So to research how ideas and trends spread virally, Watts (who is author of Everything is Obvious, principal research scientist at Yahoo! Research (he directs their Human Social Dynamics group), and founding director of Columbia University’s Collective Dynamics Group) ran large-scale reproductions of the small world experiment and hundreds of computer simulations that brought forward two conclusions: the six degrees of separation theory is correct, but there is no evidence for super-connected ‘trend gatekeepers’ (such as Gladwell’s ‘Connectors’):

But Watts, for one, didn’t think the gatekeeper model was true. It certainly didn’t match what he’d found studying networks. So he decided to test it in the real world by remounting the Milgram experiment on a massive scale. In 2001, Watts used a Web site to recruit about 61,000 people, then asked them to ferry messages to 18 targets worldwide. Sure enough, he found that Milgram was right: The average length of the chain was roughly six links. But when he examined these pathways, he found that “hubs”–highly connected people–weren’t crucial. Sure, they existed. But only 5% of the email messages passed through one of these superconnectors. The rest of the messages moved through society in much more democratic paths, zipping from one weakly connected individual to another, until they arrived at the target. […]

[His computer simulation] results were deeply counterintuitive. The experiment did produce several hundred societywide infections. But in the large majority of cases, the cascade began with an average Joe (although in cases where an Influential touched off the trend, it spread much further). To stack the deck in favor of Influentials, Watts changed the simulation, making them 10 times more connected. Now they could infect 40 times more people than the average citizen (and again, when they kicked off a cascade, it was substantially larger). But the rank-and-file citizen was still far more likely to start a contagion.

I can’t help but find it somewhat ironic that, written almost four years ago, this argument hasn’t really gained much traction and Gladwell’s ideas are still discussed ad nauseam.

• Social Networks and Their Far-Reaching Influence
• The Contagion of Happiness
• Gladwell, Journo-gurus, and Anecdotes as Science

Taking his cue from Scott McCloud’s excellent Understanding Comics, Lukas Mathis looks at how for optimum recognition and in order to aid understanding, user interface elements must find the sweet spot between universality and realism. Like when drawing certain comics, it’s about finding the optimum comprimise between too little detail and too much.

People are confused by symbols if they have too many or too few details. They will recognize UI elements which are somewhere in the middle.

The trick is to figure out which details help users identify the UI element, and which details distract from its intended meaning. Some details help users figure out what they’re looking at and how they can interact with it; other details distract from the idea you’re trying to convey. They turn your interface element from a concept into a specific thing. Thus, if an interface element is too distinct from its real-life counterpart, it becomes too hard to recognize. On the other hand, if it is too realistic, people are unable to figure out that you’re trying to communicate an idea, and what idea that might be.

• Dark Patterns: Evil Design Patterns
• Comedic Writing Tips
• Persuasive Design Patterns

What they found were three fantastically devious secret ways to effectively control trolls and other abusive users on online communities: the hellban, slowban, and errorban:

A hellbanned user is invisible to all other users, but crucially, not himself. From their perspective, they are participating normally in the community but nobody ever responds to them. They can no longer disrupt the community because they are effectively a ghost. It’s a clever way of enforcing the “don’t feed the troll” rule in the community. When nothing they post ever gets a response, a hellbanned user is likely to get bored or frustrated and leave. I believe it, too; if I learned anything from reading The Great Brain as a child, it’s that the silent treatment is the cruelest punishment of them all. […]

(There is one additional form of hellbanning that I feel compelled to mention because it is particularly cruel – when hellbanned users can see only themselves and other hellbanned users. Brrr. I’m pretty sure Dante wrote a chapter about that, somewhere.)

A slowbanned user has delays forcibly introduced into every page they visit. From their perspective, your site has just gotten terribly, horribly slow. And stays that way. They can hardly disrupt the community when they’re struggling to get web pages to load. There’s also science behind this one, because per research from Google and Amazon, every page load delay directly reduces participation. Get slow enough, for long enough, and a slowbanned user is likely to seek out greener and speedier pastures elsewhere on the internet.

An errorbanned user has errors inserted at random into pages they visit. You might consider this a more severe extension of slowbanning – instead of pages loading slowly, they might not load at all, return cryptic HTTP errors, return the wrong page altogether, fail to load key dependencies like JavaScript and images and CSS, and so forth. I’m sure your devious little brains can imagine dozens of ways things could go “wrong” for an errorbanned user. This one is a bit more esoteric, but it isn’t theoretical; an existing implementation exists in the form of the Drupal Misery module.

• Taming White House Trolls
• The World of Web Trolling
• Social Networks and Their Far-Reaching Influence

In a study where researchers expressed delight before either presenting an infant with a toy (the reliable condition) or not presenting the infant with a toy (the unreliable condition), they discovered that infants detect “unreliable” people and choose not to learn from then, opting instead for adults that appear confident and knowledgeable — the reliable group.

“Infants seem to perceive reliable adults as capable of rational action, whose novel, unfamiliar behaviour is worth imitating,” the researchers said. “In contrast, the same behaviour performed by a previously unreliable adult is interpreted as irrational or inefficient, thus not worthy of imitating.” […]

The new finding adds to a growing body of research showing children’s selectivity in who they choose to learn from. For example, children prefer to learn from adults as opposed to their peers, and they prefer to learn from people they are familiar with and who appear more certain, confident and knowledgeable.

• The Infant Brain, Redux
• Development of the Infant Brain
• The Presence of Books and Children’s Intelligence

This cognitive difference between stray domestic dogs and their housebound brethren was uncovered by testing whether or not they understood the very human action of pointing (y’know, with your index finger). What struck me most in this discussion was this brief theory of how the action of pointing evolved:

Go ahead, let your wrist go limp and look at your hand from the side, or if you’re too insecure in your own sexuality, just picture Adam’s limp wrist at the moment of creation in Michelangelo’s masterpiece on the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling. See how even in this relaxed state the index finger is slightly extended? By contrast, when chimps do this […] their index finger falls naturally in line with their other fingers. Povinelli and Davis reason that this subtle evolutionary change in the morphology of our hands, which occurred after humans and chimpanzees last shared a common ancestor five million to seven million years ago, is at least partially responsible for the fact that human pointing with the index finger is so culturally ubiquitous today.

The argument goes something like this. When young infants begin reaching for objects just out of their range, adults are most likely to respond to those reaching attempts and to retrieve the item for the baby when the latter’s index finger is more prominently extended. That is to say, initially, the adult mistakenly reads into the child’s reaching attempt as a communicative gesture on the part of the child. Over time, this dynamic between the child and adult serves to further “pull out” the index finger because the child implicitly learns the behavioral association, so that it slowly becomes a genuine pointing gesture.

• Evolutionary Consumption
• What Makes Us Human: Tolerance and Cooperation
• An Evolutionary Hierarchy of Needs

Experts are more persuasive when they seem tentative about their conclusions […] but the opposite is true of novices, who grow more persuasive with increasing certainty.

This result held across the three experiments described in the paper (pdf, doi), but it’s worth noting that this only applies in situations where there is no objective truth — such as in consumer situations (the experiments used restaurant reviews, and I imagine product reviews would give similar results):

Earlier research […] had made the case that expressing certainty generally increases people’s persuasive power, because it boosts their perceived credibility. [However] those studies concerned topics such as witnesses testifying in court or stock market advisers giving stock recommendations where there is an objective truth or correct answer. In those instances […] people might rely on a person’s certainty as an indicator of his or her credibility. “In more subjective domains like consumer contexts, though, […] expressing certainty appears to have a more dynamic effect, giving a message more or less impact depending on who is expressing it.”

via Marginal Revolution / NYT

• Irrelevant Neuroscience Jargon Increases Persuasiveness
• Foreign Accents Make Statements Less Trustworthy
• Using Anchoring for Personal Appraisals

One of the researchers gives a good overview of the study’s findings in an article for Harvard Business School’s Working Knowledge that provides succinct negotiation tactics and reasons for why you should make the first offer. Topiccs include: when you should not make the first offer, how to counter first offers, how to construct a reasonable—yet aggressive—offer, how to protect yourself from the effects of anchoring, and more.

Some key points worth considering (in no particular order):

We might expect experts to be immune to the anchoring effect. Real estate agents, for example, should be able to resist the anchoring effects of a property’s list price because of their presumed skill at estimating property values. Testing this theory, [it is clear that] anchors affect the judgment of even those who think they are immune to such influence. But why?

Every item under negotiation (whether it’s a company or a car) has both positive and negative qualities—qualities that suggest a higher price and qualities that suggest a lower price. High anchors selectively direct our attention toward an item’s positive attributes; low anchors direct our attention to its flaws. […]

The probability of making a first offer is related to one’s confidence and sense of control at the bargaining table. Those who lack power, either due to a negotiation’s structure or a lack of available alternatives, are less inclined to make a first offer. Power and confidence result in better outcomes because they lead negotiators to make the first offer. In addition, the amount of the first offer affects the outcome, with more aggressive or extreme first offers leading to a better outcome for the person who made the offer. Initial offers better predict final settlement prices than subsequent concessionary behaviors do.

There is one situation in which making the first offer is not to your advantage: when the other side has much more information than you do about the item to be negotiated or about the relevant market or industry. […]

How extreme should your first offer be? My own research suggests that first offers should be quite aggressive but not absurdly so. Many negotiators fear that an aggressive first offer will scare or annoy the other side and perhaps even cause him to walk away in disgust. However, research shows that this fear is typically exaggerated. In fact, most negotiators make first offers that are not aggressive enough.

 

• Optimum Starting Prices for Negotiations and Auctions (and Why)
• Clarifying Questions Placate Detractors
• Negotiating Over ‘Sacred Values’

To test this, molecular gastronomist Heston Blumenthal and professor Charles Spence conducted a fascinating experiment with some ‘bacon and egg’ ice cream and some varied soundtracks. The full experiment is described in a short extract from the book Art and the Senses that also neatly summarises the various ways that our taste perception can be altered by our other senses:

The disambiguation of the flavour of a food dish can be achieved by a number of means: either visually, by changing the colour of the food, verbally by means of labelling, by presenting pictures or other cues on the packaging, and/or by the presentation of auditory cues. […] Furthermore, even saying the word ‘cinnamon’ has been shown to activate the olfactory cortex (i.e. the part of the brain that processes smells). […] Playing the sizzling bacon soundtrack at the ‘Art and the Senses’ conference may therefore have influenced the audience’s perception of the bacon flavour in the ice cream simply by making them think of bacon. […] It is at present an open question as to whether simply writing the word bacon on the screen in the front of the auditorium would have had the same effect.

Is there a name for this experience? The best I can come up with is ‘gustatory crossmodality’, but that sounds far too exciting (and is most likely incorrect). I’m hoping for a pithy, Gladwell-esque ‘Something effect’.

via @mocost

• Heston Blumenthal and Cocktails of the Future
• Molecular Gastronomy and Unboiling an Egg
• Background Noise and Taste Perception

Earlier this year the ever-excellent Jonah Lehrer summarised the study, describing how long-term learning and retention improved when classroom material was set in a hard-to-read font (e.g. Monotype Corsiva, Comic Sans Italicized or Haettenschweiler).

This study demonstrated that student retention of material across a wide range of subjects (science and humanities classes) and difficulty levels (regular, Honors and Advanced Placement) can be significantly improved in naturalistic settings by presenting reading material in a format that is slightly harder to read…. The potential for improving educational practices through cognitive interventions is immense. If a simple change of font can significantly increase student performance, one can only imagine the number of beneficial cognitive interventions waiting to be discovered.

One of the study authors, in a comment published in a New York Times article looking at cognitive fluency in learning, emphasises how it’s not the font that matters, but the processing difficulty:

“The reason that the unusual fonts are effective is that it causes us to think more deeply about the material, […] but we are capable of thinking deeply without being subjected to unusual fonts. Think of it this way, you can’t skim material in a hard to read font, so putting text in a hard-to-read font will force you to read more carefully.”

• Typography, Pronunciation and Cognitive Fluency
• Periodic Table of Typefaces
• The Cognitive Impact of Evaluative ‘Grade’ Letters

To make behaviour change easier the team identified the fifteen ways that behaviour can be changed, described each with precision, and related them to a specific “psychology”. Together this information became the Behaviour Grid:

To use the behaviour grid and to see the detailed information and advice for each behaviour type, follow the necessary steps in the useful Behaviour Wizard tool or view the grid directly.

• Behavioural Game Design and the Manipulation of Fun
• The Science of Persuasion
• Influencing Behaviour Online