Casual Fridays

Casual Fridays: Inside EVERYONE's studio of curse words

dmunger — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 16:04:16 +0000

Casual Fridays: Inside EVERYONE's studio of curse words

For last week's Casual Fridays study we asked respondents to answer James Lipton's famous ten questions from Inside the Actor's Studio. In case you've never seen the show, here are the questions:

What is your favorite word?
What is your least favorite word?
What turns you on?
What turns you off?
What sound or noise do you love?
What sound or noise do you hate?
What is your favorite curse word?
What profession other than your own would you like to attempt?
What profession would you not like to do?
If Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates?

What we wanted to know is if we could identify any recognizable patterns in the answers. Are responses completely random, or do characteristics like age, gender, occupation, and so on, have an effect?

The short answer is "no" -- they don't have much of an effect at all. There was an incredible amount of variety in the responses. Out of 509 respondents, the most popular word, "Love" was the favorite of just 10 -- less than 2 percent of responses. There was a little more regularity with least favorite words. Topping the list was "cunt," with 24 picking it as their least favorite. But still, this represents less than 5 percent of all responses. The next four "least favorite" words were moist (20 respondents), no (16), hate (11) and fart (7). One unexpected word that garnered a large favorable response was onomatopoeia, chosen by 5 respondents as their most favorite word -- the fourth most popular word, in a tie with "thanks" and "awesome." Two respondents each chose some exceptionally unusual words: defenestrate, schadenfreude, and discombobulate. Overall, 39 words were chosen more than once as favorites, representing 115 individuals. This means nearly 400 people chose completely unique words as their favorites.

But of course, you're probably most interested in our respondents favorite curse words. Fair warning: the language gets a lot more graphic from here on out, so don't click through if you don't want to see it.

This graph shows the most popular curse words among our respondents:

As you can see, "Fuck" dominates the list of favorite curse words, with 167. If you include all forms of the word (motherfucker, fuck nuts, Jesus fuck, and so on), the count increases to 219, nearly half of all responses.

Despite the dominance of "fuck," there really wasn't much of a pattern in its usage. There was no significant difference in usage between men and women. Older people were only slightly less likely to use it, as were those who professed a religious belief.

A few respondents self-censored their responses, saying "f*ck" or "f***" instead of "fuck," but once again, there was no pattern in the use of censorship. Even religious believers didn't censor the word more than non-believers.

One interesting comparison we can make is between this study and our curse-word study from 2007, where we asked people to rate 11 words for offensiveness. Here are some of those results:

So how did our results compare? Interestingly, just three of the words from our 2007 study were chosen as anyone's favorite curse word: fuck, cunt, and bitch. Why? If I had to guess, I'd say that people don't choose truly offensive words as their favorites -- thus eliminating nigger and fag. Similarly, relatively inoffensive words like gay, penis, suck, and vagina, were also not chosen. People want their curse words to have some bite to them, just not too much. Arguably, "cunt" might cross the line into true offensiveness, but note that women find the word significantly more offensive than men -- and 17 of the 22 respondents who picked cunt as their favorite curse word were indeed men.

You might also be interested in some of the other top responses. This table gives a snapshot:

For more of the results, you can check out the complete responses here. (Note that the total number of responses doesn't match because we filtered out blank responses, and the survey is still open, so that number is constantly changing)

The final question on our study asked respondents if they had ever been in a play, movie, TV show or other dramatic production. In fact, the responses were almost perfectly divided, with 49.5 percent of respondents answering yes. But do actors respond to the Actor's Studio questions any differently than non-actors? Not in any way we could measure.

(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)

dmunger Fri, 12/11/2009 - 11:04

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The moist would strike as a curious choice for less favorite word taking into account it doesn't seem to have any particular meaning or idiosyncrasy. I do believe, however, that like the "Jedi" religion phenomenon in the UK, this "moist" phenomenon might be related to the TV series How I met your mother. Do you think it might?

One thing I didn't get a chance to comment on last week is that your phrasing for question 3 is a bit different from Lipton's. He usually says "What turns you on, excites you, inspires you?" I think leaving off the last four words resulted in different answers than you would have gotten otherwise.

Interesting outcome in the profession section: You either love to be a teacher or hate to become one; same applies to nurses. Thank you for the experiment which I enjoyed allot!

The choice of moist might also come from Dr. Horrible's Singalong Blog, which has a character called Moist. In the commentary he sings a song called "Nobody Wants to Be Moist".

I think there are two separate reasons people picked favorite words, meaning vs. sound. For example, I would guess that people pick things like "thanks" for what they mean, but "onomatopoeia" for how it sounds.

Dave - are you planning to analyze the responses to the other questions at some point in the future?

Back in the day (like 2002), thespark.com had a gender test that claimed it could predict your gender on a few questions-and I vaugely remember a pivotal question was which was dirtier or worse-- moist or used. I tried to refresh my memory, but the test which has since been removed, since sparknotes caters to a slightly younger crowd now. But here's an archived webpage of the front of the test.

I independently noticed that many women found the word moist offensive when I was having a conversation in college. After that, I did a mini study where I asked a whole bunch of my male and female friends to list a few of their least favorite words. "Moist" was on many of the women's lists but none of the men's. Their negative opinion of it seemed to be because of it's relation to sexual lubrication.

Maybe Dave will break-out percentages for us so we can see if my informal observation holds with larger numbers of respondents.

I found it interesting that my top work choice is #1 overall (& my job for which I have a degree, but have never done, Teaching, is #2) & Accountant was my least favorite job choice & that's #2. Makes me rather average. Naturally, I told my mom & she said "but the other people don't have your writing skills." Gotta love the "unbiased" motherly opinions!

RE: One interesting comparison we can make is between this study and our curse-word study from 2007, where we asked people to rate 11 words for offensiveness. Here are some of those results ... Arguably, "cunt" might cross the line into true offensiveness, but note that women find the word significantly more offensive than men ..."

Although it's not absolutely clear from the data as you present it, there may be a problem with your conclusion that "... women find the word significantly more offensive ...". If you have a look, women found every word in your chart more offensive than men, probably indicating more women responded.

Interesting that so many people chose "writer" as the job they'd most like to try. It's rather unspecific, the word "writer". Do they mean journalist (although that's there as a separate category)? Novelist? Writer of non-fiction books? Movie reviewer? Technical writer? Advertising copywriter?

If, as I suspect, most respondents were thinking "novelist", I wonder if they have thought about what that work would actually involve. Not being published, but sitting down alone with pen or word processor and cranking out a publishable work of, say, 75k words. I suspect that few have the patience/obsessiveness for it.

Regarding the word "moist," I recall that there is a phenomenon regarding certain words being distasteful to some people. I heard about it on the show "A Way With Words," in which they talked about how for some people there are a few words, like "moist," which light up the brain like curse words do. It has to do with the sound of the word. I'd add the link here, but my network at work filters out sites with streaming audio.

Where I used to work about 8 years ago, we were discussing words we didn't like, and one of my coworkers stated she didn't like the words moist and retard. This was way before the TV show/video stream you are talking about. I think the dislike of the word 'moist' predates and perhaps inspired the television phenomenon you mention.

This was an intriguing study that yielded interesting facts. I know several individuals (all women) who despise the word "moist." When asked, they cannot explain their disdain. I feel that this may describe a personal sensation and/or (private) charactersitic of women, in which they reserve for intimate environments. As for males, we have no qualms about expressing our sexual characteristics in an open forum. Just a thought...

and what about the last question? Judging from the respondents religious orientation I would think there would be some very enlightening answers.

@GN (10) "If you have a look, women found every word in your chart more offensive than men, probably indicating more women responded." No, the values on the chart are (mean) ratings therefore higher bars indicate females gave higher mean ratings, not that there were more female respondents.

A fascinating website that I just discovered! In the occupations quiz, it was interesting to see my jobs listed as number 1 and 2. I have worked as a copywriter for a catalog company and as a teacher and tutor. All of these were enjoyable and fun.

