee of $12.95 for the photo, only 0.5% of them did so.

    When they could pay what they wanted, sales skyrocketed and 8.4% took a photo, almost 17 times more than before. But on average, the tight-fisted customers paid a measly $0.92 for the photo, which barely covered the cost of printing and actively selling one. […]

    When Gneezy told customers that half of the $12.95 price tag would go to charity, only 0.57% riders bought a photo – a pathetic increase over the standard price plan. […]

    But when customers could pay what they wanted in the knowledge that half of that would go to charity, sales and profits went through the roof. Around 4.5% of the customers asked for a photo (up 9 times from the standard price plan), and on average, each one paid $5.33 for the privilege. Even after taking away the charitable donations, that still left Gneezy with a decent profit.

    The researcher calls this “shared social responsibility” (in comparison to plain old corporate social responsibility).

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    Lloyd Morgan