November 24, 2009
Category: Research • Social • Video Games / Technology
Recently a woman had her sick leave benefits based on a diagnosis of clinical depression terminated because of a few pictures she posted on her Facebook page showing her smiling at a birthday party and enjoying a trip to the beach. Was this a fair assessment of her medical condition? Probably not--people with clinical depression can have moments of genuine joy or elation, and even sad people can fake a smile for a photo.
But regardless of whether a few photos posted online are sufficient evidence for a medical diagnosis, there is a larger question: Does a person's online persona match up to their real-world personality? Since most young people--and a growing number of older adults--maintain some sort of web or online social networking presence, it's important to know whether the digital world is a good representation of the real world.
It's becoming increasingly common to "meet" someone online before you encounter them in real life. In my experience, people I meet online are generally quite recognizable when I finally get together with them at a conference or physical meeting. But maybe I'm just lucky.
Max Weisbuch, Zorana Ivcevic, and Nalini Ambady asked 37 undergraduate volunteers to physically meet with another person and ask each other questions to try to get to know one and other. These brief meetings were videotaped, and, unbeknownst to the volunteers, the person they met with was not a real research participant, but one of six specially trained research assistants who took care to make sure that each volunteer was treated the same.
Immediately after the interview, the researchers obtained permission to download each volunteer's Facebook page. Then their interviewer rated them for likability, and three undergraduate research assistants from a different university rated the videotaped behavior for cues indicating non-verbal expressivity, and for "verbal disclosure"--how willing they were to disclose personal details. A different set of ten undergraduates from a different university rated the volunteers' Facebook pages for likability and expressivity, as well as the number of personal details revealed there.
The researchers found significant correlations between the behavior of the volunteers in person and online. "Liking" in person and online were moderately correlated (r = .33), as were verbal disclosure and online disclosure (r = .34). Non-verbal expressivity was also correlated with online expressivity (r = .41). But the relationship wasn't perfect. While online expressivity was strongly correlated with online liking (r = .61), there was no significant correlation between online expressivity and liking in person.
So a Facebook page really can say a lot about what a person is like in real life--up to a point. The researchers also point out that their study can't tell us much about the student's spontaneous online behavior. A Facebook page might have been carefully crafted over many hours, but other online interactions like tweets and status updates can be much more spur-of-the-moment. It's less clear whether this behavior is related to real-life spontaneity.
Weisbuch, M., Ivcevic, Z., & Ambady, N. (2009). On being liked on the web and in the "real world": Consistency in first impressions across personal webpages and spontaneous behavior Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 45 (3), 573-576 DOI: 10.1016/j.jesp.2008.12.009
Posted by Dave Munger at 4:19 PM • 7 Comments
November 20, 2009
Category: Casual Fridays
We received an astonishing number of responses to last week's Casual Fridays study, which claimed to be able to identify what makes a good writer in just a few minutes.
Of course, I wasn't actually very confident that a brief survey could actually identify the factors that make a good writer. But I did have a hunch that there were certain traits that were more likely to be associated with good writing.
Was there a trick to the study?
Some respondents had a hunch that writing wasn't the only thing we were interested in. You were right -- we were also studying a completely unrelated phenomenon -- more on that later.
But we did want to know about your writing as well, so let's start with that. The study asked a few questions about writing ability: how much writing you do for work/study, how easy writing comes to you, whether you've been published, and so on. Then there was a surprise writing test: 3 minutes to write as much as you can on any topic, to be judged for coherence but not content. Finally, a few more questions.
This week's study asked more of our readers than we usually do, so we expected that we wouldn't get as many responses as usual. We were wrong about that: over 1,400 responded to the survey, and over 800 wrote an essay response. The average response length was 133 words -- quite impressive for a three-minute time limit!
