Letters Remain

  • Body Language Mimicry and Hypnotism

    Previously I discussed how body language mimicry increases affection by helping the mimicker see the other person as they want to be seen.

    Over a decade after it was conducted I’ve now read details of “the first rigorous study looking at body language mimicry” and its effects. Affectionately known as ‘the chameleon effect’, three questions were asked:

    1. Do people automatically mimic others, even strangers?
    2. Does mimicry increase liking?
    3. Do high-perspective-takers exhibit the chameleon effect more?

    The answer to each of these questions was a resounding Yes, however it was the link to hypnotism that interested me the most:

    One influential theory of hypnosis says that in the hypnotic state the conscious will is weakened so that suggestions from the hypnotist are carried out automatically.

    This is actually an extreme version of what happens when we mimic other people’s body language. In some senses, when two people are really getting along, their feet-waggling and face-touching in perfect harmony, it’s like they’ve hypnotised each other.

    Eric Barker also highlights the important sentences from the abstracts of five studies looking at body language mimicry and its effects.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Reliable Lie Detection Cues

    We mistakenly attribute fidgeting, stuttering and avoidance of eye contact as outward signals of mendacity, suggests recent research into lie detection, showing that these are some of the least accurate ways to predict whether or not someone is lying.

    Instead, the most reliable way to tell if someone is lying is by listening carefully:

    Professor Richard Wiseman […] says that common sense is the lie-buster’s best weapon, and affirms that it is aural rather than visual clues that are key.

    Wiseman’s 1994 experiment […] had 30,000 participants watching or listening to two interviews he conducted with Robin Day. In one, Day told the truth; in the other he lied. Viewers could not spot the lie: there was a near-50/50 vote. Radio listeners, however, achieved over 70 per cent accuracy.

    “Lying taxes the mind,” Wiseman explains. “It involves thinking about what is plausible. People tend to repeat phrases, give shorter answers, and hesitate more. They will try to distance themselves from the lie, so use far more impersonal language. Liars often reduce the number of times that they say words like ‘I’, ‘me’, and ‘mine’. To detect deception, look for aural signs associated with having to think hard.”

    According to the Canadian Journal of Police and Security Services, another side-effect of lying that forensic interrogators will look for is the avoidance of verbal contractions – using “I am” instead of “I’m” and so on.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Paper Maps vs. GPS vs. Personal Directions

    Noting that “a device can be precise without being accurate” and contemplating the possible effects the simultaneous rise in digital maps and a decline in the use of paper maps could have, John McKinney looks at some studies comparing the efficacy of different navigational aids:

    Studies by the British Cartographic Society show that high-tech maps get the user from Point A to Point B but leave off traditional features such as historical landmarks, government buildings and cultural institutions; this could lead to a loss of cultural and geographic literacy, the august body warns. […]

    A study comparing paper map users versus GPS users […] found that people on foot using a GPS device make more errors and take longer to reach their destinations than people using an old-fashioned map. (Although an earlier study […] suggested GPS bettered paper maps in improving driving efficiency.) […]

    [Another] study found GPS users made more stops, walked farther and more slowly than map users and demonstrated a poorer knowledge of the terrain, topography and routes taken when asked to sketch a map after their walks. GPS users also adjudged the way-finding tasks as much more difficult than did map users. Those proving to be most proficient at navigation turned out to be those shown the route by researchers — they bested both map and GPS users by striding to destinations faster and with fewer missteps.

    via The Browser

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • How Different Cultures Define Choice

    In her book The Art of Choosing, psychologist Sheena Iyengar—the experimenter who conducted the original studies leading to the paradox of choice theory—looks at the cultural differences in the definition and acceptance of choice.

    Take a mundane question: Do you choose to brush your teeth in the morning? Or do you just do it? Can a habit or custom be a choice? When Iyengar asked Japanese and American college students in Kyoto to record all the choices they made in a day, the Americans included things like brushing their teeth and hitting the snooze button. The Japanese didn’t consider those actions to be choices. The two groups lived similar lives. But they defined them differently.

