Ideas

This is an interesting collection of observations from the Wall Street Journal. The first one, regarding active engagement in reading, is what caught my attention and one that I would like to see more information about.

WEEK IN IDEAS
JUNE 18, 2011
Week in Ideas
By CHRISTOPHER SHEA

Intelligence
Stupidity Is Contagious

Everett Collection
A study found that college students who read a short script about a moronic soccer hooligan subsequently did worse on a test of knowledge than a control group.

College students who read a short script about a moronic soccer hooligan subsequently did worse on a test of knowledge than a control group. But the deficit disappeared if the readers were encouraged to carefully notice how they differed from the character in the story.

Sixty-three Austrian students read "Slow on the Uptake," about Meier, who wakes, is confused by an adage on his calendar, gets drunk, attends a soccer match and misses the outcome because he brawls. The students either summarized the story or underlined passages where Meier differed from them. A control group of 18 read a story with an innocuous protagonist.

Afterward, on a difficult test covering geography, science and the arts, the students who had read about Meier but not underlined how he differed from them scored from 30% to 32%, compared to about 37% for the control group and for students who distanced themselves from the character.

"A Story About a Stupid Person Can Make You Act Stupid (or Smart): Behavioral Assimilation (and Contrast) as Narrative Impact," Markus Appel, Media Psychology (April-June 2011)

Personal Finance
Confidence in Debt
Young people "experience debt as empowering," according to a study, and the effect is strongest for people who come from the poorest families.

Researchers looked at the responses of 3,079 people from 1979 to 2004, in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. They ranged in age from 18 to 34, although most were in their early-to-mid 20s. The survey included data about credit-card and educational debt, and measures of respondents' self-esteem and sense of mastery.

For students from families in the bottom 25% of income, self-esteem and perceived mastery rose steadily with both educational and credit-card debt. The education itself didn't drive the rise in self-esteem; given two people with the same demographics and schooling, the one with higher debt had higher self-regard. Similar but less-consistent effects were found for students from families in the broad middle income ranges.

Only at age 28 did educational debt (though still not credit-card debt) become a drag on self-esteem.

"Youth Debt, Mastery, and Self-Esteem: Class-Stratified Effects of Indebtedness on Self-Concept, Rachel E. Dwyer, Laura McCloud and Randy Hodson, Social Science Research (May)


Blend Images/Getty Images
People who fill out bubble forms, like those ubiquitous fill-in-the-circle tests, use distinctive pencil strokes that can be used to identify them, researchers report.

Privacy
Bursting the Bubble
People who fill out bubble forms, like those ubiquitous fill-in-the-circle tests, use distinctive pencil strokes that can be used to identify them, researchers report.

They programmed a computer to take stock of 804 potentially tell-tale aspects of people's pencil strokes on such forms. These include the mark's center of mass, the variance of pencil-strokes from the bubble's radius and the depth of shading, as well as more mathematically advanced measures.

The computer analyzed 92 student surveys, checking a dozen marks from each respondent. Then the researchers scrutinized eight marks from a randomly picked person. The computer identified its man or woman 51% of the time. The correct answer was among the computer's top three choices 75% of the time and was 92.4% of the time among the top 10.

The method could be used to catch students who hire proxies to take their SATs and teachers who change answers on their students' high-stakes tests. But employers, the researchers said, could also use it to monitor the voting habits of their employees, since some jurisdictions, in the interest of transparency, release scans of voters' bubble forms, without attaching their names.

"Bubble Trouble: Off-Line De-Anonymization of Bubble Forms," Joseph A. Calandrino, William Clarkson and Edward W. Felten (to be presented at the Usenix Security Symposium, August)


Getty Images/OJO Images
A study claims that brain scans of consumers who listen to new songs can better predict hits than directly asking the consumers what songs they like.

Neuropsychology
The Brain's Pop Chart
Forget that focus group or that rave in Pitchfork or Rolling Stone: A study claims that brain scans of consumers who listen to new songs can better predict hits than directly asking the consumers what songs they like.

In 2006, 27 people aged 12 to 17 rated 120 songs by different unsigned artists while having their brains scanned. The researchers eventually analyzed all recorded sales for each song—including singles, albums and compilations—through May 2010. Sales data could be found for only 87 of the songs.

Most were duds, but three sold at least 500,000 copies. There was no correlation between the test subjects' ratings (on a 1-to-5 scale) and sales. But researchers did find a link between units sold and activity in the nucleus accumbens, a brain region linked to reward and anticipation.

The scans predicted about one-third of the hits, defined as songs with sales of 15,000 to 35,000, and 80% of the nonhits. But that was still impressive, the researchers said, given the capricious nature of the music business.

"A Neural Predictor of Cultural Popularity," Gregory S. Berns and Sara E. Moore, Journal of Consumer Psychology (forthcoming)