QR codes everywhere?

A company started including QR codes on cemetary headstones.  For those of you still in the 20th Century, QR codes are 3-dimensional bar codes that you can scan with your smart phone and it takes you to a web site with more information.  They are usually used in magazine ads to learn more about a product or on a product's packaging to get more information about it.

My first instinct was that this was taking technology a little too far.  Scanning a headstone?  But then I realized that headstones have very little information.  "John Doe (1903-1974) Loving Father and Brother."  I have walked through cemeteries (usually on the way to a loved one, but sometimes in a really old historical cemetery).  And there are sometimes some people that you just want to know more about.  It would be great if you could scan the QR code and get to the Wikipedia page or even Facebook memorial page for that person, complete with photos, biography, etc. 

So now, I think it's a great idea.  A little creepy, but worth it for what it adds.

Game Theory in politics

A fantastic editorial in the August 8-14 Bloomberg Business Week describes the debt ceiling negotiations using game theory.  Anyone familiar with the prisoner’s dilemma will recognize how it relates.  Both sides can compromise, both sides can hold out, or one side can give in to the other.  The problem is that you don’t know ahead of time what the other side will do.  If you hold out and the other side caves, you get the best result.  But if you hold out and so does the other side, then you get economic calamity.  So it is best for both sides to compromise.  But in this case, we had a third side, the Tea Party, which made it quite clear that they were not going to compromise, which forced both other sides to give in to avoid the economic calamity. 

The other major point that the editors make is that the constant election cycle and campaigning has made politics into a non-cooperative game.  Holding out becomes a better way to get re-elected than compromising.  So there is incentive for both sides to hold out and end up with the worst possible result.  Unless something really fundamental changes about our system, this will continue to be the case.

Bracing

There are some findings I have recently been reading about that show our brains protect us by processing negative events either worse than they really are or not as bad as they really are, depending on the situation.

In a study that looked at tasks like listening to an annoying noise or doing an irritating activity, if we think the negative event will not happen again, we remember it as not as bad as it really was (reducing the trauma of the memory).  But if we think it will happen again, we remember it worse than it really was so that the next time the negative event occurs, it feels not as bad in comparison.  But the memory bias didn’t happen if the person didn’t have the time or the attention to think about whether or not the negative event would happen again.

Another study looked at a bitter drink.  In this study, when a person thought they would have to drink it 20 times, their brain applied some top down bias by making it taste not as bad as it really is while they were drinking it.  So memory protects us one way and top-down processing protects us another way. 

A third study looked at how students thought they did on an exam.  Right afterwards, they were optimistic about how they did.  But just before receiving their grades, they were much more pessimistic “just in case.”  Their brains mentally protected them from potential bad news by lowering their expectations.

The authors called this “bracing” because it’s like physically bracing yourself from a painful experience.  Like when the doctor is going to stick you with a needle and says “This will only hurt for a second.”

None of this is purposeful, it's just something our brains have evolved to do. Sometimes it is fascinating how smart our brains can be when we are not using them.

Freakonomics on Suicide?

It was on a surprising topic for economics, but Freakonomics often goes outside the usual scope.  They looked at suicide.  The last segment was the best, but all of it was at least worth skimming through (is there an audio version of skimming?). I recommend listening to the whole thing, even if you haven’t ever had suicidal thoughts.

But what I want to talk about today were three specific findings.  Two are related to who is likely to commit suicide.  What they found is that depressed people do a kind of cost/benefit analysis.  They think of the burden required to live (since they are depressed, living is perceived as a lot of work).  They also think about their balance of happiness and sadness.  If the burden is worse than the net happiness, then they are likely to commit suicide. Of course, their perception is totally warped, but that is the basic mental process.

The second finding is that the balance is perceived relative to their community.  So ironically, the better off the society is, the more likely the depressed person is to commit suicide.  If there were an excuse like everyone in the neighborhood is equally bad off, then they don’t feel so bad.  But if everyone else is doing well, the balance seems worse.  This corresponds well with the happiness research, which shows that a person’s (not just depressed people) happiness is directly related to how well they are doing compared to others in the community.

Another topic that they talked about is that there are certain things that trigger suicide among people who are already likely.  So these things don’t cause suicide, but if someone is already predisposed, this increases the likelihood that they will do it.  One of these is media coverage.  In Sweden they tried an experiment.  There was a rash of suicides from people jumping in front of trains.  The government convinced the media to change the way they covered the suicides to tone it down.  When the coverage was muted, there were fewer copycats.

Another trigger was pop culture.  When a famous person commits suicide, there is a jump in people of similar demographics (age, gender, race) who commit suicide.  Again, the death of the famous person doesn’t cause the suicide, but it triggers it.  The Marilyn Monroe suicide was used as an illustration.  But Curt Kobain’s death didn’t trigger copycats.  They think it is because his wife, Courtney Love, immediately got on the media and told people how wrong this was and how suicide is not the solution.  She countered the trigger.  

Interesting findings I think.  Even though my expertise is not related to suicide, irrational thinking is similar across the board.  This says a lot that can be used in human factors too.

The Internet changes how we remember

Lots of recent research findings have serious implications for how we remember information when we have the Internet (i.e. Google) at our fingertips.  Having a regular and reliable source of external artifacts gives us a crutch, essentially using this “transactive memory”  by remembering where something is rather than what it is.   The results of all of these studies basically find that if we know a permanent record of something will be kept externally (in a computer we can access either locally or on the Internet, or even in an expert person that we trust), we use fewer resources to store it in our own personal memory (our heads).  We just remember where to find it.

Some authors conclude that this makes our thinking more superficial because we don’t think about content, just location.  Other authors conclude that this makes thinking deeper because we don’t think about details so we can think about implications. This is a really important difference.  If one is right, the Internet is a good thing for learning and education.  If the other is right, we could be starting a downward spiral to a society like the Eloi in the Time Machine.

How far can you take simulations?

Now here is a very interesting case.  There is one family of a 9/11 victim that is still suing the government.  This is the family of a passenger in one of the planes that hit the World Trade Center.  The dispute that I want to talk about today is that the family has put a very large monetary value on the terror that this person must have felt in the few minutes after he realized that the plane was going to be flown into the Towers.  The jury needs to decide how long he would have known this, how much fear that would have created, and how much compensation this is worth.  In order to do that, the family asked the judge to allow them to create a simulation of those last few minutes to show the jury and let them experience it personally.  The judge agreed. 

Can a simulation like this work?  In human factors research, we try to create ecologically valid scenarios to test user interfaces all the time.  Sometimes it is important to understand the users’ emotion, like frustration or hurriedness.  But this legal case takes it up a whole order of magnitude.  I am not sure if the typical juror could really watch a simulation and imagine what the passenger felt like, let alone put a dollar value on it. 

What do you think?