Human nature

An interesting article from Mother Jones on how we value, or don’t value, our privacy.

The conventional wisdom in Silicon Valley is that nobody cares about online privacy, except maybe creeps, wingnuts, and old people. Sure, a lot of us might say that we don’t like being tracked and targeted, but few of us actually bother to check the “do not track” option in on our web browsers. Millions of people have never adjusted their Facebook privacy settings. According to a recent Pew survey, only small fractions of internet users have taken steps to avoid being observed by hackers (33 percent), advertisers (28 percent), friends (19 percent), employers (11 percent), or the government (5 percent).

What’s going on here? The short answer is a lot of pretty twisted psychological stuff, which behavioral scientists are only now starting to understand.

Our uneasy relationship with the internet begins with the fact we don’t really know who can see our data and how they might exploit it. “Not even the experts have a full understanding of how personal data is used in an increasingly complicated market,” points out Carnegie Mellon University public policy professor Alessandro Acquisti, who researches the psychology behind online privacy perceptions. Behavioral economists often refer to this problem as information asymmetry: One party in a transaction (Facebook, Twitter, advertisers, the NSA) has better information than the other party (the rest of us).

The six reasons are:

1. we are more willing to sell our privacy than pay for it
2. we accept default settings
3. offering some privacy controls may induce people to be reckless
4. we fall for misdirection
5. we are addicts
6. ignorance is bliss

Read more at:

6 Reasons We Share Too Much Online, According to Behavioral Scientists | Mother Jones.

I’m sorry that Canadians are so apologetic.

Across four experiments with 730 people, superfluous apologies — that is, saying sorry for things for which you’re ultimately blameless — were proven to improve strangers’ opinions of the people expressing regret. The unwarranted contrition was interpreted by recipients as a sign of empathy, boosting the apologizer’s likability, perceived compassion and trustworthiness.

via One easy secret to make people like and trust you more.

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.

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,

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.