̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - perception

Brains or beauty? People perceive attractive scientists as more interesting but less able, studies show

cjb250 — Mon, 22 May 2017 19:00:06 +0000

A new study published today in Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) from researchers at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and the ̽��ֱ�� of Essex suggests that when it comes to judging scientists, we are more likely to find an attractive scientist interesting, but more likely to consider their less attractive colleagues to be better scientists.

“Given the importance of science to issues that could have a major impact on society, such as climate change, food sustainability and vaccinations, scientists are increasingly required to engage with the public,” says Dr Will Skylark from the Department of Psychology at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, who led the study. “We know from studies showing that political success can be predicted from facial appearance, that people can be influenced by how someone looks rather than, necessarily, what they say. We wanted to see if this was true for scientists.”

Dr Skylark and colleagues randomly sampled the faces of scientists from the Physics and Genetics departments at US universities (108 scientists for each field), and then from the Physics and Biological Sciences departments at UK universities (200 scientists for each field) for replication studies.

In the first set of studies, the team asked one group to rate the faces on a variety of traits, such as how intelligent the individual looked, how attractive they were, and their perceived age. Then, two other groups of participants indicated how interested they would be in finding out more about each scientist’s research or how much the person looked like someone who conducts accurate and important research.

̽��ֱ��researchers found that people were more interested in learning about the work of scientists who were physically attractive and who appeared competent and moral. Interest was also slightly stronger for older scientists, and slightly lower for females. There was no difference in interest between white and non-white scientists.

However, when it came to judging whether a scientist does high-quality work, people tended to associate this with an individual’s apparent competence and morality – and the more attractive and sociable they were perceived to be, the less people considered them to look like a scientist who conducts good research.

̽��ֱ��researchers next investigated whether facial appearance affects people’s choices about which science to engage with by pairing the titles of real science-news stories with faces that had received low or high interest judgments in the first part of the study.

Participants were more likely to choose research that was paired with a photo of an interesting-looking scientist. This bias was present both for male and female scientists, physics and biology news stories, and both video and text formats.

Next, the participants were told that they would read articles from a new magazine section comprising profiles of people discussing their interests and work. ̽��ֱ��articles were adapted from news websites to make them appear like the scientist was describing his or her own work to a general audience. Participants read two articles, each presented with a photo of its putative author – one with a high ‘good scientist’ rating in the first study and one with a low rating.

Research that was paired with the photo of a ‘good scientist’ was judged to be higher quality, irrespective of the scientist’s gender and discipline – although the effect was small. In addition, quality judgments were higher for physics articles than for biology articles. A similar study found that the attractiveness of the scientist had only a small effect on the perceived quality of their research.

“It seems that people use facial appearance as a source of information when selecting and evaluating science news,” says Dr Skylark. “It’s not yet clear how much this shapes the spread and acceptance of scientific ideas among the public, but the rapid growth in visual media means it may be an increasingly important issue.”

Reference
Gheorghiu, AI, Callan, M and Skylark, WJ. Facial appearance affects science communication. PNAS; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1620542114

If you think of good science communicators, it’s likely that the names Brian Cox, Alice Roberts or Neil deGrasse Tyson may come to mind. But do you consider them good science communicators because they look competent or because they are attractive?

We know from studies showing that political success can be predicted from facial appearance, that people can be influenced by how someone looks rather than, necessarily, what they say. We wanted to see if this was true for scientists

Will Skylark

Bob Lee

Professor Brian Cox

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

Yes

Licence type:

Attribution

Reading the face of a leader

Anonymous — Tue, 10 May 2016 13:39:46 +0000

Past studies have shown that, in competitive settings, people prefer both male and female leaders to have masculine facial characteristics – because these are perceived as signalling competitive personality traits.

A new academic study finds, however, that low facial masculinity in women is also linked in people’s minds with competitiveness, and not only to cooperation – suggesting that traits of facial masculinity in men and women are interpreted differently.

“Whereas men in competitive settings benefit from high levels of facial masculinity, women fare well when they either look particularly masculine or when they do not look masculine at all,” concludes the study published in the journal Academy of Management Discoveries.

