Changing Your Posture to a More Powerful One Actually Makes You Feel More Powerful 

Amy Cuddy in an interview with Wired:

The Harvard psychologist recently completed a study demonstrating that positioning our bodies a certain way doesn’t just tell people we’re powerful, it actually makes us more powerful. And she has the data to prove it: Standing tall directly influences our biochemistry, increasing testosterone, decreasing cortisol, and generally making us feel dominant. So pull back those shoulders and stretch out. Stand like Superman and you’ll become the Man of Steel.

Nice to see some common knowledge about body language confirmed in biochemistry: that it is two–way, as we can actively alter our postures to change our mindset. (Also, this is used “against” us, e.g. when you’re offered a coffee to give up a crossed body posture, which likely reflects a mental refusal.)

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The Economics of a Ransom 

Gabriel Rossman for The Atlantic — Lessons from Plutarch to Planet Money, including the First Rule of kidnapping insurance: Don’t tell anybody about your kidnapping insurance:

Economists would describe hostage negotiation as a bilateral monopoly price negotiation that is structurally just a special case of chicken. That is, unlike a barrel of oil or a freight car full of soybeans which can trade on an extremely liquid market with innumerable buyers and sellers, a hostage has exactly one seller (the kidnappers) and exactly one buyer (the employer and/or family of the hostage). When there is only one buyer, the opportunity cost for ransoming the hostage is zero. Likewise, the employer and/or family has no realistic alternative means to recover the hostage. In order for everybody to walk away happy, we need a cooperate-cooperate outcome: the kidnapper has to give up the hostage and the employer/family has to give up a ransom.

Reminds me to refresh and deepen my knowledge on game theory, which I just read about again other day (German link). (Also, there was this Hawaii Five–0 episode involving an ransom insurance broker, and, of course, there’s a South Park episode about Somalian piracy.)

(Via Freakonomics.)

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Does It Pay to Be Clever? 

Marianne Freiberger — Does it pay to be clever?:

Why are we so clever? In evolutionary terms this isn’t obvious: evolution tends to favour cheap solutions and the human brain is expensive. It consumes about 20% of our body’s energy budget yet it only makes up 2% of our body mass. There are many species that do perfectly well with only a minimum of intelligence, so why did it make evolutionary sense for us humans, and some of our animal cousins, to develop powerful brains?

I also posted this summary on the study of cooperation and the evolution of intelligence, as it has a nice related, recommended article, Does it pay to be nice?, which is just what I thought of when reading this one, too, as it reminded me of Either You’re Scum or You’re Stupid this time.

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The Devaluation of Everything 

The Economist has a great article on the perils of panflation, e.g.:

Inflation is also distorting the travel business. A five-star hotel used to mean the ultimate in luxury, but now six- and seven-star resorts are popping up as new hotels award themselves inflated ratings as a marketing tool. “Deluxe” rooms have been devalued, too: many hotels no longer have “standard” rooms, but instead offer a choice of “deluxe” (the new standard), “luxury”, “superior luxury” or “grand superior luxury”.

So:

Inflation of all kinds devalues everything it infects. It obscures information and so distorts behaviour.

This. And mentioning behavior, I think this goes hand in hand with most people’s need for instant gratifaction.

(Via kottke.org.)

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Creating False Memories 

A recent research showed it’s fairly easy to create false memories, even if participants know the event didn’t happen:

In Session 1 participants imitated simple actions, and in Session 2 they saw doctored video-recordings containing clips that falsely suggested they had performed additional (fake) actions. As in earlier studies, this procedure created powerful false memories. In Session 3, participants were debriefed and told that specific actions in the video were not truly performed. Beliefs and memories for all critical actions were tested before and after the debriefing.

With the summarized conclusion:

The take–home finding is that for 25 per cent of the fake actions, the participants now reported significantly stronger memory scores than belief scores — in other words, their (false) memory of having performed the fake actions persisted even though they often no longer believed they’d performed the actions.

Even in the debriefing the suggestive manipulations might not always be completely “undone”. With other researches such as the pill to forget or the memory adjustment pills, and knowing how the mind sometimes works (and its implications), this really has some serious implications, not only for this kind of research, but what memories (remembered perceptions) are “worth”.

(Via Freakonomics.)

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Thinking in a Different Language Affects How You Make Decisions 

Maggie Koerth Baker — […] Keim says that the researchers think the difference lies in emotional distance. If you have to pause and really put some brain power into thinking about grammar and vocabulary, you can’t just jump straight into the knee-jerk reaction:

The first experiment involved 121 American students who learned Japanese as a second language. Some were presented in English with a hypothetical choice: To fight a disease that would kill 600,000 people, doctors could either develop a medicine that saved 200,000 lives, or a medicine with a 33.3 percent chance of saving 600,000 lives and a 66.6 percent chance of saving no lives at all.

Nearly 80 percent of the students chose the safe option. When the problem was framed in terms of losing rather than saving lives, the safe-option number dropped to 47 percent. When considering the same situation in Japanese, however, the safe-option number hovered around 40 percent, regardless of how choices were framed. The role of instinct appeared reduced.

Full story at wired.com. — Da sagst du was!

(Via Boing Boing.)

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What Is Benchlearning? 

Stowe Boyd:

I stumbled across a new term today, a play on the idea of benchmarking: benchlearning. The notion — as I understand it — is to attempt to sidestep the top-down nature of benchmarking, and to learn through an evidenced-based, non-judgmental examination of statistical information.

More here.

That’s an interesting idea, and I’m curious about the follow–up Boyd will hopefully have. I especially like it’s picking up a, if not the major concept of personal development, “accept the things the way they are”.

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About Taste and Time 

Marco Ament on Apple’s advantage — time and taste — that isn’t just an Apple thing but rather a self–conception:

Most people don’t have great taste. (And they don’t care, so it doesn’t matter to them.) They usually like tasteful, well-designed products, but often don’t recognize why, or care more about other factors when making buying decisions.

People who naturally recognize tasteful, well-designed products are a small subset of the population. But people who can create them are a much smaller subset.

No amount of money, and no small amount of time, can buy taste.

Which has a practical implication:

Improving poor taste in upper leadership is almost as difficult as treating severe paranoia: people who don’t value taste and design will rarely recognize these shortcomings or seek to improve them. With very few exceptions, companies that put out tasteless, poorly designed products will usually never change course.

It’s not only the big companies, I know this only too well from my work as a freelancer (“can you make it pop?”), and on an inter–personal level. Also, this relates to appreciation, and I think this could be a “hipster’s dilemma” — a self–referring one, of course.

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Privacy: It’s Governmental Surveillance vs. Corporate Surveillance, Stupid! 

A friend on the current discussion on privacy:

I’ll never really understand this whole current discussion on privacy. They say things like “People use Facebook, but complain about governmental surveillance!” (or vice versa, or both, or none) as if it was the same.

The thing is, for me, those are two intentionally different things: Companies only want my money, and do only care so much about me as a person but rather who I want to be. Governments, on the other hand, are actively after me as a person, as who I am.

And while corporations will do everything to engage me (and to spy on me) in my activities to find the highest individual advertising abilities (to sell the most), governments want the opposite: To nip any sign of deviant behavior in the mud.

There’s some to it, and looking at it, if we discriminate those two, a by far more fruitful discussion could take place on where the limits should be. Puts “I ain’t got nothing to hide” and ”that’s none of your business” in a new context. (Problems really arise where those “intentions” are mixed.)

On a side note: This strongly reminds me of Amusing Ourselves to Death. It looks like we — in the western hemisphere — tend to think of privacy problems as 1984–ish, while we engage ourselves in a brave new world (they’re probably both right; also, it’s not a conspiracy).

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Cooperation and the Evolution of Intelligence 

KurzweilAI — Cooperation and the Evolution of Intelligence:

The researchers used an artificial neural network model to show that selection for efficient decision-making in cooperative dilemmas can give rise to selection pressures for greater cognitive abilities, and that intelligent strategies can themselves select for greater intelligence, leading to a Machiavellian arms race.

The results provide mechanistic support for the social intelligence hypothesis, highlight the potential importance of cooperative behavior in the evolution of intelligence.

More on the social intelligence hypothesis on Wikipedia and on Mindhacks.

Related: Which reminds me to read Yochai Benkler‘s (Open Source Economics et al.) new book, The Penguin and the Leviathan: How Cooperation Triumphs over Self-Interest.

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On the Intelligence of Octopuses 

Now this is a great article on the intelligence of octopuses, and a very reminder that intelligence doesn’t need to come in a way we usually think of it:

Another measure of intelligence: you can count neurons. The common octopus has about 130 million of them in its brain. A human has 100 billion. But this is where things get weird. Three-fifths of an octopus’s neurons are not in the brain; they’re in its arms. […]

Their intelligence sometimes even involves changing colors and shapes. One video online shows a mimic octopus alternately morphing into a flatfish, several sea snakes, and a lionfish by changing color, altering the texture of its skin, and shifting the position of its body. Another video shows an octopus materializing from a clump of algae. Its skin exactly matches the algae from which it seems to bloom-until it swims away.

And whatever Mother Nature thinks of us, I’m also confident the octopus is Earth’s next dominant species.

On a side note, octopuses? Octopi? Octopedes?

(Via kottke.org.)

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