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Swarm Behavior - National Geographic Magazine

Tags: bees, cybernetics, nature, psychology, scinece, self-organized on 2007-07-03 and saved by4 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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Shirky: A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy

Tags: emergence, group, psychology, social, software on 2007-04-13 and saved by25 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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STANFORD Magazine: March/April 2007 > Features > Mind-set Research

Tags: psychology, sports, talent on 2007-04-09 and saved by19 people -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromwww.stanfordalumni.org

Unlike much that passes for wisdom about education and performance, Dweck’s conclusions are grounded in solid research. She’s no rah-rah motivational coach proclaiming the sky’s the limit and attitude is everything; that’s too facile. But the evidence shows that if we hold a fixed mind-set, we’re bound not to reach as high as we might.
The most dramatic proof comes from a recent study by Dweck and Lisa Sorich Blackwell of low-achieving seventh graders. All students participated in sessions on study skills, the brain and the like; in addition, one group attended a neutral session on memory while the other learned that intelligence, like a muscle, grows stronger through exercise. Training students to adopt a growth mind-set about intelligence had a catalytic effect on motivation and math grades; students in the control group showed no improvement despite all the other interventions.
People with performance goals, she reasoned, think intelligence is fixed from birth. People with learning goals have a growth mind-set about intelligence, believing it can be developed. (Among themselves, psychologists call the growth mind-set an “incremental theory,” and use the term “entity theory” for the fixed mind-set.) The model was nearly complete (see diagram).
It certainly cemented Tony Faulkner’s belief that Dweck could help the Blackburn Rovers soccer team. Unlike the disadvantaged kids in Dweck’s middle-school study, the Rovers didn’t think they lacked what it took to succeed. Quite the opposite: they thought their talent should take them all the way. Yet both groups’ fixed mind-set about ability explains their aversion to effort.
Mindset: The New Psychology of Success
The key, she found, isn’t ability; it’s whether you look at ability as something inherent that needs to be demonstrated or as something that can be developed.
On some level, Faulkner knew the source of the trouble: British soccer culture held that star players are born, not made. If you buy into that view, and are told you’ve got immense talent, what’s the point of practice? If anything, training hard would tell you and others that you’re merely good, not great. Faulkner had identified the problem; but to fix it, he needed Dweck’s help.

Rosenhan experiment - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Tags: experiment, psychiatry, psychology, research on 2007-03-21 and saved by2 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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Wired 13.05: Dome Improvement

Tags: intelligence, interesting, iq, psychology, research, science, trends on 2007-03-20 and saved by4 people -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromwww.wired.com

visual media - interactive visual media in particular - poses an implicit challenge to our brains: We have to work through the logic of the new interface, follow clues, sense relationships. Perhaps unsurprisingly, these are the very skills that the Ravens tests measure - you survey a field of visual icons and look for unusual patterns.
When you take the Ravens test, you're confronted with a series of visual grids, each containing a mix of shapes that seem vaguely related to one another. Each grid contains a missing shape; to answer the implicit question posed by the test, you need to pick the correct missing shape from a selection of eight possibilities. To "solve" these puzzles, in other words, you have to scrutinize a changing set of icons, looking for unusual patterns and correlations among them.

This is not the kind of thinking that happens when you read a book or have a conversation with someone or take a history exam. But it is precisely the kind of mental work you do when you, say, struggle to program a VCR or master the interface on your new cell phone.
Most cognitive scholars remain genuinely perplexed. "I find it a puzzle and don't have a compelling explanation," wrote Harvard's Steven Pinker in an email exchange. "I suspect that it's either practice at taking tests or perhaps a large number of disparate factors that add up to the linear trend."
What part of our allegedly dumbed-down environment is making us smarter? It's not schools, since the tests that measure education-driven skills haven't shown the same steady gains. It's not nutrition - general improvement in diet leveled off in most industrialized countries shortly after World War II, just as the Flynn effect was accelerating.
But the fact is, that gene is making him 1 percent better, and the other 99 percent is that because he's slightly taller, he got all this environmental support." And what goes for basketball goes for intelligence: Small genetic differences get picked up and magnified in the environment, resulting in dramatically enhanced skills. "The heritability studies weren't wrong," Flynn says. "We just misinterpreted them."
The two most powerful indications of this are at the top and bottom of the chart: Identical twins raised in different environments have IQs almost as similar to each other as the same person tested twice, while adopted children living together - shared environment, but no shared genes - show no correlation. When you look at a chart like that, the evidence for significant heritability looks undeniable.