People feel safer with the established order in the face of potential change. That’s partly why people buy the same things they bought before, return to the same restaurants and keep espousing the same opinions.
This has been called the ‘system justification bias’ and it has some paradoxical effects (research is described in Jost et al., 2004)…
A case of “better the devil you know”?
Blogged without comment…
Researchers in Spain used a huge archive known as the Million Song Dataset, which breaks down audio and lyrical content into data that can be crunched, to study pop songs from 1955 to 2010.
A team led by artificial intelligence specialist Joan Serra at the Spanish National Research Council ran music from the last 50 years through some complex algorithms and found that pop songs have become intrinsically louder and more bland in terms of the chords, melodies and types of sound used.
Ok, I will comment briefly on the ‘loudness war’: it is a noticeable trend and probably to the detriment of the music itself.
A perfect storm engenders online rudeness, including virtual anonymity and thus a lack of accountability, physical distance and the medium of writing …
With a presidential campaign, health care and the gun control debate in the news these days, one can’t help getting sucked into the flame wars that are Internet comment threads. But psychologists say this addictive form of vitriolic back and forth should be avoided — or simply censored by online media outlets — because it actually damages society and mental health.
Working out solutions to the kinds of hard problems that tend to garner the most comments online requires lengthy discussion and compromise. “The back-and-forth negotiation that goes on in having a conversation with someone you don’t agree with is a skill,” Markman said. And this skill is languishing, both among members of the public and our leaders.
What is art? What does art reveal about human nature? The trend these days is to approach such questions in the key of neuroscience.
“Neuroaesthetics” is a term that has been coined to refer to the project of studying art using the methods of neuroscience. It would be fair to say that neuroaesthetics has become a hot field. It is not unusual for leading scientists and distinguished theorists of art to collaborate on papers that find their way into top scientific journals.
What is striking about neuroaesthetics is not so much the fact that it has failed to produce interesting or surprising results about art, but rather the fact that no one — not the scientists, and not the artists and art historians — seem to have minded, or even noticed.
[N]euroscience, which looks at events in the brains of individual people and can do no more than describe and analyze them, may just be the wrong kind of empirical science for understanding art.
Far from its being the case that we can apply neuroscience as an intellectual ready-made to understand art, it may be that art, by disclosing the ways in which human experience in general is something we enact together, in exchange, may provide new resources for shaping a more plausible, more empirically rigorous, account of our human nature.
An example of the Endowment effect, with some advice on how to overcome it.
Question: How do you make something instantly twice as expensive?
Answer: By thinking about giving it away.This might sound like a nonsensical riddle, but if you’ve ever felt overly possessive about your regular parking space, your pen, or your Star Wars box sets, then you’re experiencing some elements behind the psychology of ownership. Our brains tell us that we value something merely because it is a thing we have.
[A] new study by three psychology scientists (forthcoming in Psychological Science) offers valuable insight into the universal power of awe.
Although the study looks to investigate several aspects of this emotion, the initial – and perhaps most intriguing – hypothesis is pretty striking: the experience of awe will expand your perception of time.
Referencing current research, the study offers several explanations for this phenomenon. Perhaps most integral, though, to this study is the fact that awe puts the beholder in the moment, which can augment his or her sense of time.
In addition to confirming the expansion of time, the study shows that awe can ease impatience and actually make you more willing to volunteer time in the name of others. People also begin to prefer an actual experience over a material good. And just in case that wasn’t good enough, an awesome moment can increase your overall satisfaction and happiness in life.
Today I’ve got 5 such studies that will give you some solid research on smart web design:
- Too many options ensure NONE will be chosen
- Visitors read long widths of text faster, but prefer shorter widths
- Your headlines draw even more eyes than images!
- Image captions are the most consistently read in-post content
- People follow the “line of sight” of other people
An interesting piece about the plausibility of Isaac Asimov’s concept of Psychohistory becoming a reality.
Isaac Asimov introduced the fictional scientific field of psychohistory in his Foundation universe. In this science fiction setting, this science could predict the future by analyzing data and making inductive inferences from this data using various algorithms and formulas. The predictions resulting from the science are not about specific individuals, but rather about broad events. For example, the science could predict the fall of the Empire, but it could not be used to predict which specific person would be the emperor at that time.
See also the Wikipedia article about Psychohistory.
Too many to list here, so click on the link for more reading suggestions.
Six writers on their favorite reading, genre by genre…
Peter Carey (historical fiction):
The Radetzky March (1932) by Joseph Roth
Blood Meridian (1985) by Cormac McCarthy
Midnight’s Children (1981) by Salman Rushdie
Riddley Walker (1980) by Russell Hoban
Specimen Days (2005) by Michael Cunningham
War and Peace (1869) by Leo Tolstoy
An Artist of the Floating World (1986) by Kazuo Ishiguro
The Eye in the Door (1993) by Pat Barker
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000) by Michael Chabon
William Gibson (science fiction):
Tiger! Tiger! (1956) by Alfred Bester
Dhalgren (1975) by Samuel R. Delany
Arslan (1976) by M. J. Engh
The Crystal World (1966) by J. G. Ballard
The Forever War (1974) by Joe Haldeman
Pavane (1968) by Keith Roberts
Random Acts of Senseless Violence (1993)by Jack Womack
Great Work of Time (1991) by John Crowley
Holy Fire (1996) by Bruce Sterling
334 (1972) by Thomas M. Disch
Kathryn Harrison (memoirs):
Boyhood: Scenes From a Provincial Life (1997) by J. M. Coetzee
The Lover (1984) by Marguerite Duras
A Fan’s Notes (1968) by Frederick Exley
To the Is-Land (1982) by Janet Frame
Fierce Attachments (1987) by Vivian Gornick
The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (1976) by Maxine Hong Kingston
Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story (1992) by Paul Monette
Speak, Memory (1951) by Vladimir Nabokov
Running in the Family (1982) by Michael Ondaatje
Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness (1990) by William Styron
Simon Rich (humour):
Our Dumb Century (1999) by the Writers of ‘The Onion’
Me Talk Pretty One Day (2000) by David Sedaris
The Magic Kingdom (1985) by Stanley Elkin
Decline and Fall (1928) by Evelyn Waugh
Claw Your Way to the Top: How to Become the Head of a Major Corporation in Roughly a Week (1986) by Dave Barry
The Magic Christian (1959) by Terry Southern
Love Is Hell (1984) by Matt Groening
My Uncle Oswald (1979) by Roald Dahl
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979) by Douglas Adams
The Great American Novel (1973) by Philip Roth
Otto Penzler (thrillers):
The Tears of Autumn (1975) by Charles Mccarry
The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (1963) by John Le Carré
The Garden of Weapons (1980) by John Gardner
Child 44 (2008) by Tom Rob Smith
Empire of Lies (2008) by Andrew Klavan
Spies of the Balkans (June 15, 2010) by Alan Furst
Six Days of the Condor (1974) by James Grady
Word of Honor (1985) by Nelson Demille
The Cold War Swap (1966) by Ross Thomas
A Coffin for Dimitrios (1939) by Eric Ambler
Rebecca Skloot (science):
The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, And the Collision of Two Cultures (1997) by Anne Fadiman
In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (1985) by Daniel J. Kevles
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat: And Other Clinical Tales (1985) by Oliver Sacks
Confessions of a Knife (1979) by Richard Selzer
Love at Goon Park (2002) by Deborah Blum
And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic (1987) by Randy Shilts
A Long Line of Cells (1990) by Lewis Thomas
His Brother’s Keeper: A Story From the Edge of Medicine (2004) by Jonathan Weiner
The Best American Science Writing Edited by Jesse Cohen
The Best American Science and Nature Writing Edited by Tim Folger
