Marc Abrahams's Blog, page 447

Good for interpretation: Social-do-gooding brags by certain CEOs

This week’s Make-of-This-What-You-Will Press Release comes from the University of California, Riverside. It says, in part:

This dynamic – espousing good actions but then taking steps in the opposite direction – is surprisingly common among CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, researchers have found in a just published paper.

They found firms that engaged in prior socially responsible behavior are more likely to then engage in socially irresponsible behavior and that this tendency is stronger in firms with CEOs who attempt to put forth a moral image.

“The finding is very counterintuitive,” said Elaine Wong, an assistant professor of management at the University of California, Riverside School of Business Administration who co-authored the paper. “You wouldn’t think doing well by one’s stakeholders would set the stage for actions that harm stakeholders in the future.”

Wong co-authored the paper, “License to Ill: The Effects of Corporate Social Responsibility and CEO Moral Identity on Corporate Irresponsibility,” with Margaret Ormiston, a faculty member at the London Business School. It was just published in the winter 2013 issue of the journal Personnel Psychology…

Here are two of the many ways to interpret this [wording differences between the two are underlined, for clarity]:

Some corporate CEOs have their companies do some socially wonderful things, but their companies inexplicably later “engage in socially irresponsible behavior”.
Some corporate CEOs say that their companies do some socially wonderful things, but their companies “engage in socially irresponsible behavior”.

Possibly there are other ways to interpret the study and the press release. Discuss.

“Zebrafish… also find these scents disgusting”

Danielle Venton writes in the PNAS First Look Blog:

Geneticists and cell biologists from the University of Cologne in Germany and Harvard University have found that zebrafish, a vertebrate model animal, also find these scents disgusting.

The phrase “these scents” refers to the personal odors of the socially-isolating chemical cadaverine [the structure of which is pictured here] and its lonely-making buddy, putrescine.

The study is:

“High-affinity olfactory receptor for the death-associated odor cadaverine,” Ashiq Hussain, Luis R. Saraiva, David M. Ferrero, Gaurav Ahuja, Venkatesh S. Krishna, Stephen D. Liberles, and Sigrun I. Korsching, PNAS, epub November 11, 2013.

BONUS VIDEO [quasi-related]: The Wellcome Trust’s “Science and beauty and the zebrafish”:

Dead reckoning as to whether cats (or dogs) have exactly nine lives

How long does a cat last, statistically speaking? This study cast a cold eye on that question:

“Epidemiological studies on the expectation of life for cats computed from animal cemetery records,” H. Hayashidani, Y. Omi, M. Ogawa, and K. Fukutomi, Nihon juigaku zasshi, The Japanese journal of veterinary science, vol. 51, no. 5, 1989, pp.  905-908  (Thanks to investigator Bob O’Hara for bringing this to our attention.)

The same team looked, a year earlier, at the competition:

“Epidemiological studies on the expectation of life for dogs computed from animal cemetery records,” H. Hayashidani, Y. Omi, M. Ogawa, and K. Fukutomi, Nihon juigaku zasshi, The Japanese journal of veterinary science, vol. 50, no. 5, October 1988, pp. 1003-8.

BONUS: Dropping and bouncing cats (a collection)

BONUS (related): Camille Dalmais comments on the nature of the beasts:

BONUS (somewhat related, but not just to cats and dogs): Rosie Ifould’s essay: “Eat five portions of fruit and veg, drink eight glasses of water, exercise five times a week… these figures grab our attention, but do the numbers really add up?“

On the spot: The Macbeth Effect

Some psychologists are beginning to feel the same sense of “cursedness” about studying “The MacBeth Effect” that some actors have about performing Shakespeare’s play “Macbeth” — the sense that things can all too easily go wrong.

The BPS Research Digest blog writes::

Not so easy to spot: A failure to replicate the Macbeth Effect across three continents

“Out, damned spot!” cries a guilt-ridden Lady Macbeth as she desperately washes her hands in the vain pursuit of a clear conscience. Consistent with Shakespeare’s celebrated reputation as an astute observer of the human psyche, a wealth of contemporary research findings have demonstrated the reality of this close link between our sense of moral purity and physical cleanliness.

One manifestation of this was nicknamed the Macbeth Effect – first documented by Chen-Bo Zhong and Katie Liljenquist [pictured here, upper right] in an influential paper in the high-impact journal Science in 2006 – in which feelings of moral disgust were found to provoke a desire for physical cleansing. For instance, in their second study, Zhong and Liljenquist found that US participants who hand-copied a story about an unethical deed were subsequently more likely to rate cleansing products as highly desirable….

