Monthly Archives: July 2007

Conserving Energy: My Friends Make Me Do It

Clive Thompson (8/15/07, Wired magazine, “Desktop Orbs Could Reform Energy Hogs“) suggests that we could effectively reduce energy consumption if our daily energy consumption was apparent to all of our friends on a site like MySpace or Facebook or sent it to our friends through an RSS feed.

Friends might compete to be more eco-friendly.

Thompson notes that such of eco-feedback mechanisms already work: hybrid-car owners try to maximize their energy efficiency through on-board real time dashboard displays showing instantanteous gas mileage.  Electricity company NStar notes that when customers have monitors that display real time energy use across their appliances, they change their behaviors and average 15-25% less energy consumption.

This suggested approach marries the use of feedback mechanisms with the power of social norms, and threatens to ostracize people who drive hummers or fail to replace their incandescent bulbs with compact fluorescent ones.

Thompson writes:  “it could spawn a cascade of conservation. It’s fun seeing your personal energy tab go down by kilowatts — but just imagine watching the world’s usage plunge by terawatts or petawatts. It would be like a global Prius, with millions worldwide tweaking the Earth for maximum mileage. Now that’s fun.”

Who’s READ Minding READ the READ Mind? (READ THIS)

A fascinating piece “Who’s Minding the Mind?” (Science Times, NYT, 7/31/07) discusses accumulating evidence of the influence of the subconscious on individuals’ actions.  Researchers think that smells, touch, sights, and other senses prime our brain to respond in a certain way, sometimes overwhelming or shifting our more normal, patterned conscious response.

There are lots of interesting experiments described (including the apochrophyal  subliminal advertising for concessions in a NJ movie theater in the late ’60s). But some of the following experiments relate most to how we treat others (trust or generosity or like/dislike):

  • Yale psychologists manipulated test subjects’ judgments of a lab assistant — a stranger to them – by whether they asked them on the way to “an experiment” to hold a warm cup of coffee or iced coffee.  The iced coffee created, as you might suspect, icier views of the lab assistant. (The lab assistant according to these subjects was colder, less social and more selfish” than the one that gave other random students a hot cup of coffee to hold.)   [I'm sure there is a dating/mating how-to book to be written from these and other such studies -- i.e., no iced lattes on a first date!] “The study participants, college students, had no idea that their social instincts were being deliberately manipulated. On the way to the laboratory, they had bumped into a laboratory assistant, who was holding textbooks, a clipboard, papers and a cup of hot or iced coffee — and asked for a hand with the cup….That was all it took:”

  • A 2004 experiment (at Stanford University, under Aaron Kay, psychologist) found that students could be subconsciously conditioned to respond in a more competitive or cooperative manner depending on whether there was a briefcase or a backpack on the other end of a table. The students played a 1-on-1 investment game with an unseen opponent.  “Half the students played while sitting at a large table, at the other end of which was a briefcase and a black leather portfolio. These students were far stingier with their money than the others, who played in an identical room, but with a backpack on the table instead. The mere presence of the briefcase, noticed but not consciously registered, generated business-related associations and expectations, the authors argue, leading the brain to run the most appropriate goal program: compete. The students had no sense of whether they had acted selfishly or generously.”
  • Northwestern University undergraduates in a 2006 experiment were asked to remember something unethical or virtuous they had done, “like betraying a friend…[or] returning lost property. Afterward, the students had their choice of a gift, an antiseptic wipe or a pencil; and those who had recalled bad behavior were twice as likely as the others to take the wipe. They had been primed to psychologically ‘cleanse’ their consciences…..Once their hands were wiped, the students became less likely to agree to volunteer their time to help with a graduate school project. Their hands were clean: the unconscious goal had been satisfied and now was being suppressed, the findings suggest.”

And brain imaging suggets that the brain uses the same neural circuits for subconscious as conscious processing.  The subconscious responses originate in the more reptilian part of the brain but then rise and compete against more conscious responses.  And the subconscious impact can be greater since we can’t easily moderate it, since we’re unaware of it being employed.


The article doesn’t mention it, but the findings are consistent with findings of Mahzarian Banaji with her Implicit Association Test where they find lots of implicit/subconscious discrimination against lots of groups (people of color, elderly, etc.).  One of the rare ways to improve people’s scores on the IAT is to have people spend some time prior to the test looking at pictures of inspirational figures from the discriminated against group; for example, if the test was to test implicit bias against blacks, subjects could lessen their implicit bias by looking at pictures of Jackie Robinson, Louis Armstrong, Maya Angelou, Barack Obama, etc.

The article relates to issues like social trust or social capital because it suggests potentially that one of the reasons why we are less generous or trusting to others might be that we receive more subliminal and subconscious signals (through others’ behavior or news broadcasts or advertisements) that leave us subconciously a lot less likely to be generous or trust than what our conscious might decide is our “approach.”  And in an environment like today when we are relatively more socially isolated, one can easily imagine that the relative weight of these subconscious influences is greater than when our conscious might be able to have stronger intuitions based on all our socializing, but I’m speculating on the latter.  Moreover, if our subsconscious does pick up on a lot of these signals, it certainly helps explain another reason why social capital tends to move in virtuous circles or viscious spirals because the actions (positive or negative) by others may be subconsciously spreading these to others who then in turn influence others subconsciously.

And on a lighter note, with so many women complaining that men don’t do their share of housecleaning, another experiment mentioned in this article suggested that people clean more (picking up loose crumbs in the experiment) when they smell citrus-scented cleaning fluid even though they aren’t aware that they are doing this.  So how about a product idea – boxer shorts (smelling of citrus-scented cleaning fluid) as a Christmas gift of women to their loved ones.

The full article, Who’s Minding the Mind? is available here 

Community mapping

















Overweight friends as social contagion (II)












Can your friends affect your weight?
















Getting the boomers to volunteer

I’ve written about this topic elsewhere

Getting them to volunteer will not be easy, but if one could get them to volunteer, it would be of immense importance given the size of the Boomer population.  An increase in Boomer volunteering could dramatically expand the ranks of volunteers, dramatically increase the health and happiness of Boomers.

VolunterMatch reports on recent survey data indicating that Boomers (even among non-volunteers) may be interested in volunteering.  The devil may well be in the details, because unless the survey was very thorough in trying to get the opinions of less civic minded Boomers, the people who are easiest to get on the phone are also probably most civicly minded and therefore most likely to volunteer.

Moreover, the definition of *non-volunteers* is a little suspect.  They seem to define non-volunteers as those who didn’t volunteer in the last year.  When data gathered by the Corporation for National Service seems to show that 33% of all volunteers don’t volunteer in consecutive years.  If Boomers are typical, then many of these *non-volunteer* Boomers may be Boomers who are volunteers but simply didn’t volunteer in the past year.

The question that was asked by Peter Hart and Associated in their phone interview of 300 adults (ages 55 and older) was “how interested are you in volunteering, either now or at some point in the future? Among older adults 55+ years of age who have not volunteered in the past year, 14% are very interested, 20% fairly interested, and 29% somewhat interested.   And of the 34% who say they are “very” or “fairly” interested in volunteering:
• 45% are college graduates
• 42% are professionals/managers
• 41% are women age 55-64
• 39% are churchgoers

As of yet, I have not been able to get an answer to what % of Boomers who haven’t been volunteers in the last 10-15 years really are interested in volunteering, as opposed to the inflated number that VolunterMatch used that presumably includes a lot of semi-regular Boomer volunteers that might volunteer one year but not the next.

The social formings of individuals’ psyches

There was an interesting column by David Brooks on Friday (NYT, 7/20/07).  Brooks, based on Douglas Hofstadter’s “I Am A Strange Loop“, discusses the idea of the relational self. Namely, that  Hofstadter’s work emphasizes “how profoundly we are shaped by relationships with others, but it’s not one of the those stiffling collectivist theories that puts the community above the individual.”  Brooks notes that this line of research invaldiates the Ayn Rand claim that success is merely a function of genius and willpower since there “is no self that exists before society.”

In a statement sure to vex fellow conservatives, Brooks notes that Hofstadter’s work “explains why it’s so hard to tackle concentrated poverty.  Human beings are permeable.  The habits that are common in underclass areas get inside the brains of those who grow up there and undermine long-range thinking and social trust.”    It explains how the same individual could be a flaming liberal or flaming conservative depending on where they grow up.

We’ve been interested in related questions of social identity (how people come to define themselves, what groups they see themselves as part of, etc.) and although the field of social identity is just starting to become a bit more hard-nosed, it has appeared clear to us that people’s sense of identity is partly informed by their social capital (who they hang around with and befriend, their relationships) and their social identity in turn also influences their social capital.  More work will need to be done to sort out how strong these arrrows are in both directions.  Are you more of a radical feminist or a Dittohead because of the friends you hang out with or does your identity as a radical feminist or Dittohead more influence who you relate to?

Brooks notes that in the information age we know that we’re connected to others by communication and “no man is an island” but yet the ways in which those webs of relationships and interconnections influence us is still somewhat of a mystery that Hofstadter is helping to solve.

[The Brooks article called "A Partnership of Minds" is available here.]

Volunteer and live to 100? Why Good Things Happen to Good People

Stephen Post and Jill Neimark have written a popular book on the health benefits of volunteering and doing good to others called Why Good Things Happen to Good People (2007) . More information available from their web site.

The book is written in a quite accessible way and captures many of the underlying research that talks about the health benefits of social connectedness, although they also have a special focus on how giving provides pleasure, happiness, and boosts immunological protection.

Among the studies they cite:

  • High School giving predicted positive physical and mental health some 50 years later (Psychologist Paul Wink, Wellesley College studying some 200 individuals from 1920-1970)
  • Giving significantly reduces mortality in sernior years. (Doug Oman, Univ. of California at Berkeley) Among individuals 55+ years of age, those who volunteered for two+ organizations reduced their chance of dying in the next 5 years 44% over those who didn’t. Only the cessation of smoking had a slightly higher health impact.
  • Giving eases economic anxiety. (Neal Krause, Univ. of Michigan) Among a population of 1000 churchgoing adults, those who had offered social support to others experienced reduced anxiety if they later came under economic stress.
  • Helping others increases your longevity, but receiving the same  help does not. (Psychologist Stephanie Brown, Univ. of Michigan).  Brown studied 400 older couples. Even adjusting for age, gender, physical and emotional health, personality, and marital status, Brown found that the givers were twice as likely to remain alive in the 5 years studied.
  • Sometimes just ‘thinking’ charitable thoughts is healthy. For example, a new NIH study found that just deciding to donate to a charity helps release the feel-good chemicals, dopamine and serotonin in the brain. And a Harvard University study (by David McClellan) showed that merely watching a movie of Mother Theresa boosted the immune system and that this could be sustained after the watching by thinking about this giving that had been observed.
  • Coveting thy neighbor’s investment decisions

    There’s a new, interesting paper that describes how we’re influenced by our social connections in how we invest.  The paper, called Information Diffusion Effects In Individual Investors’ Common Stock Purchases: Covet Thy Neighbors’ Investment Choices,” by Asst. Profs. Zoran Ivkovich and Scott Weisbenner at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. [Previous working paper available here.]

    The findings are summarized in Mark Hulbert’s Neighborly Advice, for Good or Ill (NYT, Business Section, 7/15/07).

    Hulbert writes: “The impulse to keep up with Joneses plays an enormous role in the behavior of consumers, whether they’re shopping for clothing or toothpaste, buying a home or deciding which school ought to be entrusted with their children…..It turns out that the investing arena is no different. When making changes in their portfolios, people pay a great deal of attention to what their neighbors are doing.”

    The study analyzed 35,000 households’ stock portfolios (that had accounts with a large discount brokerage firm from 1991-1996).

    Households from the same zip code were likely to herd in their investment behaviors (with the strongest herding for households more geographically proximate) and this herding was strongest in states that had the strongest social networks (using Robert Putnam‘s state-level data of social capital).   THe authors presume that in places with stronger social connections, individuals are more likely to learn what their friends and neighbors are doing, beit at the bowling alley, the PTA meeting, kids’ soccer, after church or at Rotary.

    Hulbert notes, “Because the time period the professors analyzed ended in 1996, it is unclear what impact, if any, the explosive growth in investment chat rooms, and of the Internet generally, might have on the word-of-mouth effect. But in his book “Bowling Alone,” Professor Putnam argues that more traditional modes of social interaction are in many ways far more powerful than those conducted over the Internet. This suggests that the word-of-mouth effect is likely to still be playing a powerful role, Professor Weisbenner indicated in an e-mail message.”

    Supremes: Who’s Your Daddy?

     Recent rulings by the Supreme court limiting the rights of free speech in schools, campaign finance reform, the right of Lilly Ledbetter and other workers to sue for pay discrimination, and the ability to use race to achieve equity in schools, enabling companies to set minimum prices, among other rulings, show how much the Supreme Court has tipped to the right with the appointment of Justices Alito and Roberts.  [Slate’s Emily Bazelon has a piece showing just how wrong some liberals who knew Roberts were in guessing that he’d be a moderate, reasonable, and wary of overturning precedent.]
    But the rulings, seemed the death knell for natural law, and a validation of The Supreme Court and the Attitudinal Model Revisited by Jeffrey Allan Segal/Harold J. Spaeth (2002) that showed that at least for the Supreme Court the law and precedent does not restrain personal preference. [Of course, perhaps we didn’t to know this after seeing the Supreme Court’s nadir in decision-making, putting an end to the recounting of Florida ballots in the 2000 election rather than enabling America to learn which presidential candidate, Bush or Gore, Floridians had actually elected.]