strange behaviors

Accentuating The Negative

Richard Conniff — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 06:50:46 +0000

This is one I wrote for The New York Times back before I started this blog. But it still applies, and, yes, I am still grunting.

One of the most daunting and widely repeated insights from recent social research holds, in essence, that your marriage is doomed if you and your spouse can’t muster up five positive interactions for every negative one.

“Five seems like a lot,” I suggested to a friend, who promptly rattled off five nice things he had done for his wife before leaving the house that morning to go for a run. It was easy stuff once you put your mind to it, he said, like making the coffee and getting the newspaper.

“Gee, that’s terrific,” I replied. And I immediately started thinking of his marriage as “The Gottman Wars,” after the University of Washington psychologist, John Gottman, who came up with the five-to-one ratio. I imagined my insufferable friend and his wife creeping around the house before dawn desperately racking up positives to cushion the big fat negative that was burning a hole in their hearts. Meanwhile, I was having trouble getting my wife to accept that a grunt can be a positive interaction.

As a journalist, I have always regarded a willingness to state the negatives as a mark of intellectual honesty. Or maybe it was something not quite that admirable. A column I once wrote for The New York Times Magazine dwelt a little too gleefully on the pleasures of audacious speech (“The Case For Malediction”). But now I had the sinking feeling that Gottman and my do-gooder friend were right.

I thought so because of another much less popular idea from recent social science, called “negativity bias.” One reason we need to be so positive — to groom, to sweet-talk, to flatter, to bring home flowers — is that people discount the positives. They don’t even notice them much of the time. It has to do with “the phenomenological paleness of comforts,” according to Paul Rozin and Edward B. Royzman, University of Pennsylvania researchers who have written about negativity bias in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Review. People don’t generally get pleasure from their central heating, for instance. But they notice when it doesn’t work. Or as Arthur Schopenhauer, the 19th-century German philosopher, put it, “We feel pain, but not painlessness.”

It is, in fact, our biological nature to accentuate the negative, to dwell on the one cutting remark rather than the three or four sweet nothings. We differentiate between negative and positive events in just a 10th of a second, and the negative ones grab our attention. For instance, when researchers show test subjects a paper with a grid of smiley faces on it and one angry face, the subjects instantly zero in on the angry face. Reverse the pattern, and it takes them a little longer to pick out the solitary smile. Likewise when a boss makes four positive comments in an employee review, and one quibble, the subordinate almost invariably fixates on the quibble.

This tendency might seem perverse. But neurologists say it’s a survival mechanism. A heightened focus on what can go wrong helps us deal with danger. An angry face grabs our attention more urgently than a smile because it represents a potential threat.

Negativity bias got built into our minds during millions of years of evolution because early humans who were oblivious to danger often got a brief, bloody lesson in natural selection. As Rozin and Royzman delicately phrase it, “the threat of a predator is a terminal threat.” Excessive blitheness tended to get cut short, and thus became less and less common in succeeding generations. Skittishness, or negativity bias, became a distinguishing characteristic of the survivors. And it continues to drive our behavior even now, when the biggest threat in our daily lives is likely to be a difficult boss or a disagreeable spouse.

An exaggerated emphasis on the positive — Gottman’s five-to-one ratio — is apparently the natural antidote at home. A long-term study of corporate management suggests that it’s true in the workplace, too. Despite the ample lore about fierce executives driving up profits with their “mean business” scowls, the study found that the most productive teams managed 5.6 positive interactions for every negative. Other research has demonstrated that even chimpanzees, despite their reputation for belligerence, actually spend about 15 to 20 percent of their time grooming one another and just 5 percent fighting — a three- or four-to-one ratio.

So it starts to look like a basic primate need: To cultivate good relationships, you need to ease the innate animal skittishness of the people around you and provide them with a sense of safety, comfort and reciprocity. This is not perhaps such a startling revelation. And it is unlikely to produce an epidemic of Scrooge-like seasonal epiphanies. But for me, there is something compelling about the idea that being nice is a biological imperative, and not just sentimental humbug.

Five good deeds before breakfast still seems like a bit much. But when I grunt at my wife these days, I am striving to sound less like a hungry predator.

Making the First Great Evolutionary Sensation

Richard Conniff — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 06:48:58 +0000

Who was “Mr. Vestiges” who first shook the world with his evolutionary thinking?

1. The celebrated biological thinker Charles Darwin

2. The Edinburgh journalist Robert Chambers

3. The Engish mathematician and philosopher Charles Babbage

4. Botanist and explorer Joseph Dalton Hooker

And the answer is

Robert Chambers.

