Category — psychology

Everybody, please take today to do something nice for the (borderline) autistic in your life.

Research is not yet at the stage where autism can be detected prenatally using a biological test, but this may not be far off.

Such a test will need to prove itself clinically in terms of whether it is highly specific (in detecting just autism).

But assuming such a test is developed, we would be wise to think ahead as to how such a test would be used.

If it was used to ‘prevent’ autism, with doctors advising mothers to consider termination of the pregnancy if their baby tested ‘positive’, what else would be lost in reducing the number of children born with autism?

Would we also reduce the number of future great mathematicians, for example?

Or if this test led to some kind of prenatal treatment, such as the use of drugs to block the effect of testosterone which is already medically possible, would this be desirable?

If reducing the testosterone in a foetus helped that baby’s future social development, we would all be delighted.

But what if such a treatment reduced that baby’s future ability to attend to details, and to understand systematic information like maths?

BBC News: Autism test ‘could hit maths skills’

Researchers replicate Milgram’s experiment and get the same results as Milgram got 50 years ago. A good thing to remember in these days of peace-wishing and all-round goodness: most humans need only a little prodding to commit atrocities.

“People learning about Milgram's work often wonder whether results would be any different today,” said Burger, a professor at Santa Clara University. “Many point to the lessons of the Holocaust and argue that there is greater societal awareness of the dangers of blind obedience. But what I found is the same situational factors that affected obedience in Milgram's experiments still operate today.”

Stanley Milgram was an assistant professor at Yale University in 1961 when he conducted the first in a series of experiments in which subjects – thinking they were testing the effect of punishment on learning – administered what they believed were increasingly powerful electric shocks to another person in a separate room. An authority figure conducting the experiment prodded the first person, who was assigned the role of “teacher” to continue shocking the other person, who was playing the role of “learner.” In reality, both the authority figure and the learner were in on the real intent of the experiment, and the imposing-looking shock generator machine was a fake.

Milgram found that, after hearing the learner's first cries of pain at 150 volts, 82.5 percent of participants continued administering shocks; of those, 79 percent continued to the shock generator's end, at 450 volts. In Burger's replication, 70 percent of the participants had to be stopped as they continued past 150 volts – a difference that was not statistically significant.

via Replicating Milgram: Researcher finds most will administer shocks when prodded by ‘authority figure’

… tanta duda y tantos sesudos estudios sobre lo que es el hombre, por qué podemos o no podemos llevarnos bien, etc… y luego no somos capaces ni de tirar de la cadena del wáter… para mi eso lo resume todo …

Rough translation:

… so much doubt and so many brainy studies about what man is, why we can or cannot get along fine, etc… and then we aren’t even able to flush the toilet… for me this summarizes it all …

Tatus (tatus.net » » Tanto debate… tanta filosofía…)

You are your own favorite hobby. You’re an expert on you.

All a good salesman does is make eye contact, mimic your body language, nod or laugh or grunt to prove he’s spellbound — those noises or gestures, they’re called “verbal attends.” A salesman only has to prove that he’s just as obsessed with you as you are with yourself. After that, the two of you share a common passion: you.

Catching up with my feed reading, I see that lately there’s been some buzz in the ’sphere around Let’s All Evolve Past This: The Barriers Women Face in Tech Communities. It is indeed a very insightful article.

In particular, I am pleased to see someone talking about the differences in handling sub-optimal communication and how it affects the whole ‘women in tech’ issue. The bit under the heading Men are generally very good at ignoring bad behavior is spot on.

But even though the article gives some good advice on building communities with better communication patterns, it does not give any advice to women as to how to help themselves to better cope with difference in communication modes. For example, it would help if more women were aware of these differences and would try to contemplate harsh things said by their colleagues in the context of the colleague’s overall behavior and character, and avoid over-analyzing these comments.

Quite a few of the problems faced by women in tech could be addressed by working on women’s self-efficacy. Among other things, people with higher self-efficacy are more comfortable taking harsh criticism, are more likely to voice their opinions, have higher motivation, and are more willing to take some risks and experiment. So maybe we should all be working on that. I, for one, will try to work on mine.

Lately I’ve been noticing that a big percentage of entry titles in the RSS feeds I read contain a numeral. Often these titles are of the form: “N ways of doing X” or “M best Ys.

This trend seems particularly pronounced in the del.icio.us/popular feed. As I write this, the top two popular bookmarks are Top 17 Search Innovations Outside Of Google and Top 57 Wikis By Rank.

Today I noticed Show Numbers as Numerals When Writing for Online Readers, one of Jakob Nielsen’s last columns. The summary of the article goes:

It’s better to use “23″ than “twenty-three” to catch users’ eyes when they scan Web pages for facts, according to eyetracking data.

Apparently writing numbers as numerals, instead of spelling them out, improves scannability of the text. Which is, of course, the exact opposite of what our language teachers taught us.

And not only numerals make your facts easier to extract from the text, Nielsen claims that numerals can also increase your credibility:

Even when users aren’t scanning for data, having your facts stand out visually by presenting them as numerals is an easy way to enhance credibility by making your page seem more useful.

This might explain the numbers-in-titles phenomenon: the “10″ in the 10 R’s to Apply if you Want to Succeed makes the title/article so credible that 668 people found fit to bookmark it. Scary stuff.

The need for a “proper frame” I talked about in this post is an important idea to have in mind when trying to get recognition for your work, be it artistic or not, professional or just a hobby.

In the case of artistic output, this might be quite obvious: a 9×15 photo print does not look as good as the same image when printed in a large format and professionally framed. Even a small black frame around a simple digital picture often makes a big difference. Look at all those Flickr pictures, if you don’t believe me.

But what is the “small black frame” for your professional, non-artistic output? You could try dressing to “look more professional” [1]. Of course, you should give as many good presentations of your work as possible, both in formal and informal settings. And send to colleagues/bosses/etc e-mails with bits of your output that you think can be useful to them is probably also a good idea.

If your main output is code, at the very least you should make it human-readable and well-tested (by unit tests, of course; stop bullshitting people with golden-file-based regression tests that you’ll never update again).

If your main output is in the form of a written report, choose a professional-looking font and layout (no more Comic Sans, no more than two or three fonts in the same document, etc). And, por dios, double-check your grammar and spelling!

Can you think of any more examples of how to better frame your work?

[1] Note that I use the concept of “dressing like a professional” in a broad sense. Where I work, “dressing like a professional” involves jeans and black t-shirts and/or looking generally nerdy. I bet those guys in the Ernst & Young building do not perceive our dress code as professional, though. So, when trying to look professional, study first the dress code for your chosen target audience.

The Washington Post set up an interesting experiment: they had a world-class violinist (Joshua Bell) play a famous Stradivarius outside a Washington DC metro entrance. Pearls Before Breakfast describes what happened. There is a video, too.

In a nutshell: he made 40 bucks in an hour, and hardly anyone stopped to listen.

The Post argues that nobody stopped because it was morning on a work day in Washington DC, and passers-by were all in a hurry to get to work. It was just not a good moment for them to indulge in art appreciation. The Post’s conclusion: we are all too stressed, we need to find more balance in our lives, etc. Breaking news, I know.

But the Post also mentions an alternate explanation, offered by Mark Leithauser, a curator at the National Gallery (the Washington one, not the London one):

Leithauser’s point is that we shouldn’t be too ready to label the Metro passersby unsophisticated boobs. Context matters.

I find this not only a better explanation, but also a more interesting one.

What would have happened if, instead of wearing jeans and a baseball cap, Bell would have been dressed as for a formal performance at a famous venue? What if there already was a small crowd planted around him? Would that validate passers-by desire to stop and listen, driving more people to the crowd? If there would have been some journalists taking pictures of him, asking questions and treating him like a star, would have people stopped then?

I think that if Joshua Bell’s “frame” during his performance in the Washington Metro would have clearly indicated that there was Something Big Going On, many more people would have stopped. It would have called their attention, and it would have also made it OK to stop for a couple of minutes. After all, what are a couple of minutes less work, if it will give you something to talk about at the watercooler?

(Article found via The Online Photographer, who writes his own commentary on the experiment here.)

The Online Photographer: Feet Are Optional:

What these straight-A kids wanted was for me to set the terms of their success for them. They wanted me to set up the hoop so they could jump through it for me. They wanted to be told how they could be certain of success. It was what they encountered everywhere else. But what I wanted was for them to set up their own hoop, or, better yet, look askance at the hoop and go, “Nah, not today,” and wander off somewhere and see what they could find. The fact is, you need to fail a lot if you want to succeed as an artist. That’s why the kids who were used to failing weren’t fazed by my classes: they weren’t threatened by the idea of falling flat on their faces 90% of the time. The good students definitely were.

I would go further: you need to fail a lot if you want to succeed. Not just as an artist.

While recently playing World of Warcraft I came across the following situation.

Player A and player B decide to create new characters. Player A wants to have engineering as a profession, because that will allow the player to “build cool stuff”; player A decides to be a gnome in order to have better engineering abilities. Player B decides then to be dwarf, for variety’s sake. Players create their characters and start playing.

After an hour or so of playing with these new characters, player A declares “We are short and fat, I don’t like it”. Player B suggests, “Well, we can create new, human characters. We would be taller and slimmer then.” Player A agrees, and new (human) characters are created. Player A still sticks to the “will become engineer” plan. Upon seeing player B’s new avatar, player A remarks “Oh, it looks just like you in the Real World (TM)!”, which is fairly accurate, except that A doesn’t usually carry a mace around in the Real World (TM).

I think this story is a nice example of the importance we attach not only to the image we have of ourselves, but also to any kind of representation of ourselves. We don’t want to appear short and fat, even if it is inside a game. And we are surprisingly attached to whatever we consider to be our “core” characteristics (e.g. “I am an engineer”), too.

Technorati Tags: image, self, wow

Joi Ito has a post about gender of World of Warcraft characters, where he asks if anyone has studied this issue academically. The comment thread is very interesting.

One of the gold nuggets from the comment thread is Nick Yee’s Daedalus project, where he explores the psychology of MMORPGs. Among other things, on Nick’s site I find some interesting data on World of Warcraft Character Race Demographics. Nick writes that night-elves and gnomes significantly more likely to be played by a female player. This is a particularly interesting thing to me, as I started playing WoW last week, and I chose a night-elf as my first character. When I have some more experience I will see how do people treat my character, and if it matters that is female.

According New Scientist article Dear diary, you make me sick:

Keeping a diary is bad for your health, say UK psychologists. They found that regular diarists were more likely than non-diarists to suffer from headaches, sleeplessness, digestive problems and social awkwardness.

Although she does not have proof, Duncan speculates that diarists buck the usual trend because instead of a single, cathartic outpouring to offload trauma, diarists continually churn over their misfortunes and so never get over them. ?��Ǩ?�It?��Ǩ�Ѣs probably better not to get caught in a ruminative, repetitive cycle,?��Ǩ�� she says.

But the results are not at all conclusive:

But she acknowledges that her experiment could not demonstrate which came first - the diary writing or the health problems.

The NYTimes publishes yet another article (free registration required) about the European work and quality of life models. Nothing new, but still interesting to read an American article about this. Some excerpts:

” [...] Or as Joaqu?ɬ?n Almunia, European commissioner for economic and monetary affairs, put it, for Europeans, economic growth is a tool, not an end in itself.

“We are not in a race with the U.S.,” he said. “Our goal is not to grow as fast as the U.S. or anybody else, but to do what we need to protect our economic and social model.”

[...]

“Americans move from the 20,000 -square-feet house to the 30,000-square-feet house to the 40,000-square-feet house. It’s a different mentality,” said Kenneth S. Rogoff, an economist at Harvard University and former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund.

[...]

Giuseppe Roma, who conducts society studies at Censis in Rome, says European shoppers are increasingly rejecting status-quo purchases to buy quality-of-life products.

The new attitude, he says is: “I care about the real quality of life. I may not buy Prada, but I will buy organic olive oil.”

[...]

More significantly, measures of happiness in the America and Japan has been flat over the last 30 years, while they have been rising in most Western European countries.”