You might believe you have very sophisticated reasons for favoring one political candidate or the other. And that might even be true. But did those sophisticated reasons precede or follow your brain's reaction to the faces of the candidates? Brain scans of people viewing photos unknown politicians (and even their stated reactions to the pictures) can predict election outcomes.
PASADENA, Calif.-- Brain-imaging studies reveal that voting decisions are more associated with the brain's response to negative aspects of a politician's appearance than to positive ones, says a team of researchers from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), Scripps College, Princeton University, and the University of Iowa. This appears to be particularly true when voters have little or no information about a politician aside from their physical appearance.
The research was published online in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience (http://scan.oxfordjournals.org) on October 28.
In general elections some vote the straight party ticket. So their assessments of faces do not matter. But even the consistent partisan voters evaluate ideologically similar candidates in primaries (at least in electoral systems that have primaries). In those primaries the partisans probably vote on appearances just as the middle-of-the-roaders do in general elections.
You do not even need brain scans to predict election outcomes. Just show people pictures for a tenth of a second. We do not need to suffer thru listening to political commentators babbling for months. We can get the same results in seconds.
Using a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner at the Caltech Brain Imaging Center, the researchers obtained high-resolution images of brain activation as volunteers made decisions about politicians based solely on their pictures.
The researchers conducted two independent studies using different groups of volunteers viewing the images of different politicians. Volunteers were shown pairs of photos, each with a politician coupled with their opponent in a real election in 2002, 2004, or 2006. Importantly, none of the study subjects were familiar with the politicians whose images they viewed.
In some experiments, the volunteers had to make character-trait judgments about the politicians--for example, which of the two politicians in the pair looked more competent to hold congressional office, or which looked more likely to physically threaten the volunteer. In other experiments, volunteers were asked to cast their vote for one politician in the pair; once again, their decisions were based only on the politicians' appearances.
The results correlated with actual election outcomes. For example, politicians who were thought to look the most physically threatening in the experiment were more likely to have actually lost their elections in real life. The correlation held true even when volunteers saw the politicians' pictures for less than one tenth of a second.
Importantly, the pictures of politicians who lost elections, both in the lab and in the real world, were associated with greater activation in key brain areas known to be important for processing emotion. This was true when volunteers simply voted and also when they closely examined the politicians' pictures for character traits. The studies suggest that negative evaluations based only on a politician's appearance have some effect on real election outcomes--and, specifically, may influence which candidate will lose an election. This influence appears to be more uniform than the influence exerted by positive evaluations based on appearance.
But we'll keep on having elections because most people don't want to admit they are using appearances to choose leaders.
My question: How accurate are people at reading character in faces? Do the politicians with more threatening faces really govern worse once in office? Do they have different personality types compared to those with less threatening faces?
People are willing to take orders from the self-absorbed.
COLUMBUS, Ohio – When a group is without a leader, you can often count on a narcissist to take charge, a new study suggests.
Researchers found that people who score high in narcissism tend to take control of leaderless groups. Narcissism is a trait in which people are self-centered, exaggerate their talents and abilities, and lack empathy for others.
“Not only did narcissists rate themselves as leaders, which you would expect, but other group members also saw them as the people who really run the group,” said Amy Brunell, lead author of the study and assistant professor of psychology at Ohio State University at Newark.
What I wonder: Did narcissism evolve as a leadership trait? Do groups do better with a leader? Therefore did genes for narcissism get selected for to occur at low frequency so that groups will have some but not too many leaders?
Narcissists with a desire for power were more likely to become leaders of groups.
The first study involved 432 undergraduate students. They all completed assessments which measured various personality traits, including narcissism. They were then put in groups of four, and told to assume they were a committee of senior officers of the student union, and their task was to elect next year’s director. Each person in a group was given a profile of a different candidate for the position, and each was to argue for their particular candidate.
Following the discussion, they voted on the director, and then completed a questionnaire evaluating the leadership of themselves and the other group members.
