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To Avoid Stupid Mistakes, Think in French
Bloomberg BusinessWeek: Would you take a bet that offered you an even chance of winning $12 and losing $10? If you’re like most people, you would not. But what if someone offered you the bet in French? New research in the journal Psychological Science suggests that, assuming you understand French, you would. What is going on here? The explanation is not—as a France-bashing wag might suggest—that it’s always good to bet against the French. The same effect appears when wagers are presented in Japanese, Spanish—even English, if it’s a person’s second language.
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Culture, Not Biology, Shapes Language
NPR: There's no language gene. There's no innate language organ or module in the human brain dedicated to the production of grammatical language. There are no meaningful human universals when it comes to how people construct sentences to communicate with each other. Across the languages of the world (estimated to number 6,000-8,000), nouns, verbs, and objects are arranged in sentences in different ways as people express their thoughts. The powerful force behind this variability is culture. So goes the argument in Language: The Cultural Tool, the new book I'm reading by Daniel Everett.
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What Cocktail Parties Teach Us
The Wall Street Journal: You're at a party. Music is playing. Glasses are clinking. Dozens of conversations are driving up the decibel level. Yet amid all those distractions, you can zero in on the one conversation you want to hear. This ability to hyper-focus on one stream of sound amid a cacophony of others is what researchers call the "cocktail-party effect." Now, scientists at the University of California in San Francisco have pinpointed where that sound-editing process occurs in the brain—in the auditory cortex just behind the ear, not in areas of higher thought.
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Thinking in a Foreign Language Makes Decisions More Rational
Wired: To judge a risk more clearly, it may help to consider it in a foreign language. A series of experiments on more than 300 people from the U.S. and Korea found that thinking in a second language reduced deep-seated, misleading biases that unduly influence how risks and benefits are perceived. “Would you make the same decisions in a foreign language as you would in your native tongue?” asked psychologists led by Boaz Keysar of the University of Chicago in an April 18 Psychological Science study. “It may be intuitive that people would make the same choices regardless of the language they are using, or that the difficulty of using a foreign language would make decisions less systematic.
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Small “Neural Focus Groups” Predict Anti-Smoking Ad Campaign Success
Brain scans of a small group of people can predict the actions of entire populations, according to a new study by researchers from the University of Michigan, the University of Oregon and the University of California, Los Angeles. The findings are relevant to political advertising, commercial market research, and public health campaigns, and broaden the use of brain imaging from a diagnostic to a predictive tool.
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'Moody' Toddlers More Likely to Become Problem Gamblers, Study Suggests
LiveScience: Restless, moody toddlers are more likely than other tots to grow up to become problem gamblers, suggests a new study. Retracing the lives of more than 900 New Zealanders, researchers found that 3-year-olds with this so-called under-controlled personality were twice as likely as those with well-adjusted temperaments to be compulsive gamblers three decades later. The findings appeared online March 28 in the journal Psychological Science. Wendy Slutske of the University of Missouri and her colleagues reported they examined data from the New Zealand Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study.
