Casual Fridays
dmunger | September 8, 2006We've recently seen a fascinating study on music preference: What causes people to prefer certain songs to others? Why do some of us love Jewel but others think she's a bad poet and a worse singer?
We're planning on writing up the results of that study for Cognitive Daily next week, but in the meantime, we thought we'd see if we could find rhyme or reason to the musical preferences of our own readers. In that spirit, this week's study will ask you to rate three different, short musical clips.
This week's study is a bit of a risk -- we may not be able to duplicate the controlled environment or…
dmunger | September 4, 2006It's Labor Day, the kids are home from school, and Greta has to work (why is it that only professors and manual laborers work on Labor Day?), so I hope you're not expecting to see much serious thinking on CogDaily today.
However, I did promise that I'd share some of the more interesting responses to last week's Casual Fridays study, so here goes. Participants were asked to listen to snippets from two hard-to-understand songs, then indicate what they thought the words were.
Respondents were most successful with the snippet from the Talking Heads' "Burning Down the House." The actual lyric was…
dmunger | September 1, 2006The results are in for last week's Casual Fridays study, and the findings are ... uncertain. The task was to try to parse out the lyrics of two songs. The first came from the American TV show "So You Think You Can Dance." If you didn't get a chance to participate in the study, you can listen to it now:
This show is one of our family's guilty pleasures, but even though we watched the show every week, we still can't agree on the lyrics. Jim, Nora, and I think it's repeating the name of the show: "So you think you can dance." Greta insists that the male voice is singing "Shoo bee doo bee doo…
dmunger | August 25, 2006Have you missed Casual Fridays? Our travel schedule over the summer made it impossible for us to keep up with Casual Fridays, but for the 2006-07 school year, we'll be back each Friday with either a new study or the results from the previous week. There's no better time than the present to get started, so let's go:
The inspiration for this week's study came from a dispute among our family members while watching one of our "guilty pleasure" TV shows. Greta disagrees with the rest of the family on the lyrics of the show's theme song. Each of us is certain that the others must be mistaken in…
dmunger | May 12, 2006When our son Jim "graduated" from preschool, there was a very formal ceremony, complete with little caps and gowns. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your perspective), we had already planned a trip to Disneyworld for the same dates. Forced to choose between Disney and sitting through a scholarly ritual, for some reason little Jim chose the former. He didn't face a similar choice at the end of elementary school -- we all dutifully attended -- and the whole family will also attend his graduation from middle school at the end of the month.
I attended preschool as a child, but I don't…
dmunger | May 5, 2006Every year it seems there are more and more graduation ceremonies to attend. Not just high school and college, but middle school, and even elementary and pre-school ceremonies.
All this has made us wonder. Which of these ceremonies is really worth attending? Now we all have a chance to find out, because that's what we'll ask you in this week's Casual Fridays study.
Click here to participate.
As usual, the survey is brief -- just 5 questions, which should only take a minute of your time (we're cheating a bit this week, with three multi-part questions). You have until 11:59 p.m. Eastern time…
dmunger | May 5, 2006Last week, we asked Cognitive Daily readers to tell us what they believed was an acceptable excuse for two very different social gaffes. Here's the first scenario:
Suppose a co-worker insulted you during a meeting which involved your boss and several colleagues. The insult was audible to all, and caused you grave embarrassment.
And here's the second:
Suppose a friend calls you 15 minutes before to cancel a lunch meeting that had been planned for several days.
In each case, we provided the same eight excuses, and asked readers to tell us which were acceptable. We also asked readers to answer a…
dmunger | April 28, 2006When we are wronged, we expect the wrongdoer to apologize. But some apologies just don't seem to cut the muster. As a teacher, my least favorite excuse was always this one: "Can I have an extension on the assignment? I've got a really important assignment due in _______ class." If the other class is so important, what does that make my class -- chopped liver?
But clearly sometimes students -- and others -- do have acceptable excuses for their transgressions. Where do we draw the line? Today's Casual Fridays survey hopes to find out.
Click here to participate
As usual, the survey is brief --…
dmunger | April 28, 2006Last week's study generated plenty of interest: it was the fastest we've ever gotten 400 responses. The study was based on a claim by this web site that they could influence your thoughts with 98 percent accuracy using a simple math quiz. If you haven't tried it yet, unfortunately I'm going to spoil it for you right now: you're supposed to think of a red hammer.
We wanted to answer a few questions about the claim. First, 98 percent? Really? Having done a survey or two, I'd be impressed with a survey that could predict 98 percent of the responses to "what is 2 + 2?"
Second, to the extent that…
dmunger | April 21, 2006Cognitive Daily reader "Jokermage" pointed us to a web site which claimed that it could predict with 98 percent accuracy what site visitors would be thinking after a short quiz.