Casual Fridays: Inside EVERYONE's Studio

dmunger — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 10:52:17 +0000

Casual Fridays: Inside EVERYONE's Studio

At the end of every episode of Inside the Actor's Studio, interviewer James Lipton asks his celebrity guests the exact same 10 questions, most notably, "What's your favorite curse word?"

But why should celebrities have all the fun? We thought it would be neat to ask the same set of questions to our readers -- and then see if we can find interesting, statistically significant patterns. Does age affect the responses? Gender? Your chosen profession?

Also, we're going to try something a little different this week. After you respond, you'll be able to check out the responses of others. While we aren't collecting any identifying information with this survey, just be aware that others will be able to view your responses.

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, December 10 to complete your response. There is no limit on the number of respondents. Don't forget to come back next week for our analysis of the results!

dmunger Fri, 12/04/2009 - 05:52

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I object! How come I couldn't put in multiple words, but others could!?

The survey site doesn't count words, just characters. So you get an error message if you type too many characters, but technically you can still type more than one word.

It would have been nice to have a third choice for working on the crew of a play/movie/whatever. I wouldn't consider this being "in" the performance, but merits more than just saying no.

in one of the answers, for a sound you don't like i read "a fork against a plate"...

here's the case:

Once i was in some place, and i heard a sqweeching (or whatever) sound of a fork against a plate or a similar sound (those ones which give you goosebumps. nothing happened.

but a few seconds later, when i realised what produced the sound i felt the "goosebumps", what could be the reason for the "delay" in the feeling? the stimuli/reaction in different time/space?

I'd like to get something if you could tellme, there you have my email address.

thank you!

I answered some of the questions, the ones about favorite or least favorite words, in my native language (swedish), i hope that doesn't befuddle your statistics...

nearly 75% agnostic/atheist rate for respondents... interesting! Gooooooo secular humanism!

Casual Fridays: What makes a good writer, and what motivates them?

dmunger — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 16:38:14 +0000

Casual Fridays: What makes a good writer, and what motivates them?

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?

For the most part, it confirmed what you might expect. People who said they were good writers were more likely to write better essays. People who said writing came easy to them tended to write more. People who wrote more for work or study also wrote more in our test:

We asked respondents to estimate how much serious writing they did each week, whether for work or for study. This graph plots the number of pages they said they wrote against what they actually wrote in our test. As you can see, people who write more for work/study also tended to write more here, and the correlation was significant.

If English wasn't your native language, or if you don't keep a blog, or if you weren't participating in NaNoWriMo, you were likely to write less and get a lower grade on your writing. People who had read a novel more recently tended to write more (although there was no correlation between reading recently and the grade received). If you type faster, you were likely to write longer and get a better grade.

These, of course, are all just correlations. We can't say whether any of these things cause you to be a better writer, or whether the reverse is true. You could, for example, have been motivated to learn to type by your interest and writing ability.

So, what's the catch?
As I mentioned, there was one additional twist to this study--a genuine experiment. It was motivated by the fact that my family participated in the Arbitron Radio ratings this past week. It's quite a bit of work to do--every member of the family has to record every single radio station they listen to for an entire week. So how does Arbitron get people to do it? They use several tricks. They send a couple dollars with each family member's diary. They call several times to make sure you received their materials. But one thing I noticed is that at the end of every call, the interviewer was always sure to ask "can I count on you to return your surveys?" I wondered if that language could be used to motivate people to write.

So in our study, we divided respondents into three groups. Before they started their essays, everyone received the same instructions:

The next part of the study is a brief writing test. It will require you to be totally focused on your writing, but it only takes three minutes.

But one group was specifically asked "Can we count on you to devote your full attention to this section?", one was asked "will you do it?", and one group was asked no question at all, and instead proceeded directly to the essay test. Did people write more based on the question they were asked? Here are the results:

Those who were asked specifically about whether they would write were significantly more likely to actually complete the essay, and they wrote significantly longer essays. However, there was no significant difference in the results based on the question asked -- while more people completed the essay after being asked "can we count on you" rather than "will you do it," this difference wasn't statistically significant. What about writing quality? Here are those results:

This time, there was no significant difference in grades between the three groups. But that means that there was also no speed-accuracy trade-off. Even though those who were asked whether they would respond wrote more, their quality wasn't any worse than those who weren't asked. Even though writing is a difficult and painful activity for many, just asking them if they will do it actually motivates people to write more.

I have to say, some of the writing produced for this test was very entertaining. Unfortunately, a lot of it is personal and there may be copyright issues, so I'm not going to share any of it with you. This was a fascinating study, and well-worth the time it took me to grade.

dmunger Fri, 11/20/2009 - 11:38

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Hmm...babies and cats. Are there any correlations between good writers and topics?

I wrote about Warren Buffett because I had him on my TV before I started.

You also asked at the end if we'd noticed any typos. What was that about?

I'd be interested to find out about the general topics chosen, for instance how many were about babies, cats, personal, about the test itself, or about some really random topic.

Uh. My essay consisted entirely of babies and cats (with sleep playing a somewhat minor role.) I can't imagine that so many others did as well? Seriously?!? If so, then I am now more curious than ever to see what others wrote!

I second the idea to do an overview on the subjects chosen.

Chris,

As I was making the survey I noticed a couple typos. Then I decided to leave them in! I was curious if people who caught more typos would be better (or worse) writers than others. There was no correlation between how many typos writers caught and how much they wrote, or their grade.

Beck/Steve:

I'm not sure I have the wherewithal to go through all those essays again... we'll see. There were definitely quite a few essays about writing -- no doubt, that was number one. But babies and cats were a close second.

I vaguely remember what I wrote about, but could not tell you whether, in my own opinion, I would have judged it to have remained on one topic or split into two. If memory serves, which it often does not, I would call it one topic but would suspect that many people would consider it two.

But that is neither here nor there. My main question at this point (I'd love to know what "grade" I got, but given the above, I'm not that concerned) is: how many words was my essay?

I know this was not a genuine experiment, and cannot thus be expected to have been run by an IRB (was it?) nor to have a formal and personal debriefing... but is there any way for participants to find out where they fell on your distribution? (And, as a completely separate question--what are the ethical constraints of blog experiments? Should we hold these trivial (but fun, and IMHO very worthwhile) experiments to something approaching the same ethical standards to which we hold "real" experiments?)

Hah. I wrote about writer's block. I didn't notice any typos. AND I was one of the "can I count on you?" folk, so I thought the trick to the survey was seeing if you could ignore the minute countdown, or whether it distracted you. Too bad about not being able to share the essays--that would be fun!

Oh professor, if you are going to read and grade all writing assignments, we demand our grade! We also demand individual responses about whether we have what it takes to be a good writer.

I'd say just go ahead and publish the essays. Copyright lawyers need more work. I pledge to contribute to your legal defense fund.

Seriously, great project.

I knew someone would ask for their grade.......Thanks for the results-very intersting and I'm glad I participated

I wish I copied down my essay to see how many words I wrote and to try and determine my grade. Arg, I want to know!

I'm not at all surprised that people want to know their grade. I'm one of them (though based on the criteria listed, I'm pretty sure I got an A). The sad thing is how our education system causes us to be so concerned about the grade (even decades out of school). That's just one of many reasons I homeschool my kids!

Thanks for the (significant) effort that you put into this. Good read.

Percentage graphs should never be zoomed in. It looks like you are trying to manipulate implied results when you exaggerate the graph like that.

Other than that, cool study.

I enjoyed doing this. I did wonder what the extra research would be: never trust a psychologist to be testing you on what s/he says s/he is testing you on!

I think I was one of the no-prompt writers. It didn't occur to me not to write for three minutes having come that far.

I'm a bit disappointed that we know how well we write. A small part of me always hopes that I am actually doing better than I know I am.

I was happy to take part in this study. Thanks for the thorough analysis. I'd say that the most important thing in writing is just... starting to write. Thus a good incentive must be provided to motivate the writer-to-be. (i had the question "can we count on you..?", very good motivator!)

This is why nanowrimo is good, this is why writing with friends is good. Word count, quality writing and being a non-native english writer come after :)

I was curious about the essays, who has written the best and what were the topics chosen?how serious they were really?

