nono
the enigma of reason: a new theory of human understanding
hugo mercier, dan sperber 2017
not born yesterday: the science of who we trust and what we believe
hugo mercier 2020
say goodbye to the information age: it’s all about reputation now
gloria origgi 2018
aeon.co/ideas/say-goodbye-to-the-information-age-its-all-about-reputation-now
reputation: what it is and why it matters
gloria origgi 2017 not yet read
your face and moves seem happier when i smile
fernando marmolejo-ramos et al. 2020
doi.org/10.1027/1618-3169/a000470
evaluated the impact of a covert smile on perception of face and body expressions. In both scenarios, a smile was induced by participants holding a pen between their teeth, forcing their facial muscles to replicate the movement of a smile.
The research found that facial muscular activity not only alters the recognition of facial expressions but also body expressions, with both generating more positive emotions.
Lead researcher and human and artificial cognition expert, UniSA's Dr Fernando Marmolejo-Ramos says the finding has important insights for mental health.
"When your muscles say you're happy, you're more likely to see the world around you in a positive way," Dr Marmolejo-Ramos says.
"In our research we found that when you forcefully practise smiling, it stimulates the amygdala -- the emotional centre of the brain -- which releases neurotransmitters to encourage an emotionally positive state.
"For mental health, this has interesting implications. If we can trick the brain into perceiving stimuli as 'happy', then we can potentially use this mechanism to help boost mental health."
The study replicated findings from the 'covert' smile experiment by evaluating how people interpret a range of facial expressions (spanning frowns to smiles) using the pen-in-teeth mechanism; it then extended this using point-light motion images (spanning sad walking videos to happy walking videos) as the visual stimuli.
Dr Marmolejo-Ramos says there is a strong link between action and perception.
"In a nutshell, perceptual and motor systems are intertwined when we emotionally process stimuli," Dr Marmolejo-Ramos says.
"A 'fake it 'til you make it' approach could have more credit than we expect."
abstract In this experiment, we replicated the effect of muscle engagement on perception such that the recognition of another’s facial expressions was biased by the observer’s facial muscular activity (Blaesi & Wilson, 2010). We extended this replication to show that such a modulatory effect is also observed for the recognition of dynamic bodily expressions. Via a multilab and within-subjects approach, we investigated the emotion recognition of point-light biological walkers, along with that of morphed face stimuli, while subjects were or were not holding a pen in their teeth. Under the “pen-in-the-teeth” condition, participants tended to lower their threshold of perception of happy expressions in facial stimuli compared to the “no-pen” condition, thus replicating the experiment by Blaesi and Wilson (2010). A similar effect was found for the biological motion stimuli such that participants lowered their threshold to perceive happy walkers in the pen-in-the-teeth condition compared to the no-pen condition. This pattern of results was also found in a second experiment in which the no-pen condition was replaced by a situation in which participants held a pen in their lips (“pen-in-lips” condition). These results suggested that facial muscular activity alters the recognition of not only facial expressions but also bodily expressions.
don’t stop believing
journey
just a small town girl, livin’ in a lonely world
she took the midnight train goin’ anywhere
just a city boy, born and raised in south detroit
he took the midnight train goin’ anywhere
a singer in a smokey room
a smell of wine and cheap perfume
for a smile they can share the night
it goes on and on and on and on
☆strangers waiting, up and down the boulevard
their shadows searching in the night
streetlights people, living just to find emotion
hiding, somewhere in the night
working hard to get my fill
everybody wants a thrill
payin’ anything to roll the dice
just one more time
some will win, some will lose
some were born to sing the blues
oh, the movie never ends
it goes on and on and on and on
☆repeat
don’t stop believin’
hold on to the feelin’
streetlights people
don’t stop believin’
hold on
streetlight people
don’t stop believin’
hold on to the feelin’
streetlights people
evolution of social norms and correlated equilibria
bryce morsky et al. 2019
doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1817095116
In a new analysis driven by game theory, two theoretical biologists devised a model that shows how superstitious beliefs can become established in a society's social norms. Their work, which appears in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, demonstrates how groups of individuals, each starting with distinct belief systems, can evolve a coordinated set of behaviors that are enforced by a set of consistent social norms.
"What's interesting here is that we show that, beginning in a system where no one has any particular belief system, a set of beliefs can emerge, and from those, a set of coordinated behaviors," says Erol Akçay, an assistant professor of biology at Penn.
"Slowly, these actors accumulate superstitions," adds Bryce Morsky, a postdoctoral researcher. "They may say, 'Ok, well I believe that when I observe this event I should behave this way because another person will behave that way,' and over time, if they have success in using that kind of a strategy, the superstitions catch on and can become evolutionarily stable."
Morsky and Akçay's work is an application of game theory, which attempts to predict how people will interact and make decisions in a social setting. They specifically considered what are known as correlated equilibria, scenarios in which all actors are given correlated signals that dictate their response to any given situation.
"A classic example is a traffic light," says Akçay. "If two people are approaching an intersection, one will get a 'stop' signal and one will get a 'go' signal and everybody knows that. It's rational for both parties to obey the light."
The signal, in this case the traffic light, is known as a correlating device, or more evocatively, a "choreographer." But the Penn team wanted to know what would happen if there was no choreographer. If people could pay attention to a variety of other signals that could direct their actions, and their beliefs were transmitted according to the success of their actions, would coordinated behaviors arise? In other words, can evolution act as a "blind choreographer?"
"What if a cyclist is riding toward an intersection, and instead of a traffic light they see a cat," Akçay says. "The cat is irrelevant to the intersection, but maybe the person decides that if they see a black cat, that means they should stop, or that maybe that means the approaching cyclist is going to stop."
Despite the color of a cat having no bearing on the likelihood of an approaching cyclist stopping or going, sometimes this kind of conditional strategy might result in a higher payoff to the cyclist -- if it is correlated with superstitions of other cyclists.
"Sometimes it may be rational to hold these irrational beliefs," Morsky notes.
In their model, Morsky and Akçay assume that individuals are rational, in that they do not follow a norm blindly, but only do so when their beliefs make it seem beneficial. They change their beliefs by imitating successful people's beliefs. This creates an evolutionary dynamic where the norms "compete" against one another, rising and falling in prevalence through the group. This evolutionary process eventually leads to the formation of new social norms.
Morsky and Akçay showed that the evolutionarily stable norms, those that cannot be replaced by others, have to be consistent, meaning that they successfully coordinate individual behavior even in the absence of an external "choreographer. "
They found that these evolutionarily stable norms, in both prescribing how an actor should behave and also describing that actor's expectations of how others should behave, create a consistent belief system that helps coordinate the overall behavior of many actors, even if that coordination is not being directed by any outside choreographer.
To further explore their findings, the researchers hope to engage in social experiments to see whether individuals might start devising their own superstitions or beliefs when none are provided.
"What I like about this work," says Morsky, "is that these beliefs are made-up superstitions, but they become real because everybody actually follows them, so you create this social reality. I'm really interesting in testing that further."
abstract We consider social norms as collections of beliefs or superstitions about events occurring in nature. These events have no inherent meaning, but individuals can choose to believe that they do. Specifically, individuals can interpret events as prescribing behaviors for themselves along with expectations of the behaviors of others. We show how evolutionary competition between such beliefs can give rise to both prescriptive and descriptive self-enforcing norms that can allow populations to coordinate behavior. Our model provides an evolutionary account for how normative meaning emerges in an inherently meaningless world.
Social norms regulate and coordinate most aspects of human social life, yet they emerge and change as a result of individual behaviors, beliefs, and expectations. A satisfactory account for the evolutionary dynamics of social norms, therefore, has to link individual beliefs and expectations to population-level dynamics, where individual norms change according to their consequences for individuals. Here, we present a model of evolutionary dynamics of social norms that encompasses this objective and addresses the emergence of social norms. In this model, a norm is a set of behavioral prescriptions and a set of environmental descriptions that describe the expected behaviors of those with whom the norm holder will interact. These prescriptions and descriptions are functions of exogenous environmental events. These events have no intrinsic meaning or effect on the payoffs to individuals, yet beliefs/superstitions regarding them can effectuate coordination. Although a norm’s prescriptions and descriptions are dependent on one another, we show how they emerge from random accumulations of beliefs. We categorize the space of social norms into several natural classes and study the evolutionary competition between these classes of norms. We apply our model to the Game of Chicken and the Nash Bargaining Game. Furthermore, we show how the space of norms and evolutionary stability are dependent on the correlation structure of the environment and under which such correlation structures social dilemmas can be ameliorated or exacerbated.
i danced in the morning when the world was begun
i danced in the moon and the stars and the sun
i was called from the darkness by the song of the earth
i joined in the song and she gave me birth
dance, joy, wherever we may be
to dance is to live, and dance shall we
an endless dance, no leader can there be
between us all is the dance, said he
the moon in her phases and the tides of the sea
the spinning of the earth and the seasons that will be
are a rhythm of a dance / and promise through the years
that the dance goes on / with joy and tears
dance, joy, wherever we may be
to dance is to love, and dance shall we
on earth, in air, and tides of the sea
between us all is the dance, said she
between us all, wherever we may be
between us all is the dance, said (s)he
construct validation of experimental manipulations in social psychology: current practices and recommendations for the future
david s. chester, emily n. lasko 2020
doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/t7ev9
focuses on the practice of experimental manipulations, in which psychologists induce specific mental states, such as giving research participants insulting or complementary feedback to manipulate how angry they feel.
To conduct these experimental manipulations in a scientifically valid way, researchers must first establish whether their manipulations actually affect the intended psychological variable (for example: make people feel angry) and not other closely related variables (for example: make people feel sad). However, the extent to which psychologists actually examine the validity of their manipulations remains unknown.
Chester and Lasko investigated 348 psychological manipulations included in peer-reviewed studies. They found that roughly 42% of the experiments were paired with no validity evidence, and that the remaining psychological manipulations were validated in ways that were extremely limited.
The study is the first of its kind to systematically document the extent to which psychology's experiments are based on a valid foundation of empirical evidence.
Importantly, Chester said, the study's findings do not suggest that the experimental psychologists' findings were necessarily wrong or invalid.
"We do not find such experiments are invalid, instead we simply don't have the evidence to know one way or another how valid they are," he said. "Almost all of the manipulations we examined failed to provide the necessary evidence that they were valid, which does not mean they are invalid -- their validity is just unknown."
As a result, he said, the study suggests that "the findings of experimental psychology likely rest on an untested foundation."
"This framework might be weak, it might be strong, it is more likely both of these things depending on many factors," he said. "We have outlined a prescribed series of recommendations for experimenters to ensure that this is not the case going forward -- that the validity of each experimental manipulation is tested in a systematic and accurate way."
abstract Experimental manipulations in social psychology must exhibit construct validity by influencing their intended psychological constructs. Yet how do experimenters in social psychology attempt to establish the construct validity of their manipulations? Following a preregistered plan, we coded 348 experimental manipulations from the 2017 issues of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Representing a reliance upon ‘on the fly’ experimentation, the vast majority of these manipulations were created ad hoc for a given study and not previously validated prior to implementation. A minority of manipulations had their construct validity evaluated by pilot testing prior to implementation or via a manipulation check. Of the manipulation checks administered, most were face-valid, single item self-reports and only a few met criteria for ‘true’ validation. In aggregate, roughly two-fifths of manipulations relied solely on face validity. To the extent that they are representative of the field, these results suggest that best practices for validating manipulations are not commonplace — a potential contributor to replicability issues. These issues can be remedied by validating manipulations prior to implementation, using validated manipulation checks, standardizing manipulation protocols, estimating the size and duration of manipulations’ effects, and estimating each manipulation’s effects on multiple constructs within the target nomological
network.
the penguin and the leviathan: how cooperation triumphs over self-interest
yochai benkler 2011
who can you trust?
rachel botsman 2017
building trust: in business, politics, relationships, and life
robert c. solomon 2001