Andrew Patrick

Wired has an interesting article on the psychology of political assassins. The US Secret Service has done a study of 83 people who killed, or attempted to kill, political figures. They found that the motivations for the killings were often mundane and obvious. And there was often a slow deterioration in the social and mental life of the assassin prior to the event, leading the service to develop early intervention methods.

Contrary to popular assumptions about public killings, the attackers didn’t conform to any particular demographic profile. But when Fein reconstructed their patterns of thinking, he was able to distill them into a handful of recurring motives for killing a public person — motives that seemed consistent regardless of whether a given individual was delusional or not (and three quarters of those who pulled the trigger were not).

Some hoped to achieve notoriety by killing a well-known person. Others wanted to end their pain by being killed by Secret Service. Still others hoped to avenge a perceived, idiosyncratic grievance unrelated to mainstream politics. Some hoped, unrealistically, to save the country or call attention to a cause. And some hoped to achieve a special relationship with the person they were killing.

Watching this video (and the associated description) of psychological abuse of a passenger by TSA officials in a US airport reminds me of watching video from the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment.

In that experiment, conducted in 1971 in the basement of the Stanford Psychology building, normal, healthy students were randomly assigned to the roles of prisoners and guards in a mock prison. Over the course of six days, the “guards” developed extremely authoritarian, abuse behavior towards the “prisoners”, and subjected some of the “prisoners” to torture. Philip Zimbardo, the head of the study, reflected later on the results:

The situation won; humanity lost. Out the window went the moral upbringings of these young men, as well as their middle-class civility. Power ruled, and unrestrained power became an aphrodisiac. Power without surveillance by higher authorities was a poisoned chalice that transformed character in unpredictable directions. I believe that most of us tend to be fascinated with evil not because of its consequences but because evil is a demonstration of power and domination over others.

It seems to me that the actions of the TSA could be described in the same way. Without oversight, power has taken the place of rationality and domination seems to be the goal.

by Funkyah

Memory research has demonstrated that it is easy to implant false memories, convincing people that they had experienced some event or emotion that never really happened. This has long been a problem in the area of forensic psychology and eyewitness testimony.

Now researchers are speculating about implanting false memories by alter photographs, perhaps stored on a social network site like Facebook, to insert products in situations that never really happened.

Would adding Coca-Cola bottles to your favorite photos from last Christmas change your attitudes, and desire to buy, the product?

By taking advantage of implanted memories, corporate product placement in photos on social networking sites could finally accomplish the much-desired — but incredibly difficult — goal of altering brand loyalty,

TRUST2011 is scheduled for June and the Call for Papers is out. I am on the program committee for the socio-economic strand and papers are due February 15, 2011.

TRUST 2011 is an international conference on the technical and soci-economic aspects of trustworthy infrastructures. It provides an excellent interdisciplinary forum for researchers, practitioners, and decision makers to explore new ideas and discuss experiences in building, designing, using and understanding trustworthy computing systems.

What Rutgers reveals is, yet again, that new technologies can facilitate new and more creative ways of being cruel to each other.

Steve Schultze has made some interesting comments about the recent suicide by a Rutgers student after an embarrassing video was posted on the Internet. Reacting to a media treatment that took the position that it is not the technology that led to this problem, it is us (human nature), Schultze argues that technology is a facilitator that sometimes brings out the worst of human nature. He observes that technology can often allow people to do things that they would never do in the real, face-to-face world, and we ignore this at our peril.

Lying is hard, but some people are particularly good at it. Psychology Today offers 10 tips for effective lying.

…human beings have an innate skill at dishonesty. And with good reason: being able to manipulate the expectations of those around us is a key survival trait for social animals like ourselves. Indeed, a 1999 study by psychologist Robert Feldman at the University of Massachusetts showed that the most popular kids were also the most effective liars.

Courts continue to flirt with admitting fMRI evidence into court. While brain imaging techniques are uncovering great new information, it is not clear to me if they will ever be accurate enough to distinguish truth-telling from lying.

Wired Science has covered a legal case where fMRI brain scan lie detection data was offered as evidence. While the lawyer was initially hopeful, it was ruled inadmissible by the judge on the basis that judgements of witness credibility by the jury should be based on their impression of the witness.

via Mind Hacks: fMRI lie detection and the Wonder Woman problem.

You have probably seen a variety of “traffic calming measures” when you drive down roads. These range from speed bumps to pavement markings to deliberate narrowing of the roads.

Here is an article reporting results from pavement markings designed to produce an optical illusion that makes it appear that you are driving faster than you actually are. The markings are being used at the approach to a corner with a bad accident record, and they seem to we working quite well.

Traffic calming results

There have been significant advances recently in understanding the biological basis of human behavior. Brain imaging technologies, such as Functional MRI (fMRI), allow researchers to study brain processes during complex thought processes. fMRI can be used to study a variety of behaviors, and some people have proposed that the scans can be used to detect lying, although it has never been accepted in court.

In this case, a murder trial, the fMRI evidence was used at the sentencing stage in an attempt to show that the defendant suffered from a brain disorder and should be spared the death penalty. The jury did not agree and the man was sentenced to death, although there may have been some doubts raised.

fMRI Evidence Used in Murder Sentencing

For what may be the first time, fMRI scans of brain activity have been used as evidence in the sentencing phase of a murder trial. Defense lawyers for an Illinois man convicted of raping and killing a 10-year-old girl used the scans to argue that their client should be spared the death penalty because he has a brain disorder.

Studying the behavior of people in crowded conditions has always been interesting. This article from Slate describes the history of Social Psychology research in subway systems areound the world.

Psychologists have been watching us on the subway. Here’s what they’ve learned.

“About 4,450 men and women who traveled on the 8th Avenue IND in New York City, weekdays between the hours of 11:00 A.M. and 3:00 P.M. during the period from April 15 to June 26, 1968, were the unsolicited participants in this study.”