Here’s the story from The Species Seekers by Richard Conniff:

Evolutionary ideas, first loosely formulated decades earlier by Erasmus Darwin in England and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck in France, among others, were massing beneath the surface during the first half of the 19^th century, building up pressure, distorting the surface crust of conventional discourse, flaring up in odd corners of the intellectual world. Then, in October 1844, with the appearance of an anonymous tract called Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, they burst out onto the public streets, up church aisles, and into coffee shops and gentlemen’s clubs. Vestigeswas an almost miraculous work, deeply flawed, brimming over with “dangerous” ideas, and yet wildly popular.

Diagram from the first edition shows a model of development where fish (F), reptiles (R), and birds (B) represent branches from a path leading to mammals (M)

The anonymous “Mr. Vestiges,” as the author became known, deftly wove evolution into a sweeping history of the cosmos, beginning in some primordial “fire mist.” At the very moment when Darwin thought that admitting to belief in the mutability of species was like “confessing a murder,” the anonymous author of Vestiges plainly declared that humans had arisen from monkeys and apes. “In many ways,” Darwin scholar James A. Secord writes, “Darwin had been scooped…” Darwin and others in the scientific community soon suspected that the real author was an outsider, the Edinburgh journalist and publisher Robert Chambers. Vestiges was so controversial, however, that his authorship was not acknowledged until after his death in 1871.

Though Vestiges is largely forgotten today, it would alter the course of public opinion, and set both Darwin and an unknown surveyor named Alfred Russel Wallace onto career paths that would converge, years later, in the triumph of evolutionary thinking.

The Species Seekers Quiz: A Movement to Make Museums New

Richard Conniff — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 11:33:23 +0000

What spurred the 19th-century “new museum” movement?

1. Generous donations from American “robber baron” railroad magnates

2. The British urge to out-compete the museums of rival nations

3. Dermestid beetles, which ruined many old museums

4. Advances in taxidermy

And the answer is

Advances in taxidermy.

During the second half of the 19^th century, taxidermists had rapidly become more skillful and they now wanted not merely to educate but to excite the public with dioramas rendering dramatic scenes from the wild.

In 1869, the French naturalist and specimen dealer Jules Verreaux depicted a lion rearing up to claw an Arab courier down from the back of a camel (seen below), an exhibit that drew crowds to the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

A few years later, the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., displayed “Fight in the Tree-Tops,” a scene of “immense and hideously ugly male orang utans fighting furiously,” with blood gushing from the wound where one sank his fangs into the other. Critics worried about a certain lack of scientific probity. But a defender responded, “If you cannot interest the visitor you cannot instruct him; if he does not care to know what an animal is, or what an object is used for, he will not read the label.”

Recreating a moment from nature in a good diorama required fresh skins of the featured species, and also all the attendant details of its habitat, down to rocks and grass. So instead of simply buying specimens, or accepting them as gifts, museum curators and taxidermists now had to go out and become field collectors themselves. It was the beginning of the “new museum movement,” and the comprehensive survey collections they brought back served the needs of showmen and scientists alike. Read more in The Species Seekers: Heroes, Fools, and the Mad Pursuit of Life on Earth by Richard Conniff.

The Dance of the Dung Beetles

Richard Conniff — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 19:27:14 +0000

After they have gathered a ball of dung, but before they wheel it away from the dung heap, dung beetles always climb on top and spin around in a little dance. It looks like a moment of triumphant celebration, and one we can all identify with as we slog through our version of the same old shit. But it turns out they are actually just taking a compass reading.

Here’s the report from Science Daily:

Dung beetle dance provides crucial orientation cues: Beetles climb on top of ball, rotate to get their bearings to maintain straight trajectory.

The dung beetle dance, performed as the beetle moves away from the dung pile with his precious dung ball, is a mechanism to maintain the desired straight-line departure from the pile, according to a study published in the Jan. 18 issue of the online journal PLoS ONE.

The purpose of this dance, in which the beetle climbs to the top of the ball and rotates, had previously been unknown, so the authors of the PLoS ONE study, led by Emily Baird of Lund University in Sweden, investigated the circumstances that cause the beetle to dance.

They found that the beetles are most likely to perform the dance before moving away from the pile, upon encountering an obstacle, or if they have lost control of the ball, suggesting that the behavior is crucial for keeping the ball moving in a straight line.

Such direct, efficient navigation allows the beetle to quickly move away from the intense competition from other beetles at the dung pile. The authors propose that the beetles store a compass reading of celestial cues during the dance, which they then use to guide their straight-line trajectory.

So it’s all about geography, not poetry. Even so, musicians, rise up! We need a modern-day Bela Bartok or Edvard Grieg to celebrate this particular peasant dance.

Emily Baird, Marcus J. Byrne, Jochen Smolka, Eric J. Warrant, Marie Dacke. The Dung Beetle Dance: An Orientation Behaviour? PLoS ONE, 2012; 7 (1): e30211 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0030211

Impression Management 101

Richard Conniff — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 11:33:57 +0000

I watched the news without sound at the gym last night and was impressed by how NBC anchor Brian Williams always manages to keep the inside of his right eyebrow cocked up, to look like an inquiring reporter. It is almost as good as the real thing. Does he do exercises for that?

You can read one of my past articles about facial expressions here, and a profile of the founder of the science of facial expressions in my book The Ape in the Corner Office.

The Species Seekers Quiz: A Different Kind of Precious

Richard Conniff — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 15:36:34 +0000

Who or what is The Precious Wentletrap?

1. An orchid once regarded as a remedy for syphilis.

2. An audacious neo-punk Trapp Family tribute band.

3. A bird so rare that a half-dozen biological explorers lost their lives in the search for it.

4. An unusually ornate shell.

And the answer is

The Precious Wentletrap, a pale spiral of shell enclosed by slender vertical ribs, first appeared in print in Georg Eberhard Rumpf’s The Ambonese Curiosity Cabinet, an 18th century guide to the wonders of the East Indies. Many collectors then thought that only God could have created such a “work of art.” This religious spin enabled the wealthy to present their lavish collections of wentletraps and other precious specimens as a way of glorifying God rather than themselves. During the height of the Dutch shell madness (right up there with tulipmania, though less well known), a single shell once sold for more than Vermeer’s now priceless “Woman in Blue Reading a Letter.”

You can read more in The Species Seekers, or check out this article I wrote for Smithsonian called “Mad About Shells.”

The Soft, Slow, Deadly Flight of Owls

Richard Conniff — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 12:29:55 +0000

Owls need to wing down through the dark almost silently, to hear–and avoid being heard by–their prey. They have to be good because a barn owl, for instance, needs to find and eat about six vole-sized rodents a night. The secret of their extraordinary stealth lies in their ability to fly slowly, according to Thomas Bachmann, from the Technical University Darmstadt in Germany. He presented his study of barn owl wings at the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology’s annual meeting in Charleston, South Carolina. BBC Nature reports:

To find out how they managed to fly so slowly and quietly, Dr Bachmann examined the birds’ wings in minute detail.

He examined the plumage and took 3-D medical scans of their skeletal structure.

The wings’ most important features, he explained, were the high curvature or “camber” … This curvature means that each wing beat produces more lift.

Air flow is accelerated over the upper surface the curved wing. “So the pressure drops,” he said. “[And] the wing is sucked upwards into the lower pressure on the upper wing surface.”

The fine feathery fringes of each wing also help silence the owl’s flight

The feathery edges of each wing are also extremely fine – reducing any loud turbulence during flight, explained Dr Bachmann.

“Friction noise between single feathers is also reduced [by] their velvety surface,” he told BBC Nature.

In fact, Dr Bachmann explained, “all the body parts of the owl are covered by very dense plumage – owls have more feathers than other similarly sized birds”.

This soft, dense plumage absorbs other sounds the birds make as they fly.

It turns out Bachmann is interested in barn owl flight mainly as a model for biomimicry in aviation engineering. Here’s part of the abtract for one of his recent papers:

Barn owl feathers at the leading edge of the wing are equipped with comb-like structures termed serrations on their outer vanes. Each serration is formed by one barb ending that separates and bends upwards. This structure is considered to play a role in air-flow control and noise reduction during flight. Hence, it has considerable potential for engineering applications, particularly in the aviation industry. Several publications have reported possible functions of serrations at artificial airfoils. However, only crude approximations of natural serrations have so far been investigated … Confocal laser scanning microscopy was used for a three-dimensional reconstruction and investigation with high spatial resolution. Each serration was defined by its length, profile geometry and curvature. Furthermore, the orientation of the serrations at the leading edge was characterized by the inclination angle, the tilt angle and the separation distance of neighboring serrations. These data are discussed with respect to possible applications of serration-like structures for noise suppression and air-flow control.

