psychology

Interesting psychological disorders

science, weird / /

From Lauren Davis’ “Delusion or Alien Invasion? Disorders That Make Life Seem Like Scifi” (io9: 27 September 2008):

Capgras Delusion: You believe a loved one has been replaced with an exact duplicate.

…

Reduplicative Paramnesia: You believe that a place or location has been moved to another site, or has been duplicated and exists in two places simultaneously.

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Alien Hand Syndrome:Your hand seems to have a will of its own.

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Alice in Wonderland Syndrome: You perceive objects as much larger or smaller than they actually are.

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Fregoli Syndrome: You believe that multiple people in your life are actually a single person in disguise.

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Jumping Frenchman of Maine Disorder: You obey any order shouted at you in a commanding voice.

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Delusional Parasitosis: You believe that you are infested with parasites.

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Cotard Delusion: You believe you have died and that your body is rotting and/or your soul is gone.

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To solve a problem, you first have to figure out the problem

commonplace book, science, true stories / /

From Russell L. Ackoff & Daniel Greenberg’s Turning Learning Right Side Up: Putting Education Back on Track (2008):

A classic story illustrates very well the potential cost of placing a problem in a disciplinary box. It involves a multistoried office building in New York. Occupants began complaining about the poor elevator service provided in the building. Waiting times for elevators at peak hours, they said, were excessively long. Several of the tenants threatened to break their leases and move out of the building because of this…

Management authorized a study to determine what would be the best solution. The study revealed that because of the age of the building no engineering solution could be justified economically. The engineers said that management would just have to live with the problem permanently.

The desperate manager called a meeting of his staff, which included a young recently hired graduate in personnel psychology…The young man had not focused on elevator performance but on the fact that people complained about waiting only a few minutes. Why, he asked himself, were they complaining about waiting for only a very short time? He concluded that the complaints were a consequence of boredom. Therefore, he took the problem to be one of giving those waiting something to occupy their time pleasantly. He suggested installing mirrors in the elevator boarding areas so that those waiting could look at each other or themselves without appearing to do so. The manager took up his suggestion. The installation of mirrors was made quickly and at a relatively low cost. The complaints about waiting stopped.

Today, mirrors in elevator lobbies and even on elevators in tall buildings are commonplace.

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After a stroke, he can write, but can’t read

on writing, science, weird / /

From Oliver Sacks’ “The Case of Anna H.” (The New Yorker: 7 October 2002: 64):

I recently received a letter from Howard Engel, a Canadian novelist, who told me that he had a somewhat similar problem following a stroke: “The area affected,” he relates, “was my ability to read. I can write, but I can’t read what I’ve just written … So, I can write, but I can’t rewrite …”

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Language shapes thought

science / /

From Celeste Biever’s “Language may shape human thought” (New Scientist: 19 August 2004):

Language may shape human thought – suggests a counting study in a Brazilian tribe whose language does not define numbers above two.

Hunter-gatherers from the Pirahã tribe, whose language only contains words for the numbers one and two, were unable to reliably tell the difference between four objects placed in a row and five in the same configuration, revealed the study. 

…

For one, two and three objects, members of the tribe consistently matched Gordon’s pile correctly. But for four and five and up to ten, they could only match it approximately, deviating more from the correct number as the row got longer.

The Pirahã also failed to remember whether a box they had been shown seconds ago had four or five fish drawn on the top. When Gordon’s colleagues tapped on the floor three times, the Pirahã were able to imitate this precisely, but failed to mimic strings of four or five taps.

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What in our brains invest memories with emotion?

science / /

From Steven Pinker’s “What the F***?” (The New Republic: 9 Octobert 2007):

The mammalian brain contains, among other things, the limbic system, an ancient network that regulates motivation and emotion, and the neocortex, the crinkled surface of the brain that ballooned in human evolution and which is the seat of perception, knowledge, reason, and planning. The two systems are interconnected and work together, but it seems likely that words’ denotations are concentrated in the neocortex, especially in the left hemisphere, whereas their connotations are spread across connections between the neocortex and the limbic system, especially in the right hemisphere.

A likely suspect within the limbic system is the amygdala, an almond-shaped organ buried at the front of the temporal lobe of the brain (one on each side) that helps invest memories with emotion. A monkey whose amygdalas have been removed can learn to recognize a new shape, like a striped triangle, but has trouble learning that the shape foreshadows an unpleasant event like an electric shock. In humans, the amygdala “lights up”–it shows greater metabolic activity in brain scans–when the person sees an angry face or an unpleasant word, especially a taboo word.

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The Internet makes (sloppy) writers of nearly everyone

art, on writing, technology / /

From Adam Parfrey’s response to R.U. Sirius’ “Is The Net Good For Writers?” (10 Zen Monkeys: 5 October 2007):

I like the internet and computers for their ability to make writers of nearly everyone. I don’t like the internet and computers for their ability to make sloppy and thoughtless writers of nearly everyone.

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The shift from interior to exterior lives

art, on writing, technology / /

From Mark Dery’s response to R.U. Sirius’ “Is The Net Good For Writers?” (10 Zen Monkeys: 5 October 2007):

But we live in times of chaos and complexity, and the future of writing and reading is deeply uncertain. Reading and writing are solitary activities. The web enables us to write in public and, maybe one day, strike off the shackles of cubicle hell and get rich living by our wits. Sometimes I think we’re just about to turn that cultural corner. Then I step onto the New York subway, where most of the car is talking nonstop on cellphones. Time was when people would have occupied their idle hours between the covers of a book. No more. We’ve turned the psyche inside out, exteriorizing our egos, extruding our selves into public space and filling our inner vacuums with white noise.

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People being rescued run from their rescuers

commonplace book, weird / /

From Les Jones’s email in Bruce Schneier’s “Crypto-Gram” (15 August 2005):

Avoiding rescuers is a common reaction in people who have been lost in the woods. See Dwight McCarter’s book, “Lost,” an account of search and rescue operations in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. In one chapter McCarter tells the story of two backpackers in the park who got separated while traveling off-trail in the vicinity of Thunderhead. The less-experienced hiker quickly got lost.

After a day or two wandering around he was going through his pack and found a backpacking how-to book that explained what to do in case you got lost in the woods. Following the advice, he went to a clearing and built a signal fire. A rescue helicopter saw the smoke and hovered overhead above the tree tops as he waved his arms to attract their attention. The helicopter dropped a sleeping bag and food, with a note saying they couldn’t land in the clearing, but that they would send in a rescue party on foot.

The lost hiker sat down, tended his fire, and waited for rescue. When the rescuers appeared at the edge of the clearing, he panicked, jumped up, and ran in the other direction. They had to chase him down to rescue him. This despite the fact that he wanted to be rescued, had taken active steps to attract rescuers, and knew that rescuers were coming to him. Odd but true.

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The Ellsberg Paradox: People prefer definites over ambiguity

commonplace book / /

From Nicholas Lemann’s “Paper Tiger” (The New Yorker: 4 November 2002):

Ellsberg devoted a good portion of his life to decision theory, and made quite a significant contribution for somebody so young. People are still publishing comments on his best-known idea, the so-called “Ellsberg paradox.”

The paradox arises from a series of games involving colored balls in urns. Let’s say there are two urns, each of which contains a hundred balls, which are either red or black. One urn contains fifty red balls and fifty black balls. The proportion of red and black in the other urn is unknown. You can draw one ball from one of the urns, without looking, and if you draw a red ball you win a hundred dollars. Which urn will you choose?

There is no good reason to think that the chance of getting a red ball is any better in one urn than in the other, but Ellsberg found that people overwhelmingly chose the urn known to have fifty balls of each color. The person running the game would then say, “O.K., you think that urn is likelier to have a red ball; now I’m going to offer you a hundred dollars if you draw a black ball.” If you turned to the fifty-fifty urn for the red ball, it would seem you had a hunch that the other urn contained more black balls, and therefore you should try to draw your black ball from it. But, overwhelmingly, people chose the fifty-fifty urn again. The Ellsberg paradox is that people so strongly prefer definite information over ambiguity that they make choices consistent neither with the laws of probability nor with themselves.

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The importance of escalators in shopping

business / /

From “A-Z Retail Tricks To Make You Shop“:

Escalators – Multi-level Department stores often use their escalators to encourage you to see more of the store. Travelling either up or down the store you will find you have to walk half way around the level in order to find your next connecting escalator, as opposed to it being the one next to you. This has not happened by accident.

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The final moment of tragedy

art, language & literature, on writing / /

From Northrop Frye’s “The Mythos of Autumn: Tragedy” (128):

The moment of discovery or ‘anagnorisis’, which comes at the end of the tragic plot, is not simply the knowledge by the hero of what has happened to him … but the recognition of the determined shape of the life he has created for himself, with an implicit comparison with the uncreated potential life he has forsaken.

