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Trees on streets and boulevards reduce crime. Do we know the how or why of this particular correlation, nope. But we do know that trees on private lots also tend to reduce criminal activity, with the proviso that they are over 42 feet high. The studies linked are quite fascinating and most definitely worth a read.
But recent research suggests the opposite: trees don’t give burglars and highwaymen a place to hide, rather they may reduce crime in a neighbourhood.
One piece of research from 2001 focused on a public housing project in Chicago, where some buildings had trees out front, others did not. The research found that buildings with fewer trees or barren yards had more crime reports, while buildings with trees had fewer crimes. Because residents of the project were randomly assigned to various apartments, the differences in crime couldn’t be attributed to factors like income.
A more recently published article in the journal Landscape and Urban Planning focused on Cincinnati. The city’s trees were being killed by the Emerald Ash Borer beetle. Researchers took advantage of the spread of the beetle to study the relationship between trees and crime. They found that when a tree is killed and removed, crime in the area tends to go up.
Don’t feel bad about this, we are all in the same boat when it comes to making bad decisions or being unduly influenced. The science behind advertising and persuasion has come a long ways, and knowing how they manipulate you and the rest of the public is valuable knowledge. James Garvey lists three of the ways we are vulnerable to persuasion the Representative Heuristic, the Availability Heuristic, and the Anchoring Effect. Before we can discuss these systems though a brief overview of how we think and the short cutting our brain does that makes life generally go well but not always thoughtfully.
[…] by distinguishing between two kind of thinking:fast, automatic, intuitive thinking and slow, reflective, rational thinking. You can imagine that these two kinds of mental activities are the work of two parts of your mind, two systems that swing into different kinds of action to accomplish different tasks. The part that is responsible for first kind of thinking is called system 1 or the Automatic System, and the part the engages in slower, more careful thought is called system 2 of the Reflective System.
System 1 operates quickly and automatically, This feels instinctive and intuitive, and it requires no effort on your part. System 1 is in charge when you orient yourself to a sudden sound, wince involuntarily when you see something that disgusts you, read anger in the lines on someone’s face, and recognize written words in your native tongue – it all just clicks fluently and automatically, without you thinking about it at all.
The work of System 2, the Reflective system, takes effort, an act of deliberate concentration on your part. Your deliberative efforts are limited and cannot be sustained for very long without degradation, a phenomenon called ego depletion. System 2’s work is voluntary, slower that your gut reactions, and associated with the experience of choice and agency.
[…]
The two systems interact with each other in a number of surprising ways, System 1 typically engages in a kind of constant monitoring, throwing up a series of impressions and feelings that System 2 might endorse, ignore, check, focus on, act upon, or simply go along with. Much of the time System 2 is in a low power state, aroused only when the Automatic system encounters something it cannot handle.
[…]
Our mental resources are therefore limited. It is an effort to bring System 2 into play, and it can be overloaded by trying to do too much. So evolution has taught us a number of shortcuts, rules of thumb or heuristics, which conserve our mental energies and serve us well most of the time.
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But it also means that we go wrong in systematic, predictable ways – we are constitutionally susceptible to cognitive biases, and in turn, we can be nudged.
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We use shortcuts to arrive at judgments too. […] It’s a large part of the theoretical framework behind contemporary persuasion, and it’s already shaping our world and changing our lives.
Consider this description of Steve.
‘Steve is very shy and withdrawn, invariably helpful, but with little interest in people, or in the world of reality. A meek and tidy soul, he has a need for order and structure, and a passion for detail’
What do you think Steve does for a living? Is he more likely to be a farmer, salesman, airline pilot, librarian, or physician? Once you have an answer to that question , ask yourself what job he is least likely to have.
[…]
Very many people, including me when I first read that description , conclude that Steve is most likely a librarian – how could this shy guy like that possibly be a salesman? – and in coming to this conclusion we make use of what Kahneman and Tversky call the representativeness heuristic. We let our automatic faculties rip and take a short cut to an answer. If one slows down and thinks about it, though, there are a lot more farmers than librarians in the world. That’s extremely pertinent information if you are trying to guess which job on a list is most likely for anybody, and it should lead us to conclude that it’s most likely Steve is a farmer, maybe a shy and withdrawn farmer, but still a farmer. The probability that Steve is a librarian is instead assessed by the extent to which the description of Steve matches up with or is representative of stereotype of a librarian we have in our heads.
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We do this entirely automatically, and it has an effect on a host of judgments – how likely we think politicians are to be good leaders, how likely a new business is to succeed, and how likely our doctor is to be competent.
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People who understand persuasion will take care to fit the right stereotype and make it easier for us to come to conclusions about them automatically.
A second set of biases result from what Kahneman and Tversky call the availability heuristic. When we think about how likely some even is, we’re affected by how readily examples come to mind.
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We are likely to over-estimate the number of wayward politicians, shark attacks and meltdowns at nuclear plants because we can probably easily recall instance of such things. The problem is that how easily we can recall something has less to do with how likely or common or worrying an occurrence is and more to do with what we happen to have heard about in the news recently and how striking that news was to us. The news you choose to watch therefore has a lot of power over you, The stories it repeats reinforce your susceptibility to the availability effect.
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We over-react at first, then under-react as time goes on. […] Because of its salience, we think homicide is more common that suicide, but it isn’t. In fact, Americans are more likely to take their own lives than be murdered or die in a car crash, but because murder and car accidents are more newsworthy, dramatic and available that suicide, we concern ourselves more with home alarm systems and airbags than the signs of depression.
A final kind of bias identified by Kahneman and Tversky, perhaps the most interesting and difficult to accept of the three, is called the anchoring effect. When people first think about a number and try to estimate an unknown quality, the initial number affect their guess, anchors it – the estimate they make tends to stay near by. Again, the rule of thumb in play isn’t too bad a guide, and we use it all the time. What’s the population of Pittsburgh? If you don’t know, but you do know that Philadelphia is the largest city in Pennsylvania, and it has about 1.5 million people in it, you might feel able to guess about Pittsburgh. It’s certainly smaller than Philadelphia – maybe it’s half the size, so perhaps Pittsburgh has a population of few than 750,000, Maybe 600,000?
There are two very weird facts about this familiar process of guessing a quantity, First we tend to undercook the adjustments we make from the original guess. Once we have a number and begin adjusting in the direction we think is right, we tend to stay too close to the anchor, possibly because once we find ourselves in uncertainty, we can’t think of a good raise to carry on, so we play it safe and stop too soon. Pittsburgh is smaller that Philadelphia, so we adjust downwards, but how far downwards? In fact, this example we stayed much too close to the anchor, as we usually do. Just 300,000 people live in Pittsburgh.
Second, it doesn’t matter where the first figure comes from, it will still anchor our estimates, even it has nothing at all to do with the domain in question. According to at least one understanding of what’s going on in such cases, sometimes System 2 is in charge, finding what it hopes to be a reasonable anchor and adjusting off it to estimate an unknown quantity. But sometimes System 1 gets hooked on an anchor and freely associates, without our conscious control, and the cascade of associations ends up affecting our later estimate, whether it’s reasonable or not.
Tversky and Kahneman illustrated this second kind of anchoring with a rigged roulette wheel – it showed numbers from 0 to 100 but it actually stopped on either 10 or 65. They spun the wheel and asked a group of students to write the number down, and then answer two questions.
‘Is the percentage of African nations among the UN members larger or smaller than the number you just wrote?’
‘What is your best guess of the percentage of African nations in the UN?’
The average guess of those who saw the number 10 was 25 percent. The average guess of those who saw the number 65 was 45 percent. A roulette wheel is not a particularly informative thing if you’re trying to work out how many African nations are members of the UN, but still, those who saw the high number guessed higher than those that saw the low number. Even ludicrous anchors have an effect on us”
-James Garvey. The Persuaders pp. 55 – 66
Yeah, so being wary of your System 1 answers is probably a good thing. Bad news for the anchoring effect, as even when you’re told about it, it still works on you. :/
The competitive cycling world is being shaken as riders during competitions have be discovered using mechanical assists to help them perform better. From the AP:
“Caught using a hidden motor at a world championship race, cyclo-cross rider Femke Van Den Driessche of Belgium has been banned from cycling for six years.The sanction imposed Tuesday by the International Cycling Union is a first using its rules on technological fraud.
This case is a major victory for the UCI and all those fans, riders and teams who want to be assured that we will keep this form of cheating out of our sport,” UCI president Brian Cookson said in a statement.
The UCI banned Van Den Driessche through Oct. 10, 2021, stripped her of the Under-23 European title she won last November and fined her 20,000 Swiss francs ($20,500).The 19-year-old rider had said she would skip her disciplinary hearing at the UCI’s Swiss offices and retire from racing.”
Isn’t technology grand? We have miniaturized engine components enough to fit into a skinny bike frame and at the same time have improved battery performance enough to make this sort of cheating worthwhile. In the video below, see how it works and possibly see it in action on during professional racing.
I’m not a fan of bike racing or anything but what I find interesting is what the ‘competitive spirit’ can do to people and their moral/ethical character when it comes to high reward activities.
Competition should bring about the best of us, whether it is competing against a time or someone else in an endeavour. I see nothing wrong with this concept as being committed to a goal and focusing time and energy on it is how many things are accomplished in the world. However when the stakes are too high, and too fraught with competition, then unethical activities can be realized.
“There may be no Olympic sport as dependent on technology as cycling, whose space-age, feather-light carbon fiber bikes can cost more than a car and make the difference between a gold medal and nothing.
That has also made the sport ripe for an entirely new kind of doping: mechanical.
It has long been rumored that riders were finding ways to hide tiny electrical motors in their frames, or were using magnets in their wheels, to produce a couple of extra watts of power. But it was not until a young cyclocross racer was discovered to have a motor hidden in her bike frame last year that it became a prominent issue.”
Can we think of cheating as a indicator of when a sport has become too competitive?
The Cycling Union is taking this threat to the legitimacy of the sport seriously as they are using MRI scanners for the Olympics to ferret out the mechanical dopers.
“The group will work with the International Olympic Committee to test bikes in Rio; both will use proprietary software that the governing body developed for iPads. The system essentially scans a bike for magnetic fields that could indicate the presence of motors, and it is advanced enough to distinguish between illegal technology and the electronic shifting systems that have become common among elite riders.”
It seems that there is a limit to the usefulness of competitiveness as a motivator to many human endeavours as once a critical moral threshold has been breached, the allure of cheating becomes too strong. Thus the legitimacy of the sport, built on competition, is undone by that very same factor.
Similar analogs can be seen in the world of business and trading. The market works fairly well until rampant greed ruins the party for everyone. I smell a sociology paper flitting about on this topic as to how the limiting aspects of cheating interact with competitive sports and other activities.
Lateral awareness, or the ability to discriminate left from right is an acquired skill. Most people have it by age 10 and most people start to lose in after age 50 (good times). Lateral awareness, of course, falls on a spectrum and here are the results so far:
“A recent survey of 800 people found that 9 percent of men and 18 percent of women report a problem with left-right discrimination. And when 290 undergraduate medical students from Ireland were tested on laterality using a series of stick-figure images, more than half of them had trouble, scoring less than 77 percent (the test had 144 questions). Both of these studies found that women struggled more than men; one of the world’s leading researchers on this subject, Dr. Gerard Gormley of Queen’s University Belfast, became interested in the subject because his wife often mixed up her left and right. (She’s a righty who also mimes writing to set herself straight.) The studies also found that lateral awareness did not affect intellect—although in practice, spatial reasoning troubles can make you feel like a doofus, in fact they do not indicate inferior intellect. (Phew!)”
Truth time gentle readers! I’m pretty good with left and right, but the cardinal directions always send me for a loop – especially when travelling South. Everything just feels wrong as I’m navigating through the directions. I keep hoping that my sense of unease will diminish, but as of yet, no luck. Successfully navigating to a school across town is the first victory of the day, getting attendance is the second. Once those hurdles have been overcome, the easy part of the day, teaching ambivalent children can begin.