    In a review of the book, Iyengar is quoted as saying “the optimal amount of choice lies somewhere in between infinity and very little, and that optimum depends on context and culture”. I’ve posted before on how we may be overestimating the paradox of choice theory.

    via Mind Hacks

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Information, Not Recommendation, the Best Advice

    Attempting to discover the most effective way to offer advice, researchers identified four separate types of advice:

    • Advice for is a recommendation to pick a particular option.
    • Advice against is a recommendation to avoid a particular option.
    • Information supplies a piece of information that the decision maker might not know about.
    • Decision support suggests how to go about making the choice, but does not make a specific recommendation.

    Their study showed that information advice was the most valuable to those making decisions, for a number of reasons:

    For one thing, when someone makes a recommendation for or against a particular option, a decision maker may feel like they have lost a bit of their independence in making a choice. Recommendations about how to go about making the choice may also make a decision maker feel a loss of independence. When the advice comes in the form of information, though, the decision maker still feels like they have some autonomy.

    Second, information helps people to make future decisions in the same domain. New pieces of information often make people aware of dimensions of a decision that they had never considered before. A recommendation for or against a particular option is useful for the specific decision that you are making at a given time, but that advice may not be as helpful in the future.

    Finally, getting information makes people feel more confident in the decision they ultimately make. The information provides reasons for or against a particular option. There is a lot of evidence that people feel better about decisions when they are able to give a reason for making the choice. Information provides a good justification for a choice.

    via Lifehacker

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Choice Architecture of Organ Donation

    The supply of organs suitable for donation is vastly smaller than the demand. To try and increase the pool of potential donors a number of options have been tested:

    Redefining death so ‘living’ organs can be taken from donors who have died through brain death (via Link Banana), provide incentives for potential donors, or employ choice architecture to get the results you want.

    On the latter (the choice architecture option), Tim Harford provides a concise look at the rise of soft paternalism in politics and why we should be cautious:

    For a business, the choice is not straightforward, even if the aim – to maximise profit without alienating customers – is simple. For a government, the decision should be harder still. Goldstein points out that 12 per cent of Germans and 99.98 per cent of Austrians are registered organ donors. Germans have to opt in to the donor scheme, Austrians have to opt out. The implication: few people really have a strong preference as to whether to be an organ donor or not, so they stay where they’re put.

    The response to this is not obvious. Perhaps the government should use the default to maximise organ donations. A more cautious approach would be to try to figure out what people would prefer if they could be persuaded to give it some proper thought. One indication comes from research by Goldstein and Eric Johnson: in an experiment on organ donation, people forced to choose one way or the other acted like people who were placed in the donor pool by default. In this particular case, maximising the donor pool and doing what people really want seems to be much the same thing. Other cases will be less clear-cut.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • The Landscapes of Gadgets

    Stating that modern gizmos (in this example, the iPhone) are no longer just dependent on highly integrated and developed systems for their production, but now also depend upon “a vast array of infrastructures, data ecologies, and device networks” for their operation, Rob Holmes’ “mind-boggling update to I, Pencil“* looks at the landscapes of extraction, assembly and operation modern gadgets create.

    As Google is, like Apple, quite secretive about the details of the physical loci of its immaterial product, the locations of less than half of Google’s American data centers are known, with those known centers spread between California (five centers), Oregon (two), Georgia (two), Virginia (three), Washington, Illinois, Texas, Florida, North Carolina, South Carolina, Oklahoma, and Iowa.

    The first of these data centers to be constructed is in The Dalles, Oregon, and “includes three 68,680 square foot data center buildings, a 20,000 square foot administration building, a 16,000 square foot ‘transient employee dormitory’ and an 18,000 square foot facility for cooling towers”. Like Google’s other data centers, the Dalles facility consumes enormous quantities of electricity (estimates range from 50 to 100 megawatts — somewhere between a tenth and a twentieth of the capacity of an average American coal-fired power plant), generating similarly large quantities of heat, which necessitates locating the centers by significant water sources for the chillers and water towers which cool the servers.