For more about barn owls, visit http://www.barnowltrust.org.uk

Powerful People Live Large

Richard Conniff — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 15:37:51 +0000

A new study finds that the psychological experience of power makes people feel taller than they are. The paper begins with snarky promise, quoting BP Chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg, who was referring to the victims of the largest oil spill ever when he said “We care about the small people.” Here’s how the paper starts:

Height is an oft used metaphor for power: Powerful people “feel like the big man on campus” and “people look up to them.” Development psychologists have suggested that a metaphorical association between power and height may take root very early as, for instance, children are confronted with taller parents who have power over them and during adolescence taller children use their strength to physically coerce smaller children. This association continues to be reinforced as taller people earn higher salaries, are more likely to be found in
higher status occupations, to emerge as leaders and to win presidential elections.

But even if they are not taller to start with, people who get power quickly come to share that high-and-mighty feeling. Here’s the press release from Washington University:

“Although a great deal of research has shown that more physically imposing individuals are more likely to acquire power, this work is the first to show that powerful people feel taller than they are,” says Michelle M. Duguid, PhD, assistant professor of organizational behavior at Olin Business School.

Duguid is co-author, with Jack Concalo, PhD, of Cornell University, of “Living Large: The Powerful Overestimate Their Own Height,” published in the current issue of the journal Psychological Science.

In a series of three experiments, the researchers found a definite correlation between feeling powerful and feeling tall, and even suggest that future research may want to examine whether employers should consider placing short high-ranking workers in higher offices to raise their psychological sense of power.

“Height is often used as a metaphor for power,” Duguid says. “Powerful people ‘feel like the big man on campus,’ and people ‘look up to them.’ We find that the psychological experience of power may cause individuals to feel taller than objective measurement indicates they really are.”

In the researcher’s first experiment, some participants were asked to recall an incident in which they had power over another individual while others were asked to recall an incident in which someone else had power over them.

They were then asked to estimate their size in relation to a pole that had been set precisely 20 inches taller than their actual heights.

Those who had been conditioned to feel ‘empowered’ thought the pole was nearer in height to them than those who’d been made to feel subordinate.

In the second experiment, two pairs of volunteers were asked to role play a scenario in which one was a manager and the other an ordinary worker.

They were then asked to give their exact heights in a questionnaire, with those having played the role of manager supplying exaggerated figures.

Finally, the participants were conditioned in the same way as they were in the first experiment, and then asked to choose an avatar in a second-life game that they thought best represented them. The more empowered volunteers consistently chose taller avatars.

“These findings may be a starting point for exploring the reciprocal relationship between the psychological and physical experiences of power,” Duguid says. “An interesting direction for future research would be to determine whether associations between power and size extend to other self-perceptions and self-categorization.”

Duguid, Michelle M. and Goncalo, Jack A., “Living Large: The Powerful Overestimate Their Own Height” (2011). You can read it here.

Also check out one of my past articles about how the experience of power changes people. That’st’s also, in large part, the subject of my books The Natural History of the Rich and The Ape in the Corner Office.

How Livestock Feed Spreads Deadly Drug Resistance

Richard Conniff — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 20:00:16 +0000

For more than 50 years, livestock producers have been fattening their animals on commercial feed laced with antibiotics. Nobody bothered to ask how this treatment worked. Adding antibiotics to livestock feed–28.5 million pounds of the stuff a year, 80 percent of all antibiotic use in this country–was simply a quicker way to get livestock to put on weight, and since added weight meant added profit, that was enough.

A new study being published today changes all that, revealing for the first time how antibiotics alter the ecology of an animal’s gut–and also how that inadvertently puts human health at risk by making dangerous pathogens like MRSA resistant to our limited battery of antibiotics.

Among the startling new details: Use of antibiotics almost immediately causes a 20-100-fold increase in one of the most notorious bacterial pathogens, E. coli. The antibiotics also quickly cause bacteria to become resistant even to antibiotics the animals did not actually receive. (It happens through a process called horizontal gene transfer.)

Detailing what happens inside the pig is a key step in the rapidly developing debate about whether to ban the use of antibiotics in livestock feed, as has already happened in Denmark and other countries. Environmentalists and health officials have been voicing their concern about the hazards of our over-reliance on antibiotics for more than 40 years, especially with the appearance of untreatable diseases like MRSA and, just last week in India, totally drug-resistant tuberculosis.

Gut-level science also gives researchers vital information needed to begin finding alternative methods that could enable livestock to grow just as quickly–without antibiotics. The study, by researchers from Michigan State University and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, appears in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.

Researchers looked at two groups of piglets birthed and reared in tightly-controlled, decontaminated rooms at the National Animal Research Center in Ames, Iowa. Even before the study got underway, they found that both groups already had a substantial reservoir of antibiotic resistance–149 genes’ worth–at birth. “The constant selective pressure of 50 years of in-feed antibiotics appears to have established a high background level of resistance in the swine microbiome,” the authors remark. From there, it just got worse.

