Have You Heard? Some Gossip Can Be Good for Groups

A study of gossip has found that it can have positive effects on group behaviour, including encouraging cooperation and deterring selfishness.

A study of gossip has found that it can have positive effects on group behaviour, including encouraging cooperation and deterring selfishness.

Some gossip, researchers find, can help protect against the exploitation of nice people and promote the ostracism of bullies.

The findings comes from a new study by Feinberg et al. (2014) who had 216 participants playing a game in groups which involved financial choices.

The game is set up so that people are supposed to work cooperatively with each other, but they can benefit from it by being selfish.

Except in this study, between rounds people changed groups and were allowed to gossip about people in the last group.

This meant that if people were selfish, their reputation got passed on to others and they ended up being ostracised.

With the more selfish people excluded from the game, the groups were able to perform better.

The study’s lead author, Matthew Feinberg, explained:

“Groups that allow their members to gossip sustain cooperation and deter selfishness better than those that don’t. And groups do even better if they can gossip and ostracize untrustworthy members. While both of these behaviors can be misused, our findings suggest that they also serve very important functions for groups and society.”

Those who decided to be more selfish, however, often learned from their mistakes after they were ostracised. The threat served to improve their behaviour.

Co-author Rob Willer explained:

“Those who do not reform their behavior, behaving selfishly despite the risk of gossip and ostracism, tended to be targeted by other group members who took pains to tell future group members about the person’s untrustworthy behavior. These future groups could then detect and exclude more selfish individuals, ensuring they could avoid being taken advantage of.”

This study backs up previous findings which have shown that people are more generous when they know others may talk about their reputation.

Of course not all gossip serves such benevolent purposes–a lot of it is just pernicious.

But along with the irrelevant or damaging information can come crucial indicators about other people’s reputation. Often this sort of informal word would be difficult to get by other means.

Gossiping is good for you

Not only that, but passing on gossip can actually be therapeutic.

A previous study by Feinberg et al. (2012) found that people felt better after passing on information about other people’s antisocial behaviour.

Matthew Feinberg said:

“Spreading information about the person whom they had seen behave badly tended to make people feel better, quieting the frustration that drove their gossip.”

Image credit: jamacab

Painless Brain Stimulation Improves Mental Arithmetic in Five Days

Transcranial Random Noise Stimulation can improve learning and speed up mental calculations.

Transcranial Random Noise Stimulation can improve learning and speed up mental calculations.

The study, carried out at Oxford University, gave participants just five days of training with a relatively new form of brain stimulation: transcranial random noise stimulation (Snowball et al., 2013).

Some participants in the study had parts of their brains electrically stimulated while they were learning calculation drills.

Another group had a ‘sham’ treatment which appeared the same to participants, but crucially the machine was turned off after just 30 seconds.

Learning faster

The area targeted by the brain stimulation was in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. Activity in this area has been associated with learning, memory and executive control.

The results, which are published in the journal Current Biology, demonstrated that those receiving the brain stimulation learned more quickly and were faster to make the mental calculations.

Crucially, these gains were still evident when participants were tested again six months later.

Less mental effort

The study also examined physiological changes in the brain as a result of the training programme.

By measuring changes in blood haemoglobin concentrations, the researchers were able to calculate how hard the brain was working while doing maths.

What emerged was that, after training, the brains of those who had received stimulation had lower peak concentrations of blood haemoglobin.

This suggests the brain may not have been working as hard to achieve the same results. The authors think this may be because the relevant brain regions are displaying: “more efficient neurovascular coupling”.

The results of this study provide encouragement for those looking for ways to enhance cognitive function.

One of the study’s authors, Roi Cohen Kadosh, explained:

“Maths is a highly complex cognitive faculty that is based on a myriad of different abilities. If we can enhance mathematics, therefore, there is a good chance that we will be able to enhance simpler cognitive functions.”

