If anyone thinks that their feeds updated automatically and are confused by this, it may be because you need to manually set your readers with the new feed URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/notrocketscience/

And the birth of Not Exactly Rocket Science

After two brilliant years at ScienceBlogs, I’m evolving, migrating, metastasising, metamorphosing, (retro)transposing and otherwise moving to a new home at Discover Blogs (as one clever commenter correctly guessed yesterday). My inaugural post is now up. 

Being part of this collective has been an amazing experience and I’m incredibly grateful to the crew at ScienceBlogs, and specifically Virginia Hughes, Erin Johnson and Arikia Millikan, for pushing my writing out to a wide audience without ever trying to nudge its direction. Special thanks also to my Scibling friends – there are too many of you to list here but you know who you are and we will undoubtedly keep in touch on Twitter and so on.

It wasn’t easy deciding to move to uncharted territory but I’m incredibly excited about joining my esteemed blogging chums Carl Zimmer and Sheril Kirshenbaum (who’ve already extended the warmest of welcomes), as well as Razib (he’s moved too!), Phil Plait, Sean Carroll, Chris Mooney, Andrew Moseman, Smriti Rao, and others. I’ve been impressed with the stable of writers that Discover have amalgamated and I’m honoured to join their ranks.

I sincerely hope that those of you who currently read my daily musings will follow me to my new abode. I may be relocating but the menu’s still the same.  Comments will be closed on this iteration of Not Exactly Rocket Science but all the old posts have moved across, so feel free to continue the discussions there.

So, effective immediately, I will be living at http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/ and the new feed is http://feeds.feedburner.com/notrocketscience. I’ll see you over there. In the meantime, please update your feed, bookmarks, links, blogrolls and so on. If you cared to spread the word about the new site to friends, family and colleagues, I would greatly appreciate it.

Up, up and away.

Look, it’s not like I’ve discovered the Higgs Boson…

To tie in with this week’s Research Blogging Awards announcement, I spent an enjoyable half-hour on Monday being interviewed by Dave Munger, who organised the awards. The interview is now up on the SEED website, with a title that made me smile. In it, I talk to Dave about winning the award, why and how I blog, and interactions between blogging and mainstream media.

Here’s an excerpt with the question that I get asked most frequently:

Munger: You’ve got a full-time job in addition to being a blogger–and you’re one of the most prolific bloggers on ResearchBlogging.org. How do you manage to balance your blog and your work life?

Yong: Everyone asks me this and I never really have a good answer. I’m going to start making stuff up: There are actually two of me. There’s an Ed Yong and a Fred Yong, who does most of my blogging.

Feel free to check out the full interview and let me know what you think, or ask any follow-up questions here. In the meantime, don’t forget to check back tomorrow afternoon/evening for some news…

PS: The photo above, which accompanies the interview on SEED’s homepage, was taken by my wife just last weekend at Cambridge University’s wonderful Museum of Zoology, a great, tranquil space with a giant ground sloth, a fin whale, an orca, a mutant two-tusked narwhal, a leatherback turtle, Megaloceros antlers, and this beautiful specimen. Guess the species…

Warning: this post contains sentiment. If you are cynical and/or British, you might want to avert your eyes. Alternatively, read this and then go watch some Charlie Brooker. For those of you still around, bear with me. It is really hard to write something like this without falling into an abyss of clichés.

A couple of days ago, Dave Munger, under a veil of tightest secrecy, told me that I’ve won the big prize in the first ever Research Blogging Awards. Not Exactly Rocket Science is apparently the Research Blog of the Year, as well as Best Lay-Level Blog and home of the Best Post of the Year (for duck sex). The announcements have just been made public and there’s an interview between Dave and myself coming up shortly on the SEED website.

Needless to say, I’m incredibly honoured, especially given that the awards were voted for by a jury of peers and colleages. I’ve been blogging for 3.5 years now. Right from the start, writing Not Exactly Rocket Science has been a labour of love, and often a lonely one carried out in the solitary hours of the night. I certainly enjoy what I do, but it’s always gratifying to learn that other people think well of it.