[But] University of Oxford psychologist Brian Earp and his colleagues were surprised when a pilot study of theirs failed to replicate Zhong and Liljenquist’s second study….

Earp and his colleagues want to be clear – they’re not saying that there is no link between physical and moral purity, nor are they dismissing the existence of a Macbeth Effect. But they do believe their three direct, cross-cultural replication failures call for a “careful reassessment of the evidence for a real-life ‘Macbeth Effect’ within the realm of moral psychology.”

This study, due for publication next year, comes at time when reformers in psychology are calling for more value to be placed on replication attempts and negative results. “By resisting the temptation … to bury our own non-significant findings with respect to the Macbeth Effect, we hope to have contributed a small part to the ongoing scientific process,” Earp and his colleagues concluded.

The study: Brian D. Earp, Jim A. C. Everett, Elizabeth N. Madva, and [pictured here, lower right] (2014). Out, damned spot: Can the “Macbeth Effect” be replicated?, Basic and Applied Social Psychology, In Press.

BONUS: Out, damn spot:

BONUS: Liljenquist: ”Hire a Dwight Schrute for a better-performing team, says study co-authored by BYU biz prof”

UPDATE: Zhong on fast food and happiness

 

Revolving doors – an examination (Laurier #4 of 4)

Improbable has been profiling the work of Dr. Eric Laurier who is a Senior Lecturer in Geography & Interaction, Institute of Geography & the Lived Environment, University of Edinburgh. Dr. Laurier specialises in the study of ordinary life, as that life happens. A new paper is currently being written in association with Alexandra Weilenmann (University of Gothenburg) and Daniel Normark (Karolinska Institutet & University of Gothenburg) and is awaiting publication in Space and Culture, Special Issue on Mobile Formations ‘Managing Walking Together: The Challenge of Revolving Doors’.

This paper begins with an observation about doors in general :

“Doors are underestimated inventions, enabling us to enjoy the protection of walls without enclosing us in solitude.”

And then turns to a special subclass :

“There is a peculiar type of door, which is in a sense open and closed at the same time: the revolving door. While the revolving door is a wall-hole as well, there are a number of obvious differences between a revolving door and the ‘regular’ notion of a door that reformulates many of the before-mentioned the problems.”

Then, in more detail :

“The design of the revolving door reformulates the delegation of a door closer (cf Latour, 1988). Quite simply it means that as you open the door you also close it, and the action of closing the door therefore does not have to be delegated to a person or a hinge mechanism. However, while this design solves the problem of making sure that the door is never left open, how we can move through the door is also changed. The door now has slots that walkers have to fit into, slot [sic] that have to be entered into and exited in a timely fashion or the walker turns into Charlie Chaplin being either unable to leave or rotated back inside the building they just exited.”

Finally, conclusions are drawn :

• On approach, members of a together analyse trajectories toward the door and

establish who will become the first to pass through it.

• Members of the group make their selection process visible through shifts in

gait & posture and changes in speed.

• After passing through the door, the members of the group wait or adjust their

speed so as to allow for the others to catch up.

• When using different doors, the speed is maintained, while spatial proximity is

lost. The lack of spatial proximity needs to be repaired.

This concludes our short Improbable profile of Dr. Laurier, whose unique, extensive and intriguing scholarly oeuvre is catalogued here.

Further reading on doors: Approachability: How People Interpret Automatic Door Movement as Gesture International Journal of Design, 3(2).

It’s a Mess: Attempt to Connect the Messy Dots of Messy, Hard-to-Define Phenomena

What happens when you try to use new technological tools to measure and map things that are tough to define — so tough to define that people go half-crazy if they try to agree on the details of any of the definitions?

The results can be messy, this paper suggests. Very messy:

“Fledgling pathoconnectomics of psychiatric disorders,” Mikail Rubinov [pictured here] and Ed Bullmore, Trends in Cognitive Science, epub November 15, 2013. The authors, at the University of Cambridge, UK, explain:

“Pathoconnectomics, the mapping of abnormal brain networks, is a popular current framework for the study of brain dysfunction in psychiatric disorders. In this review we evaluate the conceptual foundations of this framework, describe the construction and analysis of empirical models of brain networks or connectomes, and summarize recent reports of the large-scale whole-brain connectome organization of two candidate brain-network disorders, schizophrenia and autism. We consider the evidence for the abnormal brain-network nature of psychiatric disorders and find it inconclusive.”

(Thanks to Lexie Thorpe and NeuroSkeptic for bringing this to our attention.)

BONUS: The word “pathoconnectomics” is new. We suggest you help it gain acceptance. Sprinkle it into any conversation, on any topic, if you will.

BONUS (possibly unrelated): Psychoses— A Magnificent Hoax

The Da Vince piano that maybe is mostly not a Da Vinci piano

Norman Lebrecht, writing in the Slipped Disk blog, debunks a piano, sort of:

Leonardo’s instrument? No, it’s a reproduction of an obscure German contraption

There has been much press hooh-hah about a bowed keyboard instrument imagined by Leonardo da Vinci and built by an enterprising Pole. But does it pass the acid test of musicology? Apparently not. Here’s a response to the American Musicological Society Discussion List from Professor Edmond Johnson in Los Angeles. Sorry, folks.

I hesitate to represent myself as any sort of expert in the history of bowed keyboard instruments, but I think I can probably answer Prof. Warfield’s question about “Leonardo da Vinci’s Wacky Piano.” Basically, it appears that the instrument built by Slawomir Zubrzycki is not so much a realization of a design by Leonardo da Vinci as it is a reconstruction of the instrument described as a “Geigenwerk/GeigenInstrument, oder GeigenClavicymbel” in the second volume of Michael Praetorius’s Syntagma Musicum (pp.67-72)…

I think it’s safe to say that the idea of a long-lost instrument by Leonardo da Vinci makes for far better headlines than “Instrument by Obscure German Reconstructed… Again.” … You can find some reproductions of the da Vinci sketches in Emanuel Winternitz’s “Strange Musical Instruments in the Madrid Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci,” Metropolitan Museum Journal, 2 (1969), pp. 115-126.

Here’s video of the celebrated new instrument in action:

(Thanks to investigator Jim Cowdery for bringing this to our attention.)

BONUS (unrelated): Why Is This Woman Smiling a Mona-Lisa-level Smile?

Tough outcomes for some self-chosen extreme-sports ‘Tough Mudders’

Michael Misialik, MD, writes in Boston Magazine:

Want an arctic enema? Electroshock therapy? What about the chance to walk over fire? Those are just a few of the more than 20 obstacles that participants must navigate through in the 10-plus mile Tough Mudder race…. Founded by Will Dean, a Harvard Business School graduate and former counter-terrorism agent for British Special Forces, Tough Mudder events have attracted more than a million participants since the first event in 2010, according to the event’s website. Since then, it has exponentially increased in popularity with events across the world.

But is it safe? The first-ever case study that details the injuries sustained during a Tough Mudder event was released in November and published in the journal, the Annals of Emergency Medicine….

The bottom line is that the injury patterns encountered are unique, unlike anything seen in other endurance races. The lessons learned from this case series are that there needs to better EMS preparedness and safety monitoring. Participants should be aware that no training will prevent injuries sustained from electrical shocks, crawling under barbed wire, or hypothermia from running through freezing water. Consult your physician before you decide to enter.

Rock, paper, scissors, robot, monkey

“In this research we develop a janken (rock-paper-scissors) robot with 100% winning rate as one example of human-machine cooperation systems. Human being plays one of rock, paper and scissors at the timing of one, two, three. According to the timing, the robot hand plays one of three kinds so as to beat the human being. Recognition of human hand can be performed at 1ms with a high-speed vision, and the position and the shape of the human hand are recognized. The wrist joint angle of the robot hand is controlled based on the position of the human hand. The vision recognizes one of rock, paper and scissors based on the shape of the human hand. After that, the robot hand plays one of rock, paper and scissors so as to beat the human being in 1ms.”

So say the rock paper scissors robot researchers at  Ishikawa Oku Laboratory, Department of Information Physics and Computing, Department of Creative Informatics, Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, University of Tokyo. They offer this video:

(Thanks to investigator Adele Hsieh for bringing this to our attention.)

BONUS (somewhat related): Rock, scissors, monkey

Bjork explains television, and Bjork explains television

Bjork explains television (1):

“Transcoder architectures for video coding,” Niklas Bjork  [pictured here] and Charilaos Christopoulos, IEEE Transactions on Consumer Electronics, vol. 44, no. 1 (1998): 88-98. The authors, at Ericsson Telecom AB, Stockholm, Sweden, explain:

“This paper discusses the problem of transcoding H.263-based video streams. Two different models for transcoding are examined, rate reduction and resolution reduction. Results show that the computational complexity of the basic transcoding model can be reduced for each model by, on average, 39% and 23% without significant lose in quality. Comparisons with the scaleable coding model are also shown.”

Bjork explains television (2):

BONUS: Alexis Madrigal explains Bjork explaining television