What is your snot saying?

Interesting video I first found on "Science of Us":

A personal theory of relativity

In many ways, we have a way of adapting our internal frame of reference. Instead of conforming to some objective reality, we often will try to place ourselves into the reference and determine how something might seem to us.

Considering my own personal experience, I think that this is true. When we've gone on walks, I might consider two miles to be a relative stroll while my son (who strides at half my pace) may consider it an endless march!

This article from Science of Us discusses how baseball players differ in the ways that they personally perceive a pitch. To a good hitter, the ball can seem much larger than to someone who struggles to put the ball in play. The ball itself doesn't change--it's only our perception of it that does!

For a 2005 paper, research psychologists Jessica Witt and Dennis Proffitt set up a table beside a softball game in Charlottesville, Virginia, the home of their school, the University of Virginia. For a free sports drink, ballplayers — 47 in all — were asked to partake in a brief psychology experiment. They were shown a poster with eight black circles on it, ranging from 9 centimeters to 11.8 centimeters in diameter. They were then asked to pick which circle corresponded the best with the actual size of a softball, which measures 10 centimeters. After selecting their circle, they reported their stats: at bats, hits, walks, and the like. The result: The better they hit, the bigger circle they selected. “If you’re hitting well the ball looks bigger, and if the ball looks bigger, you’re going to hit better,” Proffitt tells Science of Us. “What that suggests is that there is a reciprocal relationship between the perceived size and how well you’re going to do, and how well you do is going to be reflected in how big you perceive the object.”

I learned a new concept:  affordance.

While we walk around with the common-sense assumption that everybody sees the same objective reality, Proffitt says that nobody sees the same reality. The geometry your brain takes in isn’t the “disembodied” geometry of yardsticks, meters, and inches, which mean a lot in the abstractions of engineering or physics or math, but the “embodied” geometry of your physical form: The most accurate measurement, to an individual, is the most personal. That a basketball hoop is ten feet high means something very different to you if you’re five feet or seven feet tall. While hoops and goals and roads have objective qualities, what we see and perceive is profoundly shaped by the subjective — by your ability to interact with them. The research backs this up: Golfers who are putting well see holes as bigger; football placekickers who score more field goals see the uprights as wider and the crossbar lower; successful dart throwers recall targets being larger. 
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In psychology, this dynamic between an object and the things you can do with an object is called an “affordance,” coined by Cornell University psychologist and James J. Gibson, who is something of a Martin Luther–type figure in the study of visual perception. To Gibson, an affordance is the way an object and a subject fit together. “We call it a seat in general, or a stool, bench, chair, and so on, in particular,” Gibson wrote in The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. It can be natural like a ledge or rock or artificial, like a couch or a bleacher. “The color and texture of the surface are irrelevant,” he continues. “Knee-high for a child is not the same as knee-high for an adult, so the affordance is relative to the size of the individual. But if a surface is horizontal, flat, extended, rigid, and knee-high relative to a perceiver, it can in fact be sat upon.” Regardless of what the object is, if it fits a sittable set of qualities, then you can take a seat. It affords that to you.

The article goes on to talk about how the best players are actually using pattern recognition to determine which pitches are the best to swing at.

I like the idea that the world conforms to our personal experience of it. I think that must be true because I find it difficult to imagine that we could all perceive things in exactly the same manner.

Here is a link to the full article:  The Science of How Baseball Players Hit Fastballs

See It, Own It, Use It

Stress can actually be helpful.

I still get nervous before any big presentation. It's similar to the jitters you feel before a performance. While it can be a bit uncomfortable in the moment--my heart starts racing and it can get so bad that I am literally shaking--I also feel that without some nerves you end up lacking energy and vitality.

This article from Science of Us discusses actual research comparing two groups of students. The group that was told that stress could be helpful actually performed better.

Science of Us: Why Olympic Athletes Shouldn't Try to Calm Down

Here's one excerpt:

What’s interesting, though, is that a burgeoning scientific literature suggests that, when it comes to high-pressure, high-stakes task, trying to stay calm probably isn’t the best approach. In fact, it’s more likely to trip you up than to help you. It’s better, this research argues, to embrace your anxiety, but to reframe how to look at it — to take it as a sign that your body is getting ready to help you perform at the highest level. Now, there is a kernel of truth to the idea that anxiety can be harmful: If you’re extremely anxious, you probably won’t perform at a high level. But experts who study the psychology of performance under stress now believe that the goal shouldn’t be to get rid of your anxiety altogether, but rather to get it to a moderate level, and to then use it to your advantage.

A key point:

What mindset intervention research seems to find, over and over and over, is that contrary to the popular idea that stress is always bad and harmful (in the worst cases, deadly even), there’s a vitally important middle step between experiencing stress and responding to it: how you expect to respond to it. Your mindset with regard to stress is a strikingly powerful predictor of what stress will do to you, in other words.

Here is the three-step process:

1. See it. This entails simply recognizing that you are feeling anxious, and naming the source of your anxiety it a clear, explicit way. As the Crums put it, “[Y]ou might simply say to yourself: ‘I’m stressed about my son failing school.’ … Or ‘I’m stressed about my husband’s recent health diagnosis.’” For the sprinter, it could be something as simple as: “I’m nervous because this is a really important race.”

2. Own it. “The key to ‘owning’ your stress is to recognize that we tend to stress more, and more intensely, about things that matter to us,” write the Crums. You are stressed-out because the thing in question matters to you, or because it is somehow connected to something that does, by definition. This seems to have the effect of shifting people from pondering failure to reflecting on how a given source of stress matters to them, and what success might mean. For the sprinter, again, this is easy: “I’m stressed out because competing at the highest possible level is really important to me, I’ve been preparing for this race for years, and medaling in an Olympic event has always been a dream of mine.”

3. Use it. Time for some myth-busting about what stress is, and what it does to human bodies. “Contrary to what you might think,” write the Crums, “the body’s stress response was not designed to kill us. In fact, the evolutionary goal of the stress response was to help boost the body and mind into enhanced functioning, to help us grow and meet the demands we face.” Yes, in certain situations stress can be harmful, but again, as the aforementioned experiments showed: how you interpret it makes a huge difference. So now, when you’re feeling stressed, would be a good time to remember that stress brings all sorts of physiological benefits, that it releases hormones and increases the flow of blood and oxygen and does all sorts of other stuff that helps us prepare for the task ahead and perform better while it’s under way. The anxiety I’m feeling is going to help my body help me with this race, the sprinter might think to himself. It isn’t even anxiety, really — it’s excitement, anticipation at what my body can do when I train hard, which I have done, and when I push it to its limits, which I’m about to do.

None of this is particularly complicated, and it’s as useful for an office worker as it is for an Olympic sprinter. But even after you learn it, it’s easy to forget it given the chaos — and, yes, stress and anxiety — of everyday life. As with any habit, repetition matters: Make a point of reminding yourself, whenever possible, that anxiety doesn’t get to call the shots; you have the power to redefine it, to make it work for you, whether you’re getting into your stance for the race of your life or standing up to make an important presentation.

Depth perception

This article from "Science of Us" explains the psychology that bars use to "trick" you into buying more wine.

A bar actually ran an experiment. They served wines in differently sized glasses on different nights. Although the amount poured was the same, the results on customers were not. At the end of the experiment, they discovered that they sold more wine when they used a larger glass. The larger glass made it seem as if the customer was drinking less, so they would be more likely to order another!

Copas de vino en el Museo Vivancos de Haro en La Rioja

by Lourdes Cardenal -Wikimedia Commons

I think they are likely right!

Here is a link to the full article:  The way restaurants trick you into drinking more wine

Don't double dip!

Science of Us put out a great video that showed the before and after effects of double dipping. In summary, you certainly do add bacteria to items when you do it!

http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2016/04/we-finally-uncovered-the-scientific-truth-about-the-risks-of-double-dipping.html

Which incentive is more powerful?

What is the best way to motivate people? It's a simple question with a surprisingly difficult answer.

A professor performed an experiment on two different classes to see if he could come up with evidence.

Dalakas, a professor of marketing at California State University San Marcos, offered optional pop quizzes in both sections of his consumer-behavior class. If students did well on a quiz, they earned a point; if they did poorly, though, they lost a point. If they gained five points over the course of the semester, they could earn the right to opt out of the final exam.

The trick, however, was this, Dalakas writes for the Conversation:

In the first class, the students were told that the final exam was required but they could earn the right to not take it with five points from the quizzes. In the second class however, they were told that the final exam was optional. But, they could lose that right if they did not get five points from the quizzes.

So the difference was in the framing: The right to opt out of the final was either something to gain or something to lose.

Both classes had about the same number of students, learned the same material, earned about the same grades, and, of course, learned from the same teacher. But the outcomes were remarkably different. In the first class — where students were given the opportunity to work toward the right to opt out of the test — 43 percent of the students scored the five necessary points. But the second class — again, where the right to opt out of the final exam was presented as theirs to lose — had a much stronger showing at the end of the term, with 82 percent of students eligible to claim their right to skip the final exam.

Dalakas credits "loss aversion" as a more powerful tool than traditional bonus incentives.

Dalakas explains his findings with the behavioral-economics phenomenon called loss aversion, or the idea that our annoyance over losing something is stronger than our joy over gaining something. Dalakas uses the example of a $20 bill: You’d probably be peeved if you discovered you’d somehow lost 20 bucks. If you’d found a $20 bill lying around, on the other hand, you’d be happy — but the strength of that emotion would be milder than if you’d lost it.

What would you have done?

Here is the link to the full article:  http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2016/03/this-professor-turned-his-classes-into-an-experiment-in-motivation.html