DailyDirt: Good Parenting, Bad Parenting, Is There Really A Big Difference?

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Who can really say what effect parenting has on the development of a child? Presumably, the parents of Ted and David Kaczynski didn't raise their sons in dramatically different ways, but these brothers ultimately live very different lives. It's sometimes difficult to define what a good parent is, and it may seem like it's easier to point out bad parents, but the distinctions may not be as clear-cut as everyone thinks. (Who is qualified to judge, anyway?) Here are just a few links on the topic of raising kids.

• Peter Lanza, Adam Lanza's father, is now talking about his experience with his son before the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School. If there's a lesson to be learned from Adam's behavior, it may be that we don't yet know how to predict or find the motives behind these mass murder events. [url]
• For some time now, there's been a trend away from parenting with physical punishment. However, it looks like about 3 out of 4 parents yell/scream/shout at their kids at least once a month (and you gotta wonder what that 4th parent is doing, if not yelling). [url]
• If only parenting were as easy as this infographic makes it look. But maybe if everyone is more aware about what makes kids happy, we'll all be happier somehow. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: adam lanza, child development, parenting, psychology, sandy hook tragedy, ted kaczynski

Study Shockingly Suggests Internet Trolls May Not Be Very Nice Or Particularly Mentally Healthy In Real Life

from the you-don't-say dept

A new study from the University of Manitoba has shockingly claimed to have found that the Internet trolls we all know or love so well may not be very nice -- or particularly mentally healthy -- individuals in real life. The study tried to explore whether or not Internet trolls fell into the so called Dark Tetrad: Machiavellianism (willingness to manipulate and deceive others), narcissism (egotism and self-obsession), psychopathy (the lack of remorse and empathy), and sadism (pleasure in the suffering of others). The study (mostly survey, really) claims to have found:

"... correlations, sometimes quite significant, between these traits and trolling behavior. What’s more, it also found a relationship between all Dark Tetrad traits (except for narcissism) and the overall time that an individual spent, per day, commenting on the Internet."

It's worth noting that the survey found, by and large, that most people online are perfectly reasonable and decent human beings. At the very least they're just quiet lurkers:

"To be sure, only 5.6 percent of survey respondents actually specified that they enjoyed "trolling." By contrast, 41.3 percent of Internet users were “non-commenters,” meaning they didn’t like engaging online at all. So trolls are, as has often been suspected, a minority of online commenters, and an even smaller minority of overall Internet users."

The study appears to rely heavily on subjects pulled from Amazon's Mechanical Turk, who may not be a good control representative of what constitutes normal behavior, either online or off. The study also appears to be rather heavily reliant on simply asking people if they liked to be jerks on the Internet -- which if I were an Internet troll, I'm not sure I'd answer correctly. Reading their analysis and methodology, it's not clear to me if the researchers did (or could) calculate how anonymity can turn a relatively normal person into a blathering jackass (as this classic Penny Arcade comic illustrates in deep scientific detail).

Is somebody necessarily a sadist offline because anonymity turns them into a jerk when they're online? Isn't it possible that people act worse online because the sense of anonymity gives them the belief they're free from repercussion and can therefore experiment with darker, but not necessarily dominant, aspects of their personality they'd fear to explore offline? Wouldn't that especially be true of children, who may express anger at their lack of power through online rage, but develop into perfectly normal people as they age?

You can dig through the full methodology yourself, assuming you're smart enough, professor. Those shoes make you look fat. I'd also like to point out that the Beatles sucked, Internet Explorer is the vastly superior browser, the RIAA makes a lot of solid points based on sound scientific data, the Comcast merger will help cure cancer and save puppies, and my little sister is much better than you are at this game, bro.

Filed Under: psychology, study, troll, university of manitoba

DailyDirt: Logarithmic Thinking Is Natural

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Most of us have been taught to understand math-related topics in a linear way, but that might not be the way our brains are hard-wired. Kids actually tend to have an innate number scale that is logarithmic, so even though they know how to count to ten (or even twenty), they'll actually think more along the lines of one, many, lots of many's, and then OMG so many that's like infinity. Here are just a few links on logarithmic thinking to ponder.