I wrote about the TV show Lost because I was watching it on TV at the time. I attempted to explain a particularly tricky piece of non-linear storytelling and found it exceedingly difficult to explain it coherently (if you've ever tried to explain the show to someone who doesn't watch it, I'm sure you know what I mean). I wonder if that affected my grade... :)

re. typos: i do a bit of editing for work (scientists are not on the whole coherent writers) so i try to be alert to typos in those situations. But, in this situation typos were irrelevant; at the time, i couldn't say whether i saw any or not because they were inconsequential to my reading and understanding of the writing - it hs bn shwn tht yu cn ndrstnd txt wth mst vwls rmovd wth lttl dffclty - the mind sees what it needs to see and can fill in what is expected but absent.
for me, anyone who would be looking for typos or who, especially, would write in to point them out in a blog, or other, informal piece is no lover of language, merely self-absorbed and incapable of finding any relevant comment to make.
i would hope i am not alone in this opinion, so any attempt to find a relationship between quality of writing and an eye for error would be meaningless unless you specifically requested it and incorporated a time element into the search for them.
in all, i loved the exercise/experiment but being a 2-finger typist i kept checking the clock, fumbling over the keyboard and trying to chase my thought train.
cheers.

I was not well on that particular Casual Friday. Can I get my grade bumped up? I have a doc's cert.

Another statistic it would be interesting to see has to do with your comment about stories that you wish had been finished. It seems to me that a really competent writer should be able to judge how much writing he can do in 3 minutes and come up with a topic/theme/whatever that he could actually finish in the required time. Alternatively, he could watch the clock and when it was down to the last 10-15 seconds, round things out with an well-chosen sentence. About 20 years ago, I took some time off to write the Great American Novel and what killed me was getting bogged down in planning, outlining, and worrying about how to make everything fit together perfectly. I think that the ability to plan writing quickly and well is a critically important part of good writing, and I wonder if that was reflected in some way in this little study.

That's interesting, i thought participating it for fun.
but yes.. can't help but to return here again to see
if there is my grade ever published.

Great job..

That's pretty cool. I had no idea what to write about, so I just talked about what my roommates and I had been discussing a few minutes earlier.

But the importance of language choice actually reminds me of something I stumbled upon last week. This guy experimented with various degrees of forcefulness in telling readers about his Twitter page, and found a similar result.
http://dustincurtis.com/you_should_follow_me_on_twitter.html

>I'm a bit disappointed that we know how well we write. A small part of me always hopes that I am actually doing better than I know I am.

This comment made me curious. Did you check whether gender mattered here? ie Did women underrate their abilities, and/or men overrate?

I didn't see this last week, or I would have joined in. Sounds fun.

To the folks who wish they could see their 'grade': This is one person's opinion of your writing. He may grade you higher or lower than someone else would. He's already told you that most of you grade yourselves accurately. Relax, and enjoy your writing...

Such a great study! So glad I participated and look forward to reading more from you. Great way to bring me back to your website!

I wrote about the topic I am writing my thesis about - mental health parity law. I have no idea how much I wrote because I paid no attention to the clock and only happened to notice that it had run out.

Pretty cool survey, though. My favorite I have participated in so far. The curious part of me definitely wants to know what other people wrote about and read some stories, but I understand that ethical considerations. Though we did not give any kind of informed consent, I think many of us would consider confidentiality to be implied to some extent.

For what it's worth, I give my permission to share my written response with anybody you want, so long as I am given credit for it and it is not used for profit.

Is it too much to ask what was my grade and etc? Maybe. I was the one who wrote about writing and how I didn't know what to write about. I bet I wasn't the only one to do so. A bit selfish of me to just come here and ask for my grade, I guess. But can I count on you?

I wonder how this fits in with the Hemingway maxim that "the first draft of anything is shit"?

Casual Fridays: What makes a good writer?

dmunger — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 15:51:24 +0000

Casual Fridays: What makes a good writer?

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!

Update (Nov. 19): I'm closing down the survey. An amazing 858 respondents completed the essay test. Now I'm going to "grade" it.

dmunger Fri, 11/13/2009 - 10:51

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Ah, but I don't believe you can separate the writing from the context.. what is 'good writing' in one place or time can be disastrous in another. I wonder how you assess that part... i mean it's easy enough to measure how much people write or how easy they find it, but quality is related to context. Good writing in a novel might be bad writing in a weather forecast, good blogging might be a bad technical report, a scientific paper might not be the thing to send home to your mum at christmas, she might rather have a card. The best writers are those who write appropriately.. not who write the most, or the fastest, or even necessarily those with the best wit or rhythm or pace, just the people who have the right words in the exact right place.

It might be worth noticing that some people probably have no idea what their writing speed is. I am one such person, and I answered based on the sample I had written myself a while before with a little boost because I knew I weren't at my fastest. Still, I have no idea how accurate that answer was.

I wasn't sure on what you meant with the typo question - I answered based on my estimate of how many typos I fixed during my writing session, but I wasn't sure because it wasn't something I was paying attention to. I was also a bit unclear on what constituted a typo - since I use a mac, spelling errors are automatically highlighted even within a web browser, so there are spelling errors, and then there are times when I mistype a word that I know how to spell.

I am looking forward to your results and analysis. I don't know exactly why, but I am extremely curious!

It's a long time since I've tried automatic writing.

Presumably the question where we estimate our own writing speed is to check how accurate the estimate is. People tend to think they read a lot faster than they do (and untrained readers tend to read at about the same speed they speak) so maybe something similar operates with writing.

Teiana,

Good writers know that starting a comment with "ah" sounds extremely arrogant, and will prepare the reader for pretentious rehashing of cliches or vapid descriptions of the obvious.

I just thought that would be good advice.

I spent most of my time in the writing sample part fighting with my husband, who chose that very moment to start being very distracting ^^; Yeay for unpredictable testing environments!

I am a meticulous grammar nazi and I feel ashamed I did not pick out any typos.

Interesting topic, by the way. I have some thoughts about it, but I think I'll wait until after you release the findings before I write about them.

Hi,
I just completed the survey. I shall wait for the results. Writing has been a biggest challenge for me in recent past and I am looking forward to some pointers from the next week's post.

Thank You,
Parimala Shankaraiah

Parimala,

I'm not sure how many actual writing pointers I'll include in the post next week, but I have given some writing tips here in the past:

How to report scientific research to a general audience.

OK, I want to know where I'll be able to read these three-minute novels.

A suggestion: could you get one or two people whom you know to be excellent writers to take your test, to serve as a calibration for the others? On the other side, it would probably be a good idea to get some truly execrable writers to serve as a calibration at the low end. It shouldn't be hard to find such people; almost any college freshman or Fox News reporter could serve admirably. ;-)

Some people just seem to be natural writers

That is largely pig excrement. There is actually very little difference in ability that is not due to tremendous amounts of practice. It's just like music - do you think Mozart got good because he had some magic Mozart gene? Well, if you do, you're ignorant. The writings of Mozart, his father, and their close associates all clearly show that his father made him practice as much as 60 hours a week, starting at the age of about four. That's what made him good - practice. Look into the life of any great writer - and you will invariably find they expended horrendous amounts of time practicing their craft.

"Type as much as possible"? I could hit a lot more random keys than I could type coherent English. And I was conflicted whether or not to go back. But I suspect that this is in fact all camouflage anyway :).

[And I agree with the note that many, including me, will have no idea of their typing speed.]

It would also be interesting to know how many test takers bailed out when getting to the writing part. I did -- it seemed too much of a hassle for a casual test. (I wonder in what direction us lazy people might skew results?)

Teiana,

Good writers know that starting a comment with "ah" sounds extremely arrogant, and [...]

Yes, we can all see you have certainly mastered the art of arrogance, and I am sure we will all learn from your most instructive example. Thank you, it was very kind.

(And on a side note, if you -- that is, the rest of you -- want to sound extremely arrogant right at the outset, you just can't beat "Sorry, but..." for an opening move.)

That was fun! I'd love to know what you were really looking for. I'm glad I'm subscribed to this blog so I'll get to see the results when they come out.

Stephen: It would have been fun to publish them somewhere... but I would feel a little guilty about it because I didn't ask anyone for copyright releases. Any thoughts on that?

