In the scientists’ view, the sheep faced a dilemma: ‘In our study, sheep faced a trade-off between maximizing their access to a preferred, but limited, resource and staying together as a group.’
Sheep personality vs. location
More often than not, groups broke apart. And here personality came to the fore, say the scientists: ‘bold sheep ... tended to split into subgroups at smaller group sizes than shy sheep’. That was the study’s major finding. The scientists discovered that after a split, the new, little groups would often be of equal size.
The idea that each individual sheep might have a uniquely distinctive personality is quite modern, academically speaking. Until recently such individuality in non-human animals had never been documented by scientists, at least not in a way that merited bold, unqualified mention by other scientists.
Michelena et al. write about the newness of their notion. They say: ‘Comparative psychologists and behavioral ecologists have recently documented consistent intraspecific differences between individuals in traits such as aggressiveness, activity, exploration, risk taking, fearfulness, and emotional reactivity.’
When they say ‘recently’ they mean 1998, when a treatise in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London persuaded many biologists that some pumpkinseed sunfish are shy, and others are bold.
Michelena et al. note that earlier studies did point the way towards these personality insights. A prime example, they say, is the distractingly named ‘The Relation Between Dominance and Exploratory Behavior is Context-Dependent in Wild Great Tits’, which delighted ornithologists in 2004.
Michelena, Pablo, Angela M. Sibbald, Hans W. Erhard, and James E. McLeod (2009). ‘Effects of Group Size and Personality on Social Foraging: The Distribution of Sheep Across Patches.’ Behavioral Ecology 20 (1): 145–52.
Wilson, D. S. (1998). ‘Adaptive Individual Differences within Single Populations.’ Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B 353: 199–205.
Dingemanse, N .J., and P. de Goede (2004) ‘The Relation Between Dominance and Exploratory Behavior is Context-Dependent in Wild Great Tits.’ Behavioral Ecology 15: 1023–30.
Spacing at the Beach
Some thirty years ago, beachgoers in three countries found that strangers were coming up to them, asking strange questions. The strangers turned out to be fairly harmless. They were academics, driven by a fierce desire to understand how much space people appropriate for themselves when they plop down on a beach.
Until 1974, only lifeguards and the beachgoers themselves knew the answer. No one in academia had sufficient data to address the question with any degree of authority.
In midsummer of the previous year, Julian Edney and Nancy Jordan-Edney of the University of Arizona had travelled two thousand miles east and spent five days striding up and down a beach. Their subsequent report, called ‘Territorial Spacing on a Beach’, published in the journal Sociometry, was a landmark in the history of studying territorial spacing on beaches.
The Edneys’ artfully collected data, after careful crunching and interpretation, told them several things. As groups get bigger, they tend to grab less space per person. Men tend to grab more space than women. And there were nuances that were not so easily interpreted, then or now.
Seven years later, another American, H. W. Smith, at the University of St. Louis, went to Europe, determined to measure the spacing between people on a beach in France, and then on a beach in Germany. Smith succeeded. His report ‘Territorial Spacing on a Beach Revisited: A Cross-National Exploration’ subsequently appeared in the journal Social Psychology Quarterly.
In both Germany and France, Smith found much the same thing that the Edneys had seen in America. And he discovered something more. ‘Lone Germans’, Smith wrote, ‘had more circularly shaped claims than lone French persons.’ Also, Germans ‘overwhelmingly (99%) tended to structure very rigidly public space by building sand castles around their territories’.
The urge to measure people’s personal space has not been confined to beaches. In 1974, Paul Nesbitt of the University of Nevada, Reno, and Girard Steven of the University of California, Santa Barbara, published ‘Personal Space and Stimulus Intensity at a Southern California Amusement Park’. They explain how they sent an attractive young woman, or alternatively a man, into the queues for various attractions at an amusement park. ‘It was found that subjects immediately behind them in line stood further away when the stimulus persons wore brightly colored clothes than when they wore conservative clothing. Subjects similarly stood further away when the stimulus persons used perfume or after-shave lotion than when they used no scent.’
