Derren Brown: The Experiments- The Gameshow What is the experiment?

Brown’s second instalment in his series of ‘experiments’ was designed to show us how being anonymous in a crowd can, in his words, “turn perfectly nice people into internet bullies, or rioters, or hooligans”. To demonstrate, audience members were led to believe they were participating in a new interactive game show in which the fate of an unwitting member of the public was placed in their hands. The ‘target’ was a young man who was out for a drink with some friends.  Along with various actors, the man’s friends were in on the plan and were in contact with the studio via hidden earpieces.

Throughout the show, the audience were presented with a choice between two scenarios (one positive and one negative) for the man. The severity of the negative outcomes increased throughout the episode, and ranged from being mistakenly charged for an extra round of drinks, to being kidnapped by a ‘gang of thugs’.  The audience chose the scenario with a negative outcome each time, and for Brown, this was evidence of the moral depravity that inevitably follows anonymity in crowds.

Evaluation of the experiment

It is worth briefly noting several methodological problems with the study. These include the fact that it was not actually an experiment (as claimed by the title) since no independent variable was manipulated (there was not a sample making equivalent decisions alone or without masks), the ‘bad’ choice was always presented to the audience second, the audience understood that the consequences of their actions weren’t ‘real’, and Brown, who offered the audience the choices, is renowned for his skill in influencing people’s decision-making processes.

Brown stated during the episode and in an interview on his website that ‘deindividuation’ within crowds causes people to lose their identities and consequently behave in inevitably anti-social ways. Over thirty years of empirical work from the social identity tradition has discredited these claims. This research has shown that rather than a loss of identity within crowds, there is a shift from personal to social levels of identification.

The audience acted in terms of their collective identity as audience members in at least two ways. First, the very object of being in a game show audience is by definition to be entertained. Each time the audience were faced with a choice, they picked what was clearly the most entertaining option, and the selection that would prolong their involvement in the event. Second, the menacing masks that audience members wore were hardly neutral cues; in fact the very same masks were later worn by the ‘group of thugs’ who attempted the kidnap in the final scene. This is reminiscent of a famous study by Johnson and Downing (1979), who noted that when people were given robes resembling those of the Ku Klux Klan they displayed more anti-social behavior than control participants. However, when participants were given nurses’ uniforms they displayed significantly less anti-social behavior than controls.

By Jenna Nicholas and Nicole Kuruppuarachchi

Do video games increase violence and aggression?

Video games have often been associated with increasing violence and aggression in teens although there has been no scientific evidence proving the theory. 

Adam Lanza

One example is the Sandy Hook Massacre where 20 year old Adam Lanza killed 15 people at a Colorado high school in 1999.  Prior to the shooting Lanza often retreated to his bedroom with the windows sealed with black bin-liners and played video games.  One of the video games recovered was a school shooting game where the player must carry out a classroom killing as well as other violent video games such as Call of Duty.  However, Lanza had an obsession with mass murders as well as suffering from Asperger’s Disorder, along with “significant social impairments” and “extreme anxiety,” before showing signs of OCD – all of which he refused to get treatment for.  Although it appears there may be a link, the prosecutor concluded that there was no clear indication as to why he carried out the killing.

Anders Behring Breivik

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2

Another example is Anders Behring Breivik, who in 2011, carried out two attacks in Norway killing a total of 77 people.  The first attack was a car bomb near a Government building that killed a total of 8 lives and injured 209.  The second attack occurred at a summer camp in the island of Utøya where Anders, dressed as a police officer, opened fire and killed 69 people.  In court Anders stated that he used Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 as a training simulation, whilst using World of Warcraft as a cover for his extended period of isolation.

These two cases do show that video games are associated with increased violence and aggression; however the individual must already be showing signs of mental instability.

  

How to tell if someone is lying

A pair of flaming trousers (or a growing nose, à la Pinocchio) isn’t the only sign that a person is spewing falsehoods. Here, five experts teach you how to smoke out a fibber.

A Person’s Demeanor or Voice Radically Changes

As an investigator, I first try to assess how someone normally speaks. To do that, I begin an interview by asking questions that I know the answers to, like “What’s your full name?” or “Where do you live?” Some folks are naturally animated and talk fast; others are more subdued. Once I know which type of talker a person is, I start asking him questions that I don’t know the answer to. If his manner shifts abruptly—going from calm to agitated or lively to mellow—chances are he’s not telling the truth.

Gregg McCrary is a retired FBI criminal profiler and a crime analyst in Fredericksburg, Virginia.

A Person Avoids Saying “I”

In my research, I’ve discovered that when people fib about themselves, they tend to use I and me less often than people who are being truthful. Instead, they’ll speak about themselves in the third person (“This is a girl who loves to ski”) or even truncate their language (“Really into listening to jazz”)—anything to give themselves psychological distance from the lie.

Jeffrey Hancock is an associate professor of communication at Cornell University who studies online lying.

A Person Has an Answer for Everything

Ask most people what they were doing last week and they’ll have to pause and think about it. That’s even more true of teenagers, who generally don’t have the capacity to tell an elaborate story on the fly. So when I call a child into my office and he seems totally rehearsed—there’s zero hesitation before he answers a question—well, that’s a dead giveaway.

Julia Chung has been an educator for 16 years, first as a high school teacher in Los Angeles

A Person Fidgets and Fusses for No Reason

If someone keeps performing a random physical action that seems unnecessary—cleaning her glasses excessively, retying her shoelaces, or dusting off the (clean) table in front of her—she may be lying. The guilt and anxiety make her restless. That can be particularly true if she is lying to somebody she loves. When a person fibs to a traffic cop, she won’t necessarily fidget a lot. But if she is deceiving her husband, she won’t be able to sit still.

Barbara Mitchell has been a relationship therapist in New York City for 34 years.

Taken from: http://www.realsimple.com/work-life/life-strategies/how-to-tell-someone-lying/fidgets-no-reason

What are the best ways to learn ?

I am sure many of us now are realising that the days and months are going quicker and quicker, and before long the exam season will be here upon us. Even though it is a task many of us loathe to do, revision is an important task needed to be done. Therefore, we decided to investigate what are the most successful ways to study and revise, which may hopefully help all of us !

A new study says taking practice tests and engaging in distributed practice -- which means sticking to a schedule of spreading out your studying over time -- work the best. Surprisingly, the methods that were least effective when it came to getting a good grade on the big test were: summarization, highlighting, keyword mnemonics, creating imagery for text and re-reading. Therefore I am afraid just highlighting your notes, does not mean you have revised, sorry!

"I was shocked that some strategies that students use a lot -- such as re-reading and highlighting -- seem to provide minimal benefits to their learning and performance," study author Dr. John Dunlosky, professor of psychology and director of experimental training at Kent State University, said in a written statement. "By just replacing re-reading with delayed retrieval practice, students would benefit."

Ten different learning techniques were reviewed Dunlosky and his team and their review was published in the January 2013 issue of Psychological Science in the Public Interest.

The widely-used learning methods examined were:

• Elaborative interrogation: Generating an explanation for why an explicitly stated fact or concept is true
• Self-explanation: Explaining how new information is related to known information, or explaining steps taken during problem solving
• Summarization: Writing summaries (of various lengths) of to-be-learned texts
• Highlighting/underlining: Marking potentially important portions of to-be-learned materials while reading
• Keyword mnemonic: Using keywords and mental imagery to associate verbal materials
• Imagery for text: Attempting to form mental images of text materials while reading or listening
• Re-reading: Re-studying text material again after an initial reading
• Practice testing: Self-testing with flash cards or taking practice tests over to-be-learned material
• Distributed practice: Implementing a schedule of practice that spreads out study activities over time
• Interleaved practice: Implementing a schedule of practice that mixes different kinds of problems, or a schedule of study that mixes different kinds of material, within a single study session
But as mentioned previously, the two best were taking practice tests and engaging in distributed practice.

So now you know have to revise, it is now just a matter of when !

Victoria Kersey - Donovan and Lisa Murphy

Do smartphones make us lazy?

Every day we get everything from our phone we rely on them all day every day. Want to know who wrote that song? Google it. What train to get. Look on your app. We wonder how people managed to cope without them, but to be fair how hard could it actually be? Instead of actually thinking about things or memorising numbers we rely on our smartphones for everything. New study from the University of Waterloo in Canada says that there is connection between reliance on smartphones and not thinking deeply about how to solve problems.

Other studies have found that people who have strong cognitive skills spend less time on their devices than those with less brain power and those who think analytically also use their phone less frequently because they remember things or are able to work problems out for themselves.

So get off your phones and maybe you’ll discover your true potential!

