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Money And The Brain: More Weirdness - Planet Money Blog : NPR
reports some experiments by Kathleen Vohs
I cite: On Being Postacademic
Yet at least within the bourgeoisie the existence of a monetary reference point provides some resistance to personal power, while the structure of institutionalized intellectual work permits no such outside reference point — not community service, not ethics, not, in light of the inability of humanities scholars to agree about what such a concept might mean, truth. Academia has neither capitalist forms of abstraction nor socialist forms of solidarity to recommend it.
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The one conversation everyone is having incessantly is the one about
the micropolitical maneuvers within the department. This conversation
is, of course always done with armor on, with an eye toward alliances
and enemies already made, with everyone watching to find out which camp
the new faculty member will join. -
Because no one is talking about substance, only alliances, and
because alienation is general, a vacuum exists at the center of
institutional power which is not filled by talent or argument, but by
those who feel most comfortable or justified taking advantage of it. - 1 more annotations...
group threat bleg « orgtheory.net
Question for you soc psych folks: What are the modern articles addressing threat and group identity?
[cond-mat/0403299] Discrete Hierarchical Organization of Social Group Sizes
The "social brain hypothesis" for the evolution of large brains in primates has led to evidence for the coevolution of neocortical size and social group sizes. Extrapolation of these findings to modern humans indicated that the equivalent group size for our species should be approximately 150 (essentially the number of people known personally as individuals). Here, we combine data on human grouping in a comprehensive and systematic study. Using fractal analysis, we identify with high statistical confidence a discrete hierarchy of group sizes with a preferred scaling ratio close to 3: rather than a single or a continuous spectrum of group sizes, humans spontaneously form groups of preferred sizes organized in a geometrical series approximating 3, 9, 27,... Such discrete scale invariance (DSI) could be related to that identified in signatures of herding behavior in financial markets and might reflect a hierarchical processing of social nearness by human brains.
Cognitive Edge - Guest Blog
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The problem with this is that social groups do not have a single brain, and while multiple brains firing off communications and information at each other might seem to mirror the firing of neurons and lead us up the path of thinking about “meta-brains”, we are far too loosely and unreliably connected, I believe, to legitimize a strong analogy between a single person’s mental life and the mental life of an organisation or other social group. We can’t expect a social group to act like a tightly integrated organism with a single brain, however much utility that mental model may have in channeling our emotions and responses. Sanity and mental health in organisations is not the same thing as sanity and mental health in individuals.
It might be true in theory that organisations have a higher order mental life which is accessible to itself in the way that the minds of human individuals are accessible to us. But it’s hard to see how such a higher order mental life could be any more accessible to us than our mental lives are accessible to the cells in our liver. If there were such a higher order consciousness, we could only imagine, and imagine poorly.
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Organisations, it seems to me, work very much like slime mould aggegrates, with the two major differences that they are ridden by leaders that attempt to direct the mass in more than instinctual ways, and that the cells can belong simultaneously to different organisms pursuing very different agendas.
This suggests very strongly that if we want to understand organisations and their patterns of behaviour, the whole fascination we have about quality of leadership in organisational has limited value. Leaders are not a proxy for how the organisation thinks and behaves, and while they may have strong influences on the organisations they (attempt to) direct, those influences and the efficacy of leadership cannot be fully understood by looking at the source (the leaders themselves), but on the pattern behaviours that result, and the depth and durability of those pattern behaviours.
This is not to say we should not seek to improve and understand the quality of leadership, but that its value for enlightening us on organisational life is very limited.
- 1 more annotations...
Mind Hacks: Leadership can be based on quantity not quality
"They found that those who spoke more were rated as more competent and influential." This spells doom for me.
Dynamic spread of happiness in a large social network: longitudinal analysis over 20 years in the Framingham Heart Study -- Fowler and Christakis 337: a2338 -- BMJ
Abstract
Objectives To evaluate whether happiness can spread from person to person and whether niches of happiness form within social networks.
Design Longitudinal social network analysis.
Setting Framingham Heart Study social network.
Participants 4739 individuals followed from 1983 to 2003.
Main outcome measures Happiness measured with validated four item scale; broad array of attributes of social networks and diverse social ties.
Results Clusters of happy and unhappy people are visible in the network, and the relationship between people’s happiness extends up to three degrees of separation (for example, to the friends of one’s friends’ friends). People who are surrounded by many happy people and those who are central in the network are more likely to become happy in the future. Longitudinal statistical models suggest that clusters of happiness result from the spread of happiness and not just a tendency for people to associate with similar individuals. A friend who lives within a mile (about 1.6 km) and who becomes happy increases the probability that a person is happy by 25% (95% confidence interval 1% to 57%). Similar effects are seen in coresident spouses (8%, 0.2% to 16%), siblings who live within a mile (14%, 1% to 28%), and next door neighbours (34%, 7% to 70%). Effects are not seen between coworkers. The effect decays with time and with geographical separation.
Conclusions People’s happiness depends on the happiness of others with whom they are connected. This provides further justification for seeing happiness, like health, as a collective phenomenon.
PsycNET - If you need help, just ask: Underestimating compliance with direct requests for help.
A series of studies tested whether people underestimate the likelihood that others will comply with their direct requests for help. In the first 3 studies, people underestimated by as much as 50% the likelihood that others would agree to a direct request for help, across a range of requests occurring in both experimental and natural field settings. Studies 4 and 5 demonstrated that experimentally manipulating a person's perspective (as help seeker or potential helper) could elicit this underestimation effect. Finally, in Study 6, the authors explored the source of the bias, finding that help seekers were less willing than potential helpers were to appreciate the social costs of refusing a direct request for help (the costs of saying "no"), attending instead to the instrumental costs of helping (the costs of saying "yes"). (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2008 APA, all rights reserved)
PsycNET - God and the government: Testing a compensatory control mechanism for the support of external systems.
The authors propose that the high levels of support often observed for governmental and religious systems can be explained, in part, as a means of coping with the threat posed by chronically or situationally fluctuating levels of perceived personal control. Three experiments demonstrated a causal relation between lowered perceptions of personal control and the defense of external systems, including increased beliefs in the existence of a controlling God (Studies 1 and 2) and defense of the overarching socio-political system (Study 4). A 4th experiment (Study 5) showed the converse to be true: A challenge to the usefulness of external systems of control led to increased illusory perceptions of personal control. In addition, a cross-national data set demonstrated that lower levels of personal control are associated with higher support for governmental control (across 67 nations; Study 3). Each study identified theoretically consistent moderators and mediators of these effects. The implications of these results for understanding why a high percentage of the population believes in the existence of God, and why people so often endorse and justify their socio-political systems, are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2008 APA, all rights reserved)
PsycNET - If you need help, just ask: Underestimating compliance with direct requests for help.
A series of studies tested whether people underestimate the likelihood that others will comply with their direct requests for help. In the first 3 studies, people underestimated by as much as 50% the likelihood that others would agree to a direct request
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