May 22, 2013
Toilet paper when used with a toilet roll holder with a horizontal axle parallel to the wall has two possible orientations: the toilet paper may hang over (in front of) or under (behind) the roll. The choice is largely a matter of personal preference, dictated by habit. In surveys of American consumers and of bath and kitchen specialists, 60–70% of respondents prefer over.
Despite its being an apparently trivial topic, some people hold strong opinions on the matter. Advice columnist Ann Landers said that the subject was the most controversial issue in her column’s history. Defenders of either position cite advantages ranging from aesthetics, hospitality, and cleanliness to paper conservation, the ease of detaching individual squares, and compatibility with a recreational vehicle or a cat. Celebrities and experts are found on both sides. Some writers have proposed connections to age, sex, or political philosophy; and survey evidence has shown a correlation with socioeconomic status.
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May 20, 2013
Mind-Blindness can be described as a cognitive disorder where an individual is unable to attribute mental states to the self and other. As a result of this disorder the individual is unaware of others’ mental states. The individual is also not capable of attributing beliefs and desires to others. This ability to develop a mental awareness of what is in the mind of an individual is known as the ‘Theory of Mind’ (ToM).
This allows one to attribute our behavior and actions to various mental states such as emotions and intentions. Mind-blindness is associated with autism and Asperger’s syndrome (AS) patients who tend to show deficits in social insight. It is also associated with schizophrenia, dementia, bi-polar disorders, and antisocial personality disorders.
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May 13, 2013
The selective exposure theory is a concept in media and communication research that refers to individuals’ tendency to favor information that reinforces pre-existing views while avoiding contradictory information. In this theory people tend to select specific aspects of exposed information based on their perspective, beliefs, attitudes and decisions.
People can determine the information exposed to them and select favorable evidence, while ignoring the unfavorable. This theory has been explored using the cognitive dissonance theory, which suggests information consumers strive for results of cognitive equilibrium (consistent rather than conflicting thoughts). In order to attain this equilibrium, individuals may either reinterpret the information they are exposed to or select information that are consonant with their view.
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May 13, 2013
Countersignaling is the behavior where agents with the highest level of a given property invest less into proving it than individuals with a medium level of the same property. This concept is primarily useful for analyzing human behavior and thus relevant to economics, sociology and psychology; there is no known animal behavior which conforms to the predictions of the countersignaling model.
Many of the things – such as toughness, cooperativeness or fertility – that people and animals want to know about each other are not directly observable. Instead, observable indicators of these unobservable properties must be used to communicate them to others. These are signals. Signaling theory deals with predicting the level of effort that individuals, the signalers, should invest to communicate their properties to other individuals, the receivers, and how these receivers interpret the signals.
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May 13, 2013
Within evolutionary biology, signalling theory is a body of theoretical work examining communication between individuals. The central question is when organisms with conflicting interests should be expected to communicate honestly (no presumption being made of conscious intention) rather than cheating. Mathematical models in which organisms signal their condition to other individuals as part of an evolutionarily stable strategy are important for research in this field.
Signals are given in contexts such as mate selection by females, which subjects the males’ signals to selective pressure. Signals thus evolve because they modify the behaviour of the receiver to benefit the signaller. Signals may be honest, on average conveying information that is actually useful to the receiver, increasing its fitness, or dishonest. A cheat can give a dishonest signal, gaining an advantage, but potentially undermining the signalling system for all.
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May 10, 2013
Quorum [kwawr-uhm] sensing is a chemical messaging system employed by bacteria to determine the presence of other bacteria. It is part of a system of stimulus and response correlated to population density (e.g. some bioluminescent bacteria will not produce light unless in sufficient concentration).
Many species of bacteria use quorum sensing to coordinate gene expression according to the density of their local population. In similar fashion, some social insects use a form of quorum sensing to determine where to nest. In addition to its function in biological systems, quorum sensing has several useful applications for computing and robotics.
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May 9, 2013
The bias blind spot is the cognitive bias of failing to compensate for one’s own cognitive biases. The term was created by Emily Pronin, a social psychologist from Princeton University’s Department of Psychology, with colleagues Daniel Lin and Lee Ross. Pronin and her co-authors explained to subjects the better-than-average effect (illusory superiority), the halo effect, self-serving bias, and many other cognitive biases.
According to the better-than-average bias, specifically, people are likely to see themselves as inaccurately ‘better than average’ for possible positive traits and ‘less than average’ for negative traits. When subsequently asked how biased they themselves were, subjects rated themselves as being much less vulnerable to those biases than the average person.
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May 9, 2013
The introspection illusion is a cognitive bias in which people wrongly think they have direct insight into the origins of their mental states, while treating others’ introspections as unreliable. In certain situations, this illusion leads people to make confident but false explanations of their own behavior (Causal theories’) or inaccurate predictions of their future mental states.
The illusion has been examined in psychological experiments, and suggested as a basis for biases in how people compare themselves to others. These experiments have been interpreted as suggesting that, rather than offering direct access to the processes underlying mental states, introspection is a process of construction and inference, much as people indirectly infer others’ mental states from their behavior.
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May 7, 2013
Libertarian science fiction is a sub-genre of science fiction that focuses on the politics and social order implied by libertarian philosophies with an emphasis on individualism and a limited state—and in some cases, no state whatsoever.
As a category, libertarian fiction is unusual because the vast majority of its authors are self-identified as science fiction authors. This contrasts with the authors of much other social criticism who are largely academic or mainstream novelists who tend to dismiss any genre classification.
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May 7, 2013
Social science fiction is a subgenre of science fiction concerned less with technology and space opera and more with sociological speculation about human society. In other words, it ‘absorbs and discusses anthropology,’ and speculates about human behavior and interactions.
Exploration of fictional societies is a significant aspect of science fiction, allowing it to perform predictive (H. G. Wells, ‘The Final Circle of Paradise’) and precautionary (Ray Bradbury, ‘Fahrenheit 451’) functions, to criticize the contemporary world (Russian author Alexander Gromov’s ‘Antarctica-online’ ) and to present solutions (B.F. Skinner’s ‘Walden Two’), to portray alternative societies (World of the Noon, a fictional future setting for a number of hard science fiction novels written by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky) and to examine the implications of ethical principles (the works of Russian science fiction author Sergei Lukyanenko).
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May 7, 2013
Walden Two is a utopian novel written by behavioral psychologist B. F. Skinner, first published in 1948. In its time, it could have been considered to be science fiction, since science-based methods for altering people’s behavior did not yet exist. (Such methods exist now and are known as applied behavior analysis, formerly behavior modification).
‘Walden Two’ is controversial because it includes a rejection of free will, the proposition that human behavior is controlled by a non-corporeal entity, such as a spirit or a soul. The book embraces the proposition that the behavior of organisms, including humans, is determined by genetic and environmental variables, and that systematically altering environmental variables can generate a sociocultural system that very closely approximates utopia.
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May 7, 2013
Flow is the mental state of operation in which a person performing an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity. In essence, flow is characterized by complete absorption in what one does.
Proposed by Hungarian psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, the positive psychology concept has been widely referenced across a variety of fields including sports, arts, and science. Popular terms for this or similar mental states include: ‘to be in the moment,’ ‘present,’ ‘in the zone,’ ‘on a roll,’ ‘wired in,’ ‘in the groove,’ ‘on fire,’ ‘in tune,’ ‘centered,’ or ‘singularly focused.’
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