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Incompetent & they don’t know it

commonplace book, science / /

From Erica Goode’s “Incompetent People Really Have No Clue, Studies Find: They’re blind to own failings, others’ skills” (The New York Times: 18 January 2000):

Dunning, a professor of psychology at Cornell, worries about this because, according to his research, most incompetent people do not know that they are incompetent.

On the contrary. People who do things badly, Dunning has found in studies conducted with a graduate student, Justin Kruger, are usually supremely confident of their abilities — more confident, in fact, than people who do things well. …

One reason that the ignorant also tend to be the blissfully self-assured, the researchers believe, is that the skills required for competence often are the same skills necessary to recognize competence.

The incompetent, therefore, suffer doubly, they suggested in a paper appearing in the December issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

“Not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it,” wrote Kruger, now an assistant professor at the University of Illinois, and Dunning.

This deficiency in “self-monitoring skills,” the researchers said, helps explain the tendency of the humor-impaired to persist in telling jokes that are not funny, of day traders to repeatedly jump into the market — and repeatedly lose out — and of the politically clueless to continue holding forth at dinner parties on the fine points of campaign strategy. …

Unlike unskilled counterparts, the most able subjects in the study, Kruger and Dunning found, were likely to underestimate their competence. The researchers attributed this to the fact that, in the absence of information about how others were doing, highly competent subjects assumed that others were performing as well as they were — a phenomenon psychologists term the “false consensus effect.”

When high-scoring subjects were asked to “grade” the grammar tests of their peers, however, they quickly revised their evaluations of their own performance. In contrast, the self-assessments of those who scored badly themselves were unaffected by the experience of grading others; some subjects even further inflated their estimates of their own abilities.

“Incompetent individuals were less able to recognize competence in others,” the researchers concluded.

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Living in a cave behind your house

commonplace book, law, weird / /

From Reuters’s “Chinese fugitive leaves cave after 8 years” (5 October 2006):

A Chinese man wanted by police on gun charges has given himself up after hiding in a cave constructed at the back of his house for eight years, the official Xinhua news agency said.

The 35-year-old man from the southeastern city of Fuzhou had tunneled the cave out of a hill behind the bedroom of his house and had put a wardrobe in front of the entrance as a disguise, Xinhua said in a report seen on Thursday.

The man, named as Liu Yong, left the cave during the day to read, wash and watch television in the house, but went back into it at night, it said.

He told his wife he was hiding from debt collectors, the report said.

Xinhua said Liu was accused of attacking people with guns, but it didn’t give any more details.

Liu gave himself up to police on Tuesday after no longer being able to cope with the “psychological pressure”, Xinhua added.

Some of his accomplices have already been sentenced to death, it said.

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Teach people not to want a camera, but photography itself

art, business, history, tech in changing society, technology / /

From James Surowiecki’s “The Tastemakers” (The New Yorker [13 January 2003]: 31):

… it’s one thing to foist a fad on people, and another to have a deep and enduring impact on their everyday customs and habits. In the late eighteen-eighties, when George Eastman invented the Kodak – the first point-and-shoot camera – photography was the private domain of enthusiasts and professionals. Though the Kodak was relatively cheap and easy to use, most Americans didn’t see the need for a camera; they had no sense that there was any value in visually documenting their lives. So, instead of simply marketing a camera, Eastman sold photography. His advertisements told people what to take pictures of: vacations, holidays, “the Christmas house party.” Kodak introduced the concept of the photo album, and made explicit the connection between photographs and memories. Before long, it was more or less considered a patriotic duty to commemorate the notable – and not so notable – moments in your life on a roll of Kodak film.

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The escape of Mr. Flitcraft

commonplace book, language & literature, security / /

From Claudia Roth Pierpont’s “Tough Guy: The mystery of Dashiell Hammett” (The New Yorker [11 February 2002]: 70):

There is one section of “The Maltese Falcon” that could not be filmed, and for many readers it is the most important story Hammett ever told. A dreamlike interruption in events, it is a parable that Spade relates to Brigid about a man called Flitcraft, dutiful husband and father of two, who was nearly hit by a falling beam while walking to lunch one day. Instead of going back to work, Flitcraft disappeared. “He went like that,” Spade says, in what may be Hammett’s most unexpected and beautiful phrase, “like a fist when you open your hand.” His narrow escape had taught this sane and orderly man that life is neither orderly nor sane, that all our human patterns are merely imposed, and he went away in order to fall in step with life. He was not unkind; the love he bore his family “was not of the sort that would make absence painful,” and he left plenty of money behind. He travelled for a while, Spade relates, but he ended up living in a city near the one he’d fled, selling cars and playing golf, with a second wife hardly different from the first. The moral: one can attempt to adjust one’s life to falling beams but will readjust as soon as the shock wears off.