Image credit: Enzo Varriale

13 Milliseconds: The Incredible Speed at Which Your Brain Can Identify an Image

Scientist thought it took the brain at least one-tenth of a second to understand an image, until now.

Scientist thought it took the brain at least one-tenth of a second to understand an image, until now.

A new study has brought the estimate of how fast you can process an image down to an incredible 13 milliseconds.

The new study, conducted by MIT researchers and published in the journal Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics, used everyday images such as of picnics and smiling couples (Potter et al., 2013).

Previous research by Professor Mary Potter and colleagues had found it takes one-tenth of a second for images to be processed.

After hitting the retina, the information must be passed to the visual areas of the brain and then around processing loops to identify the image.

In the new study, they began presenting images to their participants faster and faster to see if they could still make accurate judgements about them.

They expected a rapid decline in performance as they approached one-twentieth of a second, but it didn’t come.

Instead, although their performance declined, people could still identify novel images when they were shown for just 13 milliseconds.

The researchers were unable to present the images any faster as the monitors they were using couldn’t support it.

Porter said:

“The fact that you can do that at these high speeds indicates to us that what vision does is find concepts. That’s what the brain is doing all day long — trying to understand what we’re looking at.”

Simon Thorpe, an expert on visual processing speed, said:

“This new paper shows that the meaning of an image can be extracted even when an image is mixed up in a sequence of six or even 12 images presented at 13 milliseconds per image—a rate of about 75 frames a second.”

He added:

“Another striking finding was that the effect is also seen when the question concerning the target is only presented after the sequence has been run, meaning that the brain can extract meaning even when there is no way to predict what will be shown.”

The authors think this is evidence that images continue to be processed after they have been seen, even when they are presented for such a short time.

Professor Potter said:

“If images were wiped out after 13 milliseconds, people would never be able to respond positively after the sequence. There has to be something in the brain that has maintained that information at least that long,”

Image credit: Andras Pfaff

Dogs Recognise Familiar Human Faces in Eye Tracking Experiment

A new study suggests that, like humans and some primates, dogs have the complex skills required to recognise faces.

A new experiment suggests that, like humans and some primates, dogs have the complex skills required to recognise faces.

The research is the first to measure dogs’ eye movements as they looked at pictures of both humans and other dogs.

The research, conducted by Somppi et al. (2013) and published in the journal Animal Cognition, trained dogs to lie down and look at images presented on a computer screen in front of them.

The dogs were shown pictures of their owner and other dogs they knew, as well as both humans and dogs who were strangers to them.

All the while their eye movements were tracked.

It was clear that dogs were most interested in the faces of other dogs, as they looked at these images the longest.

The dogs also spent more time looking at the faces of their human owners than they did at the faces of strangers.

Fascinated by the eyes

In addition, dogs were shown the pictures upside down. This is because upside-down faces are thought to help reveal how our brains process faces.

The researchers found that the dogs were interested in the upside-down faces and looked at them for the same length of time, on average, as those that were the right way up.

Like humans, though, dogs were most fascinated by the eyes, especially when the faces were the right way up.

The authors conclude that dogs may well be able to pick their owners out in a photograph:

“Dogs are likely to recognize conspecific [other dogs] and human faces in photographs, and their face perception expertise may extend beyond their own species.”

→ Read on: 5 Intriguing Studies of Human-Dog Psychology

Image credit: Charlie Stinchcomb

License to Sin: How to Dodge a Devilish Self-Control Loophole

Giving yourself permission to sin means you can get what you want, but at what cost?

Giving yourself permission to sin means you can get what you want, but at what cost?

You want another slice of cake or glass of wine, but you know you shouldn’t have one.

It’s the classic self-control dilemma.

But luckily there’s a loophole; sometimes we mentally give ourselves permission to indulge: “Well, I’ve worked hard today, so I’ll have another slice of cake or glass of wine.”

Now there’s a ‘license to sin’.

A recent study cleverly demonstrates this ‘license to sin’ and shows how dangerous it can be (de Witt Huberts et al., 2012).