I tried the quiz, and indeed, the site appeared to "predict" my thoughts. But could it really do this with 98 percent accuracy? We've decided to see if we can replicate the process here. I've created two different quizzes, one which exactly replicates the original quiz, and another which is slightly different. So that we can divide participants into two roughly even groups, click on the appropriate link below:
Click…
dmunger | April 21, 2006Last week, we asked our readers a few questions about procrastination: how long it takes them to wake up on a typical morning, how close to the deadline they finish computing their taxes, and so on.
The basic question was, are there different types of procrastinators, or if you put off one type of activity, are you more likely to put off another? The results suggest there is some truth to both notions. Let's first look at the evidence that procrastination in one realm is associated procrastination in another. This chart compares sleep habits with tax preparation habits:
It does indeed…
dmunger | April 14, 2006When I was in college, I put off everything until the last possible instant: I got out of bed just moments before class started; I finished papers minutes before they were due. But I rarely actually missed a deadline for a paper. Now most of my deadlines aren't nearly as firm as they were in college -- if I really need more time to complete a project, I can usually reason with my client and get more time.
Just one deadline seems set in stone: the April 15 Income Tax deadline (though this year it's actually April 17, since the 15th is a weekend day). In fact, you can actually file for an…
dmunger | April 14, 2006Last week's Casual Friday study seemed like a great idea. Playing off the study we recently analyzed which revealed that the orientation of shapes could convey emotion, we thought we might be able to demonstrate a similar phenomenon with scenes.
Respondents were divided into three groups. Everyone saw the same three pictures, but each group saw them with a different amount of slant:
The first group saw the original, unaltered photos. The second group's photos were all slanted by 7 degrees. The third group's photos were slanted by 20 degrees. Each viewer rated each photo on a scale of 1 to…
dmunger | April 7, 2006Do pictures evoke similar emotions for you as they do for others? Now's your chance to find out. This week's Casual Fridays study is designed to determine whether the same pictures evoke the same emotions in different people. You'll first be asked your birth month, which is just a way to divide participants into roughly equal sized groups. Then you'll be asked to rate pictures on emotional scales. Come back next Friday to see the results!
Click here to participate.
As usual, you'll have until 11:59 p.m. on Tuesday, April 11, to participate (or until there are 400 responses, 150 more than…
dmunger | April 7, 2006This week's Casual Friday study was about the hearing loss problem associated with headphone use, and whether readers would adopt a technological solution to the problem. Eighty-one percent of our 133 respondents said that they own a portable music device (though the relatively low response rate suggests that perhaps some people who don't own such devices chose not to respond to the study) (from here on out, I'm going to refer to these devices as iPods, even though not everyone who has a portable music device has an iPod -- remember, it's casual!). Forty-nine percent of our respondents said…
dmunger | March 31, 2006With legendary guitarist Pete Townshend's recent public statement that studio headphones have caused deafness, there's growing concern that iPods and other portable music devices might be destroying the ears of the children of the digital era.
We thought this might be a good time to find out how significant an issue this is to our readers, and how they're dealing with the problem. Would you make use of a technological solution?
Click here to participate.
As usual, you'll have until 11:59 Eastern Daylight Time on Wednesday, April 5 to respond -- or until we have 250 responses, whichever comes…
dmunger | March 31, 2006Last week we asked readers to answer some questions about how they managed their email. The results are in, and boy are they ... confusing. We're having trouble identifying any clear patterns at all in email management. First of all, let's get a sense of the scale of the problem. Here's how respondents' email use broke down:
Most respondents send and receive between 11 and 50 emails a day, and the vast majority -- 84 percent of respondents -- have non-spam email traffic of less than 50 per day. One respondent of the 251 who answered actually claims to send and receive over 1000 emails a…
dmunger | March 24, 2006One of my pet peeves is when I respond carefully to someone's email and they don't notice that I've addressed several points in one message. They seem to only read the first sentence or two and then move on.
This has made me curious as to how others handle important email messages to make sure their concerns are addressed. We've come up with a short set of questions to see if there are any commonalities about how people handle email. If there's anything we've left out, make sure you let us know in the comments!
As usual, the survey will only take a minute or so of your time. You have until 11…
dmunger | March 24, 2006We received quite a few complaints about last week's Casual Fridays study, most of them centered around our scientifically inaccurate eye exam. In our defense, the Snellen chart is only designed to be a rough measure of visual acuity. General practitioners use it as a first-pass to determine if patients should be referred to eye doctors or optometrists, who always use additional tests beyond the Snellen chart to determine prescriptions.
We're not prescribing eyeglasses, just trying to get a rough sense of respondents' vision. We thought giving a simple test would be easier than asking folks…
dmunger | March 17, 2006Our son Jim doesn't like wearing his glasses, so we got him contacts. Then we found out that he wasn't wearing his contacts, so about a month ago we made him start wearing his glasses again. Today at our parent-teacher-student conference, his English teacher remarked that today was the first time she had ever seen him wearing glasses. Apparently, he takes the glasses off as soon as he gets to the bus stop.
Since neither Greta nor I spend even a waking moment without our glasses, we were curious how much of the time other people wore glasses. Hence today's study. You will first be directed to…