Maria Konnikova

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“Nobody Thinks They Are Joining A Cult”

December 6, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

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What interests me most about human consciousness is how we’re prone to extreme apostasies, completely abandoning one belief system (or narrative) for another that’s even dicier: cults, terrorist organizations, etc. While a single person can completely lose the thread of reality, two people can seemingly drive each other even further, and a tribe or state or nation further still.

But even on the granular level, even if we don’t go too far to recover and are only casually and temporarily abandoning minute pieces of our world view, we can be conned. Why? Because we want to believe, we want things to improve, we want to be better ourselves and we’d like the same out of others. In that sense, we’d all like to join a cult, different the one we’re already a part of, and those good intentions can end disastrously.

Maria Konnikova, author of The Confidence Game: Why We Fall For It … Every Time, has penned an excellent editorial on the topic in the New York Times. An excerpt:

Before humans learned how to make tools, how to farm or how to write, they were telling stories with a deeper purpose. The man who caught the beast wasn’t just strong. The spirit of the hunt was smiling. The rivers were plentiful because the river king was benevolent. In society after society, religious belief, in one form or another, has arisen spontaneously. Anything that cannot immediately be explained must be explained all the same, and the explanation often lies in something bigger than oneself.

The often-expressed view of modern science is that God resides in the cracks between knowledge. That is, as more of the world is explained — and ends up being not so divine after all — the gaps in what we know are where faith resides. Its home may have shrunk, but it will always exist so there will always be room for things that have to be taken on faith — and for faith itself.

Nobody thinks they are joining a cult, David Sullivan explains. “They join a group that’s going to promote peace and freedom throughout the world or that’s going to save animals, or they’re going to help orphans or something. But nobody joins a cult.” We don’t knowingly embraces false beliefs. We embrace something we think is as true as it gets. We don’t set out to be conned. We set out to become, in some way, better than we were before.

That is the true power of belief. It gives us hope.•

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“When We Write, A Unique Neural Circuit Is Automatically Activated”

June 4, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

There certainly seems to be a link between handwriting and memory, and as the former fades and the latter is increasingly stored remotely, what does it mean for primary education? From Maria Konnikova of the New York Times:

“Does handwriting matter?

Not very much, according to many educators. The Common Core standards, which have been adopted in most states, call for teaching legible writing, but only in kindergarten and first grade. After that, the emphasis quickly shifts to proficiency on the keyboard.

But psychologists and neuroscientists say it is far too soon to declare handwriting a relic of the past. New evidence suggests that the links between handwriting and broader educational development run deep.

Children not only learn to read more quickly when they first learn to write by hand, but they also remain better able to generate ideas and retain information. In other words, it’s not just what we write that matters — but how.

‘When we write, a unique neural circuit is automatically activated,’ said Stanislas Dehaene, a psychologist at the Collège de France in Paris. ‘There is a core recognition of the gesture in the written word, a sort of recognition by mental simulation in your brain.

‘And it seems that this circuit is contributing in unique ways we didn’t realize,’ he continued.”

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“Could We Find A Way To Improve Our Collective Intelligence?”

May 9, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Alex Pentland got his start in Big Data, wearables and the quantified life while working with Canadian beavers four decades ago. From Maria Konnikova at the Verge:

“It all started with beavers. When Alex Pentland was three years into his undergraduate degree at the University of Michigan, in 1973, he worked part-time as a computer programmer for NASA’s Environmental Research Institute. One of his first tasks — part of a larger environmental-monitoring project — was to develop a method for counting Canadian beavers from outer space. There was just one problem: existing satellites were crude, and beavers are small. ‘What beavers do is they create ponds,’ he recalls of his eventual solution, ‘and you can count the number of beavers by the number of ponds. You’re watching the lifestyle, and you get an indirect measure.’

The beavers were soon accounted for, but Pentland’s fascination with the underlying methodology had taken root. Would it be possible, the 21-year-old wondered, to use the same approach to understand people and societies, or use sensors to unravel complex social behavior? And in so doing, could we find a way to improve our collective intelligence — to create, in a sense, a world that was more suited to human needs, where cities and businesses alike were developed using objective data to maximize our happiness and productivity?

Pentland would spend the next four decades exploring those very questions, finding ways to observe people and their patterns from a computer rather than outer space.”

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“Just How Arousing Each Emotion Was Also Made A Difference”

January 23, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

If I had titled this post “Cuddly Panda Tries To Recover From Penis Injury,” it would have had a much better chance of going viral. For a couple thousand years–and never more than now during the Internet Age–philosophers and scientists have wondered why certain content is spread from person to person. Why is some information more likely to connect us, even if it’s not the most vital to our safety and survival? The answer does not flatter us. From Maria Konnikova at the New Yorker blog:

“In 350 B.C., Aristotle was already wondering what could make content—in his case, a speech—persuasive and memorable, so that its ideas would pass from person to person. The answer, he argued, was three principles: ethos, pathos, and logos. Content should have an ethical appeal, an emotional appeal, or a logical appeal. A rhetorician strong on all three was likely to leave behind a persuaded audience. Replace rhetorician with online content creator, and Aristotle’s insights seem entirely modern. Ethics, emotion, logic—it’s credible and worthy, it appeals to me, it makes sense. If you look at the last few links you shared on your Facebook page or Twitter stream, or the last article you e-mailed or recommended to a friend, chances are good that they’ll fit into those categories.