A little snack

To investigate, the researchers tricked one group of people into thinking they’d worked twice as hard on a boring test as another group.

Both groups were then asked to do a ‘taste test’ of some rather tempting looking snacks.

The group that thought they’d worked harder now had more of a ‘license to sin’ as a reward to themselves.

And sure enough they ate, on average, 130 calories more in 10 minutes than the other group.

It’s fascinating that the participants did this without being told they’d worked harder or being given any other cues.

Also remember that, on average, both groups had their mental self-control muscles depleted the same amount as they’d both spent the same time doing the boring task.

Avoid the loophole

What this study is showing is that these well-worn mental thought processes can be insidious. The mind has all sorts of tricks it plays so that it can get what it wants.

The ‘license to sin’ is one of them. You want to over-indulge, so your mind creates this little story that says: I’ve worked hard, so I deserve it.

The clever thing is that it can completely bypass all those logical, rational things we’ve told ourselves about healthy eating (or whatever it is) and, non-coincidentally, we get what we want.

None of this is to say that we shouldn’t indulge ourselves from time-to-time, but the question is: how often is the license to sin being invoked?

It’s a way of allowing our misbehaviour that is like an exception we all know about, but somehow don’t pull ourselves up on.

Being more aware of, and watching out for this trick may be useful in bolstering our self-control.

Image credit: Christophe Verdier

Like to Stay Up Late? Different Neural Structures Found in the Brains of Night Owls

For the first time differences in neural structures have been shown between people who are night owls and early risers.

For the first time differences in neural structures have been shown between people who are night owls and early risers.

In the new research on 59 participants, those who were confirmed night owls (preferring late to bed and late to rise) had lower integrity of the white matter in various areas of the brain (Rosenberg et al., 2014).

Lower integrity in these areas has been linked to depression and cognitive instability.

This research doesn’t tell us what the relationship is, but the authors guess that it may be related to ‘social jet-lag’.

Social jet-lag comes about because night owls are forced to live–as most of us are–like early risers. Work, school and other institutions mostly require early rising, which, for night owls, causes problems.

As night owls find it difficult to get to sleep early, they tend to carry large amounts of sleep debt. In other words, they’re exhausted all the time.

As a result, they tend to be larger consumers of caffeine and other stimulants, in order to counteract their sleep debt.

Who’s a night owl?

Night owls make up around 20% of the population, with about 10% of us being larks–preferring to sleep early and rise early.

The rest of us are balanced inbetween. This means about 70% should be able to adapt to either rising early or sleeping later, as long as they stick to good sleep habits (see: How to Fall Asleep Fast).

Men are more likely to be night owls–this seems to be related to higher levels of testosterone. This is why adolescent males have the tendency to be extreme night owls, staying up all night and sleeping in all day.

Naturally, then, women, along with the elderly of both sexes, are more likely to be larks.

Image credit: Ryan Ritchie

The Brain “Sees” Objects That You Don’t Perceive

A new study shows how much visual input the brain processes, but we never consciously see.

A new study shows how much visual input the brain processes, but we never consciously see.

Every day, when you open your eyes in the morning, there is a huge flood of visual information from the external world into your mind.

Your brain edits this flood down to a trickle of things that are highly relevant: Where is the dressing-gown? Where is the curtain? Where is the door?

The rest of it–the state of the carpet, the shadows on the ceiling–all gets ignored.

Or does it?

How much processing does the brain allocate to things you’re not consciously aware of? What does ‘it’ see that ‘you’ don’t? (Obviously ‘you’ are ‘it’, but let’s not get into that!).

Fascinating new research, published in the journal Psychological Science, addresses this question.

Sanguinetti et al. (2013) had participants looking at the silhouettes of objects in the centre of a screen, while there were other shapes around the outside.

It’s like the everyday situation where you are concentrating on something, but there are all kinds of other objects and shapes in your peripheral vision.