My google map experiences are one thing, but getting mixed up as health care professional can have obvious deleterious consequences.
“However, the field under the most pressure to avoid lateral confusion is medicine. In the dentist’s chair, there’s money wasted when hygienists x-ray the wrong tooth. It’s even worse when a left-right-disoriented dentist pulls one or more teeth from the incorrect side of the mouth. It’s even more serious in general surgery: A 2011 report estimates that there are 40 wrong-site surgeries done weekly in the U.S., and many of those involve mixing up a patient’s left and right. This is a devastating problem: If a doctor removes the healthy kidney and not the cancerous one, the results can be fatal. Wrong eye? Now we have a fully blind patient.
Healthcare professionals work in tricky circumstances that make laterality harder. For them, distinguishing left from right almost always requires rotation. During a consultation, a patient is often sitting up, but that same patient is likely lying down during the subsequent procedure. The doctor or nurse’s perspective in the operating room could then change if he or she moves around the room while the patient stays stationary.
In addition, in medical situations—and in the transportation and aviation industries—there’s often time pressure and a bustle of other things going on. A 2015 study of medical students found that distracting people with sounds impacted their ability to tell left from right, and interrupting them with cognitive tasks made matters even worse. This is why the second item on the WHO’s Surgical Safety Checklist asks if the surgical site is marked—ideally by someone not distracted, and well in advance of the pressures of the operating suite.”
So, when at a hospital and if conscious make sure you talk to your surgeon and have them mark the procedure beforehand. Just to be safe.
“That leaves us with our mnemonic devices. Some wear a wristwatch. Others make a capital “L” with their fingers. But it’s been shown that people who use mnemonic devices, particularly in a medical setting, are those the most likely to make mistakes. Our tricks fail, in other words, and practice doesn’t necessarily make perfect.”
Yeah, so mnemonic devices are out. Pretty bleak picture eh? :/ While I was reading this, I thought of the common practice of turning down the radio while looking for parking or following directions. We often see on the internet people making fun of the practice, but as this study indicates loud noises/distractions hinder our ability to make left/right distinctions. So perhaps the radio-muters might just be on to something. :)
Tatsuya Ishida creates the internet comic Sinfest. Sometimes his insight hits the proverbial nail on the head.
-“We harbor an ideological bias against the feminine voice, rooted in positive primal associations with masculinity.”
Some highlights from the JSTOR article On Men and Women’s Public Speech.
“Gunn uses speeches delivered by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama in their 2008 contest for the Democratic nomination to illustrate how gendered norms about speech create a double bind for women.
Gunn argues that the field of public address is an important symbolic arena where we harbor an “[ideological] bias against the feminine voice,” a bias, he contends, that is rooted in positive primal associations with masculinity (and the corresponding devaluation of femininity, the voice that constrains and nags—the mother, the droning Charlie Brown schoolteacher, the wife).
Both Gunn and Campbell contend that masculine speech is the cultural standard. It’s what we value and respect. The low pitch and assertive demeanor that characterize the adult male voice signify reason, control, and authority, suitable for the public domain. Women’s voices are higher pitched, like those of immature boys, and their characteristic speech patterns have a distinctive cadence that exhibits a wider range of emotional expression. In Western cultures, contends Gunn, this is bad because it comes across as uncontrolled. We associate uncontrolled speech (what Gunn calls “the cry, the grunt, the scream, and the yawp”) with bodily functions and sexuality—things that happen in the private, domestic spheres (both coded as feminine). Men are expected to repress passionate, emotional speech, Gunn explains, precisely because it threatens norms of masculine control and order.
The notion of control also relates to the cultural ideal of eloquence. Eloquence is not just a Western value but is rewarded in many cultures around the world.”
[…]
““Eloquence” is, essentially, code for values associated with masculinity.”
Ouch. Yet another patriarchal societal barrier that needs to be brought to light and rectified with all due haste.
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