Will you at least tell us if people relied on narrative to generate wordage? I am very curious as to the creative strategies of filling that box!
Thanks....

1. How much formal writing do you do as a part of your job / studies?

â¢ Do not include casual emails, texts, tweets, etc.
â¢ Do include blog posts, "official" emails, reports, stories, articles, proposals, and so on.

I'm a bit unclear about this question... what other sort of formal writing is there?

Hm, I figured the quickest way to generate was to write things like "If a potato is a potato then it is a potato potato" (and variations thereupon), so that's what I did. Did other people do similarly? Or does they not consider that "coherent"?

You didn't ask for permission for the short answers to the Fox and the Grapes quiz... Is there a standard length that you have to ask for permission? I'm curious to see how long these essays are now--not that it can be answered before Friday, but still. I would think they would still be pretty short.

I think my results were a little skewed because I am doi g this on my iPhone and it's a little hard to type on the little touchscreen keys. Had I known I was going to need to actually type quickly I would have done it on a real keyboard. And I do think some people are naturally better writers, practic aside. Practice is what separates fantastic writers from merely good ones.

At first I was simply curious about this topic, but now I'm second guessing the title itself. I was initially interpreting 'makes' as 'signifies' or 'indicates', but upon reading the other responses I see that most people interpreted it as 'creates' or 'produces'.
It's interesting in any case, but I'm amused at this immediate example of how difficult it is to communicate clearly.

I was a little drunk when I took the quiz; I wonder how that will skew your results?

I'd say you have a hit on your hands, Dave. Kudos, regardless of the results or revelations next week! By the by, since there was no audible clue of time running out, I'm wondering if one of your measures was how long folks kept going after the time limit? Not paying attention to the time might denote ease of or absorption in the task??? (And now you've invalidated one of my answers - yes, I now have responded to a blog posting!)

I am a terribly literal person--not literary. When I saw the question about reading I took it very literally, but I wondered if that was the right way to take it.

I read many books but most are non-fiction.

@LR: Oops. Now I realize that I misread the directions in the same way you did. The second instruction says "Do", not "Do not". I greatly underestimated how much I write. Sorry. (Evidently, I fail at reading.)

So, what does "good" mean?

Writing is an Art.ã What good Art is, has many different answers.ã Most
artists have their own notion of what Art should be to them.ã I have my idea.
ãFor me, Art begins when an artist perceives something special.ã If,
then, that artist is able to communicate that something special to a chosen audience,
in a chosen medium, then that is Art.ã

Applying that to writing, I hold that "good" writing is writing that expresses something
special to whomever the writer chooses.ã If the writer succeeds, that is good
writing.ã Polish does not make the difference between "good" writing and "not
good."ã Polish usually enhances the communication, and thereby enhances the
Art.ã Mark Twain was not recognized at first as a polished writer.ã
In fact, he was.ã He simply chose to write the way he did to communicate what
he communicated.ã That was "good" writing.

In the public domain is Robert Louis Stevensonâs "Essays in the Art of Writing."ã
For me, this is a great inspiration for the craft of writing.ã Bob gives "elegant"
writing a higher level of achievement from which to measure "good" writing. Perhaps
most would find his style out of style.ã [smiles]ã Such is Art.

We may now briefly enumerate the elements of style. We have, peculiar to the prose
writer, the task of keeping his phrases large, rhythmical, and pleasing to the ear,
without ever allowing them to fall into the strictly metrical: peculiar to the versifier,
the task of combining and contrasting his double, treble, and quadruple pattern, feet
and groups, logic and metre - harmonious in diversity: common to both, the task of
artfully combining the prime elements of language into phrases that shall be musical
in the mouth; the task of weaving their argument into a texture of committed phrases
and of rounded periods - but this particularly binding in the case of prose: and,
again common to both, the task of choosing apt, explicit, and communicative words.
We begin to see now what an intricate affair is any perfect passage; how many faculties,
whether of taste or pure reason, must be held upon the stretch to make it; and why,
when it is made, it should afford us so complete a pleasure. From the arrangement
of according letters, which is altogether arabesque and sensual, up to the architecture
of the elegant and pregnant sentence, which is a vigorous act of the pure intellect,
there is scarce a faculty in man but has been exercised. We need not wonder, then,
if perfect sentences are rare, and perfect pages rarer. --- Conclusion, Chapter One

http://cbiclubhouse.com/2008/12/free-ebook-robert-louis-stevenson-on-th…

Ã Hill

I wrote about the research my lab is doing so I could not write as fast as I am physically capable as I was thinking of what facts to include in what order. If I'd written a fictional narrative I probably could have written much faster. I also went back to correct typing errors.

I think it sounds very interesting, and I, for one, wouldn't care at all if you published my writing bit. Of course, my writing bit literally consisted of me translating my thoughts into sentences, and was probably unbelievably boring, but you're welcome to publish it. I don't really think there is a huge issue with copyright unless someone wrote something truly profound or personal in less than three minutes - and if they did, well, that's just impressive.

I did what I was always told to do when answering an examination question...stop....think....plan...then execute your answer. The problem? Almost 2 minutes passed by before I started typing!

Teiana,

Good writers know that starting a comment with "ah" sounds extremely arrogant, and will prepare the reader for pretentious rehashing of cliches or vapid descriptions of the obvious.

I just thought that would be good advice.

Posted by: Drew | November 13, 2009 10:56 PM

Disagree. I just think it sounds conversational...the way Teiana might respond in person.

Nor do I agree that "Sorry, but" is always arrogant. These sweeping rules are what's wrong with most writing pedantry--no allowance for tone, subject, etc.

I'm amused that so many assumed that "more is better." Just because you've been asked a question about speed, and told that the test is timed, doesn't necessarily mean it's going to be "graded" on volume produced. That certainly wouldn't be my definition of a "good writer." (Acknowledgment to Mick, who appears to have been the only other commenter who mentioned this...)

My stupid move--when I glanced in the upper corner & noticed that time was up, I stopped writing in mid-sentence. Been reading Predictably Irrational too much, lately, I guess. (The author of which proposes essentially that we'll all cheat given the right opportunity.) So if we're "graded" on sentence structure...yipes.

that was fun. Since you gave a hint at the end as to what was really going on, I went through it a second time w/ another browser to look for the little gotchas that you threw in there. There are some good ones. I missed the one HL points out - that is beautiful! I like that step 2 is missing. can't wait to read next week's post!

Casual Fridays: Is political wishy-washiness a general phenomenon?

dmunger — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 16:05:37 +0000

Casual Fridays: Is political wishy-washiness a general phenomenon?

Political opinion polls are very tricky. Answers to questions depend on the order they're asked in, and on precisely how they are phrased. If you ask people whether they're in favor of killing unborn children, you'll get a much different response than if you ask if there's any situation where women should be allowed to terminate a pregnancy.

What's even more difficult is to assess public opinion on complex pending legislation. Most polls find that most Americans like the idea of requiring everyone to buy health insurance. But it's only a slim margin -- 56 to 41 percent. Kevin Drum cited a recent study that asked a follow up: would you change your mind if low-income families got government assistance to pay for insurance? Now 34 percent of naysayers changed their mind to support the requirement. But Kevin wondered if it's a fair question. Wouldn't some people change their minds no matter what?

So Kevin suggested that someone do a study to see if some people flip-flop no matter what question is asked. If some people will always flip-flop, then that suggests poll questions about flip-flops aren't very helpful in determining what the "true" public opinion is. We decided to take him up on the suggestion. Last week we created a set of six opinion questions about issues we felt our readers were likely to disagree on. 491 people responded. For each question, we came up with two different follow-ups. So, for example, everyone was asked "Should the United States adopt a government-run health care system based on Medicare?" But each respondent saw only one of the follow-ups:

Suppose the plan involved a required pay-cut for doctors of 10 percent. Would your opinion change?
Suppose the plan involved a required pay-increase for doctors of 10 percent. Would your opinion change?

Each of these groups was divided in half again. One group just answered the questions, while the other group had to keep track of the total number of flashes of a flashing square (like this) in the corner of their screen while they answered. The hope was that this task might simulate some of the distractions a typical respondent might face while answering the polling questions over the phone.