• Ask second graders to map out a few numbers on a blank line from 1 to 1,000 -- and you'll see that 7yo kids tend to space out the numbers in a logarithmic pattern. Fourth graders won't make the same number line map as these second graders, and it's apparently not too hard to un-learn logarithmic scales since many adults don't remember what a log scale graph is. [url]
• RadioLab has a nice podcast about how kids learn their numbers, switching from logarithmic thinking to more linear thinking. Young kids and even infants notice large changes (such as when quantities double), but they're not so good at exact amounts and small differences. [url]
• It's not just little kids. Some cultures think in logarithmic scales -- such as an Amazonian indigene group, the Mundurucu. Actually, logarithmic thinking may lie dormant in all of us, whenever we estimate quantities or deal with extremely large numbers. [url]
• What number is halfway between 1 and 9? Most formally educated adults say 5, but another answer (from kids) is 3. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.

Filed Under: brain, education, linear, logarithms, math, mundurucu, psychology

DailyDirt: Curious Behavior

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

The brain is an incredibly mysterious organ that can create some really bizarre psychological effects. Seemingly minor alterations to brain chemistry have resulted in profound changes in human behavior. Here are just a few examples of some interesting (and thankfully rare!) psychological syndromes.

• There have been only about 100 cases of Foreign Accent Syndrome documented since its discovery in the 1940s -- people with it usually have some form of brain injury, but not always. One woman went to the dentist to have some teeth pulled and when she woke up from the anesthesia, she started talking in a strange accent. [url]
• Capgras' Syndrome is a persistent delusion that a person's closest friends and relatives have been replaced by imposters -- sometimes the person with Capgras even thinks he himself (or she herself) is some kind of duplicate. This sounds like an old Steven Wright joke, but it's probably not that funny to be inexplicably paranoid about everyone you know. [url]
• Williams Syndrome is a congenital condition in which people are ultra-friendly and empathetic -- and lack any kind of suspicion or fear. Kids without a fear of strangers can get into a lot of trouble -- if only strangers weren't so horrible people.... [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.

Filed Under: brain, brain chemistry, capgras syndrome, disorders, foreign accent syndrome, psychology, williams syndrome

DailyDirt: Deconstructing Social Networking

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Social networks are clearly a very fashionable field of study right now because they provide an unprecedented volume of records for human interactions that can be mined for trends and correlations... and marketing strategies. Figuring out how viral messages spread could teach us how to educate our peers or to notify people about emergencies or to advertise caffeinated beverages. Here are just a few studies on how people behave in online communities.

• If you're looking to create the next Facebook, it might help to know that it's not the absolute number of friends on a social network that encourages new users to join, but the types of friends who are already signed up. A user who gets an invitation to join Facebook is more than twice as likely to join if he/she sees more than 4 of separate groups of friends are already signed up. That's real peer pressure at work. [url]
• Twitter bots can influence the behavior of online communities and help speed up human-to-human communications. These bots don't have to pass a rigorous Turing test to fool people into following and tweeting more frequently. [url]
• [PDF link:] Another research abstract discusses work on identifying influential and susceptible people on Facebook by looking at how viral messages spread. Influentials are thought to be critical people in disseminating information, but where would they be without their susceptible audiences? [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.

Filed Under: advertising, marketing, online communities, psychology, research, social networks, twitter bots, viral
Companies: facebook, twitter

DailyDirt: Modern Computer Dating

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

There are search engines for just about everything. Computers help people find all sorts of things faster and easier, so it's not surprising that computer dating is decades old (and started out with punch cards). Technology has gotten a lot better, but has online dating really improved that much?

• Online dating sites claim to be able to find soul mates, but studies suggest they can only provide introductions -- and more often than not, they instill a "shopping mindset" which is not conducive to building lasting relationships. Some psychologists even doubt the possibility of creating algorithms that could successfully match people for real romance. (But experts also scoffed at the first chess-playing computers, too.) [url]
• In 2005, Steven Carter, the director of research at eHarmony, described how his work to create predictive models for compatibility became the basis of his dream job. Carter is probably a bit biased, so where is some peer review for eHarmony's research? [url]
• Perhaps some intense linguistic analysis can predict dating success. Apparently, people who have similar speech patterns are more likely to date each other. Watch your use of pronouns, folks.... [url]
• To discover more interesting tech-related content, check out what's currently floating around the StumbleUpon universe. [url]  