Plus I get a nice badge (see above), although it’s legitimacy as a blogging award badge is seriously questionable given the use of only one exclamation mark. 

For anyone unfamiliar with the Research Blogging Awards, they deal with blogs that describe scientific research, the prizes are sponsored by SEED, the nomination lists were drawn up by a panel of superstar bloggers and the final votes were cast by registered members of the ResearchBlogging community. In my mind, they are a fantastic idea. It is baffling that even now, bloggers often have to justify ourselves against straw-man accusations that we are nothing more than vitriolic agitators, when, in fact, the blogosphere is awash with excellent content. Getting bloggers together to celebrate that quailty can only be a good thing.

I’d like to congratulate and plug the other winners, including excellent blogs like Neurotopia, Highly Allochthonous, Respectful Insolence and A Blog Around the Clock. I’d encourage everyone to check them out as well as the full nominee list, which is full of writers that deserve your attention. To steal a phrase, customers who like Not Exactly Rocket Science might also like Laelaps, Observations of a Nerd, The Lay Scientist, Neurophilosophy, The Primate Diaries, Terra Sigillata, and more.

And finally, to everyone who voted, I offer my sincere and humble thanks. I can only say that I have every intention of continuing with Not Exactly Rocket Science and trying to improve the quality of material that appears here.

And while we’re on that topic, I have a big announceme.. oh look, is that the time?

Share

&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp

And so they do – Chen-Bo Zhong and Sanford DeVoe have found that fast food can actually induce haste and impatience, in ways that have nothing to do with eating. They showed that subliminal exposure to fast food symbols, such as McDonalds’ golden arches, can actually increase people’s reading speed. Just thinking about these foods can boost our preferences for time-saving goods and even nudge us towards financial decisions that value immediate gains over future returns. Fast food, it seems, is very appropriately named.

Zhong and DeVoe asked 57 students to stare at the centre of a computer screen while ignoring a stream of objects flashing past in the corners. For some of the students, these flashes included the logos of McDonald’s, KFC, Subway, Taco Bell, Burger King and Wendy’s, all appearing for just 12 milliseconds. We can’t consciously recognise images that appear this quickly and, indeed, none of the students said that they saw anything other than blocks of colour. 

The students were then asked to read out a 320-word description of Toronto and those who had subconsciously seen the fast food logos were faster. Even though they had no time limit, they whizzed through the text in just 70 seconds. The other students, who were shown blocks of colours in place of the logos, took a more leisurely 84 seconds.

Zhong and DeVoe also found that thoughts of fast food could sway students towards more efficient, time-saving products. They asked 91 students to complete a marketing survey by saying how much they wanted each of five product pairs. One option in each pair was more time-efficient (as rated by an independent panel of 54 people), such as 2-in-1 shampoo rather than regular shampoo or a four-slice toaster versus a one-slice one.

If the students had previously thought about the last time they ate at a fast food joint, they were more likely to prefer the time-saving products that students who had thought about their last visit to the grocery store. Zhong and DeVoe say that this supports their idea that thinking about fast-food makes people impatient. To me, this is the weakest part of their study, for products like 2-in-1 shampoo are as much about saving money (perhaps more so) as they are about saving time. Fast food is not only served quickly but priced cheaply, and it may be this aspect that altered the students’ preference.

However, the duo addressed this issue in their third experiment. They randomly asked 58 students to judge one of four different logos on their aesthetic qualities, including those of McDonald’s, KFC and two cheap diners. Later, they were told that they could either have $3 immediately or a larger sum in a week. They had to say how much it would take to make them delay their windfall.

As predicted, those who considered the fast food logos were more impatient, and demanded significantly more money to forego their smaller immediate payment in favour of a larger future one. It seems that they put a greater price on instant gratification over larger future returns

Of course, these results can’t tell us if fast food actually contributes to a culture of impatience and hurry, or if it’s just a symptom of it. Nor do they say anything about whether this effect is good or bad. That would all depend on context. As Zhong and DeVoe note, a brisk walking speed is a good thing if you’re trying to get to a meeting but it would be a sign of impatience if you’re aiming for a leisurely stroll in the park.

Their study does, however, suggest that fast food and the need to save time are inextricably linked in our minds so that even familiar brands can make us behave more hastily. They could even affect our economic decisions, harming our finances in the long run. As Zhong and DeVoe say, even our leisure activites are “experienced through the coloured glasses of impatience” and “it is possible that a fast food culture that extols saving time not only changes the way people eat, but also fundamentally alters the way they experience events”.

Reference: Psychological Science http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0956797610366090 If this link isn’t working, read why here

Photo: by Rene Sinn

More from the same group:

• Clean smells promote generosity and fair play; dark rooms and sunglasses promote deceit and selfishness
• Clean thoughts can soften moral judgments
• Social exclusion literally feels cold
• The Lady Macbeth effect – how physical cleanliness affects moral cleanliness

Share

Ring-necked parakeet

Red deer

We like to be in control of our own lives, and some of us have an automatic rebellious streak when we’re told what to do. We’re less likely to do a task if we’re ordered to do it than if we make the choice of our own volition. It seems that this effect is so strong that it even happens when the people giving the orders are… us.

In a set of three experiments, Ibrahim Senay from the University of Illinois has shown that people do better at a simple task if ask themselves whether they’ll do it than if they simply tell themselves to do so. Even a simple reversal of words – “Will I” compared to “I will” – can boost motivation and performance.

Therapists and managers alike are taught to ask people open questions that prompt them to think about problems for themselves, rather than having solutions imposed upon them. Senay’s work suggests that this approach would work even if we’re counselling or managing ourselves. When we question ourselves about our deeds and choices, we’re more likely to consider our motivations for doing something and feel like we’re in control of our actions. The effect is small but significant.

To begin with, Senay asked 53 psychology students to solve an anagram task, rearranging the letters of ten words into ten new ones. Before they started, they had to spend a minute thinking about either whether they would work on the task or simply that they would so do. The first group ended up with significantly higher scores than the second.

For his next experiment, Senay duplicated the same effect without any explicit instructions. Under the guise of a handwriting study, he asked 50 students to practice writing the words “I will”, “Will I”, “I”, or “Will”. After 20 repetitions, they were given some anagrams to do. The students who wrote “Will I” solved twice as many as those in the other groups. None of them guessed the true purpose of the experiment.

Finally, Senay asked 56 students to once again write 20 lines of either “I will” or “Will I”. Afterwards, they had to rate their intentions to start exercising regularly or continue doing so. They also had to rate 12 reasons for exercising according to their relevance to them, from internal motivators like taking responsibility for their health to external motivators like feeling guilty or ashamed of being idle. As before, the simple word swap had a significant effect. The recruits who wrote “Will I” were more likely to want to exercise, and their extra impetus was driven by a boost of self-motivation rather than a stronger pull from outside influences.

This isn’t the only study to show that subtle grammatical shifts can sway our intentions and behaviour. Just last year, William Hart and Dolores Albarracın (who also worked on Senay’s study) showed that people are more likely to repeat their actions if they describe things they did in the imperfect tense (“I was solving anagrams”) than the perfect tense (“I solved anagrams”). The latter construction firmly suggests that something was completed, while the former has more of an ongoing vibe.

This area is ripe for more investigation. Next, Senay wants to see if other verbs, like can, should or would, can affect our behaviour in a similar way. He’s also interested in whether speaking in an active or passive voice matters – the answers to that question should be of interest to all scientists and science writers, especially in light of this excellent Nature piece on whether a constant use of the passive voice could be young harming scientists.

For now, Senay’s work is a testament not just to the subtle power of grammar, but to the value of introspection and the simple act of asking yourself questions.

Reference: Psychological Science http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0956797610364751   If this link isn’t working, read why here

More psychological mindplay:

• Subliminal flag shifts political views and voting choices
• Quicker feedback for better performance
• Becoming better mind-readers – to work out how other people see you, use the right lens
• How objectification silences women – the male glance as a psychological muzzle
• In a pandemic climate, public sneezing increases fears of unrelated risks

Random picks from the archive:

• Pain in the eye of the beholder
• Language evolution witnessed in lab experiments
• Icebergs are hotspots for life

Share

&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp