In psychology literature, “ask for the moon, settle for less” is known as the “door in the face” (DITF) technique. Unlike the “foot in the door” technique, in which the fulfillment of a small request makes people more likely to fulfill a large request, DITF uses an unreasonable request as a way of making somebody more likely to subsequently fulfill a more moderate request. The technique was first demonstrated by Robert Cialdini’s famous 1975 experiment in which students became more likely to volunteer for a single afternoon after first being asked to volunteer for an afternoon every week for two years.

So, can research on DITF shed some light on why pursuing an assault weapons ban didn’t pan out?

{ peer-reviewed by my neurons | Continue reading }

{ Exposure to wind, waves and sun degrades plastic trash into tiny plastic particles that soak up pollutants }

As life has evolved, its complexity has increased exponentially, just like Moore’s law. Now geneticists have extrapolated this trend backwards and found that by this measure, life is older than the Earth itself.

{ The Physics arXiv Blog | Continue reading }

Researchers at the University of Leeds may have solved a key puzzle about how objects from space could have kindled life on Earth.

While it is generally accepted that some important ingredients for life came from meteorites bombarding the early Earth, scientists have not been able to explain how that inanimate rock transformed into the building blocks of life.

This new study shows how a chemical, similar to one now found in all living cells and vital for generating the energy that makes something alive, could have been created when meteorites containing phosphorus minerals landed in hot, acidic pools of liquids around volcanoes, which were likely to have been common across the early Earth.

“The mystery of how living organisms sprung out of lifeless rock has long puzzled scientists, but we think that the unusual phosphorus chemicals we found could be a precursor to the batteries that now power all life on Earth. But the fact that it developed simply, in conditions similar to the early Earth, suggests this could be the missing link between geology and biology,” said Dr Terry Kee, from the University’s School of Chemistry, who led the research. […]

“Chemical life would have been the intermediary step between inorganic rock and the very first living biological cell. You could think of chemical life as a machine –a robot, for example, is capable of moving and reacting to surroundings, but it is not alive. With the aid of these primitive batteries, chemicals became organised in such a way as to be capable of more complex behaviour and would have eventually developed into the living biological structures we see today,” said Dr Terry Kee.

{ University of Leeds | Continue reading }

“GB” is a 28 year old man with a curious condition: his optic nerves are in the wrong place.

Most people have an optic chiasm, a crossroads where half of the signals from each eye cross over the midline, in such a way that each half of the brain gets information from one side of space. GB, however, was born with achiasma – the absence of this crossover. It’s an extremely rare disorder in humans, although it’s more common in some breeds of animals, such as Belgian sheepdogs. […]

In the absence of a left-right crossover, all of the signals from GB’s left eye end up in his left visual cortex, and vice versa. But the question was, how does the brain make sense of it? Normally, remember, each half of the cortex corresponds to half our visual field. But in GB’s brain, each half has to cope with the whole visual field – twice as much space (even though it’s getting no more signals than normal.)

{ Neuroskeptic | Continue reading }

Sophocles is sometimes credited with having introduced the idea that, in the theatre, spectators should be able to identify with the characters. Two thousand years later, Shakespeare went further and suggested how we might also identify with the actors. “All the world’s a stage,” says Jaques in As You Like It, “And all the men and women merely players.” But it was not until 1959 that the dramaturgical metaphor for human life was theorised fully in sociologist Erving Goffman’s seminal The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. […]

Whenever we are with others we are always “performing”, trying to control how we appear to them, consciously or otherwise. […]

Most things change according to their situation and each variant reveals another aspect of their entireties. To say we are only ourselves in one kind of situation is as nonsensical as saying water is only itself when liquid, and that steam and ice are just performances. […]

If you resort to humour when you’re hurt, for instance, someone could comment that you are “wearing a mask”. But it might be a coping strategy. […] Rather than worry about whether you’re being “real”, it might be more helpful to ask more specific questions, such as whether a coping strategy is working or not.

{ FT | Continue reading }

related:

Why do we sigh?

Does it help regulate my breathing when I’m stressed? Is it a subconscious action I do to express to those around me that I’m anxious or upset? Perhaps a mental reset button, so to speak?

In fact, it may be a combination of all three.

In a series of studies, Teigen and colleagues at University of Oslo explored the context in which people sigh—when are people doing it, and how is it perceived by others?

{ Gaines, on Brains | Continue reading }

photo { Mario Torres }

{ Why People in Cities Walk Fast }

photos { Beth Chucker | Collection Brad Feuerhelm }

With human decisions come human biases, even in situations that demand objectivity. For example, crimes involving more victims can sometimes receive lesser punishments, an outcome known as the “identifiable victim effect.”  With more victims, each one becomes less identifiable, and this elicits less sympathy for the victims and a corresponding punishment that’s less severe.

A new study by a group of Tilburg University psychologists lays out another bias that can creep into evaluations of wrongdoing. In a series of six experiments the researchers found evidence for the “insured victim effect” — the tendency for perpetrators to be judged differently if the losses they cause are covered by insurance.

{ peer-reviewed by my neurons | Continue reading }

art { Jean-Michel Basquiat, Untitled, 1980 }

{ A Collection of Human Brains from the Texas State Mental Hospital }

Last week I discussed a way of preserving bodies almost indefinitely in some cases: embalming. On the other side of this is decay, the process of bodily decline and biological breakdown of the flesh. If you’ve ever watched any of the forensics crime shows, you know that understanding decay and changes in the body can be a key factor in determining when the individual died and how the body was treated after death. But it’s also important for archaeologists dealing with remains that are ancient.

First, let’s look at the early stages of decay. […] The first stage consists of the ‘mortis‘ phases. The blood isn’t being pumped through the body so due to gravity it pools in certain areas, and this is known as livor mortis. Shortly after this, the muscular tissue becomes rigid and incapable of relaxing, a state called rigor mortis. Next the body loses heat and cools in a process called algor mortis. Second, the body goes through bloat, in which means that microbes are rapidly growing and forming gases within the body. […]

Bones are also subject to continued decay, the study of which is known as taphonomy and is extremely important for archaeologists.

{ Bones Don’t Lie | Continue reading }

photo { Bobby Doherty }

Take a container of mixed nuts, shake it and examine the contents. The chances are that the largest nuts, Brazil nuts for example, have risen to the top.

This phenomenon is called the Brazil nut effect and is known to depend on a number of factors, such as the container size and shape as well as the frequency and amplitude of the shaking. However, the general idea is that the shaking process creates voids that smaller, but not larger, particles can drop in to. […]

Carsten Guttler [et al.] have performed standard Brazil nut effect experiments […] on an A300 Airbus flying parabolic arcs to simulate gravitational forces on the Moon and on Mars.

{ The Physics arXiv Blog | Continue reading }

Gerald Crabtree, a neurobiologist at Stanford University, states that intelligent human behavior requires between 2,000 and 5,000 genes to work together. A mutation or other fault in any of these genes, and some kind of intellectual deficiency results. Before the creation of complex societies, humans suffering from these mutations would have died. But modern societies may have allowed the more intelligent to care for the less intelligent. While anyone who had participated in a group project understands this phenomena, it doesn’t explain why IQ and other tests have consistently risen, and why people with high scores on those tests still do stupid things.

{ United Academics | Continue reading }

photo { via Bill Sullivan }

Around 1 in 7,500 otherwise healthy people are born with no sense of smell, a condition known as isolated congenital anosmia (ICA). So dominant are sight and hearing to our lives, you might think this lack of smell would be fairly inconsequential. In fact, a study of individuals with ICA published last year showed just how important smell is to humans. Compared with controls, the people with ICA were more insecure in their relationships, more prone to depression and to household accidents.

{ BPS | Continue reading }

photo { Francesca Woodman, Self-portrait talking to Vince, Providence, RI (RISD), 1975-78 }

A new form of corpse treatment has also been developed: freeze-drying or lyophilization. In freeze-drying the body of the deceased is cooled to -18° C. The frozen body is then immersed in a bath of liquid nitrogen. The frozen body then becomes very fragile. By then subjecting it to vibrations, the body falls apart into a kind of powder from which the moisture is then extracted by means of vacuum. A dry, odourless powder with a weight in the order of 25 to 30 kg eventually remains.

{ U.S. Patent Application/Improbable | Continue reading }

art { Cady Noland , Oozewald, 1989 }

Imagine you have a choice to make.
 
In one scenario, you’d get $8 and somebody else — a stranger – would get $8 too. In the other, you’d get $10; the stranger would get $12.
 
Economists typically assume you’d go for the $10/$12 option because of the belief that people try to maximize their own gains. Choosing the other scenario would just be irrational.
 
But new research conducted in collaboration with a professor at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management shows that if a person is feeling threatened, or concerned with their status, they are more likely to choose the option that gives them less. And although this choice might seem irrational from an economic perspective, this choice satisfies an important psychological need.
 
People who do this, “have a reason for their behaviour, and that reason is to protect themselves from low status,” described as a low position or rank in relation to others, says Prof. Geoffrey Leonardelli.

{ University of Toronto | Continue reading }

image { Tony Oursler }

Find the pattern for the following series of numbers:

8, 5, 4, 9, 1, 7, 6, 3, 2, 0

{ Solution }

We are swimming in a sea of good advice. Yet we often refuse to take it, and end up drowning.  In a series of clever experiments described in her new book Sidetracked Harvard social scientist, Francesca Gino has found that despite evidence from hundreds of studies over the past two decades showing our decisions greatly benefit from another pair of eyes, we routinely sabotage ourselves by refusing to take advice.

The question is why?

In one study, Gino and her colleagues discovered that making people feel powerful—even temporarily—[…] significantly reduced their willingness to use advice. […]

In another experiment, [they] made one group of people feel angry. […] Others were induced to feel gratitude. […] The gracious bunch proved three times more likely than the mad men and women to accept advice.

{ Psychology Today | Continue reading }

The “Foot-in-the-door” (FITD) is a compliance technique that consists of making a small initial request to a participant, then making a second, more onerous request. In this way greater compliance with the second request is obtained than under a control condition where the focal request is not preceded by the initial request. Most of the studies using this paradigm have tested prosocial requests. So the generalization of this compliance technique to other types of requests remains an open question.

The authors carried out two experiments in which the FITD effect on deviant behaviors was tested. Results showed that the FITD technique increased compliance with the focal request, but only among male participants.

{ Taylor & Francis }

quote { George Santayana, Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies (1922); often misattributed to Plato }

The capacity to deceive others is a complex mental skill that requires the ability to suppress truthful information. The polygraph is widely used in countries such as the USA to detect deception. However, little is known about the effects of emotional processes (such as the fear of being found guilty despite being innocent) on the physiological responses that are used to detect lies. The aim of this study was to investigate the time course and neural correlates of untruthful behavior by analyzing electrocortical indexes in response to visually presented neutral and affective questions. […]

The ERP data [An event-related potential (ERP) is the measured brain response that is the direct result of a specific sensory, cognitive, or motor event] show the existence of a reliable neural marker of lying in the form of an increased amplitude of the N400 component (which likely indexes conscious control processing) in frontal and prefrontal regions of the left hemisphere between 300 and 400 ms post-stimulus. Importantly, this marker was observed to be independent of the affective value of the question.

{ PLoS | Continue reading }

photo { Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin }