How do you whip procrastination?

Over the summer, while I was in the field, I was listening to a book called "Predictably Irrational." It was a great book about behavioural economics, a sort of wedding between the findings of psychology, and what it should tell us about economic decision making by individuals and large groups of people. It's a very good book, and a very practical book, because it's full of gems about how to use innate human tendencies against themselves so we can do what we actually want to do - exercise more, save more money, be more honest, and so on. Here's a great example from the author himself, explaining how procrastination can be gamed.

Think like an Economist

My BiL  linked a really neat talk about how incentives matter (or don't) that had a neat animation to go with it. I'm not going to link it, because I'm mean like that. I'm not even going to link what I clicked on after that, which is an animation of another talk by Dan Levitt. Instead, I want to share the full version of the talk. It's a talk that's been in social psychology and economics circles for ages: is there such a thing as altruism?

Originally, my training is as a behavioural ecologist. Not as a geneticist, or population ecologist, or whatever. I studied behaviour. From a biological standpoint, altruism doesn't make much sense. Give away what you've worked to earn? If there's a gene for that behaviour, that gene will quickly go away as sure as a gene that results in an animal that tears holes in its side. In fact, for a long time, altruism was raised as an issue against evolution. Well, some very clever solutions show that you can have altruistic like behaviour, where you help your relatives (who have a copy of a gene for helping relatives), thereby increasing your own gene's fitness. An alternative solution, no less clever involves "I help you today, but you help me tomorrow." We call that reciprocal altruism. There's a number of other solutions to apparent altruism, where the giver is really getting something in return.

There's the rub. Is it possible to envision a situation where someone gets absolutely nothing in return? Or their family? Even feeling good about giving something is a benefit (although then you need to explain why one feels good about it). I think there probably is true altruism, but it's a mistake. It's a behaviour that goes off in the wrong context - we express the 'care for family' behaviour towards a total stranger because it miss-fires. But just because it's evolutionarily a mistake doesn't make it bad. After all, some of my favourite body parts don't have any function at all in one gender or another (I'll keep this blog pg-13 by not listing them. ;) ). Mistakes and misfires can be beautiful, wonderful. But that's not to say the whole problem of altruism is foxier than you'd think.

The Evolution of Mickey Mouse

A while back I wrote about neoteny in humans, and why most of us can't look at a bucket full of puppies without going "Aww!" It's all rooted in the evolution of the human brain, shaped by the millions of years something resembling Homo has been around. Jerry Coyne, author of the wonderful book "Why Evolution is True" (and author of a blog by the same name) gave his own take on the issue, which you can find here. I strongly recommend you give it a read! In it, he has a wonderful picture showing the neotenic evolution of Mickey Mouse. How could I not reproduce it here?

Notice how Mickey's characteristics keep changing. Gradually, he's become shorter snouted, thicker limbed, large headed and more squat. In short, more like a baby human's form. 'Generations' of drawings have been winnowed down to what we find the most visually appealing, and that turns out to be the most juvenilized version!

Spot the changes

Would you notice if I was switched with another person while we talked? What a silly question, you might reply. You can't get swapped out in a conversation, and if you were talking to someone, and not asleep, surely you'd notice if your conversation partner was changed for a new person. Oh, but you'd be oh so very wrong. Watch this short video, as a man asking for directions is changed out before two people's eyes, and neither of them notice that the person they were talking to is gone.





The problem is our brain is too good at filling in the gaps, and ignoring things it thinks are irrelevant. Much of what we see in our day to day life is a broadly painted picture, with our brains filling in the blanks with patterns from our previous experience. This makes eye-witness testimony some of the most unreliable and weakest of the forms of evidence. It's ironic that in law, eye-witness evidence is considered some of the strongest.

Edited to add: I forgot two things. First, I want to hat-tip Neuroskeptic for an article that had the video. Second, I want to link this other, more amusing video. In it, the person is not just swapped out for another White male with a similar hair cut, but by a bald White male, Black male, a much shorter Asian female, and a variety of other people. You'd think people would notice when the appearance and gender of the person they're talking to radically changed!

But you started out so well!

What colour is the colour for little girls? Well, if you were raised in a "Western" context, the answer is really simple. It's pink, duh. But if you think about it, there's no reason why pink should be for little girls per se, or why boys have blue. Why can't girls have brown, and boys have tangerine? It's just as logical as pink for girls, blue for boys. And I like the colour tangerine. And the fruit isn't half bad, either.

