Sunday morning social science

A relaxing Sunday morning of feed-reading has yielded some nice treats.

Check out this story about babies exhibiting social intelligence.

The babies were sat on their parents’ laps and shown a display representing a character trying to climb a hill.

The climbing character, which had eyes to make it human-like, was either knocked down the hill by an unhelpful character (a toy of a different shape and colour) or pushed up the hill by a helper cartoon figure (another shape and colour).

After watching the “puppet show” several times, each baby was presented with the helper and hinderer toys and asked to pick one.

All of the 12 six-month-old babies tested and 14 of the 16 10-month-olds reached out to touch the helper character rather than the anti-social one.

Researchers controlled for various aspects of appearance in order to be certain the babies were really making their choice based on who helped. This actually doesn’t come as a very big surprise to me, but it’s definitely nice to have some evidence that points to such reasoning being present in infants less than a year old.

Next up is a poorly conceived study that claims men are motivated by superior wages. First off, duh. Second, there’s no control group! The entire sample is composed of men, 38 of them, and yet the researchers claim their results applied to men rather than to humans in general. Now, this could just be shoddy reporting, but why would the researchers only select male participants?

In the study, 38 pairs of male volunteers were asked to perform the same simple task simultaneously, and promised payment for success.

Both “players” were asked to estimate the number of dots appearing on a screen. Providing the right answer earned a real financial reward between 30 (£22) and 120 (£86) euros. Each of the participants was told how their partners had performed and how much they were paid.

[...]

A wrong answer, and no payment, resulted in a reduction in blood flow to the “reward region”. But the area “lit up” when volunteers earned money, and interestingly showed far more activity if a player received more than his partner.

This indicated that stimulation of the reward centre was not merely linked to individual success, but to the success of others.

Finally, I found a nice 10-page write-up on the pronunciation of “Thanksgiving.” Apparently the word has pretty much always been accented on the second syllable, and it’s somewhat of a linguistic oddity because of that. Who knew? I think my favorite part of the article was these archaic spelling examples:

1539 BIBLE (Great) 1 Tim. iv. 4 For all the creatures of God are good, and nothing to be refused, yf it be receaued with thankesgeuynge.
1535 COVERDALE Ps. xxxix. [xl.] 3 He hath put a new songe in my mouth, euen a thankesgeuynge vnto oure God.
1641 Nicholas Papers (Camden) 10 It was resolved that there shalbe on ye 7th of September next a publique thanksgiving for this good accord betweene ye 2 nacions.

What a silly language English is.