Cognitive dissonance

SciTech Daily links to NPR’s excerpt from Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson. The book is about cognitive dissonance, that is, “about how people strive to make sense out of contradictory ideas and lead lives that are, at least in their own minds, consistent and meaningful.” The concept of cognitive dissonance was developed fifty years ago by a social psychologist, Leon Festinger. This is the tale of one case study.

Leon Festinger and two associates infiltrated a group of people who believed the world would end on December 21. They wanted to know what would happen to the group when (they hoped!) the prophecy failed. The group’s leader, whom the researchers called Marian Keech, promised that the faithful would be picked up by a flying saucer and elevated to safety at midnight on December 20. Many of her followers quit their jobs, gave away their homes, and dispersed their savings, waiting for the end. Who needs money in outer space? Others waited in fear or resignation in their homes. (Mrs. Keech’s own husband, a nonbeliever, went to bed early and slept soundly through the night as his wife and her followers prayed in the living room.) Festinger made his own prediction: The believers who had not made a strong commitment to the prophecy—who awaited the end of the world by themselves at home, hoping they weren’t going to die at midnight—would quietly lose their faith in Mrs. Keech. But those who had given away their possessions and were waiting with the others for the spaceship would increase their belief in her mystical abilities. In fact, they would now do everything they could to get others to join them.

At midnight, with no sign of a spaceship in the yard, the group felt a little nervous. By 2 a.m., they were getting seriously worried. At 4:45 a.m., Mrs. Keech had a new vision: The world had been spared, she said, because of the impressive faith of her little band. “And mighty is the word of God,” she told her followers, “and by his word have ye been saved—for from the mouth of death have ye been delivered and at no time has there been such a force loosed upon the Earth. Not since the beginning of time upon this Earth has there been such a force of Good and light as now floods this room.”

The group’s mood shifted from despair to exhilaration. Many of the group’s members, who had not felt the need to proselytize before December 21, began calling the press to report the miracle, and soon they were out on the streets, buttonholing passersby, trying to convert them. Mrs. Keech’s prediction had failed, but not Leon Festinger’s.

What’s so funny?

In an article in Discover Magazine, Robert Provine, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of Maryland, asserts that the root of human laughter doesn’t lie in humor but in social interaction. We laugh to bond.

Previous studies of laughter had assumed that laughing and humor were inextricably linked, but Provine’s early research suggested that the connection was only an occasional one. As his research progressed, Provine began to suspect that laughter was in fact about something else—not humor or gags or incongruity but our social interactions. He found support for this assumption in a study that had already been conducted, one analyzing people’s laughing patterns in social and solitary contexts. “You’re 30 times more likely to laugh when you’re with other people than you are when you’re alone—if you don’t count simulated social environments like laugh tracks on television,” Provine says. Think how rarely you’ll laugh out loud at a funny passage in a book but how quick you’ll be to give a friendly laugh when greeting an old acquaintance. Laughing is not an instinctive physical response to humor, the way a flinch is a response to pain or a shiver to cold. Humor is crafted to exploit a form of instinctive social bonding.

As an added bonus, the article’s author also reproduces the joke that an international survey determined was the world’s funniest joke:

A couple of New Jersey hunters are out in the woods when one of them falls to the ground. He doesn’t seem to be breathing; his eyes are rolled back in his head. The other guy whips out his cell phone and calls the emergency service. He gasps to the operator: “My friend is dead! What can I do?” The operator says: “Take it easy. I can help. First, let’s make sure he’s dead.” There is silence, then a shot is heard. The guy’s voice comes back on the line. He says, “OK, now what?”

Prejudicial voices

The Australian has a short item about a new study of newborns and preschools that seems to indicate that linguistic discrimination may be at the root of social prejudice.

US and French researchers have found that the language babies hear spoken in their first six months of life leads to a preference for speakers of that language.

The preference is so entrenched that by age five youngsters prefer playmates who not only speak the same language but do so with the same accent.

They judged the preferences of three groups of children. Five-to six-month-old infants looked at native speakers longer than non-native speakers.

Ten-month-olds selected toys most often from native speakers, and most five-year-olds chose native speaking playmates over children with an accent.

According to Professor Spelke, the most surprising result came from the group’s experiment with five-year-olds. “The findings suggest that (the preference) has nothing to do with information, the semantics of language, but rather with group identity,” she said.

Water, water, everywhere, but . . .