So, did the flashing square affect whether respondents flip-flopped their answers? Here are the results:

This graph charts the average number of flip-flops each respondent made over the course of all six questions. While people who saw the flash flipped slightly more than the people who did not, the two groups were not significantly different.

But to return to Kevin's question, did we find that a certain number of respondents flipped their answers no matter what the follow-up question was? While it is true that someone changed their answer for each question, in some cases, very few people did. Consider the responses to the question "Should the United States withdraw all troops from Afghanistan?" Respondents were roughly evenly divided. But depending on the follow-up question, there was a big difference in the portion of flip-floppers:

While 35 percent of respondents said they'd change their answer if the US kept one base in Afghanistan to address only the terrorist threat, only 4 percent said they'd change their answer to the original question if the US also closed the prison at Guantanamo Bay. And this wasn't the only question that resulted in a small number of flips. There were a total of four (out of twelve) follow-ups that caused 4 percent or fewer to flip. Just 1 percent of respondents flipped their response about lotteries when asked "Suppose J.K. Rowling had never written the Harry Potter books. Would your opinion change?"

So to answer Kevin's question, it seems that the baseline level for flip-flopping is quite low -- perhaps as low as 1 percent, and certainly below 4 percent.

Interestingly, for nearly every follow-up we asked, the flip-flops were quite evenly distributed. No matter how you answered the original question, you were equally likely to change your mind. Is this a general phenomenon, or just a coincidence? Since it didn't happen every time, I think it's just a coincidence.

Here's an example where it didn't happen. The original question was whether recreational drugs should be legalized. When followed up with "Suppose the law also prohibited health insurance companies from providing substance-abuse treatment coverage. Would your opinion change?" the response to the original question had an important effect on flip-flopping:

If you initially wanted to legalize drugs, you were nearly twice as likely to change your opinion in this case as someone who had wanted to keep them illegal.

But how biased was our sample? There's no doubt that our audience at CogDaily is more educated than the average American. What about politics? We asked readers to rate their political philosophy on a simple scale. Here are the results:

As you can see, CogDaily readers are quite a liberal bunch. Does stated political philosophy affect your likelihood of flip-flopping? You bet:

While the differences between individual groups on this graph aren't significant, the overall trend is: the more conservative you said you are, the less likely you were to change your answer to the questions on this survey. Does this mean liberals as a group are wishy-washy? Possibly. Or it's also possible that we did a good job coming up with questions that liberals were likely to be ambivalent about: after all, that was our goal when when we created the study.

dmunger Fri, 10/30/2009 - 12:05

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Casual Fridays

Your ideology explanations don't take into account the literature on cognitive differences between political ideologies. Specifically, conservatives prefer firm answers (they have a high need for closure), so if they came to their decision on the original question they would be less likely to flip-flop. Could liberals be "wishy-washy?" Sure, but its just as likely that conservatives are "rigid."

I can't speak for all conservatives, but I'm "rigid" as you say because I have a unchanging foundation upon which I base my decisions.

Mark B.,

I'd be curious to discover the data upon which you base your generalization.

I can only offer anecdotal evidence, but quite a few of my friends who are conservatives are "P" on the Myers-Briggs, and quite a few of my friends who are liberal are "J" on the "Structure" continuum.

Perhaps it is only "literature" to which you refer, as you contend.

Jost et al., (2003) Psychological Bulletin.
Shook & Fazio (2009) Journal of Experimental Social Psychology
Amadio et al (200?) Nature Neuroscience

Or a quick Google search with "need for closure" and "conservatism" as the search terms.

A quick Google search of Myers-Briggs suggests that it is an out-dated measure of personality with questionable validity and reliability.

None of these studies are perfect, but taken together they support my comment. Like most psychological evidence there will always be exceptions--perhaps these include your friends, but perhaps not. Nonetheless the scientific literature suggests that conservatives are higher on the need for closure etc. The data from this blog post support that assertion as does the data in the citations I included in this comment.

I merely suggested that Dave could have contextualized his ideology results (which I think are interesting) within this literature.

I'm sorry, to be clear I tend to shy away from value laden descriptions of psychological constructs. I only said that conservatives were "rigid" as a rhetorical counterpoint to the idea that liberals are "wish-washy". The same data can be described in the same way.

[angry comment arguing results are meaningless without error bars]

Conservatives are rigid while liberals are fluid? Except for conservatives who change their mind all the time, and liberals who don't, obviously.

Conservatives are definite and liberals are fuzzy? So conservative notions like "market forces" and "family values" are definite and non-slippery, whereas liberal notions like "gay marriage is good" and "climate change is real" are vague and unclear? No.

There's another small problem with such an analyses like the one Mark B gives at #1. The far-right are prominent and visible - think of Pat Robertson, Orly Taitz and the "conservative movement". The moderate right are also visible - think Colin Powell. The moderate left are actually in power in America, though you could be forgiven for thinking they need to do deals with the far-right.

So where is the far left? Ralph Nader and Michael Moore aren't socialists, whatever the Wingnut Daily calls them. Maddow and Olbermann are traditional left-democrats. The far left does exist, but it's almost invisible. There's Chomsky, I suppose - he's an anarcho-syndicalist.

The point is, the American popular image of "left" and "right" is skewed to make the moderate left look like they're the far left.

Maybe I missed it, but I'm a little surprised at nobody noting the obvious - that liberals/progressives, IMO thoughtful almost by definition, will reassess positions based on salient new information. Wishy-washy? Hardly. Howzabout anchored in the real world and its increasing demands for informed, flexible thinking, as opposed to reliance on simplistic, predetermined schemata which result from pre-conscious needs for emotional regulation. It's pretty simple, really - one approach attempts to see the world as it is (as much as that is possible); the other filters sensory info through the lens of personal, primary emotional needs. One approach is modern; the other archaic. Good thing epigenetic human evolution is happening much faster than previously thought.

Good and true points, Kapitano.

One thing I did not see any discussion of here were the questions at the end of the survey regarding general knowledge. Does that mean there were no interesting correlations?

Casey,

There was a small, significant positive correlation (r=.10) between quiz score and liberal political philosophy, but no relation between quiz score and flip-flopping.

So liberals did slightly better on the quiz, but otherwise it doesn't tell us much.

(The "quiz" was actually just two questions: Who wrote "Two Treatises of Government" and who is the President of France)

Liberal mush vs. Conservative dogma is off topic.

People in general are disillusioned with Government, albeit for good reasons. Perhaps the Liberal wants change to solve that problem; perhaps the Conservative wants more controls to solve the problem, but any case, what to do is a social conundrum.

Ether group is floundering in the quest for better Government. The idea that anything will make a difference may or may not be given tacit support. In my opinion, most people have a subconscious notion, and many a conscious notion, that everything we have tried has come to nothing.

Still, we tilt the windmills with a primordial yearning for betterment. Like going to war, that is an idea we could do without; like free health care, as if; like it is not too late to stop the runaway global warming; like religion can be separate from state; like we could find politicians who are not corruptible; like business can do anything different than to make the most Buck for the bangâ¦

Perhaps the initial problem is in the question. Surveys? There is no end to problems with trying to look at a multi-dimensional problem in a one dimensional world. Our minds consider many different aspects of an important question. These aspects or dimensions of an issue are inter-related. So it would seem that as you try to look at some important sociological struggle, any one of two different one-dimensional evaluations can appear to be conflicted. That may not be the case.

Life and death issues engender deep emotional responses. Emotional and rational responses are not always congruous. And yet, in my opinion, it is the whole person (mind, body, and spirit) working together that is really always at play. Many seeming dissonances between the three are resolved differently in each different case. In addition, each individual finds their own balance between the three.

I suggest that most anybody will have many complex ideas about many different aspects of Government. How many dimensions will that be? We must have many, maybe more than we would like to admit, facets to our convoluted thinking about government.

Do I want no government? Yes. Do I want government to guarantee my right to life liberty and justice? Yes. Am I conflicted? Perhaps, from one point of view, I am; but the truth be told, all of us desire seemingly dissonant goals. [Did I use the word âall?â] That would make this a general phenomenon.