Recently, Masae Shiyomi, of Ibaraki University in Mito, Japan, performed an Edney-esque set of measurements with cows. Details can be found and enjoyed in her report ‘How are Distances Between Individuals of Grazing Cows Explained by a Statistical Model?’ This is the sixth in Shiyomi’s ongoing and subtle series of cow-spacing reports.
Cows in a pasture, she finds, space themselves differently than do people on a beach. How, exactly, do cows form a crowd? The question drives Shiyomi; statistically minded farmers will want to follow her adventures.
Edney, Julian J., and Nancy L. Jordan-Edney (1974). ‘Territorial Spacing on a Beach.’ Sociometry 37: 92–104.
Smith, H. W. (1981). ‘Territorial Spacing on a Beach Revisited: A Cross-National Exploration.’ Social Psychology Quarterly 44 (2): 132–37.
Nesbitt, Paul D., and Steven , Girard (1974). ‘Personal Space and Stimulus Intensity at a Southern California Amusement Park.’ Sociometry 37 (1): 105–15.
Shiyomi, Masae (2004). ‘How are Distances Between Individuals of Grazing Cows Explained by a Statistical Model?’ Ecological Modeling 172: 87–94.
Distance between two cows during grazing phase
Take a Seat in Bulgaria
When people walk into a cinema, where do they choose to sit? The question has vexed several brain researchers.
The topic arose in Bulgaria. Bulgarian cinema receives less global attention than its counterparts in other developed countries. Bulgarian cinema audiences receive correspondingly little scrutiny. This attention deficit was addressed, slightly, in the year 2000, when George B. Karev of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences conducted his study ‘Cinema Seating in Right, Mixed and Left Handers’.
At the time, Karev was best known for his 1993 report ‘Arm Folding, Hand Clasping and Dermatoglyphic Asymmetry in Bulgarians’. The cinema seating study, dealing as it does in questions of left versus right, in some respects builds on the earlier work.
Karev made some diagrams showing the seat locations in five different cinemas. He blocked off the seats in the middle, and asked people to tell him which of the open seats they would select. Most chose seats on the right side. This was especially true among people who, in answer to another question, said they were right-handed.
Why this general preference for the right side? Most probably, Karev says, it’s because: (a) films pack an emotional wallop; (b) one side of the brain is better at handling emotions; and (c) experienced film-goers learn to sit where that side of their brain will have the best vantage point.
The response of the scientific community was immediate, if minuscule. Professor Sergio Della Sala of the University of Aberdeen suggested that ‘one possible way to find out if Karev is correct would be to ask people to sit in a room exempt from any emotional content – example a large waiting room, a lecture theatre, even possibly the House of Lords?’ Della Sala made this comment in the form of a press release. The press release announced two things: that Karev’s study had just been published; and that Della Sala was the new editor of the journal that published it. The journal is called Cortex.
That was about the extent of the scientific community’s reaction to the Karev experiment, at least publicly, until 2006. In that year, a German research quartet took the stage.
Peter Weyers and colleagues at Bavarian Julius-Maximilians University repeated Ka
rev’s experiment, but with some twists. The original cinema diagrams showed the film screen at the top of the page. But here, some diagrams showed the screen at the bottom of the page, or on one side. Looking at these diagrams, people had no real preference for sitting with the screen to their left or to their right.
The Germans published a report in the journal Laterality. There could be many reasons, they said, why the Bulgarians opted for the right. Top of the list: the odd fact that most people habitually turn to the right when entering a room.
That’s how things stand, for now, on the mental and cinematic significance of choosing sides in Bulgaria or elsewhere.