By the way, StumbleUpon can recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

Filed Under: algorithms, compatibility, dating, natural language processing, nlp, psychology, relationships
Companies: eharmony

Yeah, It Turns Out That Technology Doesn't Make Us Lonely

from the the-lonely-moral-panic dept

Just recently, we were talking about the bizarre claims by Sherry Turkle that social networking makes us more lonely because we spend less time alone (don't try to make sense of it). Soon after that, the Atlantic published an equally vapid feature arguing that Facebook leads to loneliness. These kinds of arguments show up every so often, and they always seem supported by anecdotal evidence.

Perhaps that's because the actual evidence suggests it's a load of crap. Boing Boing points us to a good piece by Claude Fischer in the Boston Review noting that the idea that we're living in an age of increasing loneliness is complete hogwash and not supported by the data at all. First, the article notes just how many articles and books have been claiming the opposite. It seems that claiming that we're all getting more lonely is a lucrative niche sector for the publishing industry. It's one of those things that lots of people want to believe, so books that support that worldview are apparently quite popular. Fischer has compiled a bunch of data looking at their social connections from 1970 to 2010, and finds that "Overall, Americans reported no more loneliness in the 2000s than they did in the 1970s."

It is true that the nature of social relationships has changed, but the difference is just different, not "bad."

The results, which I compiled in Still Connected (2011), show that some aspects of social involvement have changed since the 1970s. In particular, Americans these days sit down to fewer family dinners and host guests in their homes less often; eating and sociability continues, but outside the home. Americans communicate more frequently with their relatives and friends. Critically Americans are not discernibly more isolated—few were isolated at any point in those decades—and Americans remain just as confident of the support family and friends provide.

What the research really shows is that technology is a tool, and people use it for a variety of purposes. Some use it to avoid contact with people, while others use it to increase their contact with people. You can't blame the technology for how people use it. The technology just amplifies the individual aspects of different people:

People using the Internet, most studies show, increase the volume of their meaningful social contacts. E-communications do not generally replace in-person contact. True, serious introverts go online to avoid seeing people, but extroverts go online to see people more often. People use new media largely to enhance their existing relationships—say, by sending pictures to grandma—although a forthcoming study shows that many more Americans are meeting life partners online. Internet dating is especially fruitful for Americans who may face problems finding mates, such as gays and older women. Finally, people tell researchers that electronic media have enriched their personal relationships.

People typically turn new technologies into devices for doing what they have always wanted to do. And people like to stay in touch. A century ago, Americans, especially women, turned two new technologies marketed for other purposes, the telephone and automobile, into “technologies of sociability.” Developers of the Internet meant it to be a tool for the military and for scholars, and only a few imagined it might even serve business. Now users have made the Internet a largely social technology.

As the article notes, this doesn't mean loneliness isn't a problem for those who experience it, but it's not a growing problem, and there's no evidence to suggest that social networking or Facebook in particular increases loneliness.

Filed Under: psychology, sherry turkle, social networking, technology

Sherry Turkle Says Technology Is Making Us Lonelier Because We Spend Less Time Alone, Or Something

from the say-what-now? dept

A decade ago psychologist Sherry Turkle was at the forefront of encouraging children to go online so they could better learn to communicate with others. Yet, somewhere over the past decade, she's shifted almost entirely, and joined the "get off my lawn" generation. Her latest is a screed in the NY Times about how all of this social networking makes us all lonely because kids can no longer talk to humans face to face any more. At least that's what I think she's saying. Perhaps it would make more sense if she explained it face to face, because the arguments in the article don't fully make sense. It talks about how the kids these days in the workplace put on headphones and work instead of talking to each other. Some might call that being focused on work rather than chit chat. And, chances are many of them are still talking to each other via instant messaging, which is often more efficient anyway.

Of course, to Turkle, that kind of communicating doesn't count. It's not clear why -- other than it's "different." And therefore it's bad. The argument isn't particularly convincing... and it gets worse at the end. It turns out that actually communicating with people makes us more lonely. We'd apparently all be less lonely if we spent more time alone:

So, in order to feel more, and to feel more like ourselves, we connect. But in our rush to connect, we flee from solitude, our ability to be separate and gather ourselves. Lacking the capacity for solitude, we turn to other people but don’t experience them as they are. It is as though we use them, need them as spare parts to support our increasingly fragile selves.