The science of the mind is still in the very early stages of development.

Ã Hill

Casual Fridays: Do your political opinions depend on circumstances?

dmunger — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 13:55:46 +0000

Casual Fridays: Do your political opinions depend on circumstances?

Political opinion polls are funny things. A recent poll suggests that Americans are much less concerned about global warming than they were a couple years ago. What happened? The science hasn't changed, and the world isn't putting out any fewer greenhouse gases.

It seems that respondents must simply be distracted by other things -- the economic crisis, perhaps, seems more important now. But when a pollster calls a survey respondent, other distractions are at play as well. There might be a screaming baby in the house. Or perhaps the respondent is missing his favorite TV show and isn't really thinking about his answers.

We wondered if we could affect poll responses just by modifying the setting in which the poll is taken. We've created a couple different versions of the same poll. Some allow you to focus your attention completely on the poll responses, but others ask you to do other tasks at the same time. Will that have any impact on the results? There's only one way to find out.

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, October 29 to complete your response. There is no limit on the number of respondents. Don't forget to come back next week for the results!

dmunger Fri, 10/23/2009 - 09:55

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Casual Fridays

Ack! I can't do it. I think you need a "how confident are you" question after you ask how many flashes. I stopped counting partway through because I lost track, so then I just guessed.

Another reason that opinions may have changed over the last couple of years: they've had more time to overcome the media hype and decide whether the information is actually something to be concerned about.

I didn't finish the questions, I decided to drop out at the last page instead of posting my result. I really tried, but the flashes stopped long before I could finish even reading the second question on each page, so I felt like I was "cheating" because I was too slow. Some of the questions I didn't really understand at a glance and had to read really carefully several times before I felt somewhat able to give an answer. Some of the questions would require me to stop to go and look things up, for example I dodn't know off the top of my head what PG-rated means _exactly_ (some of the questions were slightly US centric too). And those flashes kept breaking my concentration so I constantly had to start over.

Also, some of the questions probably should have a 'maybe' option, particularly the ones asking whether X would make me change my mind. Those really depend on circumstances and details.

I really think how well people do on this kind of thing depends a lot. I simply can't do it. I can't answer questions that quickly. I wonder if anyone can actually answer these questions properly - with enough consideration - in the time before the flashes stop.

I had the same problem as CTV and should probably not have submitted either, but I did. I can't read very fast, and I can also not read and count the flashes (on another part of the screen) at the same time. Not having English as a native language (and not living in the US for some of the questions) may not have helped either. It may have been possible for me to answer the questions while counting, but it would have been very slow. The flashes did not nearly last long enough for this. They usually stopped when I was midway through struggling with the second question.

I literally couldn't take this one - I have ADD. Surely I'm not the only one who was unable to complete it at all. This will probably skew your results.

For political philosophy, there was no libertarian option. I've noted that absence in a lot of surveys.

What are these flashes that everyone is mentioning? I didn't see any flashes. Please explain.

Some participants had to watch a flashing square as they responded -- counting the flashes while answering the questions, to see if dividing their attention had an effect on the results. Others didn't -- we're going to see if this affects the results.

Casual Fridays: Who says "hi" to you, part II

dmunger — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 15:12:06 +0000

Casual Fridays: Who says "hi" to you, part II

Almost three years ago, we conducted our first-ever Casual Fridays study, where we asked who says "hi" to you while you're outside exercising. The results confirmed my suspicions:

Runners report that they say "hi" to walkers 57.1 percent of the time. But looking back at the other graph, walkers claim runners only say "hi" only 31 percent of the time. That's a massive difference -- a statistically significant one. A similar -- and also significant -- disparity holds for bikers and walkers.

But there were some unanswered questions back then. Are the people who answered our survey just friendlier than average? It's possible that they were telling the truth about how often they say "hi" and that others aren't so friendly.

This time around, we have a larger sample (415 responses), and we've asked a few additional questions that may help us determine if our respondents self-selected, or if we really do just misrepresent how often we say "hi." Clearly there is some self-selection going on, because we had many fewer responses than we normally get. I'm guessing this is because a lot of our readers simply don't go outside to do their exercise. Let's see if we can confirm that with a quick poll:

Now, let's take a look at the results of the new study. As before, respondents indeed report saying "hi" more often than people say "hi" to them:

But three years ago we also found that runners and bikers say they say "hi" to walkers much more frequently than walkers acknowledge. This year we found the same pattern:

As you can see, walkers say bikers and runners say "hi" less than 25 percent of the time, but runners and bikers say they say "hi" to walkers over 40 percent of the time -- once again, a significant difference.

Can this be explained by the "friendliness" of our respondents? Runners and bikers actually say that walkers say "hi" to them much more than the walkers in our study say they do. For this to be the case, the walkers who responded to our study would need to be much friendlier than average, and the bikers and runners would need to be much less friendly than average.

I came up with two different ways to measure "friendliness." One is a composite of how many different people you say that you say "hi" to -- if you say "hi" to just walkers, you'd get a 1 on this scale, but if you say "hi" to walkers, bikers, and pet-walkers, then you'd get a 3. The other is a composite of answers to three questions: whether you join a friend when you exercise, whether you stop to talk to folks along your route, and whether you ask more questions than you answer in a conversation over lunch. This graph shows the results:

The "friendliness" score combines all these measures, while the "No 'Hi'" score ignores when people say they say "hi." In both tests, there's no significant difference in friendliness among runners, bikers, or walkers. So this suggests that people really do overestimate how often they say "hi", or they underestimate how often others say hi to them.

Some other interesting results from this week's study:

Here the results are broken down by region. People in Europe say "hi" significantly less often than in the US or Canada (there weren't enough responses from Asia or Australia/Oceania for those differences to be significant).

Finally, as you might expect, people are less likely to say "hi" in urban versus suburban/rural areas:

dmunger Fri, 10/16/2009 - 11:12

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Casual Fridays

I'm from Boston, where of course no one says hi to anyone. You know why people live in Boston? Because it gives us a dark satisfaction to know that we can survive in a place no humans should be. It's windier than Chicago and rainier than Seattle, and it was built on a swamp by cows. (All of this is true; look it up.) Official motto: "I do not want to talk to you."

I say hi to walkers when I'm running, but only a minority of walkers - depends on eye contact and other non-verbals I get. So if you asked me a yes or no question, I'd say 'Yes, I say hi to walkers', but if you asked all the walkers I passed, only a minority of them would say that I said hi. Also, I say hi to other runners much more consistently than to walkers. Other runners seem to expect a hi and generally make eye contact at the proper moment when passing. Walkers aren't as consistent.

I think it's in the interpretation of the question. When I run, I see maybe 2-4 dozen walkers and say 'hi' to maybe 5-10 of them What do I as a runner see? A lot of hellos. What does the average walker see? 50-75% of walkers see a runner pass them silently.

I exercise on a fairly regular basis, but I didn't do the survey. When I go for a walk, it's out in the grapes and I rarely see anyone. My other option is playing hockey, where you don't say "hi" since you're playing a game.

Southern California here, we are obligated to say hi to everyone. If you happen to speak Spanish, well the salutations just go on and on regardless of the time of day/evening/night. It really depends if you get a good vibe and good eye contact, some people just want to be left alone.

If, say, 2 out of 5 of the walkers simply don't hear the runner (or specially the biker) what would things look like? People are walking and daydreaming and they have only a second (or a split second for a biker) to realize that someone has said something. I can't believe there aren't already studies about this very effect, it sounds ripe for some kind of thesis research.

Context may be relevant. Running in the hills around where I live encounters are few and people almost invariably exchange a few friendly words in passing ("Hi" might be considered rather rude in this situation). Running around town it would be exceptional to do so unless you recognised the other person as someone you knew or were acquainted with.

@Alex:

You just made my day. I love visiting Boston, but it always seems like the average Bostonian interacts with people so little I might as well consider them human-shaped scenery rather than fellow pedestrians.

As for the original topic, I don't exercise regularly while at school, but when I go home for the summer, I bike a lot. I only really say hi to other bikers, and only other bikers say hi to me.

