Two experiments were undertaken. For the first, 65 men and 65 women, all of an average age of 21, anonymously played a cooperation game where they could donate money via a computer program to a group fund. Donations were selfless acts, as all other players would benefit from the fund, whilst the donor wouldn’t necessarily receive anything in return.
Players did not know who they were playing with. They were observed by either someone of the same sex or opposite sex — two physically attractive volunteers, one man and one woman. Men were found to do significantly more good deeds when observed by the opposite sex. Whilst the number of good deeds made by women didn’t change, regardless of who observed.
For the second experiment, groups of males were formed. Males were asked to make a number of public donations. These increased when observed by an attractive female, where they were found to actively compete with one another. When observed by another male, however, donations didn’t increase.
Luke M. relates (see linked discussion):
Baboons... literally have been the textbook example of a highly aggressive, male-dominated, hierarchical society. Because these animals hunt, because they live in these aggressive troupes on the Savannah (just like we humans used to, and thus we evolved similarly), they have a constant baseline level of aggression which inevitably spills over into their social lives.
Scientists have never observed a baboon troupe that wasn't highly aggressive, and they have compelling reasons to think this is simply baboon nature, written into their genes. Inescapable.
Or at least, that was true until the 1980s, when Kenya experienced a tourism boom.
Sapolsky was a grad student, studying his first baboon troupe. A new tourist lodge was built at the edge of the forest where his baboons lived. The owners of the lodge dug a hole behind the lodge and dumped their trash there every morning, after which the males of several baboon troupes — including Sapolsky's — would fight over this pungent bounty.
Before too long, someone noticed the baboons didn't look too good. It turned out they had eaten some infected meat and developed tuberculosis, which kills baboons in weeks. Their hands rotted away, so they hobbled around on their elbows. Half the males in Sapolsky's troupe died.
This had a surprising effect. There was now almost no violence in the troupe. Males often reciprocated when females groomed them, and males even groomed other males. To a baboonologist, this was like watching Mike Tyson suddenly stop swinging in a heavyweight fight to start nuzzling Evander Holyfield. It never happened.
This was interesting, but Sapolsky moved to the other side of the park and began studying other baboons. His first troupe "scientifically ruined" by such a non-natural event. But really, he was just heartbroken. He never visited.
Six years later, Sapolsky wanted to show his girlfriend where he had studied his first troupe, and found that they were still there, and still surprisingly violence-free. This one troupe had apparently been so transformed by their unusual experience — and the continued availability of easy food — that they were now basically non-violent.
And then it hit him.
Only one of the males now in the troupe had been through the event. All the rest were new, and hadn't been raised in the tribe. The new males had come from the violent, dog-eat-dog world of normal baboon-land. But instead of coming into the new troupe and roughing everybody up as they always did, the new males had learned, "We don't do stuff like that here." They had unlearned their childhood culture and adapted to the new norms of the first baboon pacifists.
As it turned out, violence wasn't an unchanging part of baboon nature. In fact it changed rather quickly, when the right causal factor flipped, and — for this troupe and the new males coming in — it has stayed changed to this day.
Somehow, the violence had been largely circumstantial. It was just that the circumstances had always been the same.
Until they weren't.
I liked John Medina's Brain Rules, and my sister just had a baby, so I skimmed Brain Rules for Baby.
... (N = 1041), a large gender difference emerged in the sexual attractiveness of happy displays: happiness was the most attractive female emotion expression, and one of the least attractive in males. In contrast, pride showed the reverse pattern; it was the most attractive male expression, and one of the least attractive in women. Shame displays were relatively attractive in both genders, and, among younger adult women viewers, male shame was more attractive than male happiness, and not substantially less than male pride. (more)
Baumeister has a book coming out on willpower. There's a NYTimes article about his work, summarized and discussed on LessWrong.
