The Social Thermometer
We often describe our social relationships in temperature metaphors, like “cold shoulder” or “warm memories” or even “she’s hot!” This is no coincidence. An experiment last year from the University of Toronto showed that thinking about an incident where the subject felt socially excluded led them to estimate the room’s temperature to be lower than those subjects who recalled a better experience. Three more experiments from Hans IJzerman and Gün R. Semin of Utrecht University show the converse to be true as well: warm or cold temperatures affect how people perceive relationships. In the first experiment, subjects rated a relationship on the social proximity, or overlap, between the subject and a person they were asked to think about.
The participants had been divided into two groups at the beginning of the experiment. Those in the warm condition had been given a warm drink to hold when they entered the room, while those in the cold condition had been given a cold one. It was found that the perceived degree of overlap with the known other was significantly greater for those participants handed a warm drink at the start of the experiment than those handed a cold one. Similarly, another recent study found that those who hold a hot cup of coffee judged others to be more generous and caring than those who held a cup of iced coffee.
Get yourself a nice hot cup and read about the other two experiments at Neurophilosophy. Link
(image credit: Flickr user bitzcelt)
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The Secret to Happiness: Sisters!
What’s the secret to happiness? According to a study by the University of Ulster, the answer is: having sisters!
Lead researcher Professor Tony Cassidy said: "Sisters appear to encourage more open communication and cohesion in families.
"However, brothers seemed to have the alternative effect. Emotional expression is fundamental to good psychological health and having sisters promotes this in families."
He said many of the participants had been brought up in families where parents had split and the impact of sisters was even more marked in these circumstances.
"I think these findings could be used by people offering support to families and children during distressing times. We may have to think carefully about the way we deal with families with lots of boys."
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Jane Elliott's Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes Experiment on Racism
Photo: Charlotte Button
After Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968, school teacher Jane Elliott wanted to teach her third-grade class about racism. Rather than a lengthy discussion about it, she decided to show the 8-year-olds what racism is all about in a famous "experiment":
With King shot just the day before in Memphis, Elliott encouraged her third-graders to discuss how something so horrible could happen.
"I finally said, ‘Do you kids have any idea how it feels to be something other than white in this country?’ "
The children shook their heads and said they wanted to learn, so Elliott set the rules. Blue-eyed children must use a cup to drink from the fountain. Blue-eyed children must leave late to lunch and to recess. Blue-eyed children were not to speak to brown-eyed children. Blue-eyed children were troublemakers and slow learners.
Within 15 minutes, Elliott says, she observed her brown-eyed students morph into youthful supremacists and blue-eyed children become uncertain and intimidated.
Brown-eyed children "became domineering and arrogant and judgmental and cool," she says. "And smart! Smart! All of a sudden, disabled readers were reading. I thought, ‘This is not possible, this is my imagination.’ And I watched bright, blue-eyed kids become stupid and frightened and frustrated and angry and resentful and distrustful. It was absolutely the strangest thing I’d ever experienced."
Corina Knoll of the Los Angeles Times has the story: Link
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Can Two People Eat on $67 a Week?
Jason Song was reading a book about making homemade bacon when his wife suggested they both undertake the ‘food stamp challenge.’
The challenge? Seeing if the two of them could subsist on $72 worth of food a week. This dollar amount is about what a family of two in California will get in food stamps.
Considering that they both spent $700 on food, alcohol, and dining out alone the month before, they had quite a challenge on their hands.
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Does Being Brutally Honest Help Your Marriage?
Guys, when your wife or girlfriend asks "Does this clothe makes my butt look big?" what’s your answer? Did you tell a little white lie?
Well, not Cathal Morrow. The 43-year-old Welshman decided to be brutally honest for a year as a personal challenge … and was surprised with his wife’s reaction:
Throughout our marriage, Patti has always asked my opinion about the clothes she buys and her weight. She goes through stages where she’ll eat loads and, to be honest, it shows.
Before, I went on auto-pilot and made reassuring noises about how lovely she looked. Now, when she asks me if I think her bum looks big, I’ll tell her it does.