Results showed that students who scored higher on one dimension of narcissism – the desire for power - were more likely to say they wanted to lead the group, were more likely to say they did lead the group discussion, and were more likely to be viewed as leaders by the other group members.
The other dimension of narcissism – the desire for attention – was not as strongly related to leadership roles in the groups.
So will future parents choose to give their offspring genes that code for desire for power and narcissism? Will future generations compete harder for leadership positions?
But do narcissists really make better leaders? Student groups were asked to imagine themselves shipwrecked on an uninhabited island with the ability to choose among items needed for survival. The groups led by narcissists did not make any better decisions.
This study went further, though, by seeing how well the narcissists performed as leaders. Researchers looked at the lists, prepared by each individual and group, of the 15 items that they thought would help them survive. They compared their lists to one prepared by an expert who has taught survival skills to the U.S military.
Results showed that narcissists did no better than others on selecting the items that would best help them survive. In addition, groups that overall scored highest on narcissism did no better than other groups on the task.
We need ways to select reluctant but talented people for leadership positions.
Update: My question: Are members of the US Congress, the British and Australian Parliaments, and other major elected figures more or less narcissistic on average than CEOs of large corporations? Does selection for business leaders do a better job of filtering out narcissists than elections do?
John R. Hibbing of the University of Nebraska Lincoln and and John R. Alford of Rice University have made a name for themselves studying twins and political beliefs. They've found evidence of a genetic component for political leanings. In a new paper in Science working with several collaborators they find that those rightward leaning folks who favor a strong national defense react more strongly to threatening visual and sound stimuli. This is additional evidence for very innate cognitive differences as causes of political views.
Although political views have been thought to arise largely from individuals' experiences, recent research suggests that they may have a biological basis. We present evidence that variations in political attitudes correlate with physiological traits. In a group of 46 adult participants with strong political beliefs, individuals with measurably lower physical sensitivities to sudden noises and threatening visual images were more likely to support foreign aid, liberal immigration policies, pacifism, and gun control, whereas individuals displaying measurably higher physiological reactions to those same stimuli were more likely to favor defense spending, capital punishment, patriotism, and the Iraq War. Thus, the degree to which individuals are physiologically responsive to threat appears to indicate the degree to which they advocate policies that protect the existing social structure from both external (outgroup) and internal (norm-violator) threats.
Just watching how much someone blinks in reaction to threatening stimuli will help you figure out their hidden political beliefs. All my professional interrogator readers please take note.
This study involved a group of 46 people who admitted to caring about political issues. Researchers showed participants threatening visual images -- pictures of a very large spider on a person's face, a dazed person with a bloody face and an open wound with maggots in it -- and their skin was monitored for electrical conductivity. Hibbing said skin conductance tests indicate emotion, arousal and attention. By using the skin conductance tests, the researchers are able to track a person's reactions to the threatening stimuli.
In another physiological measure, scientists tested the "orbicularis oculi startle blink response" to record the amplitude or intensity of blinks. They surprised subjects with a sudden, jarring noise and measured how hard they blinked in response to being startled.
In the comments of previous postings I've done on this general area some have argued that once we understand the genetic causes of political differences we'll become more tolerant of opposing viewpoints. I expect the opposite reaction. When people come to understand that it is not possible to persuade their opponents on many topics I expect people will become less tolerant of opposing views. There'll be a reduction in feelings of shared membership in a common identity. Each side will say its views make sense but that the opposing side has a genetic burden that prevents them from understanding the truth.
Hibbing at least holds out the possibility that greater knowledge about the biological causes of political differences will increase tolerance for those who differ. That's probably just his genes talking.
"And if political beliefs do run as deep as we suggest, it becomes easier to understand why political conflict is so persistent. It's not that those who disagree with us politically are being intentionally stubborn but rather that the world seems very different to them. Perhaps recognition of the deep physical nature of these differences will increase political tolerance and understanding," Hibbing concluded.
"Liberals will probably say conservatives are scaredy cats," while conservatives might call liberals naive, he says. "The more important point is that people differ".
Conservatives react more strongly to spiders than liberals?
"Those with the strongest eye or skin reactions to unexpected noises or threatening pictures such as a spider on a person's eyeball tended to endorse political positions that were interpreted as protective of social groups," said John Hibbing, professor of political science at UNL.
Some day a totalitarian government might strap its subjects into chairs, hook up sensors to their skin, and then show them frightening and disgusting pictures. Anyone who does not react correctly will be weeded out from the gene pool by sterilization or death.
When prospective parents (or state birthing units) start choosing genes for their kids will they choose genes that make them more or less likely to recognize threats in their environments? Will offspring genetic engineering make people more conservative or more left-leaning? Or what?
Update: Reacting to this paper Razib pictures a future where adoptive parents screen babies for compatible political leanings.
So it's complicated. But it's comprehensible. Does this matter for you? The physiological responses above are interesting, because it seems like you might be able to test at a very young age for them. If you are an adoptive parent perhaps you might want to screen your potential children for political compatibility. A few weeks ago I listened to a documentary about a woman in Argentina who had been kidnapped as an infant and adopted by a different family. In her particular circumstances here biological parents were left-wing activists killed by a military junta. Her adoptive family were associated with the right-wing junta. She did not find out about her origins until she was 18, but, she observed that she had always had political differences with the family in which she was raised and was active in left-wing politics as a teenager. Remember she was adopted as an infant!
Why stop with adoptions? The bigger screening will get done on embryos by parents conceiving via in vitro fertilization (IVF). In fact, the ability to screen for political compatibility will be one of the reasons why many more parents in the future opt for IVF and pre-implantation genetic diagnosis.
The ability to screen embryos for political leanings will make babies more like their parents and therefore make families more internally consistent. This will increase the mutual incomprehensibility between political factions. A liberal parent won't become more tolerant of conservatives in general as a result of the experience of raising a conservative son. Or a conservative father won't become more tolerant of liberals as a result of raising a surprisingly very radical daughter. There'll be fewer people in the political middle and fewer people with close friends and family members of opposing views. I see a politically more balkanized future.
Update II: John Hawks takes a very critical look at this paper. My reaction: Yes, the paper doesn't prove anything. But compelling evidence exists from twins studies for genetic influences on political views. That these differences might manifest in reactions to threats seems plausible given the very different reaction that conservatives have toward issues related to security and dangers.
Just forget about free will. If you are politically active you are just following the dictates of your genes.
Washington, DC—A groundbreaking new study finds that genes significantly affect variation in voter turnout, shedding new light on the reasons why people vote and participate in the political system.
The research, conducted by political scientists James H. Fowler, Christopher T. Dawes (of UC San Diego) and psychologist Laura A. Baker (of University of Southern California), appears in the May issue of the American Political Science Review, a journal of the American Political Science Association (APSA). The article is available online at: www.apsanet.org/imgtest/APSRMay08Fowler_etal.pdf.
“Although we are not the first to suggest a link between genes and political participation,” note the authors, “this study is the first attempt to test the idea empirically.” They do so by conducting three tests of the claim that part of the variation in political participation can be attributed to genetic factors. The results suggest that individual genetic differences make up a large and significant portion of the variation in political participation, even after taking socialization and other environmental factors into account. They also suggest that, contrary to decades of conventional wisdom, family upbringing may have little or no effect on children’s future participatory behavior.
Relax, no need to teach the kids civic values. They either inherited the right genes or not.
Think you choose to vote? If so, your genes sure have you fooled.
In conducting their study, the authors examine the turnout patterns of identical and non-identical twins—including 396 twins in Los Angeles County and 806 twins in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. Their findings suggest that 53% of the variation in turnout can be accounted for by genetic effects in the former, with similar outcomes in the latter.
Moreover, genetic-based differences extend to a broad class of acts of political participation, including donating to a campaign, contacting an official, running for office, and attending a rally. According to Fowler, “we expected to find that genes played some role in political behavior, but we were quite surprised by the size of the effect and how widely it applies to all kinds of participation.”
