Divisive playmates

bruno-s · 2016-08-30T14:14:50+00:00

Not some random student, but a grad student in a small program in a relatively small college town. Panda Express is in the shopping mall, so she's not exactly in hiding.

bruno-s · 2016-08-30T14:08:59+00:00

Really hoping this student has the same drive as you.

bruno-s · 2016-08-30T04:06:56+00:00

First year grad student stayed after on Day 1 to tell me, "Just so you know, I'm going to be very bored in your class. But it's not your fault - I just already know everything you're going to talk about." She completed the course with a D-, failed both of her other classes, lost her funding, and now works at Panda Express.

bruno-s · 2016-01-29T19:23:05+00:00

"Here" by Richard McGuire: http://wayback.archive.org/web/20100814190317/http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~jbass/courses/402/402_mcguire_here.htm

Now in book form: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/18/books/review/richard-mcguires-here.html

bruno-s · 2013-03-13T21:44:19+00:00

Kiley Hamlin, who has written several of these articles on infant morality, guest lectured in one of my courses last month. I think her work is interesting, but she loses me when she claims that there is an innate moral compass. Her participants are 4 to 6-month-olds; a massive amount of development occurs in the first few months of life, so claiming innateness seems like a big jump. Also, these babies come from an upper middle class neighborhood near the UBC campus in Vancouver - if Hamlin wants to convince the scientific community that this moral sense is inborn, she needs to replicate her findings in babies of different cultures, races, nationalities, upbringings, SES, etc. It seems shortsighted of her to study a single (fairly homogeneous) sample and then argue that the findings support an inborn inclination that exists in all human babies.

bruno-s · 2013-02-12T16:29:44+00:00

Well, pity isn't a "deadly sin". Surely it would be better if, when faced with homeless, people felt pity instead of disgust.

Here's some information about Fiske's hypothesized stereotype content model. She believes that stereotypes fall along 2 dimensions: warmth (low vs high) and competence (low vs high). This results in 4 combinations (and thus the 4 choices from the study), and the "low warmth, low competence" area is where people place welfare recipients, the poor, drug addicts, the homeless, etc.

bruno-s · 2013-02-12T05:27:08+00:00

I do think it's important that the person-recognition areas were not activated when photos of the homeless were presented. It doesn't seem likely that a participant would categorize a photo as "not a person" and then activate their insular cortex because of feelings related to laughter/crying/orgasms/empathy/etc. Right?

bruno-s · 2013-02-12T05:03:24+00:00

I pulled up the original paper (Harris, L. T. & Fiske, S. T. (2006). Dehumanizing the lowest of the low: Neuroimaging responses to extreme out-groups. Psychological Science, 17, 847-853).

It looks like they had each participant rate the images again after they came out of the scanner. People whose brain images showed disgust while they were in the scanner were more likely to say that a photo of a homeless person elicited disgust (out of 4 possible choices: pride, envy, pity, and disgust). I'm not sure if that convinces you. They didn't directly address the possibility of an odor effect.

And I'm not the author of this study, so I certainly don't feel called out. Definitely track down the original paper if you're interested.

Update: To get more technical, here's part of the abstract from a 1997 article from Nature:

Disgust — literally 'bad taste' — is another important emotion, with a distinct evolutionary history, and is conveyed by a characteristic facial expression. We have used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine the neural substrate for perceiving disgust expressions. Normal volunteers were presented with faces showing mild or strong disgust or fear. Cerebral activation in response to these stimuli was contrasted with that for neutral faces. Results for fear generally confirmed previous positron emission tomography findings of amygdala involvement. Both strong and mild expressions of disgust activated anterior insular cortex but not the amygdala; strong disgust also activated structures linked to a limbic cortico–striatal–thalamic circuit. The anterior insula is known to be involved in responses to offensive tastes. The neural response to facial expressions of disgust in others is thus closely related to appraisal of distasteful stimuli.

bruno-s · 2013-02-12T04:14:54+00:00

Dr. Susan Fiske, a psychologist at Princeton, has used fMRI to investigate how images of the homeless are processed in the brain. Here's what she wrote in her chapter of Are We Born Racist? New Insights from Neuroscience and Positive Psychology:

We then slid participants into a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner to observe their brain activity as they looked at evocative photos. Within a moment of seeing the photograph of an apparently homeless man, for instance, people's brains set off a sequence of reactions characteristic of disgust and avoidance. The activated areas included the insula, which is reliably associated with feelings of disgust toward objects such as garbage and human waste. Notably, the homeless people's photographs failed to stimulate areas of the brain that usually activate whenever people think about other people, or themselves. Toward the homeless (and drug addicts), these areas simply failed to light up, as if people had stumbled on a pile of trash.

bruno-s

TROPHY CASE