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It takes 10 years to develop expertise

business, commonplace book, education, teaching, technology / /

From Peter Norvig’s “Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years” (2001):

Researchers ([John R. Hayes, Complete Problem Solver (Lawrence Erlbaum) 1989.], [Benjamin Bloom (ed.), Developing Talent in Young People (Ballantine) 1985.]) have shown it takes about ten years to develop expertise in any of a wide variety of areas, including chess playing, music composition, painting, piano playing, swimming, tennis, and research in neuropsychology and topology. There appear to be no real shortcuts: even Mozart, who was a musical prodigy at age 4, took 13 more years before he began to produce world-class music. In another genre, the Beatles seemed to burst onto the scene with a string of #1 hits and an appearance on the Ed Sullivan show in 1964. But they had been playing small clubs in Liverpool and Hamburg since 1957, and while they had mass appeal early on, their first great critical success, Sgt. Peppers, was released in 1967. Samuel Johnson thought it took longer than ten years: “Excellence in any department can be attained only by the labor of a lifetime; it is not to be purchased at a lesser price.” And Chaucer complained “the lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.”

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When people feel secure, they’re easier targets

business, security, technology / /

From Bruce Schneier’s “Burglars and “Feeling Secure” (Crypto-Gram: 15 January 2005):

This quote is from “Confessions of a Master Jewel Thief,” by Bill Mason (Villard, 2003): “Nothing works more in a thief’s favor than people feeling secure. That’s why places that are heavily alarmed and guarded can sometimes be the easiest targets. The single most important factor in security — more than locks, alarms, sensors, or armed guards — is attitude. A building protected by nothing more than a cheap combination lock but inhabited by people who are alert and risk-aware is much safer than one with the world’s most sophisticated alarm system whose tenants assume they’re living in an impregnable fortress.”

The author, a burglar, found that luxury condos were an excellent target. Although they had much more security technology than other buildings, they were vulnerable because no one believed a thief could get through the lobby.

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Examples of tweaking old technologies to add social aspects

history, social software, tech in changing society, technology / /

From Clay Shirky’s “Group as User: Flaming and the Design of Social Software” (Clay Shirky’s Writings About the Internet: 5 November 2004):

This possibility of adding novel social components to old tools presents an enormous opportunity. To take the most famous example, the Slashdot moderation system puts the ability to rate comments into the hands of the users themselves. The designers took the traditional bulletin board format — threaded posts, sorted by time — and added a quality filter. And instead of assuming that all users are alike, the Slashdot designers created a karma system, to allow them to discriminate in favor of users likely to rate comments in ways that would benefit the community. And, to police that system, they created a meta-moderation system, to solve the ‘Who will guard the guardians’ problem. …

Likewise, Craigslist took the mailing list, and added a handful of simple features with profound social effects. First, all of Craigslist is an enclosure, owned by Craig … Because he has a business incentive to make his list work, he and his staff remove posts if enough readers flag them as inappropriate. …

And, on the positive side, the addition of a “Nominate for ‘Best of Craigslist'” button in every email creates a social incentive for users to post amusing or engaging material. … The only reason you would nominate a post for ‘Best of’ is if you wanted other users to see it — if you were acting in a group context, in other words. …

Jonah Brucker-Cohen’s Bumplist stands out as an experiment in experimenting the social aspect of mailing lists. Bumplist, whose motto is “an email community for the determined”, is a mailing list for 6 people, which anyone can join. When the 7th user joins, the first is bumped and, if they want to be back on, must re-join, bumping the second user, ad infinitum. … However, it is a vivid illustration of the ways simple changes to well-understood software can produce radically different social effects.

You could easily imagine many such experiments. What would it take, for example, to design a mailing list that was flame-retardant? Once you stop regarding all users as isolated actors, a number of possibilities appear. You could institute induced lag, where, once a user contributed 5 posts in the space of an hour, a cumulative 10 minute delay would be added to each subsequent post. Every post would be delivered eventually, but it would retard the rapid-reply nature of flame wars, introducing a cooling off period for the most vociferous participants.

You could institute a kind of thread jail, where every post would include a ‘Worst of’ button, in the manner of Craigslist. Interminable, pointless threads (e.g. Which Operating System Is Objectively Best?) could be sent to thread jail if enough users voted them down. (Though users could obviously change subject headers and evade this restriction, the surprise, first noted by Julian Dibbell, is how often users respect negative communal judgment, even when they don’t respect the negative judgment of individuals. [ See Rape in Cyberspace — search for “aggressively antisocial vibes.”])

You could institute a ‘Get a room!’ feature, where any conversation that involved two users ping-ponging six or more posts (substitute other numbers to taste) would be automatically re-directed to a sub-list, limited to that pair. The material could still be archived, and so accessible to interested lurkers, but the conversation would continue without the attraction of an audience.

You could imagine a similar exercise, working on signal/noise ratios generally, and keying off the fact that there is always a most active poster on mailing lists, who posts much more often than even the second most active, and much much more often than the median poster. Oddly, the most active poster is often not even aware that they occupy this position (seeing ourselves as others see us is difficult in mediated spaces as well,) but making them aware of it often causes them to self-moderate. You can imagine flagging all posts by the most active poster, whoever that happened to be, or throttling the maximum number of posts by any user to some multiple of average posting tempo.

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Clay Shirky on flaming & how to combat it

history, social software, tech in changing society / /

From Clay Shirky’s “Group as User: Flaming and the Design of Social Software” (Clay Shirky’s Writings About the Internet: 5 November 2004):

Learning From Flame Wars

Mailing lists were the first widely available piece of social software. … Mailing lists were also the first widely analyzed virtual communities. …

Flame wars are not surprising; they are one of the most reliable features of mailing list practice. If you assume a piece of software is for what it does, rather than what its designer’s stated goals were, then mailing list software is, among other things, a tool for creating and sustaining heated argument. …

… although the environment in which a mailing list runs is computers, the environment in which a flame war runs is people. …

The user’s mental model of a word processor is of limited importance — if a word processor supports multiple columns, users can create multiple columns; if not, then not. The users’ mental model of social software, on the other hand, matters enormously. For example, ‘personal home pages’ and weblogs are very similar technically — both involve local editing and global hosting. The difference between them was mainly in the user’s conception of the activity. …

… The cumulative effect is to make maximizing individual flexibility a priority, even when that may produce conflict with the group goals.

Netiquette and Kill Files

The first general response to flaming was netiquette. Netiquette was a proposed set of behaviors that assumed that flaming was caused by (who else?) individual users. If you could explain to each user what was wrong with flaming, all users would stop.

This mostly didn’t work. The problem was simple — the people who didn’t know netiquette needed it most. They were also the people least likely to care about the opinion of others …

… Addressing the flamer directly works not because he realizes the error of his ways, but because it deprives him of an audience. Flaming is not just personal expression, it is a kind of performance, brought on in a social context.

… People behave differently in groups, and while momentarily engaging them one-on-one can have a calming effect, that is a change in social context, rather than some kind of personal conversion. …

Another standard answer to flaming has been the kill file, sometimes called a bozo filter, which is a list of posters whose comments you want filtered by the software before you see them. …

… And although people have continually observed (for thirty years now) that “if everyone just ignores user X, he will go away,” the logic of collective action makes that outcome almost impossible to orchestrate — it only takes a couple of people rising to bait to trigger a flame war, and the larger the group, the more difficult it is to enforce the discipline required of all members.

The Tragedy of the Conversational Commons

Briefly stated, the tragedy of the commons occurs when a group holds a resource, but each of the individual members has an incentive to overuse it. …

In the case of mailing lists (and, again, other shared conversational spaces), the commonly held resource is communal attention. The group as a whole has an incentive to keep the signal-to-noise ratio high and the conversation informative, even when contentious. Individual users, though, have an incentive to maximize expression of their point of view, as well as maximizing the amount of communal attention they receive. It is a deep curiosity of the human condition that people often find negative attention more satisfying than inattention, and the larger the group, the likelier someone is to act out to get that sort of attention.

However, proposed responses to flaming have consistently steered away from group-oriented solutions and towards personal ones. …

Weblog and Wiki Responses

… Weblogs are relatively flame-free because they provide little communal space. In economic parlance, weblogs solve the tragedy of the commons through enclosure, the subdividing and privatizing of common space. …

Like weblogs, wikis also avoid the tragedy of the commons, but they do so by going to the other extreme. Instead of everything being owned, nothing is. Whereas a mailing list has individual and inviolable posts but communal conversational space, in wikis, even the writing is communal. … it is actually easier to restore damage than cause it. …

Weblogs and wikis are proof that you can have broadly open discourse without suffering from hijacking by flamers, by creating a social structure that encourages or deflects certain behaviors.

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