Are people who have genes that cause them to vote reproducing faster or slower than people who do not carry these genes? Which group is winning the Darwinian struggle? Are people who vote more or less likely to make the babies?
Professor Jens Krause, a biology professor at University of Leeds, has found that only 5% of a moving crowd can influence the direction of the rest of the crowd.
Professor Krause, with PhD student John Dyer, conducted a series of experiments where groups of people were asked to walk randomly around a large hall. Within the group, a select few received more detailed information about where to walk. Participants were not allowed to communicate with one another but had to stay within arms length of another person.
The findings show that in all cases, the ‘informed individuals’ were followed by others in the crowd, forming a self-organising, snake-like structure. “We’ve all been in situations where we get swept along by the crowd,” says Professor Krause. “But what’s interesting about this research is that our participants ended up making a consensus decision despite the fact that they weren’t allowed to talk or gesture to one another. In most cases the participants didn’t realise they were being led by others.”
Other experiments in the study used groups of different sizes, with different ratios of ‘informed individuals’. The research findings show that as the number of people in a crowd increases, the number of informed individuals decreases. In large crowds of 200 or more, five per cent of the group is enough to influence the direction in which it travels. The research also looked at different scenarios for the location of the ‘informed individuals’ to determine whether where they were located had a bearing on the time it took for the crowd to follow.
Okay, we need to recruit people to form the core 5% that will lead the rest of Western societies in the direction of developing full body rejuvenation therapies. We can do this. We just need to start signaling to everyone else that we can do this. We don't need to convince everyone. We just to get a vanguard to say this is possible and worth doing. Then the crowd will follow.
Remember that movie where Kevin Costner played a deep undercover Russian spy working as a US naval officer for Gene Hackman in the Pentagon? I'm thinking some day people pretending to be from a particular country will get identified by brain scans that will show that they don't think like people from that country. Known differences in styles of processing information between East Asians and Americans show up as different brain activation patterns when trying to solve the same problems.
Psychological research has established that American culture, which values the individual, emphasizes the independence of objects from their contexts, while East Asian societies emphasize the collective and the contextual interdependence of objects. Behavioral studies have shown that these cultural differences can influence memory and even perception. But are they reflected in brain activity patterns"
Could a mind get trained to be equally good at both methods of thinking? Or is there a trade-off in the mind where resources get allocated toward one style of thinking at the expense of the other style?
The scientists used functional magnetic resonance imaging to watch the brains of subjects while they solved problems that involved either relative or absolute determinations about shapes.
To find out, a team led by John Gabrieli, a professor at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT, asked 10 East Asians recently arrived in the United States and 10 Americans to make quick perceptual judgments while in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner--a technology that maps blood flow changes in the brain that correspond to mental operations.
The results are reported in the January issue of Psychological Science. Gabrieli's colleagues on the work were Trey Hedden, lead author of the paper and a research scientist at McGovern; Sarah Ketay and Arthur Aron of State University of New York at Stony Brook; and Hazel Rose Markus of Stanford University.
Subjects were shown a sequence of stimuli consisting of lines within squares and were asked to compare each stimulus with the previous one. In some trials, they judged whether the lines were the same length regardless of the surrounding squares (an absolute judgment of individual objects independent of context). In other trials, they decided whether the lines were in the same proportion to the squares, regardless of absolute size (a relative judgment of interdependent objects).
In previous behavioral studies of similar tasks, Americans were more accurate on absolute judgments, and East Asians on relative judgments. In the current study, the tasks were easy enough that there were no differences in performance between the two groups.
However, the two groups showed different patterns of brain activation when performing these tasks. Americans, when making relative judgments that are typically harder for them, activated brain regions involved in attention-demanding mental tasks. They showed much less activation of these regions when making the more culturally familiar absolute judgments. East Asians showed the opposite tendency, engaging the brain's attention system more for absolute judgments than for relative judgments.