In these hot, humid days of summer, as you reach for that bottle of water, pause for a minute and think about this The New York Times story about tap water versus bottle water.

THOSE eight daily glasses of water you’re supposed to drink for good health? They will cost you $0.00135 — about 49 cents a year — if you take it from a New York City tap.

Or, city officials suggest, you could spend 2,900 times as much, roughly $1,400 yearly, by drinking bottled water. For the extra money, they say, you get the added responsibility for piling on to the nation’s waste heap and encouraging more of the industrial emissions that are heating up the planet.

Coincidentally, Boing Boing recently had an excerpt from an article in Fast Company by Charles Fishman on the environmental cost of drinking that fancy bottle of Fiji Water.

The label on a bottle of Fiji Water says “from the islands of Fiji.” Journey to the source of that water, and you realize just how extraordinary that promise is. From New York, for instance, it is an 18-hour plane ride west and south (via Los Angeles) almost to Australia, and then a four-hour drive along Fiji’s two-lane King’s Highway.Every bottle of Fiji Water goes on its own version of this trip, in reverse, although by truck and ship. In fact, since the plastic for the bottles is shipped to Fiji first, the bottles’ journey is even longer. Half the wholesale cost of Fiji Water is transportation–which is to say, it costs as much to ship Fiji Water across the oceans and truck it to warehouses in the United States than it does to extract the water and bottle it.

That is not the only environmental cost embedded in each bottle of Fiji Water. The Fiji Water plant is a state-of-the-art facility that runs 24 hours a day. That means it requires an uninterrupted supply of electricity–something the local utility structure cannot support. So the factory supplies its own electricity, with three big generators running on diesel fuel. The water may come from “one of the last pristine ecosystems on earth,” as some of the labels say, but out back of the bottling plant is a less pristine ecosystem veiled with a diesel haze (…)

Fiji Water produces more than a million bottles a day, while more than half the people in Fiji do not have reliable drinking water.

Why I have daughters

Psychology Today has an article on Ten Politically Incorrect Truths About Human Nature. Number 6 is “Beautiful people have more daughters.” It’s too convoluted to summarize, so, here it is in full:

It is commonly believed that whether parents conceive a boy or a girl is up to random chance. Close, but not quite; it is largely up to chance. The normal sex ratio at birth is 105 boys for every 100 girls. But the sex ratio varies slightly in different circumstances and for different families. There are factors that subtly influence the sex of an offspring.

One of the most celebrated principles in evolutionary biology, the Trivers-Willard hypothesis, states that wealthy parents of high status have more sons, while poor parents of low status have more daughters. This is because children generally inherit the wealth and social status of their parents. Throughout history, sons from wealthy families who would themselves become wealthy could expect to have a large number of wives, mistresses and concubines, and produce dozens or hundreds of children, whereas their equally wealthy sisters can have only so many children. So natural selection designs parents to have biased sex ratio at birth depending upon their economic circumstances—more boys if they are wealthy, more girls if they are poor. (The biological mechanism by which this occurs is not yet understood.)

This hypothesis has been documented around the globe. American presidents, vice presidents, and cabinet secretaries have more sons than daughters. Poor Mukogodo herders in East Africa have more daughters than sons. Church parish records from the 17th and 18th centuries show that wealthy landowners in Leezen, Germany, had more sons than daughters, while farm laborers and tradesmen without property had more daughters than sons. In a survey of respondents from 46 nations, wealthy individuals are more likely to indicate a preference for sons if they could only have one child, whereas less wealthy individuals are more likely to indicate a preference for daughters.

The generalized Trivers-Willard hypothesis goes beyond a family’s wealth and status: If parents have any traits that they can pass on to their children and that are better for sons than for daughters, then they will have more boys. Conversely, if parents have any traits that they can pass on to their children and that are better for daughters, they will have more girls.

Physical attractiveness, while a universally positive quality, contributes even more to women’s reproductive success than to men’s. The generalized hypothesis would therefore predict that physically attractive parents should have more daughters than sons. Once again, this is the case. Americans who are rated “very attractive” have a 56 percent chance of having a daughter for their first child, compared with 48 percent for everyone else.

Time to learn a new tune

Spiegel Online has a news item about the responses of birds to new tunes.

Elizabeth Derryberry, a biologist at Duke University in North Carolina, compared recordings of sparrow hits from 1979 to those of 2003 and found that the newer songs have a much slower rhythm and dip further down into the lower registers. And upon playing the different versions to hip, modern-day sparrows in a variety of areas, she found that today’s birds are much more into current chart hits than those of 30 years ago.

