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January 27 2011
U.S. Spies May Soon Make Smarter Decisions, Thanks to Video Games
Even U.S. intelligence agents make decidedly unintelligent decisions at times. So it may not come as a surprise that the government is willing to invest in any project that could help agencies spot and correct their own decision-skewing prejudices–even if that project is a video game.
Dubbed “Sirius,” the anti-bias project is the brainchild of the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), a government agency whose mission statement might as well have come from a spy novel: to invest in “high-risk/high-payoff research programs that have the potential to provide our nation with an overwhelming intelligence advantage over future adversaries.”
One of those overwhemlming advantages: clear, bias-free thinking. That’s why computer scientists, gaming experts, social scientists, and statisticians will descend on Washington, D.C. in February to discuss the program. The focus of the Sirius project is on “serious games,” or educational video games. As IARPA reports:
A Serious Game could provide an effective mechanism for exposing and mitigating cognitive bias…. The goal of the Sirius Program ...
October 04 2010
AAAAIIEEE! Tennis Players’ Grunts May Help Their Game
Those unearthly hows, shrieks, and grunts that burst out of tennis players’ mouths may do more than just fill the silence of tennis stadiums. A new study suggests that a player’s grunt might slow down the response time of her opponent, giving the grunter an advantage.
For the study, published in the journal PLoS ONE, researchers asked students to watch videos of a tennis player hitting a ball; some shots were accompanied by a soft grunt, others were performed in silence. For each shot, the student had to indicate which side of the court the ball would land on by hitting a keyboard key.
According to the study, “The results were unequivocal: The presence of an extraneous sound interfered with a participants’ performance, making their responses both slower and less accurate.”
Of course, highly trained, professional tennis players might be less thrown by the noises than college students sitting in a lab; the researchers say the next step is to try some experiments on the court. But the findings do strengthen the case of the anti-grunting brigade:
Grunting tennis players made the news during the 2009 Wimbledon Championships, when tennis officials announced that they were considering fines for serial grunters. Referees can currently award points against players who seem to be deliberately disturbing their opponents, but many players have said that they simply grunt to focus their energy during a swing.
Related Content:
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Beware of Wii tennis.
Discoblog: Can Golfing Make You Deaf?
80beats: Fooled by an Illusion, Tennis Refs Make Wrong “Out” Calls
Not Exactly Rocket Science: What Tennis Rackets Tell Us About Giant Extinct Armadillos
Image: flickr / alphababy
September 20 2010
Given the Choice, Liberals Would Rather “Kill Whitey”
Recent work by David Pizarro at Cornell is shedding light the role that race and ethics play in politics, by asking people to sacrifice the lives of either Tyrone Payton or Chip Ellsworth III.
OK, they didn’t really have to sacrifice anyone, but each participant in the study was faced with a variation of the classical ethical dilemma called the “trolley problem.” The trolley problem asks the question: Would you push someone on to the tracks (and kill them) to stop a trolley holding 100 people from crashing (and killing them all)?
The paper (pdf) describes the twist that Pizarro and colleagues put on the trolley question when they asked it to California undergraduates:
Half of the participants received a version of the scenario where the agent could choose to sacrifice an individual named “Tyrone Payton” to save 100 members of the New York Philharmonic, and the other half received a version where the agent could choose to sacrifice “Chip Ellsworth III” to save 100 members of the Harlem Jazz Orchestra.
While the study didn’t specifically mention each person’s race, the researchers reasoned that “Tyrone” would be stereotyped as black, while “Chip” would be stereotyped as white. On the saving end, they assumed that the Philharmonic would be thought of as white, while the Harlem Jazz Orchestra would be assumed black.
When faced with this choice, each individual in the study group showed different reactions based on their political leanings–the liberals were more likely to sacrifice “Chip” to save the Orchestra than they were to sacrifice “Tyrone” to save the Philharmonic. When describing the findings in a recent talk Pizarro explained his interpretation of the findings:
If you’re wondering whether this is just because conservatives are racist—well, it may well be that conservatives are more racist. But it appears in these studies that the effect is driven [primarily] by liberals saying that they’re more likely to agree with pushing the white man and [more likely to] disagree with pushing the black man.
Pizzaro told David Dobbs of Wired Science that he thinks these results mean we actually have two different sets of morals, one relating to the action itself, and the other focused on its consequences:
“The idea is not that people are or are not utilitarian; it’s that they will cite being utilitarian when it behooves them. People are aren’t using these principles and then applying them. They arrive at a judgment and seek a principle.”
So we’ll tell a child on one day, as Pizarro’s parents told him, that ends should never justify means, then explain the next day that while it was horrible to bomb Hiroshima, it was morally acceptable because it shortened the war. We act—and then cite whichever moral system fits best, the relative or the absolute.
Related Content:
Gene Expression: Experiments in Ethics
Gene Expression: Means vs. Ends & morality
80beats: Magnetic Zaps to the Brain Can Alter People’s Moral Judgments
DISCOVER: Whose Life Would You Save?
DISCOVER: Is Morality Innate and Universal?
Image: Flickr/ Katie Tegtmeyer
August 20 2010
“Kids Can Be So Cruel” Science: Squinting Kids Get Fewer Party Invites
Whom would you invite to your birthday party? If you’re a six-year-old, probably not the kid with an eye disorder.
Shown pictures of other children and asked to pick birthday party attendees, six- to eight-year-olds did not care about gender or shirt color with any statistical significance. But they did care if a possible invitee had strabismus–a condition when a child’s eyes don’t line up while focusing, often resulting in crossed eyes or squinting. This heart-breaker brought to you by the British Journal of Ophthalmology.
The photographs included identical twins: children in four pairs of pictures looked the same, except for their digitally altered shirt colors and eyes. Given four chances to pick children with strabismus, 18 of 48 children did not select any child with the disorder. None picked the child with the eye disorder on all four opportunities.
The researchers say the study indicates that parents may want to consider corrective surgery before children with strabismus turn six–apparently the age when kids take a turn for the shallow.
Younger birthday boys and girls appear to care less about what their invitees eyes looked like: Of 31 children between the ages of four and six, the researchers found that 9 children picked kids with strabismus three or four times. Only one meanie didn’t pick any children with an eye disorder.
Related content:
Discoblog: Eugenics Today: Do Ugly People Deserve Beautiful Children?
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Discoblog: Dentists Organize A Cash-For-Candy Program on Halloween
Discoblog: New Villain in the Obesity Epidemic: Mean Gym Teachers
Image: flickr / Spojeni
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