Many of the essays were skeptical that any human would actually read them, but I read every single one. I wanted to get a rough sense of the quality of the essays, so I assigned each a "grade." To get an A, you had to be coherent for the entire essay, and not switch topics. Just writing complete sentences and only switching topics once or twice earned a B. A semi-random string of sentences earned a C. Incoherent drivel got a D, or in rare cases, an F. These were converted to a 4-point grade scale (where A=4 and F=0). This graph shows the distribution of grades:
As you can see, B was by far the most common grade, with very few Ds and Fs. There were some great little stories, including several I wish the writers had had time to finish. Lots about babies and cats. But did the questions we asked shed any light on what makes a good writer?
Read on »
Posted by Dave Munger at 5:38 PM • 26 Comments
November 19, 2009
Category: Color perception • Face perception • Research
How does our visual system decide if something is a face? Some automated face-detecting software uses color as one cue that something is a face. For example Apple's iPhoto has no trouble determining that there are two faces in this color picture:
That's Nora in the back, and her cousin Ginger in front. In this picture, however, iPhoto can't identify a face:
That's a vintage black-and-white photo of Nora and Ginger's grandfather, but the computer can't find any faces in it. Do people, like computers, use color to help decide whether something they see is a face? Humans are excellent at identifying colors, and while faces can be many colors, there are also many colors that are very rarely seen in faces (e.g. blue, green, orange). Could we use skin-tones to help identify faces?
Markus Bindemann and Mike Burton created a set of images with faces placed in random locations, like this:
Read on »
Posted by Dave Munger at 3:43 PM • 6 Comments
November 17, 2009
Category: Research • Social
Who's more "sociable," men or women? Common sense says it's women, right? And many research studies back this impression up: Women are more interpersonal, more connected, more interdependent than men. Women are more likely to share intimate information with each other than men. But is that really the whole story?
There is also research suggesting that men have larger social networks than women do, and that male-male friendships last longer than female-female ones.
A team led by Joyce Benenson conducted a set of three studies that may shed some light on the question. In their first study, they identified 30 male and 30 female undergraduates at a small, Northeastern U.S. college. Half of each group was specifically recruited because they said they had some kind of conflict with their roommate. The other half said they were planning on living with their roommate for the rest of the school year. Each student was asked to rate their satisfaction with their roommate on a scale of 1 to 5. A score of 4 or 5 was defined by the researchers as "satisfied." So were there gender differences? Here are the results:
The male students were significantly more likely to be satisfied with their roommates than female students, whether or not they had a conflict with their roommate. The students also rated their roommates on social interaction, interests, values, and hygiene, and male students gave significantly higher ratings for their roommates than females for every category except hygiene.
In a second study, the researchers surveyed three separate institutions to see how frequently male and female students requested to change roommates. Here are those results:
Read on »
Posted by Dave Munger at 5:28 PM • 29 Comments
November 13, 2009
Category: Casual Fridays
Some people just seem to be natural writers -- they can write perfect, elegant sentences with a minimum of effort. Some popular fiction novelists crank out 6 or more novels per year. Some bloggers write 10 or more posts per day. Others labor over every word, or simply choose careers that don't require a lot of writing. But are there universal characteristics that separate good writers from bad writers, and quick writers from slow writers?
I think I may have come up with a quick study that can answer those questions -- and like all Casual Fridays studies, it can be completed in just a few minutes. With any luck, we may have some (non-scientific) insight into what makes a good writer -- or at least a quick one.
Click here to participate
As usual, the study is brief, with about 15 questions. It should take only a few minutes to complete. You have until Thursday, November 19 to complete your response. There is no limit on the number of respondents. Don't forget to come back next week for the results!
(Just a reminder: All Casual Fridays studies are non-scientific. This doesn't mean we can't use scientific principles to assess what's going on, but we can't make general claims based on the results)
Update (Nov. 19): I'm closing down the survey. An amazing 858 respondents completed the essay test. Now I'm going to "grade" it.
