Author: vaughanbell

The Economist has a good write-up of a recent PLoS One study that found that the perceived ‘human-ness’ of another player in a game altered the extent of activation in brain areas associated with understanding others’ mental states.

The participants were asked to play the prisoner’s dilemma game in a brain scanner and were introduced to four opponents – software on a laptop, a laptop controlled by robotic hands, a humanoid robot and a real human. In reality though, the other players’ moves were all randomly generated.

Dr Krach and Dr Kircher chose the “prisoner’s dilemma” game because it involves a difficult choice: whether to co-operate with the other player or betray him. Co-operation brings the best outcome, but trying to co-operate when the other player betrays you brings the worst. The tendency is for both sides to choose betrayal (thus obtaining an intermediate result) unless a high level of trust exists between them. The game thus requires each player to try to get into the mind of the other, in order to predict what he might do. This sort of thinking tends to increase activity in parts of the brain called the medial prefrontal cortex and the right temporo-parietal junction.

The scanner showed that the more human-like the supposed opponent, the more such neural activity increased. A questionnaire also revealed that the volunteers enjoyed the games most when they played human-like opponents, whom they perceived to be more intelligent. Dr Krach and Dr Kircher reckon this shows that the less human-like a robot is in its appearance, the less it will be treated as if it were human. That may mean it will be trusted less—and might therefore not sell as well as a humanoid design.

It’s an interesting extension of a type of study first pioneered by psychologist Helen Gallagher and colleagues where she asked people to play ‘paper, scissors, stone’ supposedly against human and computer opponents in a PET scanning study.

Like with this recent study, all ‘opponents’ were actually just a series of randomly generated moves but the participants showed significantly greater brain activation in the frontal cortex when playing against the supposedly ‘human’ opponent than versus the computer.

The philosopher Daniel Dennett suggests that attributing mental states is a particular way of thinking about something that he calls the ‘intentional stance‘.

For example, we might play a chess computer and treat it if it was ‘intending’ to take our our bishop, or as if it ‘believed’ that getting the Queen out would be an advantage, but this says nothing about whether the machine actually has intentions or beliefs.

Of course, we can apply this to humans, and just because we find it useful to talk about others’ beliefs, it doesn’t mean belief is necessarily a scientifically sound concept.

Link to Economist article ‘I, human’.
Link to full-text article in PLoS One.

Full disclosure: I’m an unpaid member of the PLoS One editorial board.

PsyBlog has a delightful article discussing whether louder music increases alcohol consumption. It turns out it does, and surprisingly, there seems to have been quite a few studies done to examine the effect.

One research group even did a sort of randomised controlled trial on bars and music in a fantastic real-world experiment.

One study by Gueguen et al. (2004) found that higher sound levels lead to people drinking more. In a new study published in Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research, Gueguen et al. (2008) visited a bar in the west of France to confirm their previous finding in a naturalistic setting. Here, they observed customers’ drinking habits across three Saturday nights, in two different bars in the city.

The level of the music was randomly manipulated to create the conditions of a true experiment. It was either at its usual volume of 72dB or turned up to 88dB. For comparison: 72db is like the sound of traffic on a busy street while 88db is like standing next to a lawnmower.

Sure enough when the music went up the beers went down, faster. On average bar-goers took 14.5 minutes to finish a 250ml (8 oz) glass of draught beer when the music was at its normal level. But this came down to just 11.5 minutes when the music was turned up. As a result, on average, during their time in the bar each participant ordered one more drink in the loud music condition than in the normal music condition.

Link to ‘Why Loud Music in Bars Increases Alcohol Consumption’.

People in close social groups, such as family and friends, were more likely to agree on the attractiveness of a face, according to an interesting study published in Perception.

It’s a novel take on face perception research, which usually implies that there are some general features of attractiveness which we all can perceive, but rarely looks at how other people can influence this.

Beauty is in the ‘we’ of the beholder: greater agreement on facial attractiveness among close relations.

Perception. 2007;36(11):1674-81.

Bronstad PM, Russell R.

Scientific research on facial attractiveness has focused primarily on elucidating universal factors to which all raters respond consistently. However, recent work has shown that there is also substantial disagreement between raters, highlighting the importance of determining how attractiveness preferences vary among different individuals. We conducted a typical attractiveness ratings study, but took the unusual step of recruiting pairs of subjects who were spouses, siblings, or close friends. The agreement between pairs of affiliated friends, siblings, and spouses was significantly greater than between pairs of strangers drawn from the same race and culture, providing evidence that facial-attractiveness preferences are socially organized.

Link to PubMed entry for study.

BBC Radio 4 have just finished broadcasting Team Spirit, a great series of five 15-minute programmes on the psychology of group dynamics by taking a look at a diverse range of teams – from paramedics to Morris dancers.

Each programme looks at specific team chosen to reflect different forms of groups dynamics, meets the people and then discusses the social processes with psychologists working in the field.

