Greasing the social wheel

Boingboing has an item on a new study about children and flattery reported in the University of Toronto Magazine.  Similar to an earlier story about lying babies (see Born liars), this report should serve as a warning to adults that children are not to be trusted.

The research was conducted by a Canadian-Chinese team.

They asked a group of preschool children ages 3 to 6 to rate drawings by children and adults they knew, as well as strangers. The preschoolers judged the artwork both when the artist was present, and when he or she was absent. The three-year-olds were completely honest, and remained consistent in their ratings; it didn’t matter who drew it, or whether the person was in the room. Five- and six-year-olds gave more flattering ratings when the artist was in front of them. They flattered both strangers and those they knew (although familiar people got a higher dose of praise). Among the four-year-olds, half the group displayed flattery while the other half did not. This supports the idea that age four is a key transitional period in children’s social understanding of the world.

Evolutionary food chain

It is remarkable how often the things we know turn out to be false knowledge, and it is even more instructive when such false knowledge has passed into the realm of public or common knowledge.  A blog entry in the Wall Street Journal is a reminder of one such example.  Christopher Rhoads writes about the demise of Hydrox and how its devotees are petitioning Kellogg to revive the cookie.

Here is the short history of the Hydrox:

Hydrox was created in 1908 by what would later become Sunshine Biscuits Inc. . . . When Keebler acquired Sunshine in 1996, Sunshine was a distant third behind Keebler and Nabisco. Keebler then replaced the original Hydrox with a reformulated, sweeter cookie aimed more at children, called Droxies. When they failed to make a dent in the Oreo, Kellogg, which had acquired Keebler in 2001, quietly stopped making Hydrox two years later.

Anyone who remembers the Hydrox remembers it as the cheapo imitation of the Oreo.  So it comes a surprise to most when they learn that the Oreo was brought out 1912 by the company that would become Nabisco — four years after the introduction of Hydrox.

In the mournful words from a website devoted to the Hydrox:

Hydrox debuted in 1908, the signature product of the nascent Sunshine Biscuits, and ruled the category until 1912, when National Biscuit (later Nabisco) launched the remarkably similar Oreos. Given Nabisco’s superiority over Sunshine in everything from distribution channels to advertising budgets, it was no contest–Hydrox never had a chance. Over the years, Oreos’ popularity and market hegemony became so overwhelming that the product transcended the consumer realm and came to be viewed as a cultural icon, an American original–even though there was nothing original about it.

Online disinhibition effect

In a column by Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence and Social Intelligence, he notes that “Psychologists have a technical name for flaming: the ‘online disinhibition effect,’ which describes the many ways people behave with less restraint in cyberspace.” The causes for this effect are many:

Psychologist John Suler has suggested that several psychological factors can cause online disinhibition: the anonymity and invisibility that the Web provides; the time lag between sending an email message and getting feedback; the exaggerated sense of self from being alone; and the lack of any online authority figure.

Clay Shirky, a professor of social computing at NYU,

suggests ways to respond to “flamer” situations, especially where a flamer is a complete stranger who you’ll never meet in person. For instance, he notes that flaming is much more severe in online groups than it is in two–person exchanges. So users often find that they can defuse flamers by contacting them directly. “When you take them out of the social part of the conversation, where they’re performing in front of an audience, and address them as an individual, they become much less prone to name–calling and vituperation,” he says.

New software can also make a difference, says Shirky. He argues that if people can post even tiny digital images of themselves in an online discussion, that will dampen flaming and help people’s emotional intelligence emerge. “We’re so fantastically attuned to reading faces that [photos] give us more of a sense of who we’re dealing with,” he says.