I'm with Markk on this one. I have noticed a lot of runners pant "hi" on their way past someone. The person they've passed may not even hear them. This is why when I run past people, I shout out, "MORNING!" That way there's no mistaking the fact that I've said hello. As a runner, I'd say most walkers don't initiate an exchange, but will respond if I say good morning to them. I think they may think runners are snobs who will judge them for not exercising more vigorously (and some runners really are, and would). Given the time of day when I run, though, most people who are out may not even be awake yet. It's hard to run four miles before the sun comes up without being awake, but you can sleep-walk your dog and crawl back into bed.

For me, it depends on eye contact. Since I walk, making eye contact with runners or bikers is less likely. When people are walking with dogs or strollers, there is more of an excuse to greet them. When I have my son in his stroller, I'm more likely to greet people because they usually make eye contact and/ or coo at him.

Biker = person on a Harley, Cyclist = person on a bicycle. As a Cyclist I have a 100% ROI when giving Bikers the "low wave"

@Alex:

C'mon, you know better. Our official motto is "Don't talk to me, I don't know you."

As a cyclist (of the mountain persuasion) I don't meet that many people, but I greet everyone I meet. Walkers always greet back, but I think that might be because they are intimidated. I can tell by the way they jump to the side and tense up. And that's why I greet them in the first place, to lessen the harsh tone between hikers and bikers here in Norway.

Other mountainbikers are less jovial. Or cyclists in general. At first I thought they would see a kindred spirit, a member of their tribe, a fellow traveller on two wheels, but nay. Maybe I am shunned because I don't wear the same tight fitting cycling pants so they don't recognize me as worthy..

Casual Fridays: Revisiting "who says hi"?

dmunger — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 12:25:26 +0000

Casual Fridays: Revisiting "who says hi"?

For the first-ever Casual Fridays study nearly four years ago, we asked readers who said "hi" to them while they were out for a walk or run:

Today's entry is a survey designed to test a hypothesis I've been developing during my daily run. I think I've noticed a pattern in the responses of people I see while I'm running, and I want to find out whether it's a local quirk in the way people react to me, or if it's a universal phenomemon. The question centers around who says "hi" to you while you engage in your regular outdoor fitness activity. If you've never thought about this before, you might want to go out for a run/skate/bike ride before you respond.

Although we got some interesting results, with only 213 respondents, we weren't able to examine some key details, such as whether men or women say "hi" more often. And there are also a couple other interesting avenues to explore. So this week we're offering a new, improved version of the study:

Click here to participate

As usual, the study is brief, with just 10 questions. It should take only a few minutes to complete. You have until Thursday, October 15 to complete your response. There is no limit on the number of respondents. Don't forget to come back next week for the results!

dmunger Fri, 10/09/2009 - 08:25

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Casual Fridays

I had two difficulties with this.

The first is that I'm not sure if the questionnaire meant 'hi' to include other verbal greetings (how about someone who nods rather than verbalizing 'hi'?)

The second is that I'm somewhat faceblind, which means that I don't know if the people I meet are strangers or not. That's why I say hi to dogwalkers more often then to other people, because I can tell that they are neighbors.

My outdoor fitness activity is rugby. People I know say hi. The opponents just say "ow" a lot. Sometimes they punch me, but I guess that isn't the kind of greeting you're interested in... :)

For the question about the likelihood of a car honking at a pedestrian to say "hi," I answered that this was likely. But, in my experience the honking car is usually trying to express a sentiment more along the lines of "hey baby." I don't think that they're the same thing, but this wasn't really addressed by the survey.

I counted nods as "hi"s. I had some trouble deciding if the DC area was "Northeast" or not - it's not Southeast, though, so I decided it was.

My prefered outdoor fitness activity is open water swimming - everyone says hi to someone swimming by their boat, and the triathletes as where our wetsuits are :)

Wrong environment, so I answered for my running days.

I have a few issues with the survey. For a start, I wince at the phrase "outdoor fitness activity". It implies that fitness is the purpose of these activities, which may often be true for vigorous activities such as running, but not so much for a casual walk. Fitness is at best a side-effect.

I think q4 should have come before q2-3. When I first read q2, it seemed to generalise too much. How can I say whether a walker says hi to me? Does it mean that most walkers say hi to me? Does it mean that at least one walker per walk typically says hi to me? Further down, I discover that the issue of frequency is covered by q4, but it would have saved me some trouble to know this when I was at q2.

I also agree with Ann's comment - is "saying hi" a euphemism for all greetings, verbal or otherwise? I'll assume that it is - that a nod and a smile counts as a hi. Grounds for this can be found in q4, where it is assumed that the honk of a car can mean hi, though I'm not so sure on that one. Cars occasionally honk at pedestrians, but does the honker think of it as a greeting, or is the sentiment typically more analagous to jumping out from behind a wall and shouting "Boo!"? I suspect the latter.

Incidentally, I've lived in both rural and suburban environments, and can say confidently that car drivers waving to other cars and to pedestrians is pretty much universal in rural parts, and pretty much unknown in suburban (or else they'd never be stopping).

The survey only asks which gender more often says hi to us, and not the other way around. But I wonder how many men, for example, would admit (if asked) that they are more likely to say hi to a woman than to another man. Or not, as the case may be.

I think it would have been useful to distinguish between umprompted greetings and response greetings. Take q5, for example. If (as I suggested above) I'm more likely to nod and smile at a woman than at another man, then it follows that the greetings I receive are also more likely to be from women, just because some proportion of greetings will be responses to my own. But perhaps your intent with asking this question is better captured by ignoring this factor and counting only unprompted greetings. It's impossible to know unless you say so explicitely.

I live in a big city in the UK, so nobody talks to each other... That said, depending on what I wear when I go out, I get a fair bit of attention from other people - but I guess being wolf whistled at by a builder or honked at by a man in a van is not exactly the same as someone saying hi to me.

one thing that the survey didn't address is frequency that someone will say hi back, i ride (bicycles) upwards of 20hrs a week during the summer and I'll wave hi to other riders and it's maybe a 50/50 ROI.

Casual Fridays: Troxler's not for everyone

dmunger — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 15:09:20 +0000

Casual Fridays: Troxler's not for everyone

Whenever I create a demo for this site, there's always a balance: Do I make the demo dramatic, so it's most surprising when it works? Or do I make it less dramatic, so it works for more people? (There are other things to balance as well, such as my time and technical proficiency)

The Troxler effect is a particularly dramatic and simple demonstration of how much our visual system adapts to the environment. Just stare at the center dot in this figure for about 15 seconds, and the outer ring should fade completely from view!

But the illusion, like nearly all illusions, doesn't work for everyone. Some people only see a partial fading. For some people, the center region turns green, but they still see the outer ring. Others see a variety of effects, from double-vision to a pulsing, color-shifting mess.

Last week for our Casual Fridays study we presented a variety of different versions of the illusion, along with another illusion, a "color-blindness" test, and a few semi-random questions about habits and tendencies. We thought we might find a pattern in the responses. What we certainly did find is a lot of variation in responses. This graph shows the response for the image I showed you above:

Fewer than half of the respondents experienced the illusion completely, but almost 80 percent had some experience of the effect.

But we also showed subtler versions of the figure. Here are three more versions (I reduced them to fit on this page so you probably won't be able to try the illusion).

I converted the viewer response to each figure into a score (3 = ring completely faded, 0 = no fading at all). Here are the results for all four versions of the figure:

The results were significantly different for each version of the figure. The light, blurry ring gave the best results, with over 70 percent of respondents seeing the ring completely disappear, and over 90 percent experiencing at least a partial illusion. But of course it's not as dramatic to see a rather faded ring disappear compared to the original, dark green ring.

We also showed some viewers a different-colored ring: blue, instead of green. There was no difference in the responses, except for one interesting trend. We gave respondents a quick "color-blindness" test:

If you see the number 74 in this figure, then you probably have normal trichromatic vision. However, if you see the number 21, then your vision is likely dichromatic and you may not be able to distinguish between green and red. Dichromats saw the illusion more often when it was presented in green than when it was blue, but this difference didn't rise to the level of significance.

