12 Monday Mar 2012
Tags
animals, biology, Capsaicin, Human, Melanocortin 1 receptor, Pain, Popular science, Red hair, redhead, Redheads, science, science and society, Science communication
I’ve recently come across some press coverage reporting research by Danish scientists which has shown that “redheads feel pain differently than the rest of us”. I read the paper and thought it would be nice to write something short about it here, both for the change of tone and to give my own perspective on it.
03 Saturday Mar 2012
Tags
book review, constructionist, language, Language acquisition, language faculty, language organ, Linguistics, Michael Tomasello, Noam Chomsky, Social Sciences, Steven Pinker, universal grammar
This post is a bit of an exception.; I don’t generally plan to post book reviews, but I really enjoyed Michael Tomasello’s Constructing A Language and I’m hoping that this will be an informative post rather than just a review. It’s also a good opportunity for me to start writing about language, which is something I’d like to do even though it’s not my area of expertise. In addition to being a well-written book on its own merits, Constructing A Language really struck me because it successfully challenged what I thought I knew about language acquisition and made me reconsider my position, which is always a remarkable and rewarding experience. This book gave me the wonderful gift of educating me out of my complacent acceptance of an idea and forcing me to really think about it.
18 Saturday Feb 2012
Tags
animals, Hindsight bias, People, Popular science, psychology, rape, science, social science, Victims
It’s not unusual for people to think that an outcome was inevitable after the fact, a phenomenon known as “hindsight bias”. This remains the case even when test subjects are instructed to ignore their knowledge of the outcome and rate the likeliness of several possible outcomes. Once an outcome is known, people tend to see causal links in antecedents (the events preceding the outcome); this builds into a causal chain that makes the outcome seem an inevitable consequence of the antecedents. Studies have shown that, in addition to constructing such links, people also tend to exercise selective memory, preferentially remembering details that are consistent with the seemingly inevitable outcome. Linda Carli (of Wellesley College) conducted a study extending these findings even further. She found that people will “misremember” additional antecedents that are stereotypically associated with a given outcome; these novel memories reinforce the hindsight bias – their perception that the outcome is inevitable – which affects their judgement of the behaviour and character of the individuals involved. These findings shed light on how & why we judge that people “get what they deserve”, often over-simplistically attributing credit for success and unfairly blaming victims. Continue reading
15 Wednesday Feb 2012
Tags
bias, biology, culture, Education, interaction, Popular science, science, science and society, Science in Society, society
In these “enlightened” times, people often try to use science to justify their social, political or ideological positions. While the influence of scientific research on our world view is commonly recognized, the converse dynamic gets far less attention. Cultural factors shape the sort of questions we ask and how we choose to interpret the answers; for example, despite the claim that the idea of evolution has radically altered our view of ourselves, it also often serves to reinforce existing social and cultural norms. Here are five commonly accepted biological “facts” which are untrue but are used to justify our conception of ourselves and our place in the world.
08 Wednesday Feb 2012
Tags
ancestry, animals, biology, Education, evolution, Human, Mitochondrial DNA, Mitochondrial Eve, out of Africa, Popular science, science, Y-chromosomal Adam
In a paper published in 1987 in the leading science journal Nature, researchers claimed to have identified a female from whom all humans alive today are descended, dubbed “mitochondrial Eve”; nearly ten years later, another group of scientists published findings identifying her male counterpart, “Y-chromosomal Adam”. The choice of names, though evocative, was unfortunate and uninformative, since the use of “Adam” and “Eve” has led to several major misunderstandings about these two ancient humans. In this post, I’ll try to clear up some of these misunderstandings by explaining what these terms actually mean and how scientists have gone about trying to identify our most recent common male and female ancestors.
27 Friday Jan 2012
In December 1954, a doomsday cult was awaiting the arrival of a UFO which would rescue the faithful. Leon Festinger, a social psychologist, had infiltrated the cult to see how they would respond when the UFO failed to appear and the world didn’t end. Remarkably, the cult emerged from their failed prediction with renewed strength, convinced that they had “spread so much light that God had saved the world from destruction.”. Cognitive dissonance is a phrase coined by Festinger in 1956 to explain this sort of response. It refers to the discomfort we feel when trying to simultaneously hold two contradictory ideas in our mind; we reflexively try to resolve this discomfort, often pre-consciously. It’s a striking and elegant idea which can explain aspects of a wide range of seemingly strange human behaviours, from doomsday cults and initiation ceremonies to post-purchase rationalizations.
Inspiring Science 