    Inside, the data centers are filled with standard shipping containers, each container packed with over a thousand individual servers running cheap x86 processors: anonymous, modular data landscapes, the nerve centers of America’s conurbations, their standardization and dull rectilinearity indicating extreme placelessness, but contradicted by the logistical logic of water bodies, energy sources, and transmission distances which governs their placement.

    * As Simon Bostock called it (via).

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Why Urban Legends Spread

    In a short profile of David and Barbara Mikkelson–proprietors of urban legend reference Snopes–the two discuss how they have seen their site grow and what they have observed about the subset of society that visit and contact their site.

    It’s an eminently quotable article of observations, questioning why urban legends spread the way they do. (The answer, as Ryan Sager states, is “People don’t much want to know the truth. They just want a story that amuses them, confirms their biases, or makes the world a more wondrous place”).

    “Rumors are a great source of comfort for people,” Mrs. Mikkelson said. […]

    “Especially in politics, most everything has infinite shades of gray to it, but people just want things to be true or false. […] In the larger sense, it’s people wanting confirmation of their world view.” […]

    It is not just the naïveté of Web users that worries [Snopes’ fans and volunteers]. It is also what Mr. Mikkelson calls “a trend toward the opposite approach, hyper-skepticism.”

    “People get an e-mail or a photograph and they spot one little thing that doesn’t look right, and they declare the whole thing fake,” he said. “That’s just as bad as being gullible in a lot of senses.” […]

    “When you’re looking at truth versus gossip, truth doesn’t stand a chance.”

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Our Common Navigational Mistakes

    Reading how some animals are able to “instinctively solve navigational problems” that baffle us humans, I was reminded of Tom Vanderbilt, author of Traffic, writing on the most common navigational mistakes we all make.

    In [a recent study] a number of subjects were asked to estimate the travel time for a northbound versus southbound bird. The majority of respondents believed traveling north from the equator would take longer than the reverse.

    What was going on, the authors speculated, was that subjects were supplanting map-based metaphors for the actual experience of travel. “A lifetime of exposure to the metaphoric link between cardinal direction and vertical position,” they write, “may cause people to associate northbound travel with uphill travel.” Or, as they quote Treebeard in Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers: “I always like going south. Somehow… it feels like going downhill.” […]

    The north-south imbalance is just one of any number of ways we rearrange objective time and space in our heads. There are the famous examples of geographical distortion, for example, in which people routinely assume that Rome is farther south than Philadelphia or that San Diego is west of Reno (when in both cases the opposite is true). Or take a simple trip into town: Studies have found that people tend to find the inbound trip to be shorter than the outbound trip, while a journey down a street with more intersections will seem to be longer than one with fewer (and not simply because of traffic lights).

    Our state of mind on any trip can influence not just our perceptions of time but of geography itself. As Dennis Proffit, et al., write in the wonderfully titled study “Seeing Mountains in Mole Hills,” […] “hills appear steeper when we are fatigued, encumbered by a heavy backpack, out of shape, old and in declining health”—and this is not some vague feeling, but an actual shift in our estimates of degrees of inclination. Transit planners have a rule of thumb that waiting for transit seems to take three times as long as travel itself. And then, looming over everything, is Vierordt’s Law, which, applied to commuting, roughly states: People will mentally lengthen short commutes and shorten long commutes.

    If this topic interests you, Vanderbilt writes about such topics on his blog, How We Drive. You may also be interested in a video interview with Vanderbilt that looks like it will be excellent.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Writing to Subvert Audience Expectations

    Suggesting that “Audiences always think they know how a story will go”, Roz Morris of Nail Your Novel dissects Kathryn Bigelow‘s award-winning The Hurt Locker (spoilers galore) to see why a film that “[sets] up several conventional situations – and uses our expectations to pull us up short” made such an impact with audiences.

    Readers always try to second-guess where a story is going. They can’t help it. Subverting the audience’s expectations is not new. The Hurt Locker twists them overtly and violently to tell us the world of war is nothing like the one we know. Neither are the people anything like the people we know. It is storytelling that is fully in control of its audience.

    via The Browser

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    Lloyd Morgan