social science
edyong | September 15, 2009
You may have seen rowing before, but I guarantee you that you know little about the sport unless you went to university at Cambridge or Oxford. There you will find a subspecies of human known as the "boatie" who seem perfectly happy to gather en masse at godforsaken times of the morning to paddle about on a river. In the rain. In winter. With a hangover. Later, in the pub, they will spend innumerable hours discussing their training schedules, talking about "catching crabs" without a hint of irony and comparing blisters.
For those of us who wondered what could possess grown men and women to…
edyong | September 6, 2009This article is reposted from the old Wordpress incarnation of Not Exactly Rocket Science.
Everybody, apparently, needs good neighbours, but in many parts of the world, your neighbours can be your worst enemy. In the past century, more than 100 million people have lost their lives to violent conflicts. Most of these were fought between groups of people living physically side by side, but separated by culture or ethnicity.
Now, May Lim and colleagues from the New England Complex Systems Institute have developed a mathematical model that can predict where such conflicts by looking at how…
edyong | September 3, 2009When it comes to encouraging people to work together for the greater good, carrots work better than sticks. That's the message from a new study showing that rewarding people for good behaviour is better at promoting cooperation than punishing them for offences.
David Rand from Harvard University asked teams of volunteers to play "public goods games", where they could cheat or cooperate with each other for real money. After many rounds of play, the players were more likely to work together if they could reward each other for good behaviour or punish each other for offences. But of these two…
edyong | September 1, 2009A common problem afflicting modern psychology is that it's mainly based on experiments with middle-class white people, often from North America or Europe. Open up the field of inquiry to other cultures, social circles or ethnic groups and different trends come to the fore.
Take the effects of a baby-face. Decades of studies have found that rounded, smooth, young-looking faces engender trust and sympathy. People adorned with such youthful looks tend to be treated with more sensitivity and patience, receive more lenient sentences, and make better spokespeople during PR crises. But these…
edyong | August 31, 2009And now for something completely different... This is a repost with a difference - it's an edited interview I did with London scientist Chris McManus way back in September 2007. This has a fond place in my heart, for it was the first proper freelance writing assigment that I did after winning the Telegraph's Science Writer award. This is where all the cool freelancing began. It was originally published on Nature Network, but I note that their news archives have disappeared. As such, here it is again.
McManus, a Professor of Psychology and Medical Education at UCL, is an expert on asymmetry…
edyong | August 24, 2009Our minds are battlegrounds where different media fight for attention. Through the Internet, desktops, mobile screens, TVs and more, we are constantly awash with headlines, links, images, icons, videos, animations and sound. This is the way of the 21st century - a saturated sensory environment where multi-tasking is the name of the game. Even as I type these words, my 24-inch monitor displays a Word document and a PDF side-by-side, while my headphones pump Lux Aeterna into my head (see image below).
You might think that this influx of media would make the heaviest of users better at…
edyong | August 5, 2009You wouldn't think it to look at our skyrocketing global population, but many parts of the world are experiencing serious falls in fertility. A country's fertility rate is the average number of children born to a woman over her lifetime. In most developed countries, it needs to be 2.1 or higher if the number of newborns is to compensate for citizens who die. In developing countries, where death is a more frequent visitor, this replacement threshold is even higher.
The problem is that declining fertility is intimately linked with a country's economic and social development. As a result, more…
edyong | June 24, 2009Thirty-five thousands years before the likes of Kraftwerk, Nena and Rammstein, the lands of Germany were resounding to a very different sort of musical sound - tunes emanating from flutes made of bird bones and ivory. These thin tubes have recently been uncovered by Nicholas Conard from the University of Tubingen and they're some of the oldest musical instruments ever discovered.
The ancient flutes hail from the Hohle Fels Cave in Germany's Ach Valley, a veritable treasure trove of prehistoric finds that have also yielded the oldest known figurative art. The flutes were found less than a…
edyong | June 23, 2009Think of a scientist - not anyone in particular, just a random individual working in the field. Got one? Did you picture a man or a woman? If it's the former, you're probably not alone. There have been a few times when I've only ever known a scientist through their surname on a citation and automatically assumed that they were a man, only to learn, to my chagrin, that they're actually a woman. It's always a galling reminder of how pervasive the stereotype of science as a male endeavour can be, even at an unconscious level.
Now, Brian Nosek from the University of Virgina, together with…
edyong | June 19, 2009Talking with someone comes so naturally that we forget sometimes how skilful it is. Rhythms of conversation and cues of grammar need to be judged so that people can take their turns at talking without cutting off their partner or without leaving pregnant pauses. The former is rude, the latter awkward.
That's certainly how things are usually conducted in English, but a new study suggests that this pattern of turn-taking applies across human cultures. By studying 10 languages from all over the world, Tanya Stivers from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics discovered a universally…
edyong | June 1, 2009History has had no shortage of outstanding female mathematicians, from Hypatia of Alexandria to Ada Lovelace, and yet no woman has ever won the Fields medal - the Nobel prize of the maths world. The fact that men outnumber women in the highest echelons of mathematics (as in science, technology and engineering) has always been controversial, particularly for the persistent notion that this disparity is down to an innate biological advantage.
Now, two professors from the University of Wisconsin - Janet Hyde and Janet Mertz - have reviewed the strong evidence that at least in maths, the gender…
edyong | May 13, 2009
Image by Nicholas Conard
This sculpture may look a little bit like a roast chicken, but don't let that distract you - it's an incredibly important artistic find. This small figurine is arguably the oldest representation of the human body yet discovered.
The figure is clearly human, with short arms ending in five, carefully carved fingers, and a navel in the right position. But its most obvious features show that it depicts a woman, and very explicitly at that. She has large protruding breasts, wide hips and thighs, accentuated buttocks and pronounced vulva between her open legs. In contrast…
edyong | May 11, 2009 Money has subtler benefits beyond the ability to buy lavish goods or luxurious services - it's also a psychological and physical salve. According to research by Xinyue Zhou from Sun Yat-Sen University, handling money can soothe the sting of social rejection and appease the physical pain of hot water. Even bringing up the mere thought of money can have these effects.
Popularity matters to social animals like humans, who rely on each other for our wants and needs. Our dependence on each other makes it important to get along with our peers. But in many societies, money can bypass that need,…
edyong | May 5, 2009Popularity is a fickle thing. Styles, products, social movements and people can be bathing in the spotlight one day and languishing in obscurity the next. And according to a new study, things that catch on most quickly are also abandoned most easily - the faster the rise to prominence, the steeper the fall from grace.
Many researchers have looked into the reasons behind the success of cultural tastes, but Jonah Berger and Gael Le Mens were more interested in the factors that drive them to extinction. To examine that, they looked at the changing popularities of first names in France and the…
edyong | April 16, 2009In American high schools, black students typically perform worse than their white peers, which can damage their self-esteem and their future prospects. Studies have found that the fear of living up to this underachieving stereotype can cause so much stress that a child's performance suffers. Their teachers may even write them off as lost causes, and spend less time on them.
With so many students caught in this vicious cycle, where the stereotype of poor performance strengthens itself, it might seem absurd to suggest that you could turn things round in less than an hour. But try telling that…
edyong | April 6, 2009What happens when you remember a good deed, or think of yourself as a stand-up citizen? You might think that your shining self-image would reinforce the value of selflessness and make you more likely to behave morally in the future. But a new study disagrees.
Through three psychological experiments, Sonya Sachdeva from Northwestern University found that people who are primed to think well of themselves behave less altruistically than those whose moral identity is threatened. They donate less to charity and they become less likely to make decisions for the good of the environment.
Sachdeva…
ksharpe | April 3, 2009Originally posted by Grrlscientist
On March 30, 2009, at 2:55 PM
Unlike most people who were raised in a religious household and grew up surrounded by religious people, I never experienced a "crisis of faith" since I never believed there was a god any more than I believed there was a Santa Claus or a Tooth Fairy. However, some of my friends are religious and because I value them as people, I have listened to them from time to time as they pondered aloud the deep questions that all of us face in the wee hours or after experiencing a significant loss or other life-changing event -- the same…
edyong | March 31, 2009Classical ballet is one of the more conservative of art forms. Dancers express emotion and character through the same vocabulary of postures that was originally set in 1760, and often with entire choreographies that have been handed down for centuries.
But even amid this rigorous cascade of tradition, there is room for change. Over the years, successive generations of ballet dancers have subtly tinkered with positions that are ostensibly fixed and limited by the physical constraints of a dancer's body. The only changes ought to be a result of the dancers' varying abilities. But that's not…
ksharpe | March 18, 2009Originally posted by Brian Switek
On March 15, 2009, at 12:05 PM
Ancestors are important. We like to know where we came from and what sort of legacy our forebears left, but it has only been recently that we have been able to trace the concept of "ancestor" through the depths of geological strata. I may not know the detailed history of my family during the last hundred years or so, but I do know that a number of hominins figure into my family tree.
I am not proud or ashamed of this deeper ancestry which I share with every other Homo sapiens on the planet. It is simply historical fact, but I…
ksharpe | March 11, 2009Originally posted by Brian Switek
On March 8, 2009 6:32 PM
On November 8, 1882 the paleontologist O.C. Marsh, popular minister Henry Beecher, industrialist Andrew Carnegie, and other influential men of the late 19th century converged on Delmonico's Restaurant in New York. They were there to toast Herbert Spencer, the social scientist who had gone beyond Charles Darwin's studies of natural transmutation to outline the evolution of society itself. All present, in one way or another, had been influenced by Spencer's work, and they ate and pontificated long into the night despite the fact that…