“We were surprised at the magnitude of the difference between the two cultural groups, and also at how widespread the engagement of the brain's attention system became when making judgments outside the cultural comfort zone,” says Hedden.
Do East Asians raised in America show American patterns of brain activation solving these sorts of problems? In other words, are the differences due to genetics or culture? If cultural, what about developmental environment causes one style of thinking or the other?
Adrian Raine and Yaling Yang have found that habitual liars have more white matter and less gray matter in their brains as compared to less lie-prone people.
The research – led by Yaling Yang and Adrian Raine, both of the USC College of Letters, Arts and Sciences – is published in the October issue of the British Journal of Psychiatry.
Consider what these numbers say about the make-up of a temporary employment pool in a major US city:
The subjects were taken from a sample of 108 volunteers pulled from Los Angeles’ temporary employment pool. A series of psychological tests and interviews placed 12 in the category of people who had a history of repeated lying (11 men, one woman); 16 who exhibited signs of antisocial personality disorder but not pathological lying (15 men, one woman); and 21 who were normal controls (15 men, six women).
At least a quarter of the temporary employees examined were pathological liars or had antisocial personalities.
“We looked for things like inconsistencies in their stories about occupation, education, crimes and family background,” said Raine, a psychology professor at USC and co-author of the study.
“Pathological liars can’t always tell truth from falsehood and contradict themselves in an interview. They are manipulative and they admit they prey on people. They are very brazen in terms of their manner, but very cool when talking about this.”
A significant portion of the human race are predatory liars and con artists. On top of that there are rapists, murders, and assorted other criminals and psychopaths as well. Think about that next time someone speaks about humanity and the human future in lofty terms.
The habitual liars had histories of conning other people.
Aside from having histories of conning others or using aliases, the habitual liars also admitted to malingering, or telling falsehoods to obtain sickness benefits, Raine said.
Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scans found more white matter and less gray matter in the liars. So then are women better liars than men on average? Women also have a higher ratio of white matter to gray matter than men do.
After they were categorized, the researchers used Magnetic Resonance Imaging to explore structural brain differences between the groups. The liars had significantly more “white matter” and slightly less “gray matter” than those they were measured against, Raine said.
Specifically, liars had a 25.7 percent increase in prefrontal white matter compared to the antisocial controls and a 22 percent increase compared to the normal controls. Liars had a 14.2 percent decrease in prefrontal gray matter compared to normal controls.
The white matter probably helps in the formulation of deceptions.
More white matter – the wiring in the brain – may provide liars with the tools necessary to master the complex art of deceit, Raine said.
“Lying takes a lot of effort,” he said.
“It’s almost mind reading. You have to be able to understand the mindset of the other person. You also have to suppress your emotions or regulate them because you don’t want to appear nervous. There’s quite a lot to do there. You’ve got to suppress the truth.
“Our argument is that the more networking there is in the prefrontal cortex, the more the person has an upper hand in lying. Their verbal skills are higher. They’ve almost got a natural advantage.”
But in normal people, it’s the gray matter – or the brain cells connected by the white matter – that helps keep the impulse to lie in check.
Imagine genetically engineered people who are talented liars. Or imagine artificial intelligences which are geniuses at lying.
Pathological liars have a surplus of white matter, the study found, and a deficit of gray matter. That means they have more tools to lie coupled with fewer moral restraints than normal people, Raine said.
“They’ve got the equipment to lie, and they don’t have the disinhibition that the rest of us have in telling the big whoppers,” he said.
One of the reasons why I'm not particularly sanguine about our transhumanist future is that human ethical constraints are in large part a product of genetic coding. I do not buy the argument that rational self interest by itself provides enough basis to maintain a civilized society. Well, once biotechnology provides ways to enhance the ability to lie and the ability to feel less remorse or guilt won't some people opt to use this technology? Mightn't there even be a sort of mental arms race where people find it necessary to enhance their ability to deceive in order to protect themselves from other deceivers?