By monitoring their brainwaves, the researchers were able to determine whether participants were processing these peripheral objects.

People don’t usually take much notice of what’s going on in their peripheral vision because they are concentrating on what they are looking at.

The same was true in this study: participants were not consciously aware of the peripheral shapes.

And yet, the electrical activity they measured suggested that their brains were processing these peripheral shapes for meaning.

This goes against how many theorists have suggested that vision works. Professor Mary Peterson explained:

“Many, many theorists assume that because it takes a lot of energy for brain processing, that the brain is only going to spend time processing what you’re ultimately going to perceive. But in fact the brain is deciding what you’re going to perceive, and it’s processing all of the information and then it’s determining what’s the best interpretation.”

Naturally, the brain edits information coming from the eyes, because only a portion of it is useful for us.

It’s like a film director who doesn’t bother showing you the hero going to sleep or brushing his teeth.

To follow the story, what you need is the salient details, and that is what the brain is trying to give you: the edited version of the most useful visual facts.

However, what this study suggests is that even information that isn’t that useful or relevant is still being processed in the brain for meaning.

The study is a fantastic reminder that what we see is the result of an extremely complicated editing and filtering process.

What we actually perceive is just what the brain thinks will be most useful to us. But, while we don’t perceive the rest, it seems much of it is still being processed unconsciously.

Image credit: Patrick McArdle/UANews

People Are More Moral in the Morning

Faced with a moral decision? Study suggests you should make it in the morning.

Faced with a moral decision? Study suggests you should make it in the morning.

A lot of bad behaviour goes on at night. Too much drinking, eating, fighting and all the rest.

But is this just down to the fact that people are mostly at work during the day, or is it more than that?

Could it be that people’s self-control is sapped by everyday events and, by the evening, those with the relevant tendencies can’t stop themselves cutting loose?

Certainly every new day presents all of us with a series of little–and sometimes not so little–mental workouts.

Even small things like choosing what to wear, planning the day’s activities and attending a routine meeting take their toll.

All this mental effort depletes our reserves so that we can almost feel it seeping away with each new task.

We may start the day with all the best intentions, but by the time the evening rolls around, these have gone out of the window.

If this is really true, then it should be possible to see this decline in people’s self-control over the day.

If, say, we compare people’s moral behaviour in the morning with that in the afternoon, there should be a measurable difference.

That’s exactly what Kouchaki and Smith (2013) have done in a new study published in Psychological Science. Being positive souls, though, they called it the ‘morning morality’ effect: the idea that we are at our most moral in the mornings.

They checked out this theory of a ‘morning morality’ effect by giving participants in four studies opportunities to cheat while carrying out simple computer-based tasks.

Sometimes people were tested in the morning and sometimes in the afternoon. Each time, during the tasks, they were surreptitiously given chances to cut corners or tell little fibs.

Across the studies, the researchers found that people were less likely to cheat and lie in the morning than the afternoon.

People who cheated more in the afternoon also showed lower moral awareness, suggesting their moral character was bleeding away as the day proceeded.

So, perhaps all the bad behaviour that goes on at night is more than just opportunity, it’s also a result of the collective erosion of people’s moral fibre.

The authors of the study even suggest that the morning morality effect is worth knowing about if you’ve got some important decisions to make:

“The morning morality effect has notable implications for individuals and organizations, and it suggests that morally relevant tasks should be deliberately ordered throughout the day.” (Kouchaki & Smith, 2013)

Simply put: don’t make any really important decisions in the afternoon, especially those with moral implications; you’re more likely to act immorally.

Image credit: Sean Rogers

Synesthesia Could Explain How Some People See ‘Auras’

Experience of ‘auras’ around people may be result of a neuropsychological condition called synesthesia.

Experience of ‘auras’ around people may be result of a neuropsychological condition called synesthesia.

Synesthesia is a fascinating condition which causes a cross-wiring of the senses. People with it find they can taste numbers or associate particular colours with certain people.