The teams selected are air-ambulance paramedics, an Antartic research team, a girls football team, a backstage theatre crew and a group of Morris dancers (non-British people: Morris dancing is an excuse for ale drinking and maid chasing thinly disguised as a folk dance tradition).

It’s a fun and informative ‘bite-size’ series presented by the faultless Claudia Hammond. It’s archived online but only as realaudio streams, so no podcasts I’m afraid but definitely worth checking out.

Link to BBC Radio 4 Team Spirit series.

I’ve just got round to listening to ABC Radio National’s two part Health Report special on the drug and alcohol dependence and was pleasantly surprised about how well constructed and informative it was.

These sorts of programmes can be a little dry, if you’ll excuse the pun, but this two-parter in a compelling look into the effects of a number of substances, talks to some addicts in treatment, explores some residential services and discusses the evidence for various treatments.

The interviews are quite revealing and they’re a good demonstration that addiction is not solely about the drug. People who become seriously addicted change their lives to accommodate their addiction, and can live quite precariously as a result.

This often alters people’s behaviour, often in quite an adaptive way considering the unpredictable and dangerous circumstances, but not in a way that is best suited to mainstream life.

For example, one gentleman notes that he had to get out of the habit of lying to people as a short term fix to problems.

This is not a direct effect of the drug, but these sorts of maladaptive behaviours also need to be addressed during treatment for addiction for it to be successful.

Stopping the drug is only a part of the battle – stepping out of an ingrained lifestyle, mindset and pattern of behaviour can be the real challenge.

Addiction is more than just problem with taking too much of a chemical, it’s equally a social and emotional issue and we are often guilty of downplaying this aspect while clumsily trying to avoid the language of blame. The pure ‘disease model’, that says addiction is nothing more than a genetic brain disorder triggered by a particular substance, is a case in point.

It is, of course, possible to highlight individual responsibility without victimising people, but this is a difficult task for many in a society that has many double standards over the issue of drug taking.

The situation was wonderfully described in a 2003 article in the Journal of Applied Philosophy that noted that we often accuse addicts of self-deception while pushing our own self-deceptions about addiction as a substitute:

We frequently accuse heavy drinkers and drug users of self-deception if they refuse to admit that they are addicted. However, given the ways in which we usually conceptualize it, acknowledging addiction merely involves swapping one form of self-deception for another. We ask addicts to see themselves as in the grip of an irresistible desire, and to accept that addiction is an essentially physiological process. To the extent this is so, we, as much as the addicts, suffer from self-deception, and the responsibility for their state is in part ours. Conversely, since addicts are compelled to accept a self-deceptive image of themselves, they are at least partially excused from blame for their self-deception.

Parts one and two of ABC Health Report on drug dependence and treatment.
Link to ‘Self-Deception and Responsibility for Addiction’ article.
Link to DOI identifier for article.

Psychologist Jesse Bering has written a witty and informative post on the science of homophobia, evolutionary theories of homosexuality and why some hypotheses just don’t work without large quantities of strong gin.

Bering notes he’s both gay and an evolutionary psychologist, and some people find it surprising that a homosexual male works in a field that might suggest he’s a biological anomaly.

Needless to say, his whistle-stop tour through the field is both informative and funny. The final bit summarises evolutionary theories of homosexuality and the last paragraph made me laugh out loud:

‚Ä¢ E.O. Wilson’s kin altruism theory states that homosexuality was a rare but functional alternative to traditional routes of increasing inclusive fitness because gay people in the ancestral past, who weren’t burdened with their own kids, helped to raise, care for, and provide resources to their other genetic relatives, such as nieces and nephews. (This one doesn’t quite gel, especially when you consider that a gay person’s resources are usually funneled to their same-sex partners. Also, for most people, being gay doesn’t exactly endear you to your relatives.)

‚Ä¢ Evolutionary psychologist Frank Muscarella’s alliance formation theory proposes that, in the ancestral past, homoerotic behaviours by young men with high status older men would have been an effective strategy for climbing up the social ladder. (Think Ancient Greece, or maybe Mark Foley?)

‚Ä¢ John Maynard Smith is often credited with what is colloquially called the “sneaky f*cker theory,” which argues that gay men in the ancestral past had unique access to the reproductive niche because females let their guards down around them and other males didn’t view them as sexual competitors. (I rather like this one: remember, we’re not infertile, we’re just gay. Although in my case, it’d take a lot of gin to work.)
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To do it in style, presumably you’d be drinking pink gin.

Bering is one of the most inventive researchers working in evolutionary psychology, and his work on our everyday theories of souls, ghosts and the supernatural is fascinating.

One of my favourites is his study [pdf] finding that simply telling people the lab is haunted improves their honesty in a computer task, whereas another creative study [pdf] investigated which mind and brain functions children think continue after death and how this differs by age and religious schooling.

Link to ‘The Sneaky F*cker Theory (and Other Gay Ideas)’.