Aristotle’s diagnosis was broad, and tweets, of course, differ from Greek oratory. So Berger, who is now a professor of marketing at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, worked with another Penn professor, Katherine Milkman, to put his interest in content-sharing to an empirical test. Together, they analyzed just under seven thousand articles that had appeared in the Times in 2008, between August 30th and November 30th, to try to determine what distinguished pieces that made the most-emailed list. After controlling for online and print placement, timing, author popularity, author gender, length, and complexity, Berger and Milkman found that two features predictably determined an article’s success: how positive its message was and how much it excited its reader. Articles that evoked some emotion did better than those that evoked none—an article with the headline ‘BABY POLAR BEAR’S FEEDER DIES’ did better than ‘TEAMS PREPARE FOR THE COURTSHIP OF LEBRON JAMES.’ But happy emotions (‘WIDE-EYED NEW ARRIVALS FALLING IN LOVE WITH THE CITY’) outperformed sad ones (‘WEB RUMORS TIED TO KOREAN ACTRESS’S SUICIDE’).

Just how arousing each emotion was also made a difference.”

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“We Value And Identify With Our Own Names”

December 23, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Ima Hogg, 1900.

Scientific studies (which I mostly don’t believe) have long shown that those with more common names fare better in life than those with unique ones. Barack Obama is a small sample size, but he’s done fairly well personally and professionally. And then there’s Ima Hogg, who was the celebrated belle of Texas as well as un-porcine. Well, she did have family connections, so I could be talking about another exception. I suppose the one area in which a name can have an impact is when it allows an employer with biased hiring practices to know the race or ethnicity of the applicant. That does have a bearing on happiness.

The opening of an interesting New Yorker blog post on the topic by Maria Konnikova:

“In 1948, two professors at Harvard University published a study of thirty-three hundred men who had recently graduated, looking at whether their names had any bearing on their academic performance. The men with unusual names, the study found, were more likely to have flunked out or to have exhibited symptoms of psychological neurosis than those with more common names. The Mikes were doing just fine, but the Berriens were having trouble. A rare name, the professors surmised, had a negative psychological effect on its bearer.

Since then, researchers have continued to study the effects of names, and, in the decades after the 1948 study, these findings have been widely reproduced. Some recent research suggests that names can influence choice of profession, where we live, whom we marry, the grades we earn, the stocks we invest in, whether we’re accepted to a school or are hired for a particular job, and the quality of our work in a group setting. Our names can even determine whether we give money to disaster victims: if we share an initial with the name of a hurricane, according to one study, we are far more likely to donate to relief funds after it hits.

Much of the apparent influence of names on behavior has been attributed to what’s known as the implicit-egotism effect: we are generally drawn to the things and people that most resemble us. Because we value and identify with our own names, and initials, the logic goes, we prefer things that have something in common with them. For instance, if I’m choosing between two brands of cars, all things being equal, I’d prefer a Mazda or a Kia.

That view, however, may not withstand closer scrutiny.”

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“No One Joins Facebook To Be Sad And Lonely”

September 12, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I’ve said many times that social networks makes us sadder. Living inside a perpetual high-school or college yearbook, living in the past, is unhealthy. You can’t go home again, even with Google Maps. And we can never realize the expectations–and the the ideal of ourselves–that we create online. The icons lie and connectedness is not contentedness.

The opening of “How Facebook Makes Us Unhappy,” Maria Konnikova’s New Yorker blog piece about emoticons and emotions:

“No one joins Facebook to be sad and lonely. But a new study from the University of Michigan psychologist Ethan Kross argues that that’s exactly how it makes us feel. Over two weeks, Kross and his colleagues sent text messages to eighty-two Ann Arbor residents five times per day. The researchers wanted to know a few things: how their subjects felt overall, how worried and lonely they were, how much they had used Facebook, and how often they had had direct interaction with others since the previous text message. Kross found that the more people used Facebook in the time between the two texts, the less happy they felt—and the more their overall satisfaction declined from the beginning of the study until its end. The data, he argues, shows that Facebook was making them unhappy.

Research into the alienating nature of the Internet—and Facebook in particular—supports Kross’s conclusion. In 1998, Robert Kraut, a researcher at Carnegie Mellon University, found that the more people used the Web, the lonelier and more depressed they felt. After people went online for the first time, their sense of happiness and social connectedness dropped, over one to two years, as a function of how often they used the Internet.

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