One group of piglets was reared on ASP250, a standard commercial feed containing the antibiotics chlortetracycline, sulfamethazine, and penicillin. The other group received the same feed but without the antibiotics.

The researchers then analyzed the animals’ fecal samples to learn how their guts changed after just two weeks. Genetic analysis enabled them to see that antibiotic resistance genes increased in both diversity and number. They were also able to show exactly which kinds (or phyla) of bacteria increased or decreased. For instance, the phylum Proteobacteria increased from just one percent of the population in unmedicated animals to 11 percent in the piglets receiving antibiotics–and most of that change was due to the increase in E. coli. This increase in the bacteria responsible for some of our worst food-borne disease outbreaks presumably occurred because the E. coli were already resistant to antibiotics.

The study also detailed changes in a variety of mechanisms involved in converting energy into muscle. “Taken together,” the co-authors write, “the data suggest numerous possibilities for how the swine gut microbiota might be involved with the improved feed efficiency afforded by certain in-feed antibiotics.”

Asked whether these results suggest the possibility of manipulating the gut flora of livestock by inoculation or other means, rather than with antibiotics, Tufts University microbiologist Stuart Levy said, “Without a doubt. Just as we do with lactobacillus, and just as we do with probiotic treatments. We have always argued that you don’t need to use antibiotics to do this, if only we knew what the antibiotics were doing.”

You should be able sometime in the next few days to read the whole study here.

Looft, T., et al (2012) “In-feed antibiotic effects on the swine intestinal microbiome” Proceedings of the National Academy of Science

Singles Ladies and Species Discovery

Richard Conniff — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 14:53:21 +0000

One of my frustrations in writing The Species Seekers was the shortage of women in the early history of biological discovery. Mary Kingsley was clearly wonderful, but once is never enough. So this morning I was delighted to come across two stories of occasionally cross-dressing women and the discovery of new species.

This is surely the first time this blog has picked up an item from the Australian website CelebrityFix, but in a good cause:

Australian scientists have named a species of horse fly after Beyoncé, because its ‘spectacular gold colour’ makes it the “all time diva of flies.”

The scientist responsible for the fly’s superstar name, officially Scaptica (Plinthina) beyonceae, has explained the similarities between the insect and the singer in a CSIRO media release.

“It was the unique dense golden hairs on the fly’s abdomen that led me to name this fly in honour of the performer Beyoncé as well as giving me the chance to demonstrate the fun side of taxonomy – the naming of species,” said Australian National Insect Collection researcher, Bryan Lessard.

We’re hearing ‘gold’ (hotpants), (luscious)’hair’, (toned) ‘abdomen’, strange(ly attractive) species…yep, sounds like Beyonce to us!

Mr. Lessard also said that while the horse fly is “often considered a pest” they are “extremely important pollinators of plants” and “act like hummingbirds during the day, drinking nectar from their favourite varieties of grevillea, tea trees and eucalypts.”

Amazingly, the rare Scaptia (Plinthina) beyonceae was collected in 1981 — the same year Beyoncé was born! Although, it was found in north-east Queensland’s Atherton Tablelands, not in the arms of Mathew and Tina Knowles in Houston, Texas.

Amazingly, Beyonce isn’t the first star to get a creepy crawly named after her. Check out our totally educational gallery of organisms named after celebrities…

And from a more familiar source, Cynthia Graber at 60 Second Science, here’s a story about a female species seekers finally receiving her small share of recognition:

Jeanne Baret was passionate about science. So passionate that, in the 1760s, the Frenchwoman disguised herself as a man. She hid her true identity to accompany her lover, botanist Philibert Commerson, on the first French ship to sail around the world. At the time, women weren’t allowed on French navy vessels, and general sexism prevented them from working in science.

Commerson was sick for part of the trip, and so Baret accomplished much of the fieldwork on her own. Together the two collected more than 6000 specimens. More than 70 species have been named for Commerson. He intended to name a species after Baret, but he died before he could do so.

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A. Habit B. Flower showing reflexed corolla and bud C. Flower with flat corolla D. Mature fruit E. Immature fruit

Then last year, University of Utah biologist Eric Tepe heard an interview with Baret biographer Glynis Ridley on NPR. The story inspired Tepe to name a species of vine from South America in her honor: Solanum baretiae. Its leaves are of variable shape, as were the leaves of the species Commerson had intended to name for Baret. S. baretiae’s flowers are violet, yellow or white. An exotic species for an unusual woman, who made a mark on science without leaving her name. Until now.

Here’s more on Baret from Scientific American.