It might sound cruel. But what I’ve learned over the past year is that how you tell the truth matters. So I’ll say “yes, your bum does look bigger, but I like it that way”. And I honestly do.
Another time white lies used to arise was when I was going out with the lads.
I’d fly to meetings in London and stay at a friend’s house while Patti stayed in Madrid looking after the boys. When she asked me on the phone what I’d done with my mates, I’d avoid telling her we went to the pub because she’s probably been bored stuck at home and no man wants to risk an ear-bashing.
But now I’ll tell her the truth, that we went for beers.
I’ve discovered that the fear of people’s reaction to the truth is often much worse than the reality of it.
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Depressed? Don't Go to the Mall!
Feeling sad or depressed? Cross off shopping from your list. Researchers have just proven that sad people are big spenders:
In a recent experiment one group of people was shown a sad video clip about the death of a boy’s mentor, while another group viewed a non-emotional clip about the Great Barrier Reef.
Researchers then produced an insulated water bottle and asked how much of the $10 the participants were getting paid they’d be willing to give up in exchange for the bottle.
People who had seen the Great Barrier Reef video agreed to pay on average about 50 cents. People in the group that had been primed to feel sad offered up four times that price, more than $2 on average — but were unaware that the video had any impact on their spending.
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Mapping your emails
Christopher Baker analyzed some 60,000 emails that he has sent and received since 1998 to reveal his social network, as represented in an interesting visual map:
Like many people, I have archived all of my email with the hope of someday revisiting my past. I am interested in revealing the innumerable relationships between me, my schoolmates, work-mates, friends and family. This could not readily be accomplished by reading each of my 60,000 emails one-by-one. Instead, I created My Map, a relational map and alternative self portrait. My Map is a piece of custom designed software capable of rendering the relationships between myself and individuals in my address book by examining the TO:, FROM:, and CC: fields of every email in my email archive. The intensity of the relationship is determined by the intensity of the line. My Map allows me to explore different relational groupings and periods of time, revealing the temporal ebbs and flows in various relationships. In this way, My Map is a veritable self-portrait, a reflection of my associations and a way to locate myself.
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Why First Impressions Are So Important
Robert Lount of Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business found out why first impressions are so important: people are more forgiving of a
breach of trust later in the relationship as opposed as early on.
Here’s the experiment:
Lount and his colleagues had college students play a computer game in which their partners (actually a computer, unbeknownst to the participants) betrayed their trust either right off the bat or somewhere in the middle of the game.
A betrayal of trust occurred when a player defected rather than cooperated in a round of the game. A cooperative play resulted in more money rewarded to both players, while a defector would get a lot more money than the partner.
After the computer partner made two defector moves, it would follow with 30 rounds of pure cooperation. Turned out that cooperation wasn’t enough to gain back a participant’s trust. Those who experienced a breach of trust at the game’s start were the least likely to cooperate at the end of the game, cooperating less than 70 percent of the final 10 rounds.
Meanwhile, participants who experienced a betrayal later in the game, after 10 rounds of cooperation, showed the most cooperation at the end of the game, choosing to cooperate more than 90 percent of the time.
And in fact, those who were betrayed in rounds 11 and 12 were, on average, nearly 40 percent more cooperative in the last 10 rounds compared with participants who experienced an immediate betrayal.
When asked to evaluate their partners, participants gave more negative assessments of those early betrayers compared with the late ones.
"When the partner started off by defecting, and they were taken advantage of, they really formed these negative impressions — ‘That person is immoral,’ ‘They’re a jerk,’ ‘That’s not the type of person I would like,’" Lount said.
Jeanna Bryner of LiveScience has the story: Link | Photo from Fisher College of Business
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You May Be More Racist Than You Think
Soon to be an ex-racist
Are you a racist? While most people don’t view themselves as prejudiced, a surprising new study revealed that many unknowingly have racist views:
The authors divided 120 non-black participants into the roles of "experiencers" and "forecasters." The "experiencers" were placed in a room with a white person and a black person, who played out pre-arranged scenarios for the experiment. The scenarios began when the black role-player bumped the white role-player’s knee when leaving the room.
