Wednesday, February 27, 2008
THE INFLUENCE OF SOCIAL FORCES: EVIDENCE FROM THE BEHAVIOR OF FOOTBALL REFEREES
THE INFLUENCE OF SOCIAL FORCES: EVIDENCE FROM THE BEHAVIOR OF FOOTBALL REFEREES: "Analyzing the neutrality of referees during 12 German premier league (1. Bundesliga) soccer seasons, this paper documents evidence that social forces influence agents’ decisions. Referees, who are appointed to be impartial, tend to favor the home team by systematically awarding more stoppage time in close matches in which the home team is behind. They also favor the home team in decisions to award goals and penalty kicks. Crowd composition affects the size and the direction of the bias, and the crowd’s proximity to the field is related to the quality of refereeing."
The New Yorker Annals of Science: Numbers Guy
New Yorker Annals of Science: "researchers have concluded that we have a sense of number that is independent of language, memory, and reasoning in general"
"When we see numerals or hear number words, our brains automatically map them onto a number line that grows increasingly fuzzy above 3 or 4. He found that no amount of training can change this."
"Subjects performed better with large numbers if they held the response key in their right hand but did better with small numbers if they held the response key in their left hand."
"Six-month-old babies, exposed simultaneously to images of common objects and sequences of drumbeats, consistently gaze longer at the collection of objects that matches the number of drumbeats. By now, it is generally agreed that infants come equipped with a rudimentary ability to perceive and represent number."
"Our number sense endows us with a crude feel for addition, so that, even before schooling, children can find simple recipes for adding numbers. If asked to compute 2 + 4, for example, a child might start with the first number and then count upward by the second number: “two, three is one, four is two, five is three, six is four, six.” But multiplication is another matter. It is an “unnatural practice,” Dehaene is fond of saying, and the reason is that our brains are wired the wrong way. Neither intuition nor counting is of much use, and multiplication facts must be stored in the brain verbally, as strings of words. The list of arithmetical facts to be memorized may be short, but it is fiendishly tricky: the same numbers occur over and over, in different orders, with partial overlaps and irrelevant rhymes. (Bilinguals, it has been found, revert to the language they used in school when doing multiplication.) The human memory, unlike that of a computer, has evolved to be associative, which makes it ill-suited to arithmetic, where bits of knowledge must be kept from interfering with one another: if you’re trying to retrieve the result of multiplying 7 X 6, the reflex activation of 7 + 6 and 7 X 5 can be disastrous. So multiplication is a double terror: not only is it remote from our intuitive sense of number; it has to be internalized in a form that clashes with the evolved organization of our memory. The result is that when adults multiply single-digit numbers they make mistakes ten to fifteen per cent of the time. For the hardest problems, like 7 X 8, the error rate can exceed twenty-five per cent."
"When we see numerals or hear number words, our brains automatically map them onto a number line that grows increasingly fuzzy above 3 or 4. He found that no amount of training can change this."
"Subjects performed better with large numbers if they held the response key in their right hand but did better with small numbers if they held the response key in their left hand."
"Six-month-old babies, exposed simultaneously to images of common objects and sequences of drumbeats, consistently gaze longer at the collection of objects that matches the number of drumbeats. By now, it is generally agreed that infants come equipped with a rudimentary ability to perceive and represent number."
"Our number sense endows us with a crude feel for addition, so that, even before schooling, children can find simple recipes for adding numbers. If asked to compute 2 + 4, for example, a child might start with the first number and then count upward by the second number: “two, three is one, four is two, five is three, six is four, six.” But multiplication is another matter. It is an “unnatural practice,” Dehaene is fond of saying, and the reason is that our brains are wired the wrong way. Neither intuition nor counting is of much use, and multiplication facts must be stored in the brain verbally, as strings of words. The list of arithmetical facts to be memorized may be short, but it is fiendishly tricky: the same numbers occur over and over, in different orders, with partial overlaps and irrelevant rhymes. (Bilinguals, it has been found, revert to the language they used in school when doing multiplication.) The human memory, unlike that of a computer, has evolved to be associative, which makes it ill-suited to arithmetic, where bits of knowledge must be kept from interfering with one another: if you’re trying to retrieve the result of multiplying 7 X 6, the reflex activation of 7 + 6 and 7 X 5 can be disastrous. So multiplication is a double terror: not only is it remote from our intuitive sense of number; it has to be internalized in a form that clashes with the evolved organization of our memory. The result is that when adults multiply single-digit numbers they make mistakes ten to fifteen per cent of the time. For the hardest problems, like 7 X 8, the error rate can exceed twenty-five per cent."
Saturday, February 23, 2008
Seeing Faces
Seeing Faces � The Situationist: "It’s amazing how little it takes for people to see a face –a tendency so strong that it has been given a name, pareidolia."
Friday, February 22, 2008
The Hawthorne Effect
Overcoming Bias: The Hawthorne Effect: "If you took a psychology class in college, you may have run across the so-called “Hawthorne Effect,” which is discussed in many college textbooks (see page 31 of this extensive survey from 2004) and is still cited in various studies. But the original studies that gave the “Hawthorne Effect” its name have long been discredited, and textbooks don’t always give you the full details."
Consistency Bias Warps Our Personal and Political Memories
PsyBlog: How the Consistency Bias Warps Our Personal and Political Memories: "consistency bias ... is the finding that we will often reconstruct the past to make it more compatible with our current worldview."
"The consistency bias is only one of the many types of biases that our memories demonstrate. Here are a few more examples:
* Beneffectance: we tend to believe the past glories were the result of our actions, while past disgraces were someone else's fault.
* Reminiscence bump: the fascinating finding that we remember more events from our adolescence and early adulthood than from other periods of our lives.
* Hindsight bias: that we tend to think that we could easily have predicted past events when in fact we can't.
* Rose-tinted specs: remember how wonderful things were in the olden days? It wasn't that good, trust me, nostalgia isn't what it used to be."
"The consistency bias is only one of the many types of biases that our memories demonstrate. Here are a few more examples:
* Beneffectance: we tend to believe the past glories were the result of our actions, while past disgraces were someone else's fault.
* Reminiscence bump: the fascinating finding that we remember more events from our adolescence and early adulthood than from other periods of our lives.
* Hindsight bias: that we tend to think that we could easily have predicted past events when in fact we can't.
* Rose-tinted specs: remember how wonderful things were in the olden days? It wasn't that good, trust me, nostalgia isn't what it used to be."
Blind People's Other Senses Not More Acute
PsyBlog: Blind People's Other Senses Not More Acute: "studies show that the blind's other senses are not more acute, but they can learn some amazing skills to compensate."
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