more interesting reading from cialdani's book, influence.

before christmas: run ads for the 'it' toy (think: beanie babie, tickle me elmo, furbie, xbox, wii, etc.) to drum up demand from kids getting parents to promise the toy.

during christmas: undersupply stores with these products, oversupply stores with replacement toys of equal value. the 'it' toy sells out, but christmas isn't christmas without a toy under the tree, so replacement toys of equal value are temporarily substituted.

after christmas: run ads for the 'it' toy again, reminding kids their parents promised! guilt ensues and purchases are made...

voila! parents are suckered into buying the 'it' toy anyway to teach the lesson of "keeping promises" after already having a toy of equal value during the christmas season. perfect solution to otherwise expected january/february dip in toy sales.

don't get suckered!

want to try a cool little experiment?

send christmas cards to strangers this year and see what you get back.

one professor did this and got a bunch of cards back. wonder if it still works in "times like these".

clever experiment by ellen lerner. imagine there's someone using the xerox and you'd like to ask permission to use the xerox before them.

if you say, "excuse me, i have five pages. can i use the xerox because i'm in a rush?", she finds that 94% of people will let you.

if you say, "excuse me, i have five pages. can i use the xerox?", only about 60% of people will let you.

well, it may seem obvious that it's because the first one carries with it a legitimate reason.

BUT if you say, "excuse me, i have five pages. can i use the xerox because i need to make some copies?", still around 93% of people will let you and you haven't provided any more of a legitimate of a reason than you did in the second request.

now, the story actually seems to say that if you just use the word, "because", people will automatically assume you have a legitimate reason.

weird, but true.

mother turkeys are extremely protective of her chicks. oddly enough though, mother only respond to the "cheep-cheep" sound baby turkeys make - not by sight, smell, touch, or anything else. on hearing the "cheep-cheep" sound, mother turkeys will gather the chick under her wing to protect and comfort it. if a mother turkey feels the need to become defensive though, her attacks are absolutely vicious. these attacks are extremeley violent displays of rage often involving squawking, pecking, clawing, etc., and these responses are so ingrained that even a stuffed polecat will ellicit an attack.

hm.. so what do you think happens when a stuffed polecat is implanted with a recording of the "cheep-cheep" sound? haha. oh, what a contradictory idea! what a quandary!... but rest your anxious souls. animal behaviorist, m.w. fox, actually did this experiment and found that mother turkeys will actually welcome the stuffed polecat into its brood if it can produce the "cheep-cheep" sound of baby turkeys.

what the goofy?

i don't know if that is a universally american childhood saying or if it was something my silly group of second-generational chinese american childhood friends made up, but apparently... not so true.

"Jackson’s findings showed that outside of flu season, the baseline risk of death among people who did not get vaccinated was approximately 60 percent higher than among those who did, lending support to the hypothesis that on average, healthy people chose to get the vaccine, while the “frail elderly” didn’t or couldn’t. In fact, the healthy-user effect explained the entire benefit that other researchers were attributing to flu vaccine, suggesting that the vaccine itself might not reduce mortality at all."

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200911/brownlee-h1n1

via Bo

http://www.shokay.com/ebook/

... if you are indeed in need of inspiration.

the butterfly circus

Indeed, it is not possible to do "good" research. And, of course, to do good research, in practice, is even harder than that.

(McGrath 1981)

some "fun" friday night reading while waiting for stephen to arrive... actually, a prof suggested it as helpful reading for my research, but it's actually quite interesting if you take the time and energy to read it.

anyway, some crazy smart dudes set up what i think is an extremely clever simulation to model this and found:

In an initial cooperation-unfriendly world, individuals can occasionally be led to enter cooperative games that are played to costly mutual defect outcomes, thus selecting for high mindreading capacities. Once in place, those capacities permit upward drift on cooperative dispositions. Individuals with such dispositions are the frequent targets of exploitative attempts by those who are more defection-inclined, but their mindreading allows them to survive (via alternative choices) no differently from others in the population. At some point, however, two such individuals with higher probabilities of cooperating are likely to play a cooperative game with each other and to do so cooperatively— and, given that the alternative payoff is less than the mutually cooperative payoff, they will prosper by comparison with the rest of the population. Quite rapidly, the descendants of these individuals populate the entire ecology. The equilibrium level of cooperative dispositions after such a transition is high enough to attract skilled mind-readers into cooperative games but low enough to extract some gains from exploiting them once they have entered. Transitions are sustained by selection in favor of individuals who “discover” an optimal mixture of mindreading and mistrust—sufficient to ensure that they accept the true “I will always cooperate” messages characteristic of this environment but low enough to ensure that they reject the false messages that are, nevertheless, still being sent.

heh, have i officially crossed the line into academic nerdom?