The ethical features of human cognition that were selected for to work in hunter gatherer groups and in small village life might get heavily selected against when humanity enters its transhumanist phase. I have a similar worry about altruistic punishment and I have a high expectation that the tendency to want to carry out altruistic punishment is coded for by genes as well. Also, I expect the desire to carry out altruistic punishment will be found to vary between individuals due to differences in gene sequences. Brain scans show that the brain rewards itself for carrying out altruistic punishment. Well, will all genetically engineered babies of the future be as likely to be coded for that desire as humans are today? The desire to carry out altruistic punishment might be essential to maintenance of a fair degree of cooperation within societies.
Adrian Raine has also previously found differences in the brains of psychopaths and normal people which are recognizable in brain scans.
Modest proposal: Require politicians running for offer to get brain scans and publish their gray matter to white matter ratio. If the public really wants more honest politicians (and I'm not entirely convinced that is the case) then the public could vote for candidates that have higher gray to white matter. Also, politicians should have to include any indications that they have brains shaped for psychopathy.
Alexander Todorov, on the faculty of the Psychology Department at Princeton University, has found that when people are shown quick exposures to pictures of politicians they can rate them on perceived competence and that rating mirrors how those politicians did in elections for the US House of Representatives and US Senate.
Psychologist Alexander Todorov of Princeton University had volunteers look at black-and-white photographs of House and Senate winners and losers from elections in 2000 and 2002, and the competing candidates prior to the 2004 contests. The faces had to be unknown to the participants; images of Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., John McCain, R-Ariz., and John Kerry, D-Mass., for example, were immediately eliminated.
``It was just on facial appearance, it could not be influenced by any other information,'' Todorov said in an interview.
The study found that the candidate perceived as more competent was the winner in 72 percent of the Senate races and 67 percent of the House races.
Democracy is flawed because humans are shallow and superficial. Maybe blind voters make better decisions. Anyone up for restricting the voting franchise to the blind only? Ugly talented candidates would fare much better. Think about it.
The degree of competence tracked with the size of electoral victories.
“Inferences of competence not only predicted the winner but also were linearly related to the margin of victory,” the scientists wrote.
This will obviously lead to political parties using groups to screen potential candiates for perceived competence. So expect politicians of the future to look more competent on average as a result of recruitment efforts to attract more competent looking candidates.
The more competent looking candidates also looked less babyfaced.
In the second paper, Leslie Zebrowitz, of Brandeis University in Massachusetts, said that the results appeared to reflect the relative “baby-facedness” of the candidates.
Previous research has shown that people of any age who appear baby-faced, with a round face, large eyes, a small nose, a high forehead and a small chin, tend to be rated as less competent — though often as more trustworthy as well. “Although the study doesn’t tell us exactly what competence is — there are many kinds, including physical strength, social dominance and intellectual shrewdness.
Baby-faced people are perceived to be lacking in all these qualities,” Dr Zebrowitz said.
People do routinely "judge a book by its cover" in spite of countless adminitions not to. (have those admonitions helped at all?)
Despite the age-old admonition not to "judge a book by its cover," we routinely make important judgments about human traits based on instant, superficial impressions of peoples' faces. Such "blink of an eye" decision-making predicted the outcome of about 70 percent of recent U.S. Senate races, according to a new study in Science this week.
According to the study, candidates who looked "competent" prevailed in congressional elections more than two-thirds of the time. In a review of the study, Dr. Leslie Zebrowitz, a psychologist at Brandeis University, and Joann M. Montepare, explain that the outcomes of the political races were likely due to differences in the opponents' "babyfacedness."
"Although the study doesn't tell us exactly what competence is – there are many kinds, including physical strength, social dominance and intellectual shrewdness – babyfaced people are perceived to be lacking in all these qualities," said Zebrowitz, a pioneering research scientist in the field of facial impressions and author of "Reading Faces: Window to the Soul?"
