Fake news: Study tests people's ability to detect manipulated images of real-world scenes

Manipulated image -- can you spot whats wrong?

People can detect a fake image of a real-world scene only 60% of the time, and even then can only tell what is wrong with the image 45% of the time, according to research published in the open access journal Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications.

Sophie Nightingale, PhD Student and lead author from the University of Warwick said: "Our study found that although people performed better than chance at detecting and locating image manipulations, they are far from perfect. This has serious implications because of the high-level of images, and possibly fake images, that people are exposed to on a daily basis through social networking sites, the internet and the media."

The researchers set up an online test that used a bank of 40 images created from 10 original images sourced from Google Images. Six of the original images were subjected to five different types of manipulation, including physically implausible and physically plausible manipulations, to create 30 manipulated images. 707 participants in the online test were shown 10 random images that included each of the five manipulation types and five original images. Participants never saw a manipulation or original form of the same image twice.

A mean 60% of images were correctly identified as being manipulated when participants were asked "Do you think this photo has been digitally altered?," which was just over the chance performance of 50%. Of the people that answered "yes" to this question only a mean 45% of manipulations could be correctly located in the image when a grid overlay was placed on the image and participants were prompted to select the regions where a manipulation was present.

Dr Derrick Watson, study co-author from the University of Warwick explained: "We found that people were better at detecting physically implausible manipulations but not any better at locating these manipulations, compared to physically plausible manipulations. So even though people are able to detect something is wrong they can't reliably identify what exactly is wrong with the image. Images have a powerful influence on our memories so if people can't differentiate between real and fake details in photos, manipulations could frequently alter what we believe and remember."

In a second experiment using an image set created by the authors, 659 people completed an online task that tested their ability to locate manipulations regardless of whether or not they said there was one present. The results revealed that ability to detect something wrong was similar (mean 65% of the time) to the first experiment but that manipulations were accurately located in the image 39% more of the time than expected by chance. This suggests that people are better at the more direct task of locating manipulations than the more generic one of detecting if a photo has been manipulated or not.

Dr Kimberley Wade, study co-author from the University of Warwick, said: "People's poor ability to identify manipulated photos raises problems in the context of legal proceedings where photos may be used as evidence. Jurors and members of the court assume these images to be real, though a manipulated image could go undetected with devastating consequences. We need to work to find better ways to protect people from the negative effects of photo manipulation, and we're now exploring a number of ways that might help people to better detect fakes."

Read more at Science Daily

Seven Accused African Witches Burned to Death

Seven people in the East African country of Tanzania were killed earlier this week following accusations of witchcraft.

According to a report in the “Mail and Guardian:”

“‘They were attacked and burnt to death by a mob of villagers who accused them of engaging in witchcraft,’ the police chief for the western Kigoma region, which borders Burundi, Jafari Mohamed, told Agence France-Presse… Among those arrested on suspicion of carrying out the killings was the local traditional healer, or witchdoctor.”

The victims, most of whom were elderly, were burned alive and in some cases hacked to death with machetes. Nearly two dozen people were arrested, and the fact that a witch doctor was among them is not unusual.

Throughout Africa belief in witches is common, and black magic is considered a normal part of everyday life. A 2010 poll of 18 countries in sub-Saharan Africa found that over half of the population believe in magic. Witch doctors are consulted not only for healing diseases, but also for placing, or removing, curses or bringing luck. It is not unusual for people to consult witch doctors seeking magical assistance when preparing for a job interview, starting a business or seeking a mate.

It’s not clear what sparked the attack, but often witchcraft accusations follow some unexplained misfortune such as an accident, a sudden sickness or a village drinking well drying up. If there is no obvious, immediate explanation, the event may be blamed on a suspected witch — usually women and the elderly. Other times the witchcraft accusations are used as a pretext to settle personal grudges or confiscate the victim’s property.

Witchcraft persecutions have been prevalent in East Africa and especially Tanzania. In May of this year an albino woman in a rural Tanzania was murdered for her body parts. Two witch doctors were arrested in connection with her death. Though she was not accused of witchcraft, she was killed for it. The belief and practice of using body parts for magical ritual or benefit is called muti. Muti murders are particularly brutal, with knives and machetes used to cut and hack off limbs, breasts and other body parts from their living victims.

Belief in, and persecution of, witches is universal and dates back millennia. Often all that is needed is a belief in magic, though sometimes witchcraft is prohibited by organized religion. The Christian bible, for example, explicitly calls for accused witches to be put to death per Exodus 22:18, which states, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live” (KJV). The passage seems crystal clear in its murderous command to kill witches — but there’s a problem.

Read more at Discovery News

Too Much Multitasking May Affect Your Grey Matter

Are you one of those master multitaskers who can text while talking or read emails while chatting on the phone? It's a highly valued skill in today's marketplace, but new research shows using multiple devices at once is linked to lower grey-matter density in one particular region of the brain.

Previous research has shown that multitasking may be associated with poor attention skills and even depression and anxiety. This is one of the first studies to show a direct link between the behavior and the physical structure of the brain.

"Media multitasking is becoming more prevalent in our lives today and there is increasing concern about its impacts on our cognition and social-emotional well-being," said neuroscientist Kep Kee Loh in a press release. "Our study was the first to reveal links between media multitasking and brain structure."

To measure possible impacts, Kep Kee Loh and Ryota Kanai, both from the University of Sussex's Sackler Center for Consciousness Science, used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). They examined the brain structures of 75 adults who had answered questions about their use of media, including cell phones, computers, TVs and print media.

Independent of their individual personality traits, people who reported using more devices had lower gray matter density in the part of the brain known as the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). The ACC is associated with cognitive and emotional processing.

Their results were published in the journal PLOS One.

It's not yet certain which is cause and which is effect — in other words, whether multitaskers were more likely to have less dense gray matter in this part of the brain or if multitasking causes a decrease in gray matter density.

Read more at Discovery News

How we form habits, change existing ones

Much of our daily lives are taken up by habits that we've formed over our lifetime. An important characteristic of a habit is that it's automatic-- we don't always recognize habits in our own behavior. Studies show that about 40 percent of people's daily activities are performed each day in almost the same situations. Habits emerge through associative learning. "We find patterns of behavior that allow us to reach goals. We repeat what works, and when actions are repeated in a stable context, we form associations between cues and response," Wendy Wood explains in her session at the American Psychological Association's 122nd Annual Convention.

What are habits?

Wood calls attention to the neurology of habits, and how they have a recognizable neural signature. When you are learning a response you engage your associative basal ganglia, which involves the prefrontal cortex and supports working memory so you can make decisions. As you repeat the behavior in the same context, the information is reorganized in your brain. It shifts to the sensory motor loop that supports representations of cue response associations, and no longer retains information on the goal or outcome. This shift from goal directed to context cue response helps to explain why our habits are rigid behaviors.

There is a dual mind at play, Wood explains. When our intentional mind is engaged, we act in ways that meet an outcome we desire and typically we're aware of our intentions. Intentions can change quickly because we can make conscious decisions about what we want to do in the future that may be different from the past. However, when the habitual mind is engaged, our habits function largely outside of awareness. We can't easily articulate how we do our habits or why we do them, and they change slowly through repeated experience. "Our minds don't always integrate in the best way possible. Even when you know the right answer, you can't make yourself change the habitual behavior," Wood says.

Participants in a study were asked to taste popcorn, and as expected, fresh popcorn was preferable to stale. But when participants were given popcorn in a movie theater, people who have a habit of eating popcorn at the movies ate just as much stale popcorn as participants in the fresh popcorn group. "The thoughtful intentional mind is easily derailed and people tend to fall back on habitual behaviors. Forty percent of the time we're not thinking about what we're doing," Wood interjects. "Habits allow us to focus on other things…Willpower is a limited resource, and when it runs out you fall back on habits."

How can we change our habits?

Public service announcements, educational programs, community workshops, and weight-loss programs are all geared toward improving your day-to-day habits. But are they really effective? These standard interventions are very successful at increasing motivation and desire. You will almost always leave feeling like you can change and that you want to change. The programs give you knowledge and goal-setting strategies for implementation, but these programs only address the intentional mind.

In a study on the "Take 5" program, 35 percent of people polled came away believing they should eat 5 fruits and vegetables a day. Looking at that result, it appears that the national program was effective at teaching people that it's important to have 5 servings of fruits and vegetables every day. But the data changes when you ask what people are actually eating. Only 11 percent of people reported that they met this goal. The program changed people's intentions, but it did not overrule habitual behavior.

According to Wood, there are three main principles to consider when effectively changing habitual behavior. First, you must derail existing habits and create a window of opportunity to act on new intentions. Someone who moves to a new city or changes jobs has the perfect scenario to disrupt old cues and create new habits. When the cues for existing habits are removed, it's easier to form a new behavior. If you can't alter your entire environment by switching cities-- make small changes. For instance, if weight-loss or healthy eating is your goal, try moving unhealthy foods to a top shelf out of reach, or to the back of the freezer instead of in front.

Read more at Science Daily

The Case of the Spinning Egyptian Statue: Solved

An ancient statue in a British museum was caught on camera mysteriously turning in its locked display case in June. The footage mystified many and made international news. According to an article in the “Manchester Evening News:”

An ancient Egyptian statue has spooked museum bosses — after it mysteriously started to spin round in a display case. The 10-inch tall relic, which dates back to 1800 B.C., was found in a mummy’s tomb and has been at the Manchester Museum for 80 years.   But in recent weeks, curators have been left scratching their heads after they kept finding it facing the wrong way. Experts decided to monitor the room on time-lapse video and were astonished to see it clearly show the statuette spinning 180 degrees — with nobody going near it.

• ”Maybe the statue has a material component that reacts to the rotation of the earth.”
   
• ”Perhaps there is magnetism that eventually turns it to face north or south? Pulled based upon the position of the sun/moon?”
   
• ”Magnetics are a possibility — some rocks have crystalline structures which can store charge.”
   
• ”It seems to only be turning while exposed to sunlight. It doesn’t move at all when it’s dark.”
   
• ”It’s releasing some kind of gas and being on glass it’s enough to let it rotate.”
   
• ”It seems to turn at a uniform rate whenever the lights are on. Could the transformer for the lights be causing a vibration at just the right frequency?”
   
• ”The sacred geometry of a pyramid creates a natural swirling vortex of energy that beams out of the top…. Perhaps this statue is emanating the same energy that pyramids do. If it’s sitting on a very clean, polished surface, it’s possible that energy is just enough to spin in it around slowly.”

For each explanation — notably including the one that turned out to be correct — counter-arguments and counter-evidence was offered. Earlier this week, a scientist finally found the definitive explanation. As a BBC News report explained:

Vibrations expert Steve Gosling placed a specialist three-axis sensor under Neb-Senu’s glass cabinet to record its movement over 24 hours. The sensor revealed traffic and footfall vibrations at busy times of the day, such as 18:00 GMT and 07:00 GMT, caused the statue to rotate.   Mr. Gosling, of 24 Acoustics engineering noise consultancy, said: “The vibration is a combination of multiple sources so there’s buses outside on the busy road, there’s footfall activity.” Movement ceased overnight. “There’s a lump at the bottom which makes it more susceptible to vibrations than the others which have a flat base,” Mr. Gosling added.

This investigation, done on behalf of a myth-busting British television show, confirmed what many scientists had long suspected. In fact that exact explanation appeared six months ago in a Discovery News analysis of this mystery shortly after it happened:

“If the object is placed on a smooth surface with very little friction to hold it in place — and unless the glass case (and the floor underneath it) is perfectly level — the statue will turn. As with the bump on the bottom of the statue, the tilt does not need to be noticeable to be effective. The statue is housed in an ordinary glass museum case, not a laboratory platform scientifically calibrated to maintain perfect level and resist vibrations. This would also explain why the statue rotates on its axis, turning more or less in one spot instead of wandering around the display case like a lost child looking for its mummy.”

Now that the mystery has been definitively debunked, some are reacting with dismissals such as “So what? It was obvious,” or “Anyone could have figured it out.”

Read more at Discovery News

Why Do We Connect Halloween and Satanism?

For most people Halloween is a fun time of dressing up, creating elaborate costumes and decorations, visiting haunted houses, taking kids trick-or-treating, and of course eating candy. It has become a heavily commercialized holiday second only to Christmas in terms of the number of people who celebrate and participate in it.

For some, however, the fears associated with Halloween go beyond fake-scary ghosts and into genuine spiritual warfare for the souls of the innocent. These people, including many fundamentalist Christians, believe that there is a dark and sinister side to the Oct. 31 festivities. Where did this belief come from?

Fear of Witches

Part of the answer lies in the reputed origins of Halloween. Many trace it back to an ancient Celtic pagan celebration called Samhain (pronounced “sah-win”). Samhain, which occurred on Halloween, the night before All Saint’s Day, was an annual communal meeting to gather resources for the winter months.

Samhain has many aspects but focused on the changing of seasons and preparing for the dormancy (and eventual rebirth) of nature as summer turned to winter. These pre-Christian practices, with their focus on nature’s cycles and many deities, were viewed as occult by the Roman Catholic Church. All Saint’s Day and Samhain, coming so close together on the calendar, influenced each other and, many believe, later combined into the celebration we now call Halloween.

Then there’s the fact that the Bible is pretty clear about its position on magic and the occult  — for example Exodus 22:18 commands that “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.” Because witchcraft is seen as an abomination in the eyes of God — along with other occult practices such as dowsing, astrology and Ouija boards — anything associated with it is to be shunned as evil.

Still, you may ask, what’s the big deal? What, exactly, is the link between the Devil and the day kids dress up as ghosts, Spider-Man or Shrek? Christian evangelist Phil Phillips and Joan Hake Robie, in their book “Halloween and Satanism,” explain why many fundamentalists are concerned about Halloween: “A tragic by-product of fear in the lives of children as early as pre-pubescence is the interest and involvement in supernatural occult phenomena.”

Thus, they believe, if a child is scared by a haunted house zombie or spooky witch costume, his or her natural curiosity will soon lead them to read books and watch TV programs on the things that scared them — dead bodies or witches, for example. According to Phillips and Robie, this will start children on the road to Satanic practices.

Of course, it’s true that Halloween practices — like Christmas, Thanksgiving, and other holiday practices and rituals — have a historical context and make use of certain symbols, foods, music and so on. However just because there exists a long history of real, genuine witchcraft claims — such as those that resulted in the infamous Salem witch trials of 1692 — doesn’t mean that any child who sees a green-skinned, pointy-hatted witch costume will become interested in magic or witchcraft, much less become a witch.

Unlike concerned adults who read sinister meanings into things they fear or shun, children tend to take things at face value. They are more concerned about how much candy they get — or how good their costume is — than whether their black cat lawn ornament is really an invitation for Satan.

Halloween is only a high-profile part of the problem. Role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons, the Harry Potter books, and even popular films like “E.T.: The Extraterrestrial” and “Ghostbusters” are also gateways to sin. Rap music, violent cartoons and video games, and so on are all evidence of social moral decay leading to drug use, suicide and murder. Underlying all this is a conspiracy-theory like belief that there are hidden meanings behind everything, and powerful, sinister forces at work trying to brainwash the innocent.

Halloween, Samhain and Satan

The connection between Satanism and Halloween is even less plausible in historical context. Though a clear and direct historical connection between Halloween and Samhain has never been proven, many scholars — and the public — believe that the traditions are linked.

As for the allegedly sinister nature of that ancient Celtic feast, Nicholas Rogers, a history professor at York University and author of “Halloween: From Pagan Ritual to Party Night,” writes:

“We can dismiss the argument that Samhain was ‘satanic’ or that in some essentialist sense Halloween is a ‘satanic ritual,’ as the Reverend Pat Robertson, the founder of the Christian Coalition, declared in 1982…. Satanism is essentially a Christian creation, a travesty of Christian forms centered on the fallen rebel angel Lucifer. In fact, the early Christian church left little room for Satan… Certainly, Satanism was incompatible with the polytheism of the ancient Celts. Indeed, the belief in satanic cults blossomed only in the late medieval period — long after the demise of Samhain.”

The confusion may have arisen, in part, because Wiccan witchcraft traditions worship a horned god which superficially resembles depictions of a goat-headed Devil. This “Horned One,” however, is a god of fertility (among other things). Since these early pagans did not believe in anything resembling a Christian Satan, it could not have played a role in their rituals.

Hell Houses for Jesus

Despite no evidence that Halloween is satanic or occult, some religious organizations have tried to ban the holiday. Nicholas Rogers writes:

“Christian fundamentalists have taken exception to Halloween school parties on the grounds that they insidiously promote pagan, if not satanic, beliefs. There have been attempts to ban the annual party outright, or at the very least prevent masquerading as devils and witches.”

In fact some religious groups have co-opted Halloween for their own purposes, creating their own evangelical version called Hell House to give wayward teenagers a chance to be “scared straight.”

Read more at Discovery News

Is Being a Good Samaritan a Matter of Genes?

The Biblical parable of the Good Samaritan, a traveler who stops on the road to help a badly wounded robbery victim that others had passed by, is a story that we see repeated again and again in the news.

In Fort Lauderdale, Fla., after a woman lost control of her car on an Interstate freeway and flipped into a water-filled ditch, a man jumped in to rescue her from drowning. In Arizona, after a community college student lost a wallet containing her cash, credit cards, student ID and immigrant work permit, an unidentified person found it and dropped it off at her school's office. In Oklahoma, after a teenage skateboarder tumbled from his board and suffered a concussion, a man he didn't know found him by the side of the road and took him to get help.

What motivates people to stop and help others that they didn't previously know, with no apparent benefit to themselves?

Traditionally, we've viewed people who engage in prosocial behavior -- that is, voluntary acts performed to benefit others or society as a whole -- as being motivated by moral character or spiritual beliefs. But in recent years, increasing evidence has emerged to suggest that the tendency to be a do-gooder may be influenced by genes.

In a newly-published study in the journal Social Neuroscience, for example, researchers found that a single variation in a genotype seems to affect whether or not a person engages in prosocial acts. Individuals who have one variation of the genotype have a tendency toward social anxiety -- that is, unease around other people, and are less inclined to help others in ways that involve personal interaction.

Those who have another variation, in contrast, not only were less anxious, but also were more likely to be helpful. The genetic region involved is 5-HTTLPR, which regulates transport of serotonin, a neurotransmitter chemical in the brain. The researchers studied the genomes of 398 college students, and asked the subjects to fill out a questionnaire to provide information about their behavior and anxiety levels.

University of Missouri social psychologist Gustavo Carlo, one of the study's co-authors, said that the the genotype variation is just one "indirect pathway" that could lead a person to being a Good Samaritan. Another potential influence, he said, is the brain's ability to use dopamine, another brain chemical. Other genetic variations in brain chemistry may play a role as well.

"This is a really exciting area for research," Carlo said. "There are a lot of studies being done right now that focus on the micro-level biological processes associated with altruistic behavior."

Co-author Scott F. Stoltenberg, a researcher at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln's Behavior Genetics Laboratory, says the findings build on previous studies that suggest a link between relative levels of anxiety and prosocial behavior.

"It makes sense that people who have less social anxiety are more likely to help out," Stoltenberg explained. "When they're confronted with a situation where another person needs help, they don't have a problem going over to them and engaging." A person with social anxiety, in contrast, might experience so much discomfort that he or she would avoid the encounter.

Both serotonin and dopamine are neurotransmitters related to the sensations of pleasure and satisfaction, which may explain why people who perform selfless acts of generosity report that they feel good as a result.

Carlo cautioned that the study's findings don't necessarily mean that people with a genetic predisposition toward anxiety also lack empathy, the ability to care about others. While it may be more difficult for them to engage in public acts of prosocial behavior, they may instead make anonymous contributions to a person in need, or help in some other way that doesn't require personal interaction.

Why humans developed the capacity to be Good Samaritans is another widely-debated question. In the 1970s, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, a believer in the notion that "genes are selfish," argued that prosocial behavior existed to ensure genetic continuity. His view was influenced by studies suggesting that organisms were most likely to help their own kin.

Read more at Discovery News

Scholar Claims Jesus Was a Roman Hoax

A historical scholar claims to have found evidence proving that the story of Jesus as described in the New Testament is a fiction, and that historical claims about Jesus were actually created by Roman aristocrats to control the poor.

According to a news story in The Independent:

“Joseph Atwill, who is the author of a book entitled ‘Caesar’s Messiah: The Roman Conspiracy to Invent Jesus’, asserts that Christianity did not begin as a religion, but was actually a sophisticated government propaganda exercise used to pacify the subjects of the Roman Empire.”

Atwill’s take on Jesus is of course not new. In 1844 Karl Marx famously declared religion as the opiate of the masses. History is filled with skeptics, freethinkers, atheists, agnostics and other doubters who have questioned religious doctrine and dogma.

Atwill’s claims are based on what he described as important and revealing parallels between a first-person account of first-century Judea (an ancient Roman province now part of Israel and Palestine) and the New Testament.

“What seems to have eluded many scholars is that the sequence of events and locations of Jesus ministry are more or less the same as the sequence of events and locations of the military campaign of (Emperor) Titus Flavius as described by Josephus,” Atwill wrote in a blog on his web site.

Atwill believes that the story of Jesus was actually copied and created from the biography of the Roman emperor.

Evidence for a Historical Jesus?

While Atwill’s thesis is intriguing, there are reasons to be skeptical.

“The reality is we are unlikely ever to know the ‘facts’ about Jesus,” says Ronald A. Lindsay, a Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Inquiry, a non-profit educational organization. Lindsay authored an essay on the evidence for Jesus in the book “Sources of the Jesus Tradition.”

“There are too many different stories about him, all of which have some serious credibility problems and which are inconsistent with one another,” Lindsay told Discovery News. “For the objective historian, he will always remain a shadowy figure, with little substantive biographical content. On the one hand, we have many who will take things on faith, accepting some subset of the stories as unquestionably true. On the other hand, there are those who insist that Jesus is an invented figure, a myth or a hoax. I think both of these extremes are almost equally implausible.”

Biblical scholars, as well as lay Christians, have long sought hard evidence of events and miracles described in the Bible, ranging from Noah’s Ark to the Shroud of Turin, with little success. New claims about proof of Jesus surface every few years.

For example, in 2003 a relics dealer claimed to have discovered a limestone mortuary box that held the remains of Jesus’ brother. The inscription read, “James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus.”

The find made international news and spawned several documentaries, including one titled “The Lost Tomb of Jesus,” which aired on the Discovery Channel. Further investigation by the Israeli Antiquities Authority concluded that though the ossuary box was authentic, the inscription on it had been faked.

And just last year an historian at Harvard Divinity School claimed to have found documentary evidence in the form of a fragment of Coptic writing on papyrus that Jesus was married; a later analysis by Biblical scholars suggested the writing was hoaxed.

Read more at Discovery News

Spontaneous Human Combustion? Probably Not

Earlier this month a 4-month-old Indian boy was admitted to a hospital with burns on his chest, head and abdomen. Though police and medical suspicions first turned to parental abuse or neglect in the child’s injuries, the baby’s mother offered a strange explanation.

She claimed that Rahul had previously been injured by a mysterious phenomena called spontaneous human combustion (SHC), in which people are said to suddenly and inexplicably burst into flames.

She claimed that there was nothing flammable near him when he was burned and suggested that there may be something special or unique about the boy’s body chemistry that makes him prone to these strange attacks.

According to R. Jayachandran, a professor in the department of pediatrics at Kilpauk Medical College Hospital in Chennai, “The mother told us that the baby has suffered four episodes of such spontaneous fire and suffered burn injuries. The last episode was a month back.”

His parents claimed that Rahul first caught fire when he was nine days old. There is surely something strange going on with this child — but what?

Spontaneous Human Combustion?

The idea that people can suddenly burst into flames for no apparent reason has been around for over a century; it even happened to a character in the 1853 Dickens novel “Bleak House.”

Some sources claim that hundreds, or even thousands, of spontaneous combustion cases have been reported throughout history, though only about a dozen cases have been investigated.

There are many reasons to be skeptical that random people can spontaneously combust. Not only is there no plausible medical or physiological mechanism by which a person could generate enough heat to catch fire, but there exists no film or video evidence of it ever occurring.

With few exceptions, SHC cases follow a familiar pattern upon close investigation: elderly, young, or infirm people left alone in or near flammable materials and sources of ignition.

Despite a lack of credible evidence for the existence of SHC, belief in the phenomenon is widespread, and every few years a suspected case makes the news. In fact in 2011 an Irish coroner even officially listed it as a cause of death in the case of a 76-year-old man found dead lying near an open fire.

Police, understandably, take a dim view of supernatural or paranormal “explanations” for real-life injuries and crimes. Injuries to anyone — and especially children — blamed on ghosts should of course be treated with extreme skepticism; other than in scary movies and reality TV ghost shows, real injuries are caused by real people. If a child goes missing investigators assume abductions by family members, not aliens or Bigfoot.

In the case of the Indian toddler, follow-up tests found nothing unusual about Rahul.

“Over a dozen tests have been performed on the baby to check the vital functions and according to doctors the reports so far are normal,” according to a report from ZNews India. Though tests on the child turned up nothing unusual, investigators did locate a hidden source of flammable material in the huts where the family lived.

Read more at Discovery News

If You're Not Looking for It, You Probably Won't See It

If you were working on something at your computer and a gorilla floated across your computer screen, would you notice it? You would like to think yes, however, research shows that people often miss such events when engaged in a difficult task. This is a phenomenon known as inattentional blindness (IB). In a new study from Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) in Boston, researchers have found that even expert searchers, operating in their domain of expertise, are vulnerable to inattentional blindness.

This study published this week Psychological Science.

"When engaged in a demanding task, attention can act like a set of blinders, making it possible for stimuli to pass, undetected, right in front of our eyes," explained Trafton Drew, PhD, post-doctoral researcher at BWH and lead author on this study. "We found that even experts are vulnerable to this phenomenon."

The researchers asked 24 radiologists to perform a familiar lung nodule detection task. They examined five scans; each scan contained an average of 10 nodules. A gorilla, 48 times larger than the average nodule, was inserted in the last scan. The researchers found that 83 percent of radiologists did not report seeing the gorilla. With the help of Melissa Le-Hoa Vo, post-doctoral researcher at BWH, the researchers tracked the eye-movements of the radiologists and found that that the majority of those who missed the gorilla looked directly at it.

"The radiologists missed the gorillas not because they could not see them, but because the way their brains had framed what they were doing. They were looking for cancer nodules, not gorillas," explained Jeremy Wolfe, senior psychologist and director of the Visual Attention Laboratory at BWH. "This study helps illustrate that what we become focused on becomes the center of our world, and it shapes what we can and cannot see."

The researchers note that it would be a mistake to regard these results as an indictment of radiologists and stress that even this high level of expertise does not immunize against inherent attentional limitations of what we perceive. The results suggest that even expert searchers typically only see what they are looking for, and are often unaware of the unexpected. The researchers hope that the results will lead more expert searchers to recognize the important role of attention in determining what the searcher will find and what they may miss.

This work was funded by a NRSA post-doctoral fellowship from the NIBIB to TD.

From Science Daily

The Toll of Growing Up in a Religious Cult

Children who grow up in religious cults face diffiulties not only during their childhood, but also after leaving the group.

That is the conclusion of research being presented today, Friday 12 July 2013, by the Chartered Psychologist Jill Mytton at the Annual Conference of the Society's Division of Counselling Psychology in Cardiff.

In her research Jill Mytton worked with 262 adults (95 women and 167 men) who had lived in a religious group as children. Around 70 per cent of the sample lost their family on leaving, 27 per cent reported child sexual abuse and 68 per cent had found the experience of leaving traumatic.

She asked them to complete a battery of psychological measures. The results showed that the average scores of the 264 partiticpants on these measures were significantly higher than the general population.

Two other measurss -- the Group Psychological Abuse Scale and the Extent of Group Identity Scale -- were used to assess the group environment and the level of group involvement respectively, and significant correlations were found between them and all clinical measures. This may mean that the specifics of the group environment, coupled with how strongly the group identity is enmeshed with personal identity, are key factors in the causation of distress in this sample.

Jill Mytton says: "Second-generation adult survivors of high-demand groups face particular difficulties, not only during their childhood, but also upon leaving the group, because they face assimilation into a culture that is not just alien to them but also one that they have been taught is wicked and to be hated."

From Science Daily

How Psychics Play the Odds and Still Lose

In the aftermath of the recent rescue of three abducted girls held captive in a Cleveland home for years, one strange twist was revealed: The mother of one of the abducted girls, Amanda Berry, had asked prominent psychic Sylvia Browne whether her missing daughter was alive or not. Browne’s response: “She’s not alive.”

Of course Berry was indeed alive, and it’s not the first time that Browne had told the families of missing children that their loved ones were dead when they were not.

But other psychics have made the opposite error, which can be just as devastating. For example in September 2012, Harsha Maddula, a Northwestern University student, went missing after leaving a party. Volunteers and police searched the area but were unable to find him. Some feared he’d been kidnapped or murdered, but Maddula’s family said their fears were calmed when relatives consulted psychics who reassured them that he would soon be recovered safely.

“He’s still alive,” the psychics told the family. “Don’t worry.” Maddula’s body was found the next day in Wilmette Harbor not far from his dormitory. He had been dead for nearly a week, a victim of accidental drowning.

Psychics frequently give desperate families of missing persons false hope or wrongly crush real hope.

How Psychics Use Psychology

Psychics use several psychological techniques to give their visions and predictions the illusion of accuracy.

1) Psychics, like police detectives, know the odds. They know that if a missing person is not found within the first 48 hours, the chances of them being successfully recovered alive drop dramatically with each passing week. There are rare exceptions, of course, such as the long-term abductions of people like Jaycee Dugard, Amanda Berry, Elizabeth Smart  and others. But saying that a child who has been missing for a year or more is probably dead is common sense, not psychic intuition.

2) Projecting confidence and authority. People tend to believe others when they appear completely confident and knowledgeable. Browne is the author of many books and has often appeared on television programs including The Montel Williams Show and Larry King Live, giving her added credibility. Even when Browne’s clients occasionally contradict her and say that her information is wrong, she usually stands her ground and insists that she is correct.

3) Psychics offer a wide variety of random, vague and contradictory information. For example when a young Tennessee woman named Holly Bobo was abducted in April 2011, extensive searches by police and volunteers police found neither Bobo nor her abductor.

Hundreds of psychics offered information and leads, including that Bobo’s abductor might have a scar on his forehead, or a rash on his elbow, or a bite mark on his hand. He might work from home as a graphic designer and long for the 1950s. His hair might be dark brown, or blonde or salt and pepper. He might be clean shaven, or he might have a mustache. He might be a Scorpio. He’s either scrawny, or of medium build, or stocky and muscular — possibly ex-military. He might own a black leather wallet, and his name might contain one or more of the following letters: B, A, J, R, W, or M. His last name might be Glenn. Bobo might be near a place associated with the number 7, maybe an address or a highway number, or possibly 7 miles from some landmark.

It’s not clear how police are supposed to use this jumble of random associations, images, numbers, letters and feelings provided by psychics. This information is so vague, general, and contradictory that it is completely useless; police need specific, accurate information. Precious time and resources were wasted following up on some of this information, and to this day neither police nor psychics have located Bobo or her abductor.

Of course if the missing person is found — usually by police, or by a jogger or hiker — some of this information, simply by random chance, may turn out to be correct. Thus psychics also play the odds by offering very vague claims, such as that a body will be found “near water.” Statistically the majority of dead bodies are found near water of some sort: a ditch, a pond, a lake, a swamp, a sewer pipe, an ocean, a river, a water tower and so on. And, of course, “near” is a relative term, and could be interpreted to mean any distance from inches to miles.

4) Psychics also rely on the public and journalists not bothering to fact-check their claims. Most high-profile psychics make exaggerated (or fabricated) claims about their successes, but a closer look reveals the truth. For example Allison DuBois — the inspiration for the TV show Medium — once claimed to have helped solve crimes for the Glendale Arizona Police Department and the Texas Rangers. However, both the police and the Texas Rangers denied having worked with DuBois.

5) Psychics exploit uncertainty. In most cases the information that psychics provide is unverifiable because the person is never found. The psychic could give police and the grieving family two completely contradictory accounts — say, for example, that a missing girl ran away and has started a happy new life in another city, or that she was killed and buried immediately after being taken — and unless the girl is found there’s no way to know whether any of it is true.

It’s also important to remember that these are vulnerable people; they’re not seeking to find a missing heirloom or whether they will meet a dark, handsome stranger. They’re asking about their missing loved ones, and have a deep personal investment in the information they receive. Even if they don’t believe in psychics, the families are desperate for answers and will turn to anyone who seems to provide guidance.

Psychic Defectives

Like gamblers — and anyone else who plays the odds — psychics are sometimes right about some of their predictions, especially when they are obvious and vague. In cases like Amanda Berry, however, it’s crystal clear that they are completely, undeniably wrong. Psychics and their defenders claim that nobody is right all the time. And indeed that’s true: everyone makes mistakes, and no one — not diagnosing doctors nor investors nor mechanics — can expect to be correct all the time.

The problem isn’t that psychics get it wrong on rare occasions; instead it’s that psychics get it right on rare occasions. Sylvia Browne been a psychic for half a century, yet she and others have consistently failed to predict important world events and tragedies that might have been prevented, from the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks to the Boston marathon bombings. They have consistently failed to find missing and abducted persons as well as wanted criminals and terrorists such as Osama bin Laden.

How could hundreds of psychics giving information over the course of nearly 10 years about three different missing children have failed to know they were alive and being held captive in a Cleveland home? How could psychics miss Jaycee Dugard, a California girl abducted when she was 11 and held captive for nearly 20 years by a couple in a suburban home?

Read more at Discovery News

Why Do Some Believe Conspiracies at All Costs?

Amidst the grief, shock and confusion that followed the Boston marathon bombings last month, efforts to explain the senseless act inevitably led to theories of conspiracy and suspicious intrigue.

The bombers themselves may have been acting against what they saw as a conspiracy. Even the mother of the two brothers who planted the bomb declared the innocence of her sons, accusing the United States government of conspiring to kill her eldest.

What is it that motivates people to latch on to conspiracy theories, often in spite of evidence to the contrary?

In some ways, it may be inherent in human nature to invest in certain beliefs at all costs, experts said, whether it’s about the health consequences of vaccines or the death of John F. Kennedy. Several basic psychological processes are at work.

For one thing, people feel better if they think they’re right, said Gary Marcus, a cognitive psychologist at New York University who wrote about conspiracy theorists for The New Yorker. In a phenomenon called “motivated reasoning,” it’s also common for people to both notice and seek out details that support their views and to reject evidence that might contradict what they want to believe.

Over time, people generally lose track of why they believe things in the first place, Marcus added, while continuing to strengthen their resolve. If there is strong emotional investment in an idea, such as the belief by a mother that she has raised a good son who would never bomb a public event, people will go to great extremes to resist evidence that their belief might be wrong.

Smokers are a classic example, Marcus said. When the Surgeon General released its first report about the dangers of cigarettes in the 1960s, non-smokers quickly agreed that smoking could cause lung-cancer. Smokers, on the other hand, were eager to point out that other things could kill you, too, that many smokers live long lives and that smoking is beneficial in other ways.

In his book “Kluge: The Haphazard Evolution of the Human Mind,” Marcus argued that the tendency for the human mind to retrieve information that confirms its thoughts is a design flaw -- making people feel good about themselves in the short term but reinforcing poor reasoning skills in the long term and ultimately leading to conflict.

“We’re pretty much all by default tending to notice things that fit with our theories,” Marcus said. “I think it’s a bug. We can’t search our memories for negatives. In a society where everyone gets a vote, when our brains work this way, it leads to gridlock.”

Conspiracy theories seem to hold particular appeal for Americans, said Robert Goldberg, a historian at the University of Utah, Salt Lake City. One reason is that we’ve been raised on a diet of Hollywood movies that are full of sabotage, double agents and convoluted plots.

At the same time, he said, the U.S. government has long invoked conspiracy to disparage its enemies, from Communist supporters to militia groups. Even Hillary Clinton talked about the vast right-wing conspiracy that was out to get her husband.

Eighty percent of Americans believe that conspiracy was involved in JFK’s death, Goldberg said. And more than a third believe that the United States either had a hand in the 9/11 attacks or stood aside when they occurred.

Only about 20 percent of Americans trust the government to do what’s right all or most of the time, according to a recent poll, he added. That decline of faith, combined with the appeal of a good story, sets people up to believe theories that involve secret plots.

Conspiracy theories also appeal when an event is especially horrible and when available explanations are plagued by ambiguity.

“Conspiracy theories give us a rationale, they give us reason to remove the randomness from what seem to be random, senseless acts,” Goldberg said. “They provide emotional sustenance and retaining power. They tell us what happened and why it happened and they point fingers at perpetrators. They give us targets that we can do something about.”

For some people, conspiracy theories are a fun way to speculate about what-ifs. But at their root, Goldberg said, suspicious hypotheses symbolize a lack of trust in an institution. Taken to an extreme, that same sentiment can motivate terrible acts like the Boston bombing.

Read more at Discovery News

Why People Believed Fake Bomb Detectors Worked

A man who sold bogus bomb detectors likened to dowsing rods in Iraq and elsewhere has been convicted of fraud in a British court. According to a piece in the New York Times:

A British businessman who sold the Iraqi security forces more than 6,000 fake bomb detectors based on $20 golf ball finders bought from the United States was convicted of fraud on Tuesday in Britain’s central criminal court. The businessman, James McCormick, 56, was described in court as having made more than $75 million from sales of the fake device in Iraq and Georgia, among other places, claiming they could detect bombs, drugs, currency and ivory, and track objects up to 3,280 feet below ground.

The devices were not faulty nor defective; they were completely useless. They had no working electronics in them that could detect bombs or anything else. The device has only one moving part, an antenna-like piece of metal that freely swivels, supposedly detecting explosive and other materials. McCormick sold the devices for up to $40,000 each. At least 800 of the detectors were purchased by the Iraqi government and used at checkpoints throughout the country, as well as in Mexico, Syria, Lebanon and Niger. McCormick faces up to eight years in prison.

According to the Times, “Iraqi officials reacted with fury to the news, noting a series of horrific bombings in the past six months despite the widespread use of the bomb detectors at hundreds of checkpoints in the capital. ‘This company not only caused grave and massive losses of funds, but it has caused grave and massive losses of the lives of innocent Iraqi civilians, by the hundreds and thousands, from attacks that we thought we were immune to because we have this device,’ said Ammar Tuma, a member of the Iraqi Parliament’s Security and Defense Committee.”

The Logic and Psychology of Bogus Detection

You might think that if the bomb-detecting devices were completely worthless, that would soon become clear to those people whose lives depended on them.

And you’d be wrong. The detectors were widely used in the field for years before questions were raised about their validity, and McCormick himself claimed to truly believe that his gadget worked.

How is it possible that the bogus detectors went undetected for so long? Part of the answer lies in human psychology and understanding random chance.

In security and law enforcement situations where people and devices are trying to detect things such as bombs or drugs, the task is finding the threats among the non-threats (or the signal from the noise). Bombings are relatively rare events compared to the number of non-bombings: the vast majority of people, vehicles, and items going through a security checkpoint will be innocent and harmless. The number of real threats will be a small fraction of the potential threat, perhaps 1% (or likely far less).

If one of the bogus bomb detectors falsely detects a bomb or threat, then a suspicious package or person is searched and (assuming nothing is found) allowed to go on their way — an event that routinely happens at airport security checkpoints around the world every day. If that happens (with any device, working or not) the assumption is not that the device doesn’t work, but instead that it gave off a false alarm — as real, working devices often do. Thus the bogus detector’s false positives are ignored (as long as they do not happen continuously, of course). Because bombings are relatively rare events, most of the time a non-working bomb detector will appear to be working correctly, since it didn’t detect bombs that were not there. As they say, even a broken clock is right twice a day.

What about when the device “failed”? Even after a real bomb was successfully smuggled through the checkpoint (and not detected by the non-working bomb detector) and detonated, the fact that the detector failed to find the bomb can simply be rationalized away by security officials: maybe the bomb was expertly hidden in some material that prevented the detector from working that time, or the person using the detector didn’t operate it correctly, or maybe the device simply malfunctioned, as all electronics do now and then. After all, everyone knows that no system, person, or device is 100 percent accurate or perfect all the time: Operators make errors, devices are not correctly calibrated and give off false alarms, drug-sniffing dogs make mistakes, and so on. Because there were alternative, plausible explanations for the device’s clear failures, few suspected that they did not (and could not) work at all.

Read more at Discovery News

How Can We Stlil Raed Words Wehn Teh Lettres Are Jmbuled Up?

Researchers in the UK have taken an important step towards understanding how the human brain 'decodes' letters on a page to read a word. The work, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), will help psychologists unravel the subtle thinking mechanisms involved in reading, and could provide solutions for helping people who find it difficult to read, for example in conditions such as dyslexia.

In order to read successfully, readers need not only to identify the letters in words, but also to accurately code the positions of those letters, so that they can distinguish words like CAT and ACT. At the same time, however, it's clear that raeders can dael wtih wodrs in wihch not all teh leettrs aer in thier corerct psotiions.

"How the brain can make sense of some jumbled sequences of letters but not others is a key question that psychologists need to answer to understand the code that the brain uses when reading," says Professor Colin Davis of Royal Holloway, University of London, who led the research.

For many years researchers have used a standard psychological test to try to work out which sequences of letters in a word are important cues that the brain uses, where jumbled words are flashed momentarily on a screen to see if they help the brain to recognise the properly spelt word.

But, this technique had limitations that made it impossible to probe more extreme rearrangements of sequences of letters. Professor Davis's team used computer simulations to work out that a simple modification to the test would allow it to question these more complex changes to words. This increases the test's sensitivity significantly and makes it far more valuable for comparing different coding theories.

"For example, if we take the word VACATION and change it to AVACITNO, previously the test would not tell us if the brain recognises it as VACATION because other words such as AVOCADO or AVIATION might start popping into the person's head," says Professor Davis. "With our modification we can show that indeed the brain does relate AVACITNO to VACATION, and this starts to give us much more of an insight into the nature of the code that the brain is using -- something that was not possible with the existing test."

The modified test should allow researchers not only to crack the code that the brain uses to make sense of strings of letters, but also to examine differences between individuals -- how a 'good' reader decodes letter sequences compared with someone who finds reading difficult.

Read more at Science Daily

Magic Trick Offers Insight Into Neuroscience

By studying a magic trick that has been around for thousands of years, neuroscientists have shed light on human attention and visual systems -- as well as on the trick, itself.

"Magicians, in particular, are very intellectual performance artists. They are very interested in the mind and how behavior happens," Dr. Stephen Macknik, director of the Laboratory of Behavioral Neurophysiology at the Barrow Neurological Institute(BNI), told Discovery News. "What scientists are doing when we study perception is pretty much the same thing, except we're using the scientific method."

The hope is that magicians' intuitive insight could help instruct the field of neuroscience and perhaps, even be applied in medicine to help people with attention deficit issues.

In their study, recently published in the inaugural issue of PeerJ, the researchers focused upon a famous trick by a pair of very famous magicians. Penn & Teller's 10-year run at The Rio All-Suite Hotel & Casino has made them one of the longest-running and most beloved acts in Las Vegas history.

Their trick, "Cups and Balls," is a classic illusion performed by Roman magicians as far back as 2,000 years ago when gladiators still battled in the Colosseum.

Read more at Discovery News

Russians Lost in Wilderness 'Ate Companion'

Two Russians who were rescued in November after four months lost in the taiga wilderness of the Far East ate the corpse of a companion in order to survive, reports said Monday.

A group of four men had disappeared in August on a river-fishing expedition to the vast Yakutia region in the Russian Far East, one of the most remote and inhospitable places in the world.

Only two of the men were finally helicoptered to safety at the end of November and the discovery of fragments of a human corpse at their campsite prompted investigators to open a murder case amid rumors of cannibalism.

The two survivors have not been arrested but are being treated as witnesses in the murder case. However it appears investigators are now certain cannibalism took place.

"During questioning, one of the witnesses testified that cannibalism did indeed take place," a source in the investigation told the Komsomolskaya Pranda daily.

"It was not murder.

"They ate the man after he died from being unable to cope with the conditions."

Yakutia newsite NVPress.ru also quoted local investigators as saying that the fisherman named Alexander Abdullayev confessed that he and the other survivor Alexei Gorulenko ate the corpse of Andrei Kurochkin.

"According to Abdullayev, Kurochkin died a natural death -- he froze to death -- and he and Alexei Gorulenko fed themselves with his flesh for weeks," NVPress.ru said.

Investigators from Yakutsk, the capital of Yakutia, confirmed officially for the first time last week that they were looking at cannibalism as a possible explanation.

The local branch of the Investigative Committee (SK) said they had flown out one of the fishermen -- apparently Abdullayev -- last week to look for the fourth man named as Viktor Komarov.

They found the fishermen's UAZ jeep -- in which they had driven deep into the taiga -- half submerged in a frozen river but the "corpse of the fourth fisherman was not found."

Read more at Discovery News

Did You See That? How Could You Miss It?

You may have received CPR training some time ago, but would you remember the proper technique in an emergency? Would you know what to do in the event of an earthquake or a fire? A new UCLA psychology study shows that people often do not recall things they have seen -- or at least walked by -- hundreds of times.

For the study, 54 people who work in the same building were asked if they knew the location of the fire extinguisher nearest their office. While many of the participants had worked in their offices for years and had passed the bright red extinguishers several times a day, only 13 out of the 54 -- 24 percent -- knew the location.

When asked to find a fire extinguisher, however, everyone was able to do so within a few seconds; most were surprised they had never noticed them. The researchers found no significant differences between men and women, or between older and younger adults.

"Just because we've seen something many times doesn't mean we remember it or even notice it," said Alan Castel, an associate professor of psychology at UCLA and lead author of the study. "If I asked you to draw the front of a dime or the front of a dollar bill from memory, how well could you do that? You might get some elements right. Do you know who the president is? On the dime, is he facing left or right? Does it say 'In God We Trust' on the front of the dollar or the back? Do you know what else it says? You've seen it so many times, but you probably haven't paid much attention to it."

Castel said that not noticing things isn't necessarily bad, particularly when those things are not important in your daily life. "It might be a good thing not to burden your memory with information that is not relevant to you," he said.

But with safety information, such as knowing where fire extinguishers are or what to do in an emergency, being prepared can, of course, be very useful.

"When you're on an airplane, do you know where the life vest is and what to do in the event of an emergency?" Castel asked. "You've been told many times, but how would you respond under stressful conditions, when there could be smoke and people screaming?"

A few months after being asked the location of the nearest fire extinguisher, the study participants were asked again if they knew where the closest one was. All of them knew.

"We don't notice something if we're attending to something else," Castel said. "Fire extinguishers are bright red and very conspicuous, but we're almost blind to them until they become relevant."

What does this tell us about the importance of training, whether for emergencies or something as common as learning a new computer program?

Castel stresses that making errors during training is useful. As with the fire extinguisher exercise, errors -- or simple oversights -- can teach us that we don't know something well and need to pay more attention in order to remember it.

"It's good if errors happen during training and not during an event where you need the information," he said. "That's part of the learning process."

The study is published in the journal Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics.

Read more at Science Daily

How Do We Make Moral Judgments? Insights from Psychological Science

We might like to think that our judgments are always well thought-out, but research suggests that our moral judgments are often based on intuition. Our emotions seem to drive our intuitions, giving us the gut feeling that something is 'right' or 'wrong.' In some cases, however, we seem to be able to override these initial reactions.

Matthew Feinberg and colleagues hypothesized that this might be the result of reappraisal, a process by which we dampen the intensity of our emotions by focusing on an intellectual description of why we are experiencing the emotion.

Across several studies, participants read stories describing moral dilemmas involving behaviors participants would probably find disgusting. Participants who reappraised the scenarios logically were less likely to make intuition-based moral judgments. These findings suggest that although our emotional reactions elicit moral intuitions, these emotions can also be regulated.

"In this way," the researchers write, "we are both slave and master, with the capacity to be controlled by, but also shape, our emotion-laden judgmental processes."

You See, the Ends Don't Justify the Means: Visual Imagery Influences Moral Judgment

In comics, superheroes are often forced by a villain to choose between saving a single person (usually their lover) or many innocent people. The villain expects the superhero either to make a deontological choice (it's wrong to sacrifice one for many) or a utilitarian choice (it's better to save more people). Most people (including superheroes) tend to use their imagination to visualize difficult scenarios.

To investigate what role visual imagery plays in moral judgment, researchers Elinor Amit and Joshua Greene tested whether volunteers were more visually or verbally oriented, then presented them with moral dilemmas. Visually oriented people were more likely to make deontological judgments, focusing on the one above the many.

Read more at Science Daily

We Are More Easily Influenced When We Follow Our Heart

When we let our hearts choose for us, we are more influenced by people who resemble ourselves, a PhD study from BI Norwegian Business School shows.

Every day we have to make a number of choices, and it is not always easy to know what the right choice is. That is why we often seek advice from others before making decisions. The Internet provides us with entirely new ways of finding out what other people feel about different products and services.

Many of us book hotel rooms online. Unless we are already familiar with the hotel, we will probably read reviews by former guests at the hotel before making up our minds. Such reviews are written by many different types of guests, families with small children, families with older children, single travellers, older guests and many other groups.

If you are a 25 year old student, for instance, you might attach different weight to a review from a student of your own age (the reviewer is similar to you) than you would to the comments from a 60 year old professor (who is different from you).

Influence from those who are similar

In his PhD study at BI Norwegian Business School, Ali Faraji Rad has conducted seven experiments to see whether we are more easily persuaded by people who are similar to us than by people who are dissimilar to us. He also looked at what circumstance might make the differences greater.

In all the experiments, participants were asked to imagine that they were going to book a hotel room online, and that they were reading a review of the hotel they were considering. Participants were then given a negative review of this hotel, along with a profile of the reviewer. The profiles were designed to create a feeling of similarity or dissimilarity with the participant in the experiment.

"Participants were more influenced by reviewers who were similar to themselves than by reviewers who were dissimilar. This difference was greatest when the choice of hotels was based on emotions and not logic," explains Ali Faraji Rad.

Logic and feelings

In the first experiment, half of the participants were asked to use logic in evaluating the hotel, while the others were was asked to base their evaluation on feelings. Those participants who based their evaluation on feelings, were influenced by reviewers similar to themselves.

Similar reviewers had no influence on participants who chose their hotel room on the basis of common sense and logic.

In the second experiment, half the participants were asked to write down some thoughts on why it is good to use logic when making decisions, while the other half was asked to write about why it is good to use our emotions when making decisions.

In this way, participants were primed to base their choice on logic or emotions.

The second experiment showed the same results as the first one. Participants who used their emotions were influenced, while those who followed their sense of logic were unaffected by reviewers who resembled themselves.

Business or pleasure

In experiments 3 and 4, Ali Faraji Rad instructed half of the participants to imagine that they were going away for fun, while the other half thought they would be travelling with work.

Previous studies have shown that we are more likely to use our emotions when we travel for fun than if we have more functional motives (such as a business trip).

Those participants who were thinking of a trip for fun were, as expected, more affected by the similar reviewer than those who were told to imagine a business trip.

Near and within reach

One half of the participants in the fifth experiment were asked to evaluate the hotel and imagine that they would be travelling next week, while the others were told they would be going in a year's time.

Participants who thought they were going next week were more influenced by similar reviewers than those who were to travel in a year's time. "Our choices are more based on emotions when they concern the near future."

In the sixth experiment, half the participants were told to imagine they were in a lottery where the chance of winning the hotel package was 1 to 5, while the other half received much longer odds, 1 to 5000.

Participants with the best chance of winning were more influenced by the similar reviewer than participants with longer odds.

"With a good chance of winning we feel that the trip is within reach, and we base our choice more on feelings," says Faraji-Rad.

Read more at Science Daily