We think constant connection will make us feel less lonely. The opposite is true. If we are unable to be alone, we are far more likely to be lonely. If we don’t teach our children to be alone, they will know only how to be lonely.

Got it? Apparently, communicating with others makes you lonely. Being actually alone makes you less lonely. Why? Because Sherry Turkle says so. Not sure that's particularly convincing.

Filed Under: psychology, sherry turkle, technology

Swedish Occupational Psychologist First To Recognize The Debilitating Effects Of Heavy Metal Music

from the no-word-yet-if-this-excuses-you-from-serving-in-the-metal-militia dept

Sweden, home of an unofficial pirate religion, an official Pirate Party and shockingly reasonable infringement fines has upped the ante on every country wishing to fill the local papers with ONLY "weird news" features. Via Marginal Revolution comes this story of metal and the damage it has done.

Consider the plight of Roger Tullgren. Introduced to a strain of music referred to colloquially as "heavy metal" by an older brother, Roger has been forced to live a life of constant underemployment due to his newly-defined handicap.

Tullgren's addiction to heavy metal has forced him to quit job after job. Sometimes it's "the man" forcing him out because of their fear of the music's inherent "dark forces" and possible secondhand hearing loss. At other times, it's the struggle to contribute to two metal bands while still occasionally showing up for work, that leads to the unemployment line. Either way, Roger has a problem, and it's one that the crushing chords of the heaviest of metal can't cure on their own.

Fortunately, an occupational psychologist has stepped up to the plate for Tullgren:

"I signed a form saying: 'Roger feels compelled to show his heavy metal style. This puts him in a difficult situation on the labour market. Therefore he needs extra financial help'. So now I can turn up at a job interview dressed in my normal clothes and just hand the interviewers this piece of paper," he said.

With this form in hand, Tullgren is now able to fulfill his duties as a 42-year-old dishwasher. No longer is he forced to take off his multiple skull-and-pentgram rings or cover up his tattoos before heading for work. In addition, his current employer allows him to listen to his preferred music at crippling decibel levels ("unless there are guests") and take time off whenever he needs it to catch the nearest metal act live. (Tullgren attended over 300 shows last year.) Tullgren's employer not only benefits from having the hardest rocking dishwasher in Sweden but also from Tullgren's "brain thing," which ensures that the Swedish Employment Service pays part of Roger's salary.

Despite these hardships, Tullgren remains buoyant and unflappable (two words which have never been applied to a metalhead before):

"Some might say that I should grow up and learn to listen to other types of music but I can't. Heavy metal is my lifestyle," he said.

Lifestyle choice or no, it's good to see that Tullgren is finally getting the help he needs. After all, as Quiet Riot's eerily prescient album points out: "Bang your head/Wake the dead/We're all metal mad/It's all you have/Bang your head/Metal health will drive you mad."

Filed Under: heavy metal, music, psychology

If You Make A Mistake With A Paywall, It Can Linger For A Long Time

from the psychological,-not-navigational dept

Scott Rosenberg has a column up at The Guardian where he discusses Salon's experience with a paywall back at the beginning of the decade, highlighting how the damage from a paywall can be a lot more troubling than many people take into account. He points out that Salon's various paywall experiments did bring in some revenue, but they then limited Salon's growth potential, first by confusing users on how they could get access to Salon content, and then with the psychological belief that Salon couldn't be read without paying:

More important, by this point the public was, understandably, thoroughly confused about how to get to read Salon content. It took many years for our traffic to begin to grow again. Paywalls are psychological as much as navigational, and it's a lot easier to put them up than to take them down. Once web users get it in their head that your site is "closed" to them, if you ever change your mind and want them to come back, it's extremely difficult to get that word out.

Indeed. As an early reader of Salon, I used to read it all the time -- and link to it. But as I got more and more confused over whether or not anyone reading Techdirt could read the links, I was less and less inclined to ever write about Salon stories -- and eventually that resulted in me dropping Salon as a source I read as well.

Filed Under: paywalls, psychology, salon