In the first scenario, the white person did not comment afterwards. In the "moderate" case, the white person said, "Typical, I hate it when black people do that," after the black person left the room. In the "extreme" case, the white person remarked, "Clumsy n****r."
The "forecasters," meanwhile, predicted how they would feel in these situations.
The magnitude of the results surprised even the authors, Kawakami said. Experiencers reported little distress in all three scenarios, much less than the forecasters did in the moderate and severe situations.
"Even using that most extreme comment didn’t lead people to be particularly upset," said co-author Elizabeth Dunn, assistant professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.
Previously on Neatorama: How Racist Are You? Take the test!
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The Secret of Luck: Why Some People Have All the Luck
Why do some people have all the luck while others are perpetually unlucky? Professor Richard Wiseman of the University of Hertfordshire was determined to get to the scientific bottom of the phenomenon of luck, and what he discovered may surprise you:
I placed advertisements in national newspapers asking for people who felt consistently lucky or unlucky to contact me.
Hundreds of extraordinary men and women volunteered for my research and over the years, have been interviewed by me. I have monitored their lives and had them take part in experiments. The results reveal that although these people have almost no insight into the causes of their luck, their thoughts and behaviour are responsible for much of their good and bad fortune. Take the case of seemingly chance opportunities. Lucky people consistently encounter such opportunities, whereas unlucky people do not.
I carried out a simple experiment to discover whether this was due to differences in their ability to spot such opportunities. I gave both lucky and unlucky people a newspaper, and asked them to look through it and tell me how many photographs were inside. I had secretly placed a large message halfway through the newspaper saying: ‘Tell the experimenter you have seen this and win $50′.
This message took up half of the page and was written in type that was more than two inches high. It was staring everyone straight in the face, but the unlucky people tended to miss it and the lucky people tended to spot it.
Unlucky people are generally more tense than lucky people, and this anxiety disrupts their ability to notice the unexpected.
Link | Richard Wiseman’s official website | His book: The Luck Factor
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Spending Only One Dollar a Day for Food
Could you survive if you only have $1 a day for food? That’s what Christopher Greenslate, 28, and Kerri Leonard, 29, wanted to find out. So the couple, both high school social studies teachers, did a month-long dollar-a-day diet experiment:
When we first started talking about doing this, we didn’t really have an agenda, or any developed sense of why we wanted to do it. It just seemed like an interesting challenge; one that would force us to see things differently.
We are interested in many of the strands related to this experiment; food choices, consumerism, waste, poverty, social psychology, etc., and this experience may provide insights that could help us better understand and teach about a variety of concerns (we both teach Social Justice in a public high school).
Here are the rules:
1. All food consumed each day must total $1 for each of us.
2. We cannot accept free food or “donated” food unless it is available for everyone in our area. (i.e. foraging, samples in stores, dumpster diving)
3. Any food we plant, we pay for.
4. We will do our best to cook a variety of meals; ramen noodles can only be prepared if there is no other way to stay under one dollar. (We have six packages and will buy no more)
5. Should we decide to have guests over for dinner they must eat from our share; meaning they don’t get to eat their own dollar’s worth of food.
The couple recorded their experience in their blog: Link | Their first day – Thanks Geekazoid!
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Buying "Made in America" Left a Woman Hungry, Broke, and Half-Naked!
Nicole McClelland conducted an experiment where she buys only American-made goods. It seems simple, but it’s anything but. Going "Made in America" for a week left her hungry, broke, and half-naked:
In 1990, when I was in grade school, I watched a union-sponsored commercial in which a mother told her little boy that they would have to move because Dad had lost his job—too many people were buying imports. As union jobs dried up, so did that campaign; now, 14 years into nafta, buying local is hot, but buying American is, at best, a joke (though in August Barack Obama dusted off the sentiment with his "Buy American, Vote Obama" slogan). When I told Scott Paul, executive director of the Alliance for American Manufacturing, that I was going to buy only American for a week, he laughed. "I’m very sorry to hear that.
"It’s exceptionally hard, if not impossible, to be 100 percent pure," he explained. "There are just some things you can’t buy. It’s incredibly difficult and depressing."
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