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Monday Pets on Scientific American! [The Thoughtful Animal]

Feeds — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 02:48:52 +0000

For today’s dose of monday pet blogging, head on over to a piece that I wrote for Scientific American that went up today. I used the invitation as an opportunity to a dig a little deeper into the story of Belyaev and his domesticated silver foxes (I previously wrote about them, here and here)

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Source: Science Blogs: Brain & Behavior

The Weirdness of our Worldview [Casaubon's Book]

Feeds — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 02:48:48 +0000

There’s an interesting article in the National Post emergent from a recent study in _Brain and Behavioral Sciences_

The article, titled “The weirdest people in the world?”, appears in the current issue of the journal Brain and Behavioral Sciences. Dr. Henrich and co-authors Steven Heine and Ara Norenzayan argue that life-long members of societies that are Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic — people who are WEIRD — see the world in ways that are alien from the rest of the human family. The UBC trio have come to the controversial conclusion that, say, the Machiguenga are not psychological outliers among humanity. We are.

“If you’re a Westerner, your intuitions about human psychology are probably wrong or at least there’s good reason to believe they’re wrong,” Dr. Henrich says…..

….Moreover, WEIRD people do not simply react to the world differently, according to the paper, they perceive it differently to begin with. Take the well-known Muller-Lyer optical illusion, which uses arrows to trick the viewer into thinking one line is longer than another, even if both are the same length. (See the diagram on this page.)

“No matter how many times you measure those lines, you can’t cause yourself to see them as the same length,” Dr. Henrich says. At least that’s true for a Westerner. For some hunter-gatherers, the Muller-Lyer lines do not cause an illusion. “You do this with foragers in the Kalahari [Desert] and they just see the lines as the same length.”

WEIRD people, the UBC researchers argue, have unusual ideas of fairness, are more individualistic and less conformist than other people. In many of these respects, Americans are the most “extreme” Westerners, especially young ones. And educated Americans are even more extremely WEIRD than uneducated ones.

“The fact that WEIRD people are the outliers in so many key domains of the behavioral sciences may render them one of the worst subpopulations one could study for generalizing about Homo sapiens,” the authors conclude. “If the goal of the research program is to shed light on the human condition, then this narrow, unrepresentative sample may lead to an uneven and incomplete understanding.”

In other words, we do not know what we thought we knew about the human mind. We only know about the mind of a particular, unusual slice of humanity.

The UBC researchers also found that 96% of behavioural science experiment subjects are from Western industrialized countries, which account for just 12% of the world’s population. Sixty-eight percent were Americans. The United States is dominant in the field of psychology, accounting for 70% of all journal citations, compared with 37% in chemistry. Undergraduate students are often used to stand in for the entire species.

“This is a serious problem because psychology varies across cultures and chemistry doesn’t,” says Jonathan Haidt, a psychologist at the University of Virginia.

The paper argues that either many studies’ conclusions have to be retested on non-WEIRD cultural groups — a daunting proposition in terms of resources — or they must be understood to offer insight only into the minds of rich, educated Westerners.

If WEIRD people are indeed weird, it is the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution that have made them so. In the example of the Muller-Lyer illusion, the UBC team hypothesizes that growing up in an industrial-era environment with plenty of 90-degree lines and carpentered edges led to WEIRD people’s sense of vision being susceptible to the deception.

“We live in this world with police and institutions and pre-packaged food, TV, the Internet, watches and clocks and calendars. Our heads are loaded with all this information for navigating those environments. So we should expect our brains to be distorted,” Dr. Henrich says.

This is one of those things I think most of us know and do not know simultaneously, or rather, know and do not adequately regard or consider. We see clearly the ways in which we have shaped our world, but less clearly how our world has shaped us.

Sharon

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Source: Science Blogs: Brain & Behavior

Extra, Extra [The Thoughtful Animal]

Feeds — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 02:48:44 +0000

Links, links, and more links. Lots of good stuff this week.

Science

Brains and Beauty: a three-movement concerto was written inspired by a poem written by neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, and set to images culled from the research of Hanna Damasio.

How does beer become whiskey? At the Guardian Science blog, Andy Connelly describes this delicious transformation.

Fascinating musings on comparative medicine from our friends over at the Dog Zombie. What is a wallaby?

Blog bff Scicurious writes about PCR – a technique that shouldn’t work, but does.

