My Fair 'Lady'

'Lady' used to play games with me!

My grandparents have always had dogs. I have many memories of playing fetch using a tennis ball or running through the park with the dogs. Apparently, my grandmother’s very old dog, Lady, used to follow me when I was a toddler, play with me as I put together blocks, sleep beside my bed, and bark at any stranger that came near me. My grandmother always says that we had some deep connection, and she swore that Lady knew what I was thinking and tried to protect me. Evidence is surfacing about animals exhibiting theory of mind in very specific contexts, and one can indeed see some indication of this in dogs. I, unfortunately, have never owned a pet. With multiple family members who are terribly allergic to dog and cat fur, our household has never had animals running through the corridors. However, even with Lady, I remember a sort of understanding of my intentions and goals on her part. She barked when I walked near a stranger.  She played with me and demonstrated joint attention during games. I’m not sure how much of my experiences and understanding of our relationship is due to anthropomorphism or due to her real capacity for theory of mind expectations. For this reason, I would be interested to hear what evolutionary anthropologists and social psychologists have to say on the subject.

Visual Search

I have been a participant in many research studies before, but this was the first time that I participated in one using a neuroscientific approach. 

I participated in a two-part visual search study conducted by the Stephen Mitroff lab. On the first day, I gave my experimenter a saliva sample and answered a series of questionnaires asking about the last time I had drunk caffeine or taken any medications. One can only assume that this was because they were conducting some sort of study analyzing hormones. In addition, I answered a multitude of questions evaluating my personality traits, preferences, emotions and temperament, hobbies and interests, and judgments about society. In the second portion of the study, I had to take an eye test which makes sense given that I had to take part in visual searches. I performed a series of visual search tasks involving colors, direction of lines, math, and letters. The study involved four blocks each of four different tasks, and though it was very long, I was given moments to rest my eyes. Though I am not sure what the actual point of the study was, I had a lot of fun! 

I have been interested in visual perception since I took the “Perception in the Brain” course last spring. As a research project for that class, I created my own visual search task akin to the one in the image above. Participants searched for a target letter 'T' amidst distracting 'L' shapes. However, there are many different kinds of visual searches examining the efficiency of our visual perception system. In this case, the experimenters seemed to be examining visual perception in conjunction with personality. I am eager to see what the results of this experiment will be! 

Dehumanization

Dr. Susan Fiske came to speak at Duke about the treats of stereotyping and its consequences for the evaluation of those around us. She presented her stereotype content model, which describes how humans tend to categorize other groups of people based on race, gender, age, and status in society. In addition, social relationships, cooperation, competition, and power can encourage or discourage forms of discrimination. By asking people to make judgments about social groups using two dimensions, warmth and competence, she was able to point out how society values them. For example, in the video clip below, Dr. Fiske and Ph D candidate Mike North discuss the pity that people feel for older people, who are categorized as having high warmth but low competence. 

I was most intrigued by her thoughts on dehumanization of certain groups. Those who are believed to have low warmth and low competence are evaluated with disgust, like those who are homeless. She noted that fMRI studies have indicated that the MPFC does not activate when we evaluate the homeless. She suggested that almost as if by default, we do not humanize them and think about their points of view. In other words, it seems as though we dehumanize people with our stereotypes of disgust. Going beyond our categories and prejudices to learn about the individual person requires motivation. If we are asked to think about the mental states of members of those groups, then we are more likely to individuate them and humanize them. I found it shocking that universally, our default tendency to form quick judgments about groups of people can involve dehumanizing others. However, it gives me hope that this can be overcome!

Hume's Philosophy

I find David Hume’s philosophy absolutely intriguing. He was a Scottish philosopher and empiricist who believed that "Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions.” Unlike Descartes and the rationalists before him, he believed that desire rather than reason governs human behavior and examined moral philosophy and free will within that context. He also believed that innate ideas do not exist, arguing that before humans can have impressions of the world, they must first directly experience them and learn from them, akin to the "tabula rasa" philosophy of Locke. For this reason, he felt that in scientific reasoning, we have to be careful about the things we include because they are biased by our perceptions. Our morality and ethics are based on feelings rather than abstract principles inherent in nature. Finally, he noted that we develop our scientific reasoning about the phenomena around us by noting the “constant conjunction” of causes and effects that occur, all based on the proximity of two events occurring in time. I think that this does indeed shed light on how we observe phenomenon in the world and form theories about why and how they occur. We do need to be careful about observing phenomenon in a controlled setting so that we rule out third variables as being the cause for something. Our passions do cause us to see the things we are looking for in the world and do color our perceptions of the things we experience. I look forward to learning more about his thoughts!

What does it mean to trust?

According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, trust implies an “assured reliance on the character, ability, strength, or truth of someone or something.” Thus, it would seem that trust involves taking a risk and relying on something other than oneself. Meanwhile, being trustworthy implies that you are a person on which others can rely to reduce risks to them.  Trust and reliability are valued in society. For this reason, people often act against their best self-interest in order to be seen as trustworthy.

Behavioral economists have studied this relationship using the Trust Game. In this game, two participants are given a certain amount of money. One person (P1), the proposer, offers any fraction of this amount to the other person (P2). The experimenter increases this amount by some factor before giving it to the second person (P2). Then, P2 has to decide how much money to return to P1. In a world that has evolved based on the principles of social Darwinism and survival of the fittest, behavioral economists have theorized that if human beings place value on having more money, then according to game theory, P2 would be likely to send over no money to P1, meaning that P1 would not send any money to P2 in the first place. Trust would not be established between the two players. 

However in many experiments like those conducted by Joyce Berg and her colleagues in 1995 ("Trust, Reciprocity, and Social History”), P1 often ends up receiving more than he/she originally sent to P2. I find this fascinating! It seems that the initial proposal of an amount, the first sharing of wealth, shows P2 that someone is placing trust in him or her with the hope that he or she will not abuse this trust. Without knowing who this other person is, P2 becomes influenced by society’s values of fairness and reciprocity, and he or she acts against his or her self-interest. Essentially, he or she acts in a manner consistent with the level of trust that is placed in him or her. 

In a psychology class on consumerism, we read Robert Cialdini’s Weapons of Influence. The book outlined all the ways in which authority, social proof, scarcity, commitment and consistency, and reciprocity can play a big factor in our purchasing decisions. However, it would be interesting to see how such weapons of influence can be studied using behavioral economics games.