What facial qualities make someone look more babyfaced and less competent? Zebrowitz says that both babies and babyfaced adults, regardless of sex or ethnicity, share such features as a round face, large eyes, small nose, high forehead and small chin. Competency, on the other hand, is associated with facial maturity.
The babyfaced men might actually be the better choices in spite of the electorate's aversion to babyfaces in leaders.
In fact, studies by Zebrowitz and others have shown that babyfaced men are actually more intelligent, better educated, more assertive and apt to win more military medals than their mature-looking counterparts.
Research in the area of facial impressions has implications for political marketing, social decision-making and even the democratic process, Zebrowitz believes. "The data we have suggest that we're not necessarily electing better leaders – people who are actually more competent, though we are electing people who look the part."
Expect to see ambitious young business executives and politicians seeking out plastic surgeons to ask for modifications to make them look more competent.
Andrew Monk at the University of York and coworkers found that what makes the overhearing of cell phone conversations so annoying is that you can only hear one side of them.
We also feel an innate need to listen when we can only hear one side of a conversation, the researchers say. Even if it's no louder than a regular two-way exchange, the fact that we can only hear half means that we instinctively tune in, almost as if we're expecting to join in to complete the conversation.
If this idea is correct, the researchers reason, then mobile phone chatter should be no more annoying than overheard conversations where both people are present but only one voice is audible. When Monk and his team tested their theory on railway passengers in Britain, that's exactly what they found.
The article reports that ther are now silent carriages on British trains which only came about since the introduction of cell phones. Humans were never sufficiently irritated with each other's conversations to demand such carriages before cell phones came along.
This strikes me as yet another example of how modern communications technologies create environments that do not mesh well with how humans were evolved to relate to each other. It was unusual historically to find oneself able to listen to only one half of conversations. It was also unusual to be able to listen but not be able to join in on a conversation. The mind is wired up to listen to complete conversations (and even to ignore them as a whole) and finds it irritating to hear only half a conversation. I've certainly found myself annoyed at having to listen to people talk on phones. This result shows this reaction is not uncommon.
A cable arts channel occasionally shows a 1908 documentary "Moscow clad in snow" which shows what life was like outside in Moscow in the winter. One of the striking things about the film is the one horse sleighs moving in long lines along busy streets so slowly that people could talk to each other (not that one could tell from the film whether they did so) as they passed by. The sleighs were all open and the horses were moving at a speed that would allow casual exchanges. Compare that to cars today on the road. People rarely can speak to each other and events happen much more quickly. Technology has created unnatural ways for people to interact and "road rage" should not be an entirely surprising result.
Another example of unnatural interactions is with TV and movies and the idolization of stars and imagined relationships with people that most people will never meet. Imagined relationships are a part of the TV shopping channel experience that increases sales.
In order to determine if viewers developed close relationships with program hosts, the participants were asked to rate on a scale how much they agreed with statements like “The hosts are almost like friends you see everyday.”
Impulse shopping was measured by how participants rated their agreement with statements like “I decide what to buy after I watch television shopping programs.”
It’s not surprising that viewers develop close relationships with hosts, Lennon said. The shopping channels actively encourage viewers to feel close to the hosts.
“The hosts and guests on these shopping programs use a variety of conversational techniques that may encourage pseudo-interactive responses on the part of viewers,” she said.
“The hosts focus on similarities between the viewers and themselves, in order to facilitate a relationship.”
In addition the hosts invite viewers to contact them, and often provide e-mail and postal addresses, as well as telephone numbers to contact the hosts.
“Viewers develop attachments to their favorite hosts, and we find that this encourages viewers to buy more impulsively without considering whether they need the clothing they are buying,” Lennon said.
We can create changes in our environments orders of magnitude more rapidly than humans can evolve to adapt to those changes. Rules such as bans on cell phone use in many situations are natural responses to unnatural and problematic changes wrought by technological advances. It is not ignorant Luddism to support such rules. Humans need to regulate changes in their environments to keep down stress and maladaptive responses to technological changes.