̽��ֱ��practical implications of these findings, says study co-author Jochen Menges, work both ways for women: while there may be less of a disadvantage to some women than previously assumed based on traditional facial-characteristic leadership theories, recruitment in competitive settings “may be biased” against women whose faces simply fit in the middle between masculine-looking and not masculine looking at all.

“This study challenges gender theory that says women with feminine facial characteristics are associated with communal behaviour and nurturing, while men with masculine features are associated with being driven and competitive,” says Menges. “ ̽��ֱ��study finds that it’s much more nuanced – that when women look very feminine people associate competitiveness with them as well.”

More masculine facial characteristics, as shown in digitally altered photos of a man and a woman in the study, include thicker and flatter eyebrows, a squarer jaw and more pronounced cheekbones.

̽��ֱ��study – entitled “Reading the face of a leader: Women with low facial masculinity are perceived as competitive” – was co-authored by Cambridge Judge PhD alumnus Raphael Silberzahn of IESE Business School at the ̽��ֱ�� of Navarra in Barcelona, and Jochen Menges, ̽��ֱ�� Lecturer in Organisational Behaviour at ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge Judge Business School and Professor of Leadership at WHU – Otto Beisheim School of Management in Germany.

̽��ֱ��study cites Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer, Hewlett Packard’s Meg Whitman and Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg – three high-profile women executives – as having three particular things in common: “They are all top-level leaders in highly competitive companies, they are all women, and none of them look particular masculine.” In fact, the study finds, that in S&P 500 companies, “a greater range of facial masculinity is present among women CEOs compared to men CEOs.”

̽��ֱ��researchers based their findings on a series of studies involving hundreds of American adult participants, a mixture of men and women.

In one study, participants selected a suitable leader of a company that “has many rivals and competes heavily” from a series of images showing faces of women or men with digitally altered degrees of masculinity, while in another study participants were asked to assign certain competition-themed statements (such as “She wants it her way or you’re out” and “He treats others with respect to a degree, but mostly believes he is right”) to such modified images.

Among the results: For women leaders, more than 50 per cent of study participants associated such statements as “She was feared by those around her” or “There is only one boss, and that is her” with both a low-masculinity and high-masculinity image of the same woman. For men leaders, the statement “Coworkers consider him very driven” was associated by 64 per cent of participants with high-masculinity images compared to 33 per cent for low-masculinity images, while “Doesn’t tolerate people trying to act like they are smarter or wiser than he is” had a 63 percent link to a high-masculinity image compared to 27 per cent for a low-masculinity image.

“Our findings suggest that there has been a misalignment between past research and the reality,” says Menges, emphasizing that feminine-looking women have a better chance of being seen as leaders than previously thought.

Reference:

“Reading the face of a leader: Women with low facial masculinity are perceived as competitive” Academy of Management Discoveries, Raphael Silberzahn and Jochen Menges

DOI:10.5465/amd.2014.0070

Women (but not men) with both high and low facial masculinity are perceived as competitive leaders, finds new study co-authored by a Cambridge Judge Business School academic.

This study challenges gender theory that says women with feminine facial characteristics are associated with communal behaviour and nurturing

Jochen Menges

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

Yes

Lifelong learning and the plastic brain

lw355 — Wed, 19 Nov 2014 10:06:56 +0000

When a group of experimental psychologists moved into their new lab space in Cambridge earlier this year, they took a somewhat unconventional approach to refurbishing their tea room: they had the walls tiled with the Café Wall Illusion.

̽��ֱ��illusion, so-named after it was spotted on the wall of a Bristol café in the 1970s, is a much-debated geometrical trick of the eye and brain in which perfectly parallel lines of black and white tiles appear wedge-shaped and sloped.

It’s also an excellent demonstration of how the brain interprets the world in a way that moves beyond what the input is from the eye, as one of the experimental psychologists, Professor Zoe Kourtzi, explained. “In interpreting the world around us, our brains are challenged by a plethora of information. ̽��ֱ��brain is thought to integrate information from multiple sources and solve the puzzle of perception by taking into account not only the signals registered by the sensory organs but also their context in space and time.