If the colours are arbirary, have they ever been different? Well, it turns out, yes, in fact they have:

The Sunday Sentinal, an American newspaper, in 1914 advised mothers: “If you like the color note on the little one’s garments, use pink for the boy and blue for the girl, if you are a follower of convention” (March 29, 1914).

Similarly, Ladies Home Journal informed: “There has been a great diversity of opinion on the subject, but the generally accepted rule is pink for the boy and blue for the girl. The reason is that pink being a more decided and stronger color is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl” (June, 1918).

Alas, no tangerine for boys, but Pink is definitely a manly colour. Who can argue with logic such as theirs? And note the dates: 1918 was not a very long time ago, in the grand scheme of things.

As you can probably guess, I'm quoting from a paper on the subject, which started out so great as it goes into the history, and the flip-flop somewhere in the early-mid 1900s. Oh, but it started out so great, ends in a great big wallow in Evolutionary Psychology. Evo-Psych can be a good tool for exploring behaviour, when employed properly, and in a comparative context. It tries to explain human behaviour in an evolutionary (often adaptive) context, bringing examples from our past.

But often, when it's implemented, it's vacuous nonsense. There's nothing to it. It's a lovely story that sounds great, but is ultimately untestable. They're sometimes called "Just So" stories, echoing a bit of the lack of rigour to them (and referencing a child's book). Why do humans sneeze when they go out into the light? Because it helped to clear our noses in our cave days. It's just so. This pseudoscience is rightly derrided. And Frassanito and Pettorini dive into it deep:

A recent argument proposes a biological basis, connected to evolved sex differences in specialized visual pathways that allows females to better discriminate red wavelengths. The hunter–gatherer theory proposes that female brains should be specialized for gathering-related tasks and is supported by studies of visual abilities [13]. Tricromacy and the second red–green system (L–M opponent channel) are “modern” adaptations in primate evolution thought to have evolved to facilitate the identification of ripe, yellow fruit or edible red leaves embedded in green foliage [12]. It is therefore plausible that, in specializing for gathering, the female brain honed the trichromatic adaptations (and developed more the P-cell pathway of vision), and these underpin the female preference for objects reddish. Research on foraging in contemporary nonhuman primates [5] supports this hypothesis. Whereas discrimination of red wavelengths appears to facilitate identification of plant food, a preference for red or pink appears to have an advantage for successful female reproduction. This preference for reddish-pink is thought to exist because infant faces compared to adult ones are reddish-pink, and red or pink may signal approach behaviors that enhance infant survival [7]

Where do I begin with that? First of all, it assumes a sexual segregation in hunting/gathering. Did women gather more than men? I'll dispute this in a moment, but let's assume for a moment that they did. So selection would favour females who had a red-preference. But. There is no down side to males inheriting this preference too. There's no reason for it to become sex-linked. This is good, because it may be highly difficult for such a behaviour to become sex linked! It would need to become tied to some sexually differentiated system, and this adds an additional layer of complexity. No one would deny that sex based differences in the male and female brains exist, but most of the big ones are older differences (such as mate preference).

And that assumes there was sexual segregation in labour! I had the good fortune of studying under Dennis Bramble for a short while, and he'd reported that in his studies of human adaptation to cursoriality (running), he found no sex differences for the middle percentiles. The elite athletes have a sex difference, but athletes are, by definition, weird. They're not normal. He reported to his class there was no sex difference human running energetics until some point deep into pregnancy (I don't recall the exact point, but it surprised me). As cursorial mammals, there is a minimum of sex-based differences. So much for evolved sexual segregation of labour!

It's worth nothing that [5] doesn't actually support their hypothesis AT ALL. There is no mention of sex based differences. At all. Anywhere. How does that support them? They might argue "Well, human (American) males don't show the preference! Ergo, there has been differentiation." Yes, but how many human males in America actively forage? The trait is superfluous, so if it is under cultural control, it could vanish without anyone being harmed. In fact, the sexual dimorphism in "Westerners" suggests that it is not an evolved characteristic, in light of our primate relatives!

So, where the heck is their evidence?

Frassanito, P., & Pettorini, B. (2008). Pink and blue: the color of gender Child's Nervous System, 24 (8), 881-882 DOI: 10.1007/s00381-007-0559-3

2d/3d illusion

Here's a neat illusion, sadly done as a you-tube video.

Tip of the 3d illusion to Bad Astronomy.

Run for your life!

I might have mentioned I love Barking up the Wrong Tree. Some days, I feel like it should be retitled, "The Blog of Correlation Being Confused with Causation," But today, as always, there's something that strikes my fancy. Like this guy in Stanford talking about Stress:




It has my quote of the day in it: "When you're running for your life, it's no time to ovulate!" :)

Why, I wonder, are our stress responses tied into purely psychological things? When he posed it like that, I couldn't help but go "Yeah, that doesn't make sense." After all, lets say socially, you're a baboon being harassed. Why should your body amp itself up for that? There isn't really anything you can do to alleviate the situation by just tinkering with physiology...  

Abstracts: Two much?

I picked this up from Barking up the Wrong Tree:
 When two is too many: Collaborative encoding impairs memory

Humans routinely encode and retrieve experiences in interactive, collaborative contexts. Yet much of what we know about human memory comes from research on individuals working in isolation. Some recent research has examined collaboration during retrieval, but not much is known about how collaboration during encoding affects memory. We examined this issue. Participants created episodes by elaborating on study materials alone or collaboratively, and they later performed a cued-recall task alone, with the study partner, or with a different partner (Experiment 1). Collaborative encoding impaired recall. This counterintuitive outcome was found for both individual and group recall, even when the same partners collaborated across encoding and retrieval. This impairment was significantly reduced, but persisted, when the encoding instructions encouraged free-flowing collaboration (Experiment 2). Thus, the collaborative-encoding deficit is robust in nature and likely occurs because collaborative encoding produces less effective cues for later retrieval. 

This goes against my intuition, as I thought the process of teaching things to other people (being forced to explain it) actually improves information retention. 

In general, the best type of studying (in my experience) is a) having a nice lunch and b) learning the information before the night before.

WTF, Austrailian reserachers! WTF!

I subscribe to Barking Up the Wrong Tree, which is a blog of random psych abstracts of varying interest. The blogger is big into behavioural economics, which I like. I like science in general. A lot. :)

Anyhow, I wasn't going to blog anything today - I'm on vacation, and I'm trying to find a cheaper fix for my ex-truck (maybe I should ride my snowmachine into work?). But I glanced at this abstract, and went !!! Read the first bit of the methods:

Tourists at the Koorana Saltwater Crocodile Farm in Coowonga, Queensland, Australia, including 62 males and 41 females, aged 18–66 (M = 34.2, SD = 13.3), were randomly assigned to play a laptop-simulated Electronic Gaming Machine (EGM) either: (1) prior to entry, or (2) after having held a 1-m saltwater-crocodile.

So, either you play slots, or they HAND YOU A CROCODILE, and then you play slots.

Remind me not to gamble in Austrailia! O.O!!

Australia:

Abstracts: Cross-cultural recognition of basic emotions through nonverbal emotional vocalizations

 Disa A. Sauter, Frank Eisner, Paul Ekman, and Sophie K. Scott. Cross-cultural recognition of basic emotions through nonverbal emotional vocalizations. PNAS 2010 107:2408-2412; published online before print January 25, 2010, doi:10.1073/pnas.0908239106

Emotional signals are crucial for sharing important information, with conspecifics, for example, to warn humans of danger. Humans use a range of different cues to communicate to others how they feel, including facial, vocal, and gestural signals. We examined the recognition of nonverbal emotional vocalizations, such as screams and laughs, across two dramatically different cultural groups. Western participants were compared to individuals from remote, culturally isolated Namibian villages. Vocalizations communicating the so-called “basic emotions” (anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, and surprise) were bidirectionally recognized. In contrast, a set of additional emotions was only recognized within, but not across, cultural boundaries. Our findings indicate that a number of primarily negative emotions have vocalizations that can be recognized across cultures, while most positive emotions are communicated with culture-specific signals.

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Vaguely interesting! I'm not sure I'm 100% on board with their methods, but the idea is definitely intriguing.

Recently, I was talking to a friend, who told the story of how a new teacher from the states tried to correct an elder's pronunciation. I said to my friend that I would have gone "That's nice" if it were me; my friend replied that the elder went "Mmm" and walked away (It was described as "Very Yup'ik" ;) ). And since we all know annecdotes are the best data (I say, tongue in cheek), I'd use this to suggest that there are also culture specific disapproval signals.

Random papers.

Here's some stuff that's not from my normal journal reading list, but I none the less find interesting:

Danger! Science jargon ahead!

Chimpanzees adopting unrelated children. (Altruism in Forest Chimpanzees: The Case of Adoption. Boesch et al 2010) So, the question is, is this an evolutionarily adaptive trait, that is to say, in provisioning these young they gain a benefit to their own fitness, or is this a spandrel - a maladaptive piece of behaviour that is the result of a more adaptive behaviour. I can see how the adaptionalist case would work - after all, rearing offspring would be a strong signal as to mate quality - but the argument that it's a spandrel seems more appealing, given the evidence. What I'd put a whole nickel on happening is that chemically, the same brain changes are going on in bonding with these unrelated individuals as it is with their actual offspring. Question: Why the heck isn't this seen in captive situations?

Positive selection in armpit odour? (A Functional ABCC11 Allele Is Essential in the Biochemical Formation of Human Axillary Odor. Martin et al 2010) So, Europeans and Africans have some components to their armpit sweat, and people descended from East Asian populations (which would include the groups that peopled the Americas?) have individuals with subtly different compositions. The frequency of the derived allele can reach upwards of 95% in those populations. Researchers found a DNA substitution that seems to result in a change in odour composition. East Asian (does this follow into American groups?) have a subtly different odorant composition, which the authors argue is the result of positive mate choice. Genomically, the show that it has benefit from strong positive selection. The allele reaches 95% frequency in some populations. I'm totally onboard with the idea that odour drives matechoice in humans (or is a driving factor), but I'm not sold on their description that this is the primary driver of this gene. Problem is, this gene also is a factor in the dry ear wax. Which we strongly suspect is adaptive. So, the adaptive tale of that gene is probably very complex.

Why Sodoku shouldn't be a spectator sport.

I had to qualify with a firearm last Saturday, with one of my hunting buddies standing right behind me as the Range Safety Officer. I did awful (Two three inch groups out of four), but well enough to pass. He gave me some crap over it, and I vaguely blamed 5 cups of coffee and no breakfast for my poor performance. Now, I know why:

So it turns out that social pressure has a similar effect to money - it too is a double-edged sword. It motivates people, especially in tasks that demand effort and no skill. But it can provide stress, too, and at some point that stress overwhelms the skill.

Social pressure is good for things like tug of war, or hiking (you can hike longer, faster with a friend, than you can alone), but anything that requires detailed skill, well... too much pressure can hurt the skill.

Hat tip to Barking up the Wrong Tree, one of the most fascinating blogs I've found in a while. Head there for the full article, why people with large extrinsic rewards aren't always motivated to do better.

Expectations in medicine

A neat little 6 minute video I stumbled across where a researcher discusses expectation biases in both pain control and beer.



His story about vinegar in beer reminded me about the study where they took expensive wines and sold them for cheap, and cheap wines and sold them as expensive, and both at their real prices. What mattered more than the sort of wine was the price tag. The higher the price, the more people reported enjoying it, it's quality, etc. We expect a 100 dollar bottle to be great, and a 2 dollar bottle to be questionable so much that it takes amazing push to get over that hump.

Priming the Pump

You've probably seen it a million times in the newspapers. "Alcohol was not a factor." It seems innocuous enough, but it's actually journalistically unethical. The biggest objection to the phrase comes when you apply it to something else, such as `Teenaged Drivers were not a factor in the accident.` There might be good reason to suspect Teen drivers were involved in an accident, since they're more prone to crashing their truck. However, because they're not relevant, it's not mentioned. In fact, there's a great deal of non-relevant things that are not mentioned.

But far from wasting page space, these kinds of phrases when given by authority figures (such as a newspaper, or a police agency) actually have the opposite effect. It's called `priming,` and Obama has a lot of problems with it. The meat of the issue is when an authority figure discusses something, even to say it's not associated, it almost instantly becomes associated. Because of how the Human Brain works, when you hear Obama say "There are no death Panels," people are more likely to think Death Panels exist. The more time an authority figure spends dispelling a rumour, the more authority that rumour takes. It seems backwards, but the human brain often is.

So, when people talk about accidents and say `Alcohol was not involved,` readers are more likely to take away the message that alcohol was involved. Or, at least, they're primed to consider that as a possibility, if they weren't before.  The News Miner is terrible about this, when they say that drugs were found at the scene of some crime, but drugs were not a factor in the crime. Instantly, people begin to assume it is a drug related crime, when in reality it's a totally false association. My favourite example of this is  when someone pointed  out that both Hitler and Stalin had moustaches, so history books should mention that mass-murder is not moustache related.

And the worst bit is, Journalists aren't ignorant of this. If the journalist went to that fancy pants college place, they almost invariably have learnt that a) this stuff happens and b) doing this is unethical. Sadly, many reporters and editors don't seem to be able to remember their actual training. Now, I'm probably never going to the battle on accident reports, when when people detail crime victims, and say they were in possession of, say, an once of marijuana in a totally drug-unrelated crime, that really cheeses me off.

Alcohol was not a factor in this post.

Aggression

I was thinking about writing about differences in use of objects in "Cultural activities" (I hate that phrase. Can you think of an un-cultural activity?) and how they drift over time. For example, nasqurrun, or the head things for yuraqing, used to be worn by men at some frequencies. But after kass'at contact with Alaska, female-only use got codified, and that's pretty much the way it is now.

Instead, I've got side tracked with a much more light hearted topic - physical aggression between spousal partners. A cheery subject! If I were to ask you to guess who is more likely to aggress against their spouses across the whole United States, you'd probably guess men are. Unless you're suspicious of a trick question, in which you'd guess the opposite. You paranoid people would win this round.

That's probably a surprising result, but it's actually a well supported one. Surveys in 1975, 1985 and other periods found shockingly high level of wife-to-husband violence. The results became even more surprising when you found out that severe violence (Kicking, hitting, beating, threatening with a weapon, using a weapon, etc.) was consistently higher amongst females than males. According to Bhrehm et al. 2005, (p.433) " Prospective research on aggression during the first years of marriage also found higher rates of Wife-to-Husband [aggression] (O' leary et al. 1989)".

Since the initial bunches of surveys and studies, there's been more, including some as recent as 1999 and 2005, "[...] including more than eighty published articles, books and other sources [...]" Obviously, this is an under-discussed facet of the human social experience. It may be men are reluctant to talk about it for cultural reasons, but more there seems a slightly more probable explanation.

Women out aggress their spouses in all measures of violence. However, our intuitive expectations for the subject might be somewhat explained through the outcome of aggression. To quote Barbra Morse (a researcher on such issues; 1995) "Women were more often the victims of severe partner assault and injury not because men strike more often, but because men strike harder."

Any given blow by a male is more likely to result in serious injury or harm. Normally, I'd be prattling on about how humans are more or less mono-morphic, when you compare us to differences between the genders in other species. Just compare bull moose and cow moose! However, in this case, the muscular differences between males and female humans are enough to result in a very different adverse outcomes (to steal the term from medicine).

The factors that predict spousal violence are complex, and I won't pretend to understand them. I could parrot back what's in my text book on the subject, but that wouldn't be a substitute for actually understanding the interplay of factors. Needless to say, like all aggression, it's complex.

The reason I'm blogging about this is I've been on an "Aggression" kick lately. I've got a question that's bothering me - one that sounds deceptively simple. I wonder how many fights an average male is involved in, in his lifetime. How many fights an average female is engaged in within her lifetime. And within the genders, how much 'heterogeneity' is there - that is, is it either people have many/no fights,  or is it that there are many intermediate of fights?  If you know the answer to this, I'd be greatly interested in hearing it.

MHC and stinky t-shirts.

I'm going to talk about human behaviour and evolution here. Remember my disclaimer! Don't commit the is-ought fallacy!

Go ahead. Go smell your significant other. I'll wait! Back. Smell good, don't they? Unless they're splitting wood, or something. Even then, I bet they smell better to you than anyone else while splitting wood.

This isn't a coincidence. Human mate choice is governed by quite a bit, and part of the `goal` is to mate disassortatively. That is, you don't want to mate with close relatives. Part of what helps you avoid inbreeding is MHC. Wait, isn't MHC the thing I mentioned earlier to help your immune system? It's the same! It also helps you pick mates. Versatile, eh?

We suspect MHC because of a few experiments. The first, by Wedekind et al. in 1995, had men wear t-shirts for two nights without washing. After that, the t-shirts were sealed in bags, and were presented to a number of women, who were to asked to rate the smells. Wedekind and colleagues collected the questionnaires, and some DNA from both the men and the women, to find out which type of MHC they had. They found that the women rated men with different MHC types as being more pleasant.

People were resistant to this study, because of the long-held wisdom that MHC was for the immune system only. Eventually, the study was replicated in Brazil by Santos et al. (in 2005), except using sweat directly instead. Critics cried that sure, there might be an inclination, but surely other factors weigh out in the final mate choice. Well, we have reason to believe these turn into actual matings - Ober and colleagues analysed marriage patterns in Hutterite  communities and concluded that people tended to marry individuals with different MHC types.

Interestingly, MHC also seems to predict fragrence preference in perfume Milinski and Wedekind found that MHC type predicted the type of fragrance people preferred for themselves. This predictive power didn't hold over to preferences for partner fragrance. But this is, in a way, expected: for self, perfume is advertising one own MHC complement. For others, it doesn't matter what MHC they have, so long as it's different from your own. 

Humans aren't the only critters who tend to marry/mate this way. Mice (Potts et al. 1991) tend to do that, as to Fat-Tailed leamurs (Schwensow et. al 2007), and fish such as Three-spined sticklebacks (Reusch et al 2001). There are many other species that have been studied, and this pattern found - though others where it hasn't. It's important to note the magnitude of the mate selection bias varies among species to levels difficult to detect.

It's worth noting that finding MHC disimilar mates is not a hard thing to do. If this was just to keep offspring MHC diverse, it'd probably be easier to pick an individual at random - they've got a low probability to be MHC similar. All human groups have a large amount of MHC diversity, and it's been well conserved through most human lineages. Truly, the only purpose this could serve is to avoid mating with those similar to ones-self - such as close relations. Today, avoiding inbreeding might seem trivial, but you don't have to go far back in human history to have a situation where two individuals don't know how related they are to eachother, because of incomplete genealogical knowledge. If you're a ground squirrel, life is even harder, knowing who your family is!

But if you're a ground squirrel, how are you reading this blog?

It's interesting to think that this is all going on without our being aware. Aside from some researchers, I don't think anyone out there is thinking, "Gosh, this person is right for me, because their MHC is clearly quite different from mine!" This is all going on inside our nose and brain without us even being aware of it. This is just one of many things we smell, but aren't quite completely aware of - the more we learn, the more it seems we're some of the worst judges of why we do things!

Bonus points to anyone who recognizes the movie clip. :)

Locus of Control

You might think Biologists look down their noses at Psychology. Well, you'd be mostly right. There's a lot of snobbery when it comes to other fields of science. Like, Physicists think they study the one true science, and everything else is just derived from their reality. Economists see most systems in an economic light, and question why other people just can't see how things work.

But I like Psychology, and I've taken a couple of courses in it. It's everything you didn't know about yourself - we're actually quite terrible at knowing why we do most of the things we humans do!

Recently, I started reading a bit on the Imposture Syndrome - it's where you feel that you've got to where you are by faking it. It's a big problem in Academia, where you're constantly surrounded by very smart people, and it makes you feel like you're the dumb person in the room who got in because of some sort of mistake. A related phenomenon is that you're more likely to seriously question your own work, and give other people a pass because you underestimate your own expertise.

A related thingy is the idea of a Locus of Control. It is a measure of how much control you think you can exercise in your life. People with a low score mean they think anything they do or don't, accomplish or fail to accomplish, is purely on their own head. That is to say, you think you can control whether good or bad things happen to you. A corollary of this is that when bad things happen to people, people with a low score tend to say they brought it on themselves. They also are more likely to assume their actions will be successful

On the opposite end of the spectrum are people with an external locus of control. The perceive the ones' advancement (or problems) as being due to things outside their control. You didn't get that promotion? It's because you weren't lucky, or there's grift in the system. Or something was fated. The view is more of life blowing them around to wherever they are.

There's suggestions that one's locus of control is derived from experiences in the family. Based on this, it shouldn't be surprising that culture is somewhat predictive of whether one has an internal or external locus of control - though, it's a weak prediction. Arabs, for example, are slightly more likely to be `fatalistic` (not my words!), and therefore score as having more external control.

There's a cool little questionaire that you can take online from a psych proffs' webpage, where you can find out whether you have a more internal or external locus of control. You can find it here. When you take it, just follow the instructions, and if you find one you can't decide on, pick the least worst of the two. For the curious, I scored as having a weakly external locus of control.

So long as you've decided...

Sadly, I haven't time for a proper post this morning. But I'd like to share something that popped up via slashdot:

Professor Ariely describes some experiments which demonstrated something he calls “arbitrary coherence”.  Basically it means that once you contemplate a decision or actually make a decision, it will heavily influence your subsequent decisions.  That’s the coherence part.  Your brain will try to keep your decisions consistent with previous decisions you have made.

The author goes on to describe how even basing an initial decision  on random data (in this case, the last two digits of their soc. number) strongly influences subsequent decisions. It goes back to the whole cognitive bias of `Well, it doesn't matter if you made a bad decision, so long as you made a decision.`