Month: January 2008

Science News has a remarkably clear and concise article on a study that looked at how ideas spread through social networks. It found that under most circumstances a critical mass of more easily influenced people, not ‘opinion leaders’, are key to making ideas popular.

One of the major theories in marketing is that new ideas are taken up by the wider population because they are adopted by ‘opinion leaders’ – respected individuals who others listen to.

The theory goes that when opinion leaders adopt an idea, lots of other people quickly follow. Sort of like a ‘leader of the pack’ theory.

Researchers Duncan Watts and Peter Dodds wondered whether this was really the case, or whether instead, large numbers of people would embrace a particular idea when a certain number of their more easily influenced peers started to champion it. More of a ‘birds of a feather’ theory.

Watts and Dodds research how the mathematics of networks can tell us about how social systems work, and so they created various simulated social networks, set up some rules, and then ran the experiments to see how easily ideas would spread.

They simulated individual differences in the model by making each person more likely to adopt an idea if a certain percentage of their social network already believed it.

As some people are more easily influenced than others, the ‘people’ in the network varied in what percentage of their peers were needed to influence them – in effect, a mathematical simulation of individual scepticism.

The researchers compared how far an idea would spread depending on whether it started with a random individual or with an influential individual who was connected to a lot of other individuals. They found that highly influential individuals usually spread ideas more widely, but not very much more widely. For example, if an individual had three times as many connections as the average person, ideas espoused by that individual almost always spread substantially less than three times as far as the ideas of an average individual. Sometimes, the researchers found, the difference wasn’t even measurable…

More important than the influencers, the researchers found, were the influenced. Once an idea spread to a critical mass of easily influenced individuals, it took hold and continued to spread to other easily influenced individuals. In some networks, it was far easier to get an idea established this way than in others. The entire structure of the network mattered, not just the few influential people.

The full-text of Watts and Dodds’ paper is available online as a pdf if you want to read the study in more detail, but the Science News article is a great summary.

Link to Science News on ‘The Power of Being Influenced’.
pdf of study ‘Influentials, Networks, and Public Opinion Formation’.

The New York Times has a short but interesting piece on people with gephyrophobia, a morbid fear of bridges.

Phobias are often described as an irrational fear, but most have a reasonable basis to them, as reflected in the fact that phobias most commonly concern things that have an element of danger or risk – such as heights, dogs, spiders or water.

However, the fear gets exaggerated so the perceived danger vastly outweighs the actual danger.

Often the disabling aspect is not the fear itself, but how people begin to restrict their lives to avoid the fear. In a sense, people can become driven by a fear of fear.

Mrs. Steers, 47, suffered from a little-known disorder called gephyrophobia, a fear of bridges. And she had the misfortune of living in a region with 26 major bridges, whose heights and spans could turn an afternoon car ride into a rolling trip through a haunted house.

Some people go miles out of their way to avoid crossing the George Washington Bridge — for example, driving to Upper Manhattan from Teaneck, N.J., by way of the Lincoln Tunnel, a detour that can stretch a 19-minute jog into a three-quarter-hour ordeal. Other bridge phobics recite baby names or play the radio loudly as they ease onto a nerve-jangling span — anything to focus the mind. Still others take a mild tranquilizer an hour before buckling up to cross a bridge.

Link to NYT article ‘To Gephyrophobiacs, Bridges Are a Terror’.

This interesting study published in Perspectives in Biology and Medicine compared the psychological effect of castration on two quite different groups of people: on people with prostrate cancer for whom the procedure was a medical necessity, and for people who wished to castrate themselves on a voluntary basis.

Motivations for voluntary eunuchs vary, but in certain forms the condition is thought to be related to apotemnophilia or ‘body integrity identity disorder’ – where individuals have a pathological desire to have a limb amputated, often taking quite severe and damaging measures to achieve their aim.

However, eunuchs have had a long and complex social and symbolic role in history that belies the simple fact of the operation.

In fact, there is quite a large online eunuch community, who share an interest in the procedure, whether they’re personally motivated to have it, or whether they’re just interested in it for, well, whatever reason sparks your interest I suppose.

Modern-day eunuchs: motivations for and consequences of contemporary castration.

Perspect Biol Med. 2007, 50(4), 544-56.

Wassersug RJ, Johnson TW.

This article compares the motivations for, and responses to, castration between two groups of males: prostate cancer patients and voluntary modern-day eunuchs with castration paraphilias or other emasculating obsessions. Prostate cancer patients are distressed by the side effects of androgen deprivation and typically strive to hide or deny the effects of castration. In contrast, most voluntary eunuchs are pleased with the results of their emasculations. Despite a suggested association of androgen deprivation with depression, voluntary eunuchs appear to function well, both psychologically and socially. Motivation, rather than physiology, appears to account for these different responses to androgen deprivation.

Probably not quite the literal form of castration anxiety Freud had in mind when he invented the psychoanalytic term.

Link to abstract of study on PubMed.

The Situationist has a fantastic post on a recent replication of Stanley Milgram’s (in)famous conformity experiment which is usually always described as being ‘too unethical to perform today’.

In Milgram’s original study, participants were asked to give increasingly severe electric shocks to someone supposedly trying to learn a series of word pairs.

In fact, the ‘learner’ was an actor and no shocks were given, but they screamed as if they were in increasing amounts of pain, while the experimenter ordered the participant to increase the voltage.

The experiment tested how far someone would go in giving pain to another human being when being ordered by an authority figure. 65% of participants continued despite indications that the ‘learner’ might be unconscious or dead.

It’s been a hugely influential study, but was thought to be so stressful for the participants, that it has never been replicated in real life and it was assumed it would be impossible to do so.

However, this replication was carefully designed by Prof Jerry Burger to be as close as possible to Milgram’s original study while being modified so it could be fully ethically approved by a research ethics committee (the mark of all good research).

I went to great lengths to recreate Milgram’s procedures (Experiment Five), including such details as the words used in the memory test and the experimenter’s lab coat. But I also made several substantial changes.

First, we stopped the procedures at the 150-volt mark. This is the first time participants heard the learner’s protests through the wall and his demands to be released. When we look at Milgram’s data, we find that this point in the procedure is something of a “point of no return.” Of the participants who continued past 150 volts, 79 percent went all the way to the highest level of the shock generator (450 volts). Knowing how people respond up to this point allowed us to make a reasonable estimate of what they would do if allowed to continue to the end. Stopping the study at this juncture also avoided exposing participants to the intense stress Milgram’s participants often experienced in the subsequent parts of the procedure.

Second, we used a two-step screening process for potential participants to exclude any individuals who might have a negative reaction to the experience. . . . More than 38 percent of the interviewed participants were excluded at this point.

Third, participants were told at least three times (twice in writing) that they could withdraw from the study at any time and still receive their $50 for participation.

Fourth, like Milgram, we administered a sample shock to our participants (with their consent). However, we administered a very mild 15-volt shock rather than the 45-volt shock Milgram gave his participants.

Fifth, we allowed virtually no time to elapse between ending the session and informing participants that the learner had received no shocks. Within a few seconds after ending the study, the learner entered the room to reassure the participant he was fine. Sixth, the experimenter who ran the study also was a clinical psychologist who was instructed to end the session immediately if he saw any signs of excessive stress.

Although each of these safeguards came with a methodological price (e.g., the potential effect of screening out certain individuals, the effect of emphasizing that participants could leave at any time), I wanted to take every reasonable measure to ensure that our participants were treated in a humane and ethical manner.

Interestingly, the study found that levels of obedience were about the same now, as they were in the early 1960s when the original experiment was first run.

This is not the first time that someone has tried to replicate Milgram’s experiment. The BPS Research Digest reported on a virtual reality version of the study (admittedly, not a true replication), the full-text of which is available online.

The Situationist post also includes a embedded video of a TV documentary on the replication and notes some disturbing examples where the experiment has been inadvertently replicated when a prank caller directed staff to give shock to two emotionally disturbed teenagers.

Link to Situationist on Milgram replication (thanks Tom!)
Link to Wikipedia page on Milgram’s original study.

Psychologist Dr Petra Boyton has just completed her yearly review of the past year in sex, revisits last year’s predictions and looks forward to possible developments in 2008.

One of her predictions is that the media will become obsessed with ‘future sex’. Indeed, the recently published book Love and Sex with Robots got a huge amount of media coverage, including a review in The New York Times, despite being big on speculation and short on current evidence.

My own personal barometer of the progress of sex research is the balance of how many papers have been published on the neuroscience of orgasm compared to the neuroscience of hiccups.

At the time of writing, PubMed lists 99 papers on the neuroscience of hiccups, whereas only 71 are listed as discussing the neuroscience of orgasm.

Let’s hope 2008 does a better job of redressing the balance than 2007.

Link to Dr Petra’s review of 2007.
Link to review of last year’s sex predictions.
Link to predictions for 2008.