“In the Café Wall Illusion, the brain takes into account the surrounding tiles, but it also relies on our previous knowledge acquired through training and experience when interpreting a new situation.”

From the day we are born, neurons in the brain start to make connections that combine what we can see, hear, taste, touch and smell with our experiences and memories. Neuroscientists refer to the brain’s ‘plasticity’ in explaining this ability to restructure and learn new things, continually building on previous patterns of neuronal interactions.

To unravel the mechanisms that underlie how brains learn, Kourtzi’s team is looking at how brains recognise objects in a cluttered scene. “This aspect is vital for successful interactions in our complex environments,” she explained. “It’s how we recognise a face in a crowd or a landmark during navigation.”

Visual perception is also highly trainable. ̽��ֱ��brain can use previous experience of similar cues to be quicker at identifying the image from the ‘noise’ – the proverbial needle from the haystack.

But although neuroscientists recognise that this type of brain plasticity is fundamental to our ability to cope with continually changing settings at home, school, work and play, little is known about how we can stimulate our brain to enhance this learning process, right across the life span.

“ ̽��ֱ��process of ‘learning to learn’ is at the core of flexible human behaviours,” explained Kourtzi. “It underpins how children acquire literacy and numeracy, and how adults develop work-related skills later in life.”

One of the important determinants her team has discovered is that being able to multi-task is better than being able to memorise.

“ ̽��ֱ��faster learners are those who can attend to multiple things at the same time and recruit areas of the brain that are involved in attention,” she explained. “Those who are slower at learning try to memorise, as we can see from greater activity in the parts of the brain connected with memory.”

“So, in fact, being able to do the sort of multi-tasking required when interacting in busy environments or playing video games – which requires the processing of multiple streams of information – can improve your ability to learn.”

She also finds that age doesn’t matter: “what seems to matter is your strategy in life – so if older people have really good attentive abilities they can learn as fast as younger people.”

This has important implications for an ageing society. In the UK, there are now more people over State Pension age than there are children. ̽��ֱ��UK’s Office for National Statistics predicts that, by 2020, people over 50 will make up almost a third of the workforce and almost half of the adult population. ̽��ֱ��average life expectancy for a man in the UK will have risen from 65 years in 1951 to 91 years by 2050. Older age has become an increasingly active phase of people’s lives, one in which re-training and cognitive resilience is increasingly sought after.

Kourtzi and colleagues are using functional magnetic resonance imaging to detect when areas of the brain are activated in response to a sensory input and how these circuits change with learning and experience. While at the ̽��ֱ�� of Birmingham, she showed that the visual recognition abilities of young and older adults can be enhanced by training, but that the different age groups use different neural circuits to do this.

Young adults use anterior brain centres that are often used in perceptual decisions, where sensory information is evaluated for a decision to be made; older adults, by contrast, use the posterior part of the brain, which is in charge of the ability to attend and select a target from irrelevant clutter. “ ̽��ֱ��clear implication of this is that training programmes need to be geared for age,” said Kourtzi.

Crucially, what she also observed is that some people benefit from training more than others: “although it’s well known that practice makes perfect, some people are better at learning and may benefit more from particular interventions than others. But to determine how and why, we need to go beyond biological factors, like cognition or genetics, to look at social factors: what is it about the way a particular individual has learned to approach learning in their social setting that might affect their ability to learn?”

This multidisciplinary approach to understanding learning lies at the heart of her work. She leads the European-Union-funded Adaptive Brain Computations project, which brings together behavioural scientists, computer scientists, pharmacologists and neuroscientists across eight European universities, plus industrial partners, to understand and test how learning happens.

“In our work, there’s a strong element of translating our findings into practical applications, so creating training programmes that are age appropriate is our ultimate goal,” she added.

“ ̽��ֱ��reason we like the Café Wall Illusion so much is because tricks of visual perception tell us that the brain can see things in a different way to the input. How the brain does this is influenced by context, just as the way we interpret our environment is influenced by learning and previous experience.”

Inset image: Café Wall Illusion, Tony Kerr on Flickr

Our brains are plastic. They continually remould neural connections as we learn, experience and adapt. Now researchers are asking if new understanding of these processes can help us train our brains.

In the Café Wall Illusion, the brain takes into account the surrounding tiles, but it also relies on our previous knowledge acquired through training and experience when interpreting a new situation

Zoe Kourtzi

Sam Webster

11 Thinking about it

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. If you use this content on your site please link back to this page. For image rights, please see the credits associated with each individual image.

Yes

Licence type:

Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike

Feeling powerless increases the weight of the world… literally

fpjl2 — Tue, 04 Feb 2014 09:27:16 +0000

Scientists have found that people who feel powerless actually see the world differently, and find a task to be more physically challenging than those with a greater sense of personal and social power.

Eun Hee Lee - a researcher working with Dr Simone Schnall at Cambridge’s Department of Psychology - carried out a series of tests in which volunteers were surreptitiously surveyed about their own social power, then asked to lift boxes of varying weights and guess how heavy they were. Those who felt powerless consistently perceived the weight of the boxes as much heavier than those who felt more powerful.

̽��ֱ��study is the first demonstration that power – a ‘psychosocial’ construct relating to the control of resources – changes peoples’ perception of objects; that how you feel about your social standing in a situation can influence how you see the physical environment.

̽��ֱ��researchers say this overestimation of weight may be an adaptive strategy when faced with a lack of resources: when in a position of powerlessness, it would be ‘advantageous’ to have an overly cautious approach to the world in order to preserve your existing limited resources.

Experiencing perceptual attributes of the world – such as the weight of objects - in an “exaggerated fashion” when feeling powerless might be symptomatic of this instinctive resource conservation.

̽��ֱ��study is published this week in the Journal of Experimental Psychology.

“Although many psychological studies have been conducted on power not much was known about how power influences actual perceptual experiences in everyday life,” said lead researcher Eun Hee Lee.

“This research demonstrates that people’s social role, as indicated by a sense of social power, or a lack thereof, can change the way they see the physical environment.”

To measure a person’s sense of their own social power, Lee and Schnall conducted three separate studies – all disguised by cover stories so that participants were unaware of what was being tested.

In the first, 145 participants were asked to rank how strongly they felt a series of statements applied to them – such as “I can get people to listen to what I say” – to measure beliefs about their power in social relationships. They were then tasked with lifting a number of boxes and guessing the weight, before taking a final test to gauge their mood. Researchers found that the lower a person’s feelings of social power, the more they thought the boxes weighed.

In the second test, the researchers manipulated the sense of power by asking 41 participants to sit in either an expansive, domineering position – with one elbow on the arm of their chair and the other on the desk next to them – or a more constricting one, with hands tucked under thighs and shoulders dropped.

Prior to manipulation, most participants overestimated the weight; after manipulation, those who sat in the more powerful pose gave more accurate estimates, while those in the submissive condition continued to imagine heavier weight.

In the final test, 68 participants were asked to recall an experience in which they had felt either powerful or powerless, and then repeatedly estimate the weights of various boxes - under the guise of studying the effect of exercise on autobiographical memory. Those who focused on the powerful incident became more accurate at guessing the weight, while those recalling a powerless situation continually overestimated the heaviness of the boxes.

While previous research has shown that various physical and emotional states can influence perception of the environment – such as perceiving a hill slant to be steeper when wearing a heavy backpack, or threatening objects, such as a tarantula, appearing to be further from your face when feeling good about yourself – this is the first study to show that a sense of power can now be added to that list.

Giulio Andreotti, the former Italian Prime Minister who was nicknamed ‘Il Divo’ after the epithet for Julius Caesar, famously once said that “power tires only those who do not have it”. Lee and Schnall write that this comment is “no longer an unsubstantiated conjecture”, and that their data suggests the world of the powerless “is indeed full of heavy burdens”.

Added Lee: “Power plays a role when it is present in a given moment, but also when it comes to people’s personality. We find that personality, which determines how people interact with the social world, also shapes how people interact with the physical world.”

New research shows that the more personally and socially powerless you feel the heavier objects appear to weigh.

People’s social role, as indicated by a sense of social power, or a lack thereof, can change the way they see the physical environment

Eun Hee Lee

United States Marine Corps

Heave, Ho!

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. If you use this content on your site please link back to this page.

Yes

Licence type:

Attribution-Noncommerical

Generation blame: how age affects our views of anti-social behaviour

fpjl2 — Fri, 24 Jan 2014 14:12:01 +0000

A study of interpretations of anti-social behaviour (ASB) found a significant gap between the views of different age groups - with older people more likely than younger people to interpret public behaviour as anti-social, particularly when associated with young people.

More than 80% of adults thought swearing in a public place was ASB compared with less than 43% of young people, and more than 60% of adults listed cycling or skateboarding on the street compared with less than 8% of young people.

40% of adults saw young people hanging around as ASB compared with 9% of teenagers.

Lead researcher Dr Susie Hulley, from Cambridge’s Institute of Criminology, compared views of teenagers at a secondary school with those of adult residents in the same part of Greater London, and believes that perceptions of risk may influence adults’ views of young people.

“It is notable – and worrying - that young people’s presence in public places, regardless of their behaviour, was considered to be an ASB by four in ten adults,” said Hulley. “ ̽��ֱ��information that adults have about young people, for example from their negative portrayal in the media, often defines them in terms of the threat that they allegedly pose to adults.”

In making a direct comparison between younger teenagers’ perceptions about particular (so-called) anti-social behaviours with those of adults - as both groups completed the same questionnaire - the research was the first of its kind, and could offer valuable pointers to policy-makers looking to foster more cohesive communities during a time when the generation gap appears to be widening, says the study’s author.

“In the context of increasing distances between generations, between ‘them’ and ‘us’, efforts should be focused on improving social connectedness by bringing adults and young people together so that adults can get a better understanding of young people and their behaviour,” said Hulley.

“For example, previous research shows that young people gather in public places, which adults use, to feel safe and that adults often don’t know the local young people, whose behaviour they are interpreting and who they perceive as a risk.”

̽��ֱ��research, carried out while Hulley was studying at ̽��ֱ�� College London, is published online today in the Journal of Crime Prevention and Community Safety.

Hulley compared the views of 185 teenagers (aged 11-15) at a Greater London comprehensive school in 2006 with those of over 200 adult residents in the same area, in order to establish whether there are significant age-related differences. ̽��ֱ��questionnaire listed 18 different behaviours (from ‘assaulting a police officer’ to ‘young people hanging around in streets/parks’) and set out a series of vignettes to capture the views of the two groups.

̽��ֱ��results showed that a wide variety of behaviours were identified as anti-social. Acts defined as ASB ranged from serious crimes to everyday behaviours such as gathering in groups and playing football in the street.

̽��ֱ��majority of adults and young people agreed that murder, assault, burglary and shoplifting were anti-social behaviours. These were the only behaviours that were interpreted as ASB by at least 93% of adults and young people, with no significant differences between the groups.

At the lower end of the spectrum there was no such consensus, with adults significantly more likely to interpret all other behaviours presented to them as anti-social when compared with young people, including: young people hanging around; dropping litter and chewing gum; swearing in a public place; dumping rubbish or waste; scratching names or comments on bus windows; spray painting on walls; illegal parking.

In comparing the responses to the vignettes contained in the questionnaire, Hulley found that, not only did the age of the person defining the behaviour affect interpretations, but so did the age of those perceived to be the ‘perpetrators’ and the ‘victims’ of particular behaviours.

A group of young people blocking the pavement were more likely to be said to be behaving anti-socially than a group of middle aged women with pushchairs who were also blocking the pavement by both adults and young people. Still, more adults than teenagers identified the young people as anti-social.

A group of girls shouting insults at an elderly lady were defined as ASB by all adults and all but five young people, but only 60% of adults and 76% of young people defined an elderly man shouting insults at a group of teenage boys as anti-social. In conversation, adult participants surmised that the boys must have provoked the elderly man and some commented that he was ‘brave’ to confront them.

“ ̽��ֱ��results of the study show that, in practice, the identification of behaviour as anti-social involved an interpretative process that is not based simply on the behaviour itself but on the age of those involved,” said Hulley.

“My research confirms that young people are particularly likely to be labelled perpetrators of ASB - especially by adult observers - and are less likely to be recognised as victims of ASB.”

Research reveals disconnect between what adults and young people interpret as anti-social behaviour (ASB), as 40% of adults see young people gathering in public as ASB. Study is the first to directly compare teenage perceptions of ASB with those of adults.

̽��ֱ��information that adults have about young people, for example from their negative portrayal in the media, often defines them in terms of the threat that they allegedly pose to adults

Susie Hulley

Paul Townsend

Mods & Rockers 1960s - 1970s

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. If you use this content on your site please link back to this page.

Yes

Licence type:

Attribution-Noncommerical

Windows to the self?

tdk25 — Mon, 29 Oct 2012 16:55:05 +0000

Young children often make the mistake of thinking that you can’t see them if they can’t see you – hiding themselves by covering or closing their eyes. Using a process of elimination, a research team at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge has now found out why.

Testing children aged three and four, the team, led by Dr James Russell from the Department of Psychology, first asked them whether they could be seen if they were wearing a blindfold, and whether the researcher could see an adult who was wearing one. Nearly all the children felt that when they were wearing a mask they were hidden, and most thought the adult wearing a mask was hidden too.

Next, the researchers tested whether children think it is the fact that a person’s eyes are hidden from other people’s view that renders them invisible, or if they think the act of being blinded is the decisive factor.

To test this, a new group of young children were quizzed about their ability to be seen when they were wearing goggles that were completely blacked out, meaning that they could not see and their eyes were hidden. They were then asked about the same issues when wearing a second pair of goggles which were covered in mirrored film – meaning that they could see, but other people could not see their eyes.

Unfortunately, this test did not go quite according to plan. Out of the 37 children involved, only seven were able to grasp the concept that they could see out, but people couldn’t see them. Of these seven, six believed that they were invisible regardless of the goggles that they were wearing. In other words, the children's feelings of invisibility seem to come from the fact that their eyes are hidden, rather than from the fact that they can't see.

In both studies, when the children thought that they were invisible because of their eyes being covered, they nonetheless agreed that their head and body were visible. ̽��ֱ��researchers argue that this represents a distinction in the child’s mind between the concealment of the “self” and that of the body.

Coupled with the fact that hiding their eyes appeared to be the decisive factor when trying to make themselves feel hidden, the researchers wondered if their invisibility beliefs were based around the idea that there must be eye contact between two people – a meeting of gazes – for them to see their “selves”.

This idea appeared to receive some support from a further study in which more children were asked if they could be seen when a researcher looked directly at them while they averted their gaze; or, contrarily, if the researcher with gaze averted was visible while the child looked directly at them.

Many of the children felt that they were hidden so long as they didn’t meet the gaze of the researcher. They also felt that the researcher was hidden if his or her gaze was averted while the child looked on.

“It seems that children apply the principle of joint attention to the self and assume that for somebody to be perceived, experience must be shared and mutually known to be shared, as it is when two pairs of eyes meet,” Russell said.

Other explanations were ruled out with some puppet studies. For instance, the majority of a new group of children agreed it was reasonable for a puppet to hide by covering its eyes, which rules out the argument that children only hide this way because they are caught up in the heat of the moment.

̽��ֱ��revelation that most young children think people can only see each other when their eyes meet raises some interesting questions for future research. For example, children with autism are known to engage in less sharing of attention with other people (following another person's gaze), so perhaps they will be less concerned with the role of mutual gaze in working out who is visible. Another interesting avenue could be to explore the invisibility beliefs of children born blind. ̽��ֱ��authors speculate that skin-to-skin touching may serve as a proxy for eye-contact in the congenitally blind.

Researchers have offered a convincing new theory which explains why children believe that they are invisible when they cover their eyes.

It seems that children apply the principle of joint attention to the self and assume that for somebody to be perceived, experience must be shared and mutually known to be shared, as it is when two pairs of eyes meet

Dr James Russell

Audi insperation from Flickr.

Alice eyes. Researchers found that most children believe that people can only see each other when their eyes meet.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. If you use this content on your site please link back to this page.

Yes