We asked a few other random questions, but the results didn't affect whether they saw the illusion. Results are presented here for your amusement only:

dmunger Fri, 10/02/2009 - 11:09

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You know, I'd never seen the inside of the ring change color with this illusion before this version. I guess I can't go back and find out which version did it for me, but do you have stats for which ring version gave the most people that effect?

I'll hold my hand up here - I'm one of the, what, 5-6% who said "Yes" to the UFO question ;-)

Interesting. The interindividual variability differs markedly between illusions and is often poorly understood, which is of course related to that we don't really understand most illusions themselves. Here, however, I suggest that the interindividual variability can be traced to eye movements. People are very different in their fixation behaviour, and very steady fixation is required for a Troxler effect, _especially_ if the contours are sharp rather than gradual in their luminance profile.

Perhaps some for whom the ring did not disappear might experience it when they understand about the role of eye movement here. Also, I find that the instruction to "stare intently" may lead or more fixation tremor than the idea to "let you eyes hang" (in the correct gaze direction, of course ;-)). This removes the stress with the potential reduction in eye tremor.

For me, the ring didn't fade, but disappeared quite suddenly, like a light being switched off.

Firstly, I think the phenomenon is also related to your observation distance to the picture. For me, the phenomenon is more fast to appear when my eye is not so near nor not so far from the picture. It seems too close distance or too far distance could weak the appearance of phenomenon. It might be caused by our individual visual system limitation. Furthermore, this phenomenon might be more significant for the people owning a more focal attention. On the other hand, people whose attention is more global should be difficult to detect or slowly to detect this effect.

Could we get the similar result when we use one eye for each comparing with using two eyes? :)

I only tried this illusion just now, and on my extremely high-resolution screen, where the image appears to be very small, the ring doesn't disappear at all. I had a hunch that the apparent closeness of the ring and the dot were making a difference, since I've successfully experienced a similar illusion in a book of similar stuff, so I enlarged the image to the size that it probably appears on the average viewer's monitor or LCD. And then it mostly/partially disappeared. Whee!

I call shenanigans on the majority of the "Yes, a little bit." responses; I suspect they are lazy with focusing on the center dot/letting saccades get out of control. I'll come out of the anonymity closet and say it fully disappeared for me. The basis for my accusation is the fact that my own attention-starved eyes kept hopping around, and my answer was going to be/could easily have been "a little"... until I really metafocused (can coin that? focused on focusing?), at which point it fully disappeared.

This explains why I no longer see ads on the internet :O)

This actually amazed me and I know different people see different things but I felt I saw something unusual. The ring was vibrating for a start and I saw phases of both partical and full disappearance. Then there was the appearance of a 'light shadow' of a ring on top and blinking away it turned pinky red. Also, after seeing 71 (which is neither 74 nor 21) I am wondering if I landed on what of the UFO some of you spotted!

I tried to post a comment to this thread several days ago now (Saturday or Sunday I think), and got a message back that it had been held for moderation. Presumably that was because I did include a (single) link in the body of the comment. However, it was in no way spam. The link was to another illusion, on a non-commercial site, that is presumably related to the Troxler illusion, but also different in some interesting ways that I wanted to comment on and ask about.

I expected the comment to appear the next day, or maybe the day after, but it has still not appeared. Should we now expect that all comments containing links will automatically be trashed? If so, I think there ought to be some warning to that effect that might stop people wasting their time.

Bryan, I think you are correct. I was unable to force my eyes to hold still for 15 seconds--every time I started to see a 'little bit' of fading my eyes would shift slightly and the ring would snap back into view.

Lori, the "light shadow" you describe is negative palinopsia. I think you'd find that if you stared at the green ring (not the red dot) for 30 seconds or so, and then transferred your gaze to a blank white space, the pinky-red ring would appear. Positive palinopsia is a lot less common and is when the ghosted image is the same colour as the original.

The ring never completely disappeared -- I think because I was concentrating on having it disappear.

Like Bryan, my eyes moved too much to effectively see the fade for long. I also tried focusing on focusing, but could not even maintain that for particularly long. (I may possibly have undiagnosed Attention Deficit Disorder, and the inability to stay focused on something when it holds no interest to me is an old familiar foe.) My attention and therefore my eyes kept darting to the ring itself, and as my focus slipped before I dragged it back on task, the familiar negative palinopsia appeared in lurid pink at the margins of the ring, jittering and pulsing and seeming to rotate around the ring as I struggled to pull my wayward eyes back to the damned red dot. Even at the stillest I could get my eyes, my focus inevitably drifted down, brought to my attention by the herald of that pink ring.

Even maintaining a loose focus, after reading the comments, did not help the ring disappear completely, although it did fade considerably. I noticed the white areas of the screen appearing greenish, rather than their wonted white, and the red dot appeared to bleed its own color into the area surrounding it.

Casual Fridays: Who can see illusions?

dmunger — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 13:12:18 +0000

Casual Fridays: Who can see illusions?

A couple weeks ago I discussed the Troxler Effect in my column on SEEDMAGAZINE.COM. Some people said they couldn't see the illusion, so I thought it might be interesting to play around with the effect and see if people can see it under different circumstances.

For this week's Casual Fridays study you'll see a variety of different illusions, some of which will be easier to see than others. Give it your best shot at experiencing the illusion -- we'll see if we notice any patterns next week!

Click here to participate

As usual, the study is brief, with about 10 questions. However, because each illusion takes a little time, it might take as long as ten minutes to complete. Also, the study includes a vimeo video. If you can't see these at work, you might want to wait until you get home to respond. You have until Thursday, October 1 to complete your response. There is no limit on the number of respondents. Don't forget to come back next week for the results!

dmunger Fri, 09/25/2009 - 09:12

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This is a clever concept and a fun study. You guys are great at coming up with this stuff.

You should have had a "is the circle disappearing faster?" question; it would have been interesting to see if the different shades of blue/green had different time effects...

The Troxler illusions were strong and rapid for me. It did not take a full 15 seconds. The waterfall illusion did not work, but I have experienced it in the past on more than one occasion. Once after looking at a real waterfall I looked at the cliff face beside it and there was a strong impression of upward movement.

Does "have you ever seen a UFO?" mean "Do you believe you have seen an alien spacecraft?" or "Have you ever seen something flying that you could not identify?" There is a huge difference. I very much doubt whether I have ever seen an alien spacecraft, but I have certainly seen a UFO in the second sense, so I answered yes.

It would have been a good idea to put a note in each of the ring ones saying "This isn't the one you just did." At first I assumed I'd hit the "previous" button instead of the "next" button and just re-entered my answer without redoing the test.

I interpreted the UFO question differently than Nigel (#3 comment).

I also wasn't sure what the magician question meant by "fooled" -- Just that I don't know exactly how the trick was done? (Most of the time for professional magicians)?

"Fooled" in the sense that I didn't see the end of the trick coming? (Rare, given that most tricks have a predictable ending.)

Or, fooled into thinking that the magician actually did what the trick purports to do -- levitation, telepathy, etc? (Never.)

Another, more difficult study proposal: figure out what's going on with people like my girlfriend, who has an immediate headache/nausea reaction to a glimpse of just about any optical illusion.

I couldn't get the effect to work completely after the first post, and the same with the first sample on the survey... both seemed to only have patches blank out and never the whole thing. The other editions worked fine, but I definitely started to get a headache by the last green circle on the survey.

I saw it like you did, I guess, Joel, but I started to feel sick by the end. For me, most fast animation or flashing light (such as a fan between me and lighting or driving on a tree-covered road in the sun) produces much the same effect, nausea and eventually migraine. I wonder if the illusion of patches (or nearly the whole thing) coming and going was like it flashing to me.

I couldn't see the balloon one at all.

The blue rings tended to fade away entirely; the green ones took longer to fade, then only went to a shade of gray but never quite disappeared.

Waterfall/balloon did nothing.

The magic and ufo questions are offputting in the ways other commenters have mentioned. If a saucer landed in front of me in Lincoln Park and Klaatu and Gort got out I'd have to be impressed -- but I'd be much more impressed by a blue Police Box.