In the NY Times, Carl Zimmer has probably the best run-down on the recent paper by E.O. Wilson and colleagues on kin selection and inclusive fitness. And an awesome photo by Alex Wild of Myrmecos fame!

Stemming from that eusociality paper my scibling David Sloane Wilson has an open letter to Richard Dawkins that is worth a read.

Jump behind the break for more!

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Source: Science Blogs: Brain & Behavior

Extra, Extra [The Thoughtful Animal]

Feeds — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 02:48:42 +0000

Links, links, and more links. Lots of good stuff this week.

Science

Brains and Beauty: a three-movement concerto was written inspired by a poem written by neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, and set to images culled from the research of Hanna Damasio.

How does beer become whiskey? At the Guardian Science blog, Andy Connelly describes this delicious transformation.

Fascinating musings on comparative medicine from our friends over at the Dog Zombie. What is a wallaby?

Blog bff Scicurious writes about PCR – a technique that shouldn’t work, but does.

Stemming from that eusociality paper my scibling David Sloane Wilson has an open letter to Richard Dawkins that is worth a read.

Jump behind the break for more!

Read the rest of this post… | Read the comments on this post…

Source: Science Blogs: Brain & Behavior

Extra, Extra [The Thoughtful Animal]

Feeds — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 02:48:42 +0000

Links, links, and more links. Lots of good stuff this week.

Science

Brains and Beauty: a three-movement concerto was written inspired by a poem written by neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, and set to images culled from the research of Hanna Damasio.

How does beer become whiskey? At the Guardian Science blog, Andy Connelly describes this delicious transformation.

Fascinating musings on comparative medicine from our friends over at the Dog Zombie. What is a wallaby?

Blog bff Scicurious writes about PCR – a technique that shouldn’t work, but does.

Stemming from that eusociality paper my scibling David Sloane Wilson has an open letter to Richard Dawkins that is worth a read.

Jump behind the break for more!

Read the rest of this post… | Read the comments on this post…

Source: Science Blogs: Brain & Behavior

Bubbles, gullibility, and other challenges for economics, psychology, sociology, and information sciences

Feeds — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 02:48:21 +0000

Gullibility is the principal cause of bubbles. Investors and the general public get snared by a “beautiful illusion” and throw caution to the wind. Attempts to identify and control bubbles are complicated by the fact that the authorities who might naturally be expected to take action have often (especially in recent years) been among the most gullible, and were cheerleaders for the exuberant behavior. Hence what is needed is an objective measure of gullibility. This paper argues that it should be possible to develop such a measure. Examples demonstrate, contrary to the efficient market dogma, that in some manias, even top business and technology leaders fall prey to collective hallucinations and become irrational in objective terms. During the Internet bubble, for example large classes of them first became unable to comprehend compound interest, and then lost even the ability to do simple arithmetic, to the point of not being able to distinguish 2 from 10. This phenomenon, together with advances in analysis of social networks and related areas, points to possible ways to develop objective and quantitative tools for measuring gullibility and other aspects of human behavior implicated in bubbles. It cannot be expected to infallibly detect all destructive bubbles, and may trigger false alarms, but it ought to alert observers to periods where collective investment behavior is becoming irrational. The proposed gullibility index might help in developing realistic economic models. It should also assist in illuminating and guiding decision-making.

Source: FirstMonday.org

Bubbles, gullibility, and other challenges for economics, psychology, sociology, and information sciences

Feeds — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 02:48:20 +0000

Source: FirstMonday.org

Bubbles, gullibility, and other challenges for economics, psychology, sociology, and information sciences

Feeds — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 02:48:20 +0000

Source: FirstMonday.org

Bubbles, gullibility, and other challenges for economics, psychology, sociology, and information sciences

Feeds — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 02:48:20 +0000

Source: FirstMonday.org

A manifesto for modeling and measurement in social media

Feeds — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 02:48:18 +0000

Online Social Networks (OSNs) have been the subject of a great deal of study in recent years. The majority of this study has used simple models, such as node-and-edge graphs, to describe the data. In this paper, we argue that such models, which necessarily limit the structures that can be described and omit temporal information, are insufficient to describe and study OSNs. Instead, we propose that a richer class of Entity Interaction Network models should be adopted. We outline a checklist of features that can help build such a model, and apply it to three popular networks (Twitter, Facebook and YouTube) to highlight important features. We also discuss important considerations for the collection, validation and sharing of OSN data.

Source: FirstMonday.org