Tag Archives: psychology

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This post on irony is really wonderful

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Christopher Moore said somewhere that irony isn’t just a literary device, but a basic property of the universe. [citation needed] If so, that might explain why some psychologists think human beings are hardwired with a sense of irony. Psychologist Penny M. Pexman of the University of Calgary in Alberta…

…trained kids to associate niceness with a smiling yellow duck and meanness with a snarling gray shark. Then they watched puppet shows, in which the puppets made both sarcastic and literal remarks. Rather than asking the kids to interpret the remarks, she tracked their eye gaze, to see whether they shifted their attention ever so slightly toward the shark or the duck after a particular remark….

If kids were indeed processing every sentence as literally true to begin with, then their eyes would reveal that. That is, they would look automatically at the duck on hearing “Well, that’s just great.” But they did not. When that sentence was used ironically, their eyes went immediately to the mean shark. The irony required no laborious cognitive crunching. They processed the insincerity as rapidly as they processed the basic meaning of the words.

[Image: carbonNYC]

Fiction

NEW FICTION: RESURFACING BILLY by Douglas Lain

This month’s Futurismic story is a sober yet striking piece of work; Douglas Lain has constructed a moody and multilayered metaphor that compares our approach to waste management with our approach to our own minds… and the minds of our children.

Charged with subtle emotion, “Resurfacing Billy” will provide you with plenty of food for thought, and greatly rewards a close re-reading. Enjoy!

Resurfacing Billy

by Douglas Lain

About half way through my thirty-fifth year, some problems came up. My young son was unbalanced and maladjusted to school, my wife’s bohemian tendencies made her myopic and unable to respond to the situation, and the garbage buried under the wicker weave surface of our neighborhood leaked through. Toxic sludge oozed up in the parking lot of our local Food Co-Op, on the bike trail, and in our own backyard.

I didn’t know what to do about my wife and son, but my solution for the leakages in the Hawthorne neighborhood was the gumball. The design was colorful, nostalgic, and tactile. I felt confident that resurfacing the district with red, green, and yellow globes designed both to stick into a coherent and easily traversable surface and to separate into individual objects that pedestrians could manipulate, would work. I would win another ASLA prize. Organic and absorbent, they were designed to neutralize and sanitize leakages that occurred where the tarp lost integrity; the gumballs would change colors when exposed to toxins, serve as a warning system as well as a surface. Continue reading NEW FICTION: RESURFACING BILLY by Douglas Lain →

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…or were you looking at the woman in the red dress?

Researchers have discovered that the colour red enhances men’s attraction towards women:

the women shown framed by or wearing red were rated significantly more attractive and sexually desirable by men than the exact same women shown with other colors. When wearing red, the woman was also more likely to score an invitation to the prom and to be treated to a more expensive outing.

Apparently this will have implications for dating and product design, but I think that they’ve already been taken on board in these contexts.

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Undecided voters: Yeah, right

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Undecided voters have probably made up their minds. They just don’t know it yet. U. Virginia psychologist Brian Nosek and colleagues got 25,000 people to take an online test (you can try it yourself). The test mixes up pictures of Obama and McCain with “good” words like “friend” and “bad” words like “enemy,” and asks you to press a key through several cycles of screens.

On average more undecided voters reported explicitly feeling slightly warmer toward Obama than McCain, but Nosek’s implicit measurements showed the undecided subjects had a slight preference for McCain over Obama.

Color me skeptical: I scored a slight preference for the candidate I already didn’t mail in my ballot for.

[Image: gapersblock]

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The Body Politic

sakharovWe had a lively (but civil!) discussion about the psychology of political choices last week.  So how about physiology?  Science published a report suggesting that people who respond most strongly to disturbing images seem to have political views that most people would call conservative.  The test used gadgets to measure skin moisture and blink intensity. Pictures included a big spider on a face and a guy covered with blood.

Yes, I’m skeptical too.  The subjects were Nebraskans, residents of one of the more conservative of these United States in terms of voting. And if you showed this arachnophobic left-leaning blogger some of those disturbing images he’d cry like — well, like a Wall Street banker, this week.

Meanwhile, in another poli-sci story: When vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s email was easily hacked and screen-shots pasted all over the internets, she and her supporters immediately called for a repeal of the Patriot Act and warrantless surveillance, because now they know what it feels like to have their privacy invaded without warning and for no good reason.  Civil liberties enjoyed a resurgence in the U.S., and …

Sorry.  Dreaming on the job.

And just to confirm that, as The Posies sing, everybody is a frakking liar (video):

The world’s largest particle collider malfunctioned within hours of its launch to great fanfare, but its operator didn’t report the problem for a week.

[Bust of Dr. Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov: photo by dbking]