Bystander Psychology

Recent events at Penn State have no doubt been troubling.