The 20 males that heard Derryberry’s two recordings reacted much more aggressively to the new tunes, ready to defend their territory against the crooning interloper. And the chicks? They responded by becoming more open to sexual advances when the new music was played. The oldies didn’t turn them on at all.

“I’m not saying a female bird won’t respond to an old song, but not as much as she would to the newer version,” Derryberry told the newspaper the Daily Telegraph. “They regard the old songs as not as interesting, not as good as the new ones.”

What’s in a name?

A fascinating article in The Digerati Life examines the many ways names are perceived by people. For instance, the writer presents charts showing the positive and negative stereotypes people have in mind when they hear a particular name.

Positive Names

People Thought They Were…	Female	Male
Intelligent	Abigail, Eleanor, Lisa, Meredith and Rebecca	Clifford, David, Edward, John, Samuel, Ned and Tim
Leaders	Ruth	Alexander, Dwight and Lance
Hardworking	Ada, Ingrid, Marie and Margaret	Jake, Manuel, Ron and Todd
Entrepreneurial and Professional	Lorraine and Sylvia	Gregory and Ted
Talented	Tina	Neil
Wealthy	Audrey, Paige and Victoria	Lucius, Edmond and Claude
Blue-Collar	Roxy	Arnie
Refined	Indira, Calista and Grace	Nigel, Alistair, Vaughn
Ambitious	Leigh	Cedric
Organized	Julianne
Outgoing	Bernadette, Christy, Elaine, Gwen, Joy, Kathy, Kim, Patricia, Nancy and Wendy	Allen, Cole, Danny, Ed, Gary, Jim, Russ and Rob
Accountants (Nerdy)	Minerva and Ingrid	Myron and Reynold
Teachers	Trudy	Thomas
Wealthy Lawyers		Drew

Negative Names

People Thought They Were…	Name
Deceitful	Oswald
Awkward	Angus
Show-Off	Don
Bratty	Dennis
A Jerk	Ace
Stubborn	Rolf
Two-faced	Vera
Bossy	Joyce and Myrna
Opinionated	Rhea and Maud
Old and Overweight	Dolores
Dumb	Candy, Kiki and Vanna

Source: CareerBuilder.com and Behind The Name

The most stunning piece of information is from a study of twins that the writer cites. A Professor Figlio created a feminity index for women’s names.

The study then examined the effect of naming girls very “girlie” names and found the following:

Girls who are given very feminine names, such as Anna, Emma or Elizabeth, are less likely to study maths or physics after the age of 16. The effect is so strong that parents can set twin daughters off on completely different career paths simply by calling them Isabella and Alex, names at either end of the spectrum. A study of 1,000 pairs of sisters in the US found that Alex was twice as likely as her twin to take maths or science at a higher level.

Turn off the t.v. II

An article in Science News purportedly about the unforeseeable consequences of our technological advances has an interesting discussion of infants watching television. As in an earlier post, the short of it is: Turn off the t.v. and interact with your kids.

Interestingly, some new research coming from Wake Forest University demonstrates that toddlers watching television for the purposes of language acquisition – while being entertained – are not acquiring anything of the sort.

The study shows that without face-to-face human interaction, children do not pick up a host of necessary audio and visual cues to put their immediate environment into context. The study relates to young children watching Teletubbies specifically, but one could likely generalize to include numerous other “educational” television programs or interactive media. Marina Krcmar, associate professor of communications, says that parents could be limiting their child’s development significantly by sitting them in front of the idiot box.

“With the tremendous success of programs such as Teletubbies that target very young children, it has become important to understand what very young children are taking away from these programs,” says Krcmar. “We would like to think… that Teletubbies and other programs can teach initial language skills. That is not true.” In the study, Krcmar found that children could really only pick up words from another adult.

Born liars

The Telegraph (via Boingboing.net) reports that researchers have concluded that babies are not at all the innocent little creatures they pretend to be. On the contrary,

Behavioural experts have found that infants begin to lie from as young as six months. Simple fibs help to train them for more complex deceptions in later life.

Infants quickly learnt that using tactics such as fake crying and pretend laughing could win them attention. By eight months, more difficult deceptions became apparent, such as concealing forbidden activities or trying to distract parents’ attention.

One suspects that these “experts” must be childless men and women. Otherwise, how could it be possible that “Until now, psychologists had thought the developing brains were not capable of the difficult art of lying until four years old”?