Whatcha lookin’ at? The attention of crowds shows no tipping points

It's a familiar experience: you're walking through a crowded area, when you spot someone staring intently at some distant spot. Do you stop to look as well? How long do you look if there's nothing obvious there? Early research had suggested we often do stop to look, and as more join in on the stare, the crowd will eventually reach a tipping point, with the vast majority of its members staring off in the same direction. Now, researchers have revisited the question with modern imaging technology, and found that there isn't a tipping point. In fact, in circumstances where some terrorism-obsessed authorities say we should look, men actively avert their gaze.

The original experiments were done back in the 1960s, using the streets of New York as a lab. It had suggested that crowds show a tipping point behavior (also referred to as "crystallization"). Once a sufficient fraction of the group started to stare, nearly everyone would follow along.

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Thinking in foreign language makes decisions more rational

To judge a risk more clearly, it may help to consider it in a foreign language.

A series of experiments on more than 300 people from the US and Korea found that thinking in a second language reduced deep-seated, misleading biases that unduly influence how risks and benefits are perceived.

"Would you make the same decisions in a foreign language as you would in your native tongue?" asked psychologists led by Boaz Keysar of the University of Chicago in an April 18 Psychological Science study.

"It may be intuitive that people would make the same choices regardless of the language they are using, or that the difficulty of using a foreign language would make decisions less systematic. We discovered, however, that the opposite is true: Using a foreign language reduces decision-making biases," wrote Keysar’s team.

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Changing the apparent size of the hole messes with golfers’ putting

For many sports, performance is all about hitting a target: striking a ball with a bat, placing a golf or soccer ball in just the right spot, etc. A common refrain among athletes who have had a successful performance is that those targets seemed large—they perceived the ball as huge, the goal mouth as enormous. Now, some researchers have found that these perceptions work the other way around, too. By making a target look larger or smaller than it actually was, they could change the performance of golfers.

The experiment was pretty simple. The authors set up a small putting green with a hole that was 5cm in diameter. They then projected a series of circles surrounding the hole. When the circles were larger than the hole, it was perceived as smaller; when they were smaller, participants thought the hole was larger. And this made a big difference. Putting performance with the perceptually larger hole was about double that when the golfers were made to think the hole was smaller.

The authors use their discussion to consider whether this suggests that slumps and hot streaks are matters of changes in perception. But they get to their real (and currently relevant) thought in the introduction: they like going to college basketball games and watching the home crowd attempt to distract the visitors during free throws. It's possible that, in coming up with an effective optical illusion, they've given attentive college students a new recipe for doing so.

Psychological Science, 2012. DOI: 10.1177/0956797611428810 (About DOIs).

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Why humans have computers, and chimps are stuck with sticks

Humankind has made great conceptual and technological advances since we first walked the Earth. Thanks to our ability to build on others' ideas, we've progressed from the abacus to the computer, from the wheel to the modern-day car, and from simple observations about the world to our current knowledge of the laws of nature and the Universe. This ability to accumulate knowledge and improve on it, referred to as "cumulative culture," is unique to humans.

But what is it about humans that predisposes us to cumulative culture? Some claim that this "ratcheting" of ideas is a result of a particular cognitive ability, such as language or prosociality, that is unique to—or especially prevalent in—humans. Others believe that some social aspect of other species, such as the tendency to scrounge, may preclude them from building on each others' ideas as we can. A new study in Science this week suggests that a few different traits may actually be responsible for our success with cumulative culture.

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Does being wealthy make you unethical? New research suggests it does

In this week's PNAS, researchers at UC Berkeley and the University of Toronto tackle a topic that is bound to spark controversy. I'll let the title speak for itself: "Higher social class predicts increased unethical behavior." The paper describes the results of seven studies—two field studies and five experimental tests—that sought to explore how socioeconomic status (SES) correlates with behavior that most of us would consider ethical.

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Never mind the polls—we’re convinced our candidate is going to win

Imagine you’re asked to do something out of the ordinary, like carry around a funny sign for a day or eat a food that doesn’t look so appetizing. Then you’re asked how many other people might say yes to the strange request. Past studies have shown that, if you agreed to carry the sign or eat the food, you’re much more likely to believe that lots of other people would say yes to the request too. Alternatively, if you declined, you’d probably think that the majority of people would say no. The same pattern holds true if you are asked about something like recycling; you’re more likely to believe that other people value recycling if you do.

This positive association between our beliefs and our perceptions of social beliefs—called “false consensus”—generally occurs when we don’t have a lot of information about what others might do or believe. When we don’t know what other people think, we tend to make assumptions based on our own preferences.

A group of researchers wondered whether the effect would occur when there is a lot of publicly available information about what other people think: during elections. Even with frequent and well-publicized political polls, are people’s beliefs about the outcome of an election tied to their own preferences?

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For a creativity boost, think outside the box…literally

It happens in schools, cubicles, and boardrooms everywhere: someone working on a project hits a mental block. A boss or teacher might resort to a cliché like "think outside the box" or "put two and two together," encouraging a creative solution to the problem. As it turns out, this isn’t just abstract advice. According to an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, literally working outside of a box or putting two halves of something together just might help those creative juices start flowing again.

Since physical metaphors regarding creativity are so common and appear in several different languages, a group of researchers hypothesized that they may extend beyond mere clichés. But can acting out metaphors really affect how our minds work?

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Current social networks may have been present in the earliest modern humans

If you ever sit back and wonder what it might have been like to live in the late Pleistocene, you’re not alone. That's right about when humans emerged from a severe population bottleneck and began to expand globally. But, apparently, life back then might not have been too different than how we live today (that is, without the cars, the written language, and of course, the smartphone). In this week’s Nature, a group of researchers suggest that we share many social characteristics with humans that lived in the late Pleistocene, and that these ancient humans may have paved the way for us to cooperate with each other.

Modern human social networks share several features, whether they operate within a group of schoolchildren in San Francisco or a community of millworkers in Bulgaria. The number of social ties a person has, the probability that two of a person’s friends are also friends, and the inclination for similar people to be connected are all very regular across groups of people living very different lives in far-flung places.

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Old, million-dollar violins don’t play better than the new models

The old adage tells us not to judge a book by its cover, and now it seems as though we shouldn’t judge a violin by its price. Violins crafted in the so-called "golden age" by expert makers Antonio Stradivari and Guiseppe Guarneri "del Gesu" are worth up to several million dollars each, and they have long been considered the best violins in the world. However, nobody has studied whether or not these instruments are actually superior to other violins in their tonal qualities. New research in PNAS shows that these lofty prices might not actually reflect how musicians actually feel about the instruments themselves.

The research took place at the Eighth International Violin Competition of Indianapolis, a prestigious gathering of violinists, violin experts, and violin makers. Twenty-one subjects were included in the experiment, and all were very experienced violinists. The researchers used six violins in their tests; three were new high-quality violins, ranging from just a few days to a few years old, and three were old violins (two Stradivari and a del Gesu) crafted in the 1700’s. The three old violins were worth a combined total of $10 million, which was about one hundred times the combined value of the new ones. The musicians were unaware of the objective of the experiment, as well as the identities of the six violins used.

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Pigeons match primates in number sense

By now, we all know that being called a "birdbrain" isn’t really an insult; birds have been shown to have several higher-order cognitive skills that we previously thought only primates had the brains for. Jays are capable of episodic memory, parrots can solve multi-step puzzles and use a succession of tools to get a food item, and crows have even learned to use city traffic and stoplights to their advantage. Now, Science reports yet another cognitive area where birds are on par with primates: they have a sense of numbers.

In 1998, a pair of researchers used a novel experiment to show that rhesus monkeys had numerical competence; in other words, they could use abstract numerical rules. The monkeys were shown a set of three images picturing one, two, and three items, and were trained to choose these images in ascending order. Once they had been trained to a certain accuracy level, they were shown numbers of items that they hadn’t necessarily seen before. The monkeys were generally able to choose the greater of the two numbers, even when they didn’t have experience with the values involved. Clearly, they had learned not only the values they were trained on, but also more abstract rules about numerosity.

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