Posted by Dave Munger at 4:51 PM • 33 Comments
November 12, 2009
Category: Development / Aging • Research • Social
When we were getting ready to have our first child, I decided that I would quit my job, work out of home as a freelancer, and take care of our baby while Greta finished graduate school.
That worked well for about two years, but by the time Nora was born, we decided to hire a part-time nanny so I could finish a degree of my own. When Nora was one and Greta and I were starting new jobs in a new state, both kids entered full-time day care, and that was our child-care arrangement until they started kindergarten.
Naturally, at every step along the way, we wondered whether we were making the right parenting decisions. We liked their nanny and their day-care center, but wouldn't it be better for the kids to be cared for full-time by their own parents? At that time, there wasn't a whole lot of research pointing one way or another. The definitive child-care study can probably never be done: Families would have to be randomly assigned to day-care centers or parent care for years, and then the impact of the assignments wouldn't be known until the children reached adulthood. Even then, you wouldn't know if the effects were due to particular parenting or day-care practices, or to the day-care versus parent-care assignment.
Realistically, the next best thing you can do is to follow children from birth to adulthood, and see if kids who happened to have been placed in day care (or with nannies, or grandparents, or some other arrangement) ended up better- or worse-off than those cared for by their mothers. Indeed, such a study was launched by the National Institute of Child Health and Development in the early 1990s. The results have been gradually trickling in as the children in the study aged. The most recent installment, published in 2007, covers kids through the sixth grade.
The study follows over 1,000 children who were randomly selected on their day of birth from ten U.S. hospitals. Researchers checked in intermittently with the families over the next dozen years, assessing both their family situation and the child care provided. Then when the kids entered school, they tracked their progress, got teacher reports on their social behavior, and continued to monitor the quality of their parenting (in addition to whether the kids were in after-school care programs).
Read on »
Posted by Dave Munger at 5:31 PM • 18 Comments
November 11, 2009
Category: In other news
This week on SEED, I'm writing about Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS), a promising new way to treat clinical depression. Here's a snippet:
In DBS therapy, one or more electrodes the size of a spaghetti strand are precisely positioned in the patient's brain, then connected by wire around the skull and through the neck to a pacemaker-like device, a neurostimulator, just below the collarbone. The neurostimulator is activated and deactivated by a magnet that the patient carries, so if a tremor is beginning to become disruptive, DBS can be self-administered in an instant, with near-instantaneous results. A video provided by the manufacturer of a DBS device shows how it works in ideal cases.
Now new uses for the treatment are being tested. One observed side effect of DBS for Parkinson's is excessive happiness, to the point of uncontrollable elation--the sort of unhealthy, personality-changing reaction that everyone fears when they think of electrodes being implanted in their brain. Tuning the device can minimize this side effect, but its very existence suggests that DBS might be a useful therapy for clinical depression.
For more, read the whole article.
Also, in case you missed it, here are my picks for psychology and neuroscience from ResearchBlogging.org:
Posted by Dave Munger at 11:49 AM • 2 Comments
November 10, 2009
Category: Development / Aging • Reasoning • Research • Social
Take a look at this video from last night's episode of Jon Stewart's "The Daily Show."
If you'd like, you can skip past all the political snark to the 4:47 mark to watch Jon bring cognitive psychology into prime time (or at least latenight cable)! That's right; you saw it: Jon Stewart mentioned the psychological concept of "object permanence" on national TV. Object permanence was introduced by Jean Piaget as a way of measuring the growing cognitive ability of children. Three-month-olds don't have it; most 6-month-olds do. More recently, researchers have investigated similar milestones in animals. Parrots, it turns out, have object permanence, as do chimpanzees. Insects don't.
But what about higher-order cognitive functions? Do chimps understand that others have thoughts distinct from their own? Humans understand this around the age of 1, but the evidence is less clear with chimps. Some chimps will use gestures alone to beg for food from a blindfolded human. Does this mean they don't "know" the human can't see them? Perhaps not, but normally a chimp doesn't expect to communicate with a human. When two chimps are in two separate rooms, but can see into a third room where food is being hidden, the subordinate chimp will behave differently if she knows the dominant chimp saw the food being hidden. This suggests chimps do understand that other chimps have different thoughts from their own.