The journal Laterality, by the way, is edited by Chris McManus of University College London. Professor McManus was awarded the 2002 Ig Nobel Prize in biology for the short treatise ‘Scrotal Asymmetry in Man and in Ancient Sculpture’, which he wrote soon after graduating from medical school. The journal Nature published the article in 1976, and featured it on their front cover.
Karev, George B. (2000). ‘Cinema Seating in Right, Mixed and Left Handers.’ Cortex 36 (5): 747–52.
–– (1993). ‘Arm Folding, Hand Clasping and Dermatoglyphic Asymmetry in Bulgarians.’ Anthropologischer Anzeiger 51(1): 69–76.
Weyers, Peter, Annette Milnik, Clarissa Müller, and Paul Pauli (2006). ‘How to Choose a Seat in Theatres: Always Sit on the Right Side?’ Laterality 11 (2): 181–93.
Boos Act as Booze on the Power-Hungry
People with a tremendous drive for power sometimes encounter obstacles. An experiment measured what happened when power-driven people gave speeches to an audience that responded with blatant, deliberate acts of boredom.
The researchers, Eugene Fodor and David Wick of Clarkson University in Potsdam, New York, wrote up the details in a blandly titled monograph, ‘Need for Power and Affective Response to Negative Audience Reaction to an Extemporaneous Speech’.
Fodor and Wick found some power-seekers and, for comparison, some power-avoiders. They used a standard psychological method to discriminate these people from those sorts who are merely indifferent to or accepting of power. They asked each volunteer to write little stories about a set of pictures. The pictures showed ‘(1) seven men around a table, (2) man with cigarette behind woman, (3) architect at desk, (4) two women in lab coats in laboratory, (5) ship captain, and (6) trapeze artists’. The volunteers’ stories revealed, at least in theory, who unconsciously craved power and who did not.
Having selected their test subjects, Fodor and Wick asked each to give a three-minute persuasive speech to an audience. A wee, special audience it was – one woman and one man specially trained and rehearsed for the occasion.
Fodor and Wick ‘predicted that power-motivated participants would exhibit higher levels of electromyographic activity in the brow supercilii when confronted by a negative audience reaction to their speech’. In this, too, they relied on an established method, trusting that the electrical activity level in the forehead-frowning muscles would reliably indicate a person’s anxiety level.
For some speechgivers, the audience showed interest. But for others, not: ‘Fifteen seconds into the speech, the young woman crossed her legs and began looking at her hands. The young man began to shift in his chair. The woman continued looking around. The man looked at his watch, then briefly gaped out the window. At approximately 1 min into the speech, the actors looked at each other and raised their eyebrows. They then looked back at the participant delivering the speech. Both continued to shift their gaze to their hands or the floor, rarely looking at the participant. Approximately 2-and-1/2 min into the speech, near the end, the woman gave off a visible sigh. The actors continued to look around for the remaining 30s. The man, for his part, twiddled his thumbs a lot, looked at the clock a few times, yawned at specific junctures.’
The results of the experiment: under this kind of duress, the power-hungry persons, compared to the non-power-hungry individuals, had noticeably greater eyebrow-furrowing-muscle electrical activity.
Fodor and Wick end their report with an eyebrow/anxiety-raising cautionary note for anyone who aspires to leadership. They specifically mention politicians and labour-management negotiators: ‘The findings ... suggest that certain occupations may pose repeated exposures to stress of a kind that can threaten cardiovascular health for persons high in power motivation.’
Fodor, Eugene M., and David P. Wick (2009). ‘Need for Power and Affective Response to Negative Audience Reaction to an Extemporaneous Speech.’ Journal of Research in Personality 43: 721–26.
Liar, Liar
In 2006, a group called the Global Deception Research Team published a report called ‘A World of Lies’. It appeared in the Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology.
The team is big. It has ninety-one members, spread all around the world. Their stated goal: ‘studying stereotypes about liars’.
They ask someone, ‘How can you tell when people are lying?’, then follow this up with ten simple multiple-choice questions about liars:
When people are lying, they act … calm, nervous, or neither calm nor nervous?
When people are lying, they act … silly, serious, or neither silly nor serious?
When people are lying, their stories are … more consistent than usual, less consistent than usual, or neither?
When people are lying, their stories are … longer than usual, shorter than usual, or neither?
Before answering questions, people who are lying pause … longer than usual, shorter than usual, or neither?
When people are lying, they stutter … more than usual, less than usual, or neither?
When people are lying, they shift their posture … more than usual, less than usual, or neither?
When people are lying, they look at the other person’s eyes … more than usual, less than usual, or neither?
When people are lying, they touch and scratch themselves … more than usual, less than usual, or neither?
When people are lying, they use hand gestures … more than usual, less than usual, or neither?
They asked these questions of people in sixty-two different countries: China, Colombia, Croatia, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, the Dominican Republic, Egypt, Estonia, Finland, France, Georgia, Germany, Ghana, Greece, India, Indonesia, Iran, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Jordan, Kenya, Korea, Kuwait, Lithuania, Malaysia, Malta, Mauritius, Mexico, Micronesia, Moldova, Morocco, Nepal, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Pakistan, Paraguay, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Samoa, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, Spain, Sri Lanka, Swaziland, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Togo, Trinidad and Tobago, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, the UK, and the US.
The Global Deception Research Team compiled and analysed the answers. They distilled it down to this: ‘[There are] common stereotypes about the liar, and these should not be ignored. Liars shift their posture, they touch and scratch themselves, liars are nervous, and their speech is flawed. These beliefs are common across the globe. Yet in prevalence, these stereotypes are dwarfed by the most common belief about liars: “they can’t look you in the eye”.’ That is their great discovery. And it accords with previous discoveries by other researchers.
The team prepared for its work by studying thirty-two earlier studies about lying. A 1981 survey of Americans, they say, found the widespread belief that ‘liars avert gaze, touch themselves, move their feet and legs, shift their posture, shrug, and speak quickly’. A 1996 survey of Britons revealed the general opinion that ‘liars reduce eye contact, turn away, blink, and pause while giving inconsistent, implausible stories’.
Of these and other nations’ beliefs, the Global Deception Research Team says ‘These beliefs are probably inaccurate.’ It is well established, they say, that people show little ability to detect when somebody is lying.
The Global Deception Research Team did not ask whether the people who answered their survey were lying. The reader may presume that the researchers presume that, when people answer surve
ys, they tell the truth.
The Global Deception Research Team (2006). ‘A World of Lies.’ Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 37 (1): 60–74.
Norman, the Punk or the Accountant
The finding about punks and accountants came in two parts. The finders, University of Exeter psychologists Louise Pendry and Rachael Carrick, published their study in the European Journal of Social Psychology. In essence, their research is not really about punks and accountants – rather, it’s about conformity.
Pendry and Carrick’s first insight, though small and unshocking, is technically unprecedented in the annals of psychology. They got it by recruiting run-of-the-mill, non-punk, non-accountant individuals, and asking them sly questions. The answers, Pendry and Carrick say, ‘revealed that a category strongly associated with non-conformity was that of punks; whereas for conformity, a popular group was that of accountants’.
Pendry and Carrick’s second, greater insight came from an experiment. In this, too, the test subjects were neither accountants nor punk rockers. They can be thought of, in a purely academic sense, as innocent dupes.
The basic idea, with each of the dupes, was to show them a picture, then see how that picture had affected them. Would the innocent dupe be more – or less – willing to conform with other people’s opinions?
Pendry and Carrick describe the set-up tersely: ‘Participants were given a photograph of either an accountant or a punk and instructed to study it carefully for a few moments. The accountant photo depicted a man with neat appearance, wearing a suit, with short hair, and glasses. The punk photo showed a young man with spiky hair, and torn clothing covered in graffiti.’
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