Rather than being weird, spooky or mystical, it is now a recognised neuropsychological phenomenon which is thought to affect about 4% of the population.

Some argue that synesthesia may help to explain the claim that people have auras–a subtle field of energy around them which can be read.

It may be that seeing this ‘energy field’ is a type of synesthesia.

One example of this cross-over between New Age beliefs and recognised neuropsychological phenomena is the case of Esteban, a faith healer from southern Spain.

Researchers from the University of Granada have examined him and found that he has mirror-touch synesthesia (Milan et al., 2012). He experiences a sensation when he sees other people being touched; this means he can literally feel other people’s pain.

He also has face-colour synesthesia, which results from a crossover between parts of the brain responsible for face processing and colour perception.

These synesthetic phenomena, along with high levels of empathy, and a slightly delusional personality, mean Estaban has special emotional and pain reading skills.

In Estaban’s case it looks like there is some relationship between his synesthesia and his perceived special abilities.

To further examine the claim, though, Milan et al. looked specifically at four synesthetes who don’t claim any special ‘New Age’ abilities.

They then compared this with known faith healers and aura readers who do claim special abilities. A large enough overlap between the two might suggest a causal role for synesthesia.

The researchers, though, found too many differences between the experience of synesthetes and those claiming to read auras.

This does not mean that the aura readers are really seeing auras, just that their ‘powers’ can be explained by alternative means. Seeing auras may instead be a result of the normal functioning of the visual system:

“…the complementary colour effect, which results from a temporary ‘‘exhaustion’’ of the colour-sensitive cells in the retina, could account for the presence of auric colours seen by a sensitive viewer when staring at a person. Staring at a darker object (a human figure) against a bright background may induce the perception of a bright ‘‘halo’’ around the object.” (Milan et al., 2012)

Or it could be that ‘aura readers’ simply see what they want or expect to see, and perhaps invoking synesthesia is too complex an explanation for a much simpler cause.

Image credit: PhotoGraham

Sense of Belonging Increases Meaningfulness of Life

Research finds that a sense of belonging increases meaningfulness of life.

Research finds that a sense of belonging increases meaningfulness of life.

A new study finds that when social relationships provide an all important sense of belonging, people feel life has more meaning (Lambert et al., 2013).

The effect was revealed in one experiment in which participants were asked to close their eyes and think of two people or groups to which they really belonged. Then they were asked about how much meaning they felt life had.

This group was compared with two others where participants (1) thought about the value of other people and (2) the help that others had provided them.

Compared with these two conditions, participants who had been thinking about the groups they belonged to felt the highest levels of meaning in life.

So, belonging to a group provided meaning over and above the value of others or the help they could provide.

It’s more than just bonding, therefore, but really feeling like you are fitting in with others which is associated with higher levels of meaningfulness.

Just the reverse effect has been shown in previous studies. People who feel excluded from social groups tend to feel that life has less meaning.

Belonging and coherence

One of most people’s missions in life–whether they realise it or not–is to find meaning.

Feeling that life is meaningful is important because:

  • People who feel life is meaningful are more likely to be in both good psychological and good physical health.
  • People who feel life isn’t meaningful are more likely to be depressed, to require therapy and even feel suicidal.

Meaning is found in various ways–sometimes through family, religion and the sense of self.

But, certainly, one way to find meaning in life is by seeking out one or more places where we belong and where things make sense.

One reason that belonging increases meaning in life is it promotes the idea of continuity and of permanence.

If you belong to an organisation or group that is greater than yourself, there is comfort in the idea that it will outlast you.

Along with feeling like we belong, coherence in our environment also promotes meaning. When we experience things that don’t make sense, we feel life has less meaning.

Demonstrating this, one study has found that people who viewed the seasons in the correct order (spring, summer, fall, winter) felt life had more meaning than those who saw them out of order (Heintzelman et al., 2013).

So: where do you belong and does it make sense to you?

Image credit: Duncan Rawlinson