Read on »
Posted by Dave Munger at 5:09 PM • 5 Comments
November 5, 2009
Category: Art • Attention • Perception • Research • Social
Greta and I did our undergraduate studies at the University of Chicago, or as a commonly-sold T-shirt on campus put it, "where fun goes to die." To say that Chicago didn't emphasize academics over a social life is to deny that people literally lived in the library (a full-scale campsite was found behind one of the stairwells in the stacks; students had been living there for months). It's not that the administration didn't try to encourage its students to socialize. The library did close at 10 p.m. on Friday nights. There was not one but two film societies, so often students had to choose between, say, the Hitchcock fest at one theater and the Kurosawa marathon at the other.
Still, studying was the primary focus of campus life. There may have been five fraternities, but there were 30 coffee shops on campus. We didn't have "parties," we had "study breaks." But one thing we never managed to do while we were there was figure out what the most effective study break might be. When you're studying during nearly every free moment, what's the best way to clear up your mind and refocus yourself for the next round of studying?
One old idea that has re-emerged recently is called "attention restoration theory", or ART. William James actually discussed a similar concept in his 1892 psychology textbook. The idea that taking a walk in the woods can help you refocus your thoughts is at least as old as Immanuel Kant, and probably older. But how exactly does interacting with nature help focus attention? ART says that the natural world engages your attention in a bottom-up fashion, by features of the environment (e.g. a sunset, a beautiful tree). The artificial world demands active attention, to avoid getting hit by cars or to follow street signs. Since intellectual activities like studying or writing also demand the same kind of attention, taking a break in the artificial world doesn't really function like a rest.
Marc Berman, John Jonides, and Stephen Kaplan wanted to see if they could measure the effect of ART. They paid 38 student volunteers to do a backwards digit-span task. The volunteers were given sequences of 3 to 9 numeric digits and had to repeat them in reverse, so if the experimenter said "6-1-9" then the student would say "9-1-6". After 14 tests (two of each length), the students took an hour-long walk either through an arboretum, or through downtown Ann Arbor. Then the digit-span test was repeated. Did a walk through nature improve the digit-span score? Here are the results:
Read on »
Posted by Dave Munger at 4:20 PM • 10 Comments
November 4, 2009
Category: In other news
My SEED column this week focuses on artificial sweeteners. Can switching to artificial sweeteners help solve the obesity problem in the U.S.? Here's a snippet:
Saunders says an August report from the American Heart Association (AHA) made it quite clear that excessive sugar consumption is dangerous, and he argues that sugar should be seen as a toxic substance. But how much is too much? The new AHA guidelines suggest limiting added sugar to no more than half of discretionary calories--calories consumed after basic nutritional needs are met. For the average male, Saunders says, this works out to about 150 calories per day: one can of Coke, or one candy bar. No free refills.
Again, the answer seems obvious: Just switch to diet drinks. They taste about the same, but with no sugar and no calories. Not so fast, says BikeMonkey, an anonymous biomedical researcher and former bike racer who blogs at DrugMonkey. BikeMonkey cites a 2008 study published in Behavioral Neuroscience where rats were given either sugar-sweetened or artificially sweetened yogurt in addition to their usual diet of rat chow. The rats who ate artificial sweeteners gained significantly more weight over five weeks than the rats who had sugar-sweetened yogurt.
There's much more to it than that, though. Click here to read the whole thing.
Also, in case you missed them, here are my picks for psychology and neuroscience posts from ResearchBlogging.org:
Posted by Dave Munger at 12:34 PM • 8 Comments
Cognitive Daily reports nearly every day on fascinating peer-reviewed developments in cognition from the most respected scientists in the field.