I've previously discussed much of this. But some of it is new research. It's still possible that the only thing being depleted is glucose available to the brain (which is most readily available from stored liver glycogen, or food). But there may be other chemical resources involved. In any case, weighing and making choices taxes the brain; I'm not sure how much more or less than e.g. solving puzzles or reading and thinking critically. Quoting from the LessWrong summary:You spend the most willpower when you have to make AND implement your decisions:
which phase of the decision-making process was most fatiguing? To find out, Kathleen Vohs, a former colleague of Baumeister’s now at the University of Minnesota, performed an experiment using the self-service Web site of Dell Computers. One group in the experiment carefully studied the advantages and disadvantages of various features available for a computer — the type of screen, the size of the hard drive, etc. — without actually making a final decision on which ones to choose. A second group was given a list of predetermined specifications and told to configure a computer by going through the laborious, step-by-step process of locating the specified features among the arrays of options and then clicking on the right ones. The purpose of this was to duplicate everything that happens in the postdecisional phase, when the choice is implemented. The third group had to figure out for themselves which features they wanted on their computers and go through the process of choosing them; they didn’t simply ponder options (like the first group) or implement others’ choices (like the second group). They had to cast the die, and that turned out to be the most fatiguing task of all. When self-control was measured, they were the one who were most depleted, by far.
Willpower depletion makes you reluctant to make trade-offs:
Once you’re mentally depleted, you become reluctant to make trade-offs, which involve a particularly advanced and taxing form of decision making. In the rest of the animal kingdom, there aren’t a lot of protracted negotiations between predators and prey. To compromise is a complex human ability and therefore one of the first to decline when willpower is depleted. You become what researchers call a cognitive miser, hoarding your energy. If you’re shopping, you’re liable to look at only one dimension, like price: just give me the cheapest. Or you indulge yourself by looking at quality: I want the very best (an especially easy strategy if someone else is paying). Decision fatigue leaves you vulnerable to marketers who know how to time their sales, as Jonathan Levav, the Stanford professor, demonstrated in experiments involving tailored suits and new cars.
Willpower depletion makes you more likely to take the path of least resistance:
As they started picking features, customers would carefully weigh the choices, but as decision fatigue set in, they would start settling for whatever the default option was. And the more tough choices they encountered early in the process — like going through those 56 colors to choose the precise shade of gray or brown — the quicker people became fatigued and settled for the path of least resistance by taking the default option. By manipulating the order of the car buyers’ choices, the researchers found that the customers would end up settling for different kinds of options, and the average difference totaled more than 1,500 euros per car (about $2,000 at the time).
Testing willpower depletion in rural Indian villages:
Most of us in America won’t spend a lot of time agonizing over whether we can afford to buy soap, but it can be a depleting choice in rural India. Dean Spears, an economist at Princeton, offered people in 20 villages in Rajasthan in northwestern India the chance to buy a couple of bars of brand-name soap for the equivalent of less than 20 cents. It was a steep discount off the regular price, yet even that sum was a strain for the people in the 10 poorest villages. Whether or not they bought the soap, the act of making the decision left them with less willpower, as measured afterward in a test of how long they could squeeze a hand grip. In the slightly more affluent villages, people’s willpower wasn’t affected significantly.
Decision fatigue can be a factor in trapping people in poverty:
Spears and other researchers argue that this sort of decision fatigue is a major — and hitherto ignored — factor in trapping people in poverty. Because their financial situation forces them to make so many trade-offs, they have less willpower to devote to school, work and other activities that might get them into the middle class.
Glucose restores willpower in humans and dogs:
To establish cause and effect, researchers at Baumeister’s lab tried refueling the brain in a series of experiments involving lemonade mixed either with sugar or with a diet sweetener. The sugary lemonade provided a burst of glucose, the effects of which could be observed right away in the lab; the sugarless variety tasted quite similar without providing the same burst of glucose. Again and again, the sugar restored willpower, but the artificial sweetener had no effect. The glucose would at least mitigate the ego depletion and sometimes completely reverse it. The restored willpower improved people’s self-control as well as the quality of their decisions: they resisted irrational bias when making choices, and when asked to make financial decisions, they were more likely to choose the better long-term strategy instead of going for a quick payoff. The ego-depletion effect was even demonstrated with dogs in two studies by Holly Miller and Nathan DeWall at the University of Kentucky. After obeying sit and stay commands for 10 minutes, the dogs performed worse on self-control tests and were also more likely to make the dangerous decision to challenge another dog’s turf. But a dose of glucose restored their willpower.
Ego depletion causes activity to rise in some parts of the brain and to decline in others:
The results of the experiment were announced in January, during Heatherton’s speech accepting the leadership of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, the world’s largest group of social psychologists. In his presidential address at the annual meeting in San Antonio, Heatherton reported that administering glucose completely reversed the brain changes wrought by depletion — a finding, he said, that thoroughly surprised him.Heatherton’s results did much more than provide additional confirmation that glucose is a vital part of willpower; they helped solve the puzzle over how glucose could work without global changes in the brain’s total energy use. Apparently ego depletion causes activity to rise in some parts of the brain and to decline in others. Your brain does not stop working when glucose is low. It stops doing some things and starts doing others. It responds more strongly to immediate rewards and pays less attention to long-term prospects.
Good decision makers structure their lives so as to conserve willpower:
“Good decision making is not a trait of the person, in the sense that it’s always there,” Baumeister says. “It’s a state that fluctuates.” His studies show that people with the best self-control are the ones who structure their lives so as to conserve willpower. They don’t schedule endless back-to-back meetings. They avoid temptations like all-you-can-eat buffets, and they establish habits that eliminate the mental effort of making choices. Instead of deciding every morning whether or not to force themselves to exercise, they set up regular appointments to work out with a friend. Instead of counting on willpower to remain robust all day, they conserve it so that it’s available for emergencies and important decisions.
“Even the wisest people won’t make good choices when they’re not rested and their glucose is low,” Baumeister points out.
For what fraction of your beliefs could you rediscover the belief if it (only) was deleted, leaving all your other memories except those of learning or attesting to the belief? If the fraction is near 1, this is more than just robustness to damage from physical damage - e.g. stroke/alzheimer's/poisoning - (like bilingualism or other sources of cognitive reserve) due to having meaningfully connected beliefs (to each other and to your experience) rather than rote-learned mantras. It's confidence that your beliefs are effectively complete - that you have access to the derivable consequences of your experience (even if you're not genius-fast at (re)discovering them as needed).
(paraphrasing this)Little Albert was an eight month old child who briefly starred in an experiment by behaviorist John Watson. Watson showed him a fuzzy white rat. Albert seemed to like the rat well enough. After Albert liking the rat had been confirmed, Watson showed him the rat again, but this time also played a very loud and scary noise; he repeated this intervention until, as expected, Albert was terrified of the white rat. But it wasn't just fuzzy white rats Albert didn't like. Further investigation determined that Albert was also afraid of brown rabbits (fuzzy animal) and Santa Claus (fuzzy white beard).
I'm sure the kid turned out fine.
He put pigeons in a box that gave them rewards randomly. The pigeons ended up developing what he called "superstitions"; if a reward arrived by coincidence when a pigeon was tilting its head in a certain direction, the pigeon would continue tilting its head in that direction in the hope of gaining more rewards; when the reward randomly arrived, the pigeon took this as "justification" of its head-tilting and head-tilted even more.
People also don't look for negative confirmation when they're told to learn a pattern. They usually do this poorly even when forming explicit plans (not only with automatic learning), e.g.
There are four cards which have a letter on one side and a number on the other side. I lay them out and the cards appear as 2 5 F E. The rule is that a card with an odd number on one side must have a vowel on the other. What is the minimum number of cards you should turn over to prove the rule is true (and which cards would they be)?
The "positive test strategy" is sometimes a useful heuristic, but it's embarrassing how bad people are at escaping it (see Wason's "confirmation bias" experiment and its Bayesian refinement).
[There is a strong] correlation between educational TV shows and so-called "relational aggression" - things like bullying, name-calling, and deliberate ostracism. The shows most strongly correlated with bad behavior were heart-warming educational programs intended to teach morality. Why?
The researchers theorize that the structure of these shows often involved a child committing an immoral action, the child looking cool and strong, and then at the end of the show the child eventually gets a comeuppance (think Harry Potter, where evil character Draco Malfoy is the coolest and most popular kid in Hogwarts and usually gets away with it, whereas supposedly sympathetic character Ron Weasley is at best a lovable loser who spends most of his time as the butt of Draco's jokes). The theory is that children are just not good enough at the whole feedback of conseqeunces thing to realize that the bully's comeuppance in the end is supposed to be the inevitable result of their evil ways. All they see is someone being a bully and then being treated as obviously popular and high-status.
So funny.
HT