Love Ella and Neamh

Why People with Asperger’s Syndrome Lack Empathy

Aspies have a huge disconnect between thinking and feeling, or cognitive empathy (CE) and emotional empathy (EE). But what is the cause of this disconnect?

True empathy is the ability to be aware of one’s own feelings and thoughts at the same time you are aware of another person’s feelings and thoughts (or several other persons’). It means having the ability to speak about this awareness and creating mutual understanding and a sense of caring for one another.

According to the latest neuroscience research discussed in Simon Baron-Cohen’s book, The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Evil, the cause is poorly working empathy circuits in the brain.

Each brain part in the empathy circuit is not so functional by itself but needs the other circuits to carry out the complex empathy task of really stepping into the shoes of another person.

• The medial prefrontal cortex compares your perspective to another person’s perspective.
• The dorsal medial prefrontal cortex helps you understand your own thoughts and feelings.
• The ventral medial prefrontal cortex stores information about how strongly you feel about a course of action.
• The inferior frontal gyrus helps with emotion recognition.
• The caudal anterior cingulate cortex is activated with pain, both when you feel yours and observe it in others.
• The anterior insula is involved in bodily self-awareness, something that is tied to empathy.
• The right temporoparietal junction helps you judge another person’s intentions and beliefs.
• The amygdala plays a central role in empathy because of its connection to fear, thereby cueing you to look at someone’s eyes to help you gather information about that person’s emotions and intentions. People with Asperger’s Syndrome avoid eye contact unless they are specifically instructed to look someone in the eye so a lot of information is lost.
• The mirror neuron system connects several parts of the brain. It responds when you engage in an action and when you observe others engage in an action. For example, these neurons fire when you gaze in a certain direction or observe another person gazing in the same direction (hence, “mirroring”). Your mirror neurons make you look in the same direction as the speaker, but you also need other empathy circuits to make meaning of why you are looking.

These are just a few regions of the brain’s empathy circuits. You can see that it’s a very complex system. If a single one of them doesn’t work, the whole network suffers, and so do our relationships.

“Will Aspies always be like this?” Researchers and clinicians aren’t sure. There are some promising therapies. So far we really have as little information on successful clinical interventions as we do on the genetic and neurological structure of the brain. The Aspie needs to recognize that he or she does indeed have zero degrees of empathy. And, the Aspie needs to stop expecting that his or her grasp of the facts should rule.

Reference

Baron-Cohen, Simon. (2011). The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Evil. New York: Basic Books, Inc.

Baron-Cohen suggests the cause of an Asperger’s sufferer’s lack of good social skills is poorly working empathy circuits in the brain.

 

The Psychology behind Big Brother

Big Brother

Big Brother is a popular reality game show franchise created by John de Mol.The premise of the show is that there is a group of people, dubbed as "housemates", living together in a specially constructed large house. During their time in the house they are isolated from the outside world and are not commonly aware of outside events. Contestants are continuously monitored by in-house television cameras as well as personal audio microphones during their stay. To win the final cash prize, a contestant must survive periodic evictions and be the last housemate remaining in the compound by the series' conclusion.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Brother_(TV_series)


The Psychology of Big Brother By Daniel Jones
 

     

This book allows you to learn to watch Big Brother in the same way as the psychologist watch the show. Throughout this book the reader will learn to be able to 'read' the unconscious information that the Big Brother housemates give off, noticing whether they are likely to be lying or telling the truth, whether they are being manipulative, who is likely to do well and who is not, and much more.

You will learn what effect being in the Big Brother house is likely to have psychologically on the housemates and who is likely to cope best under the conditions set by Big Brother. The reader will also learn about flirt signals, bullying in the house and interpreting the housemate's dreams. Throughout, this book has used examples from Celebrity Big Brother 2007 to illustrate the points that he is covering.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Psychology-Brother-Daniel-Jones/dp/1409228258

Nineteen Eighty-Four By George Orwell

 

     

The Tv series Big Brother is loosely based George Orwell's futuristic novel (in its time) was set in a totalitarian state, where every aspect of every person's life was governed by a body of powerful people who watched every move a citizen made through countless cameras and 'telescreens'. Nothing you said or did could be kept secret, and the similarity between this and the TV show 'Big Brother' ends there.

The story itself was much darker; not only were you being constantly watched, which would have been bad enough in itself, but even your thoughts were manipulated. You would literally be made to believe a lie if that's what Big Brother wanted.
http://www.funtrivia.com/askft/Question36080.html

By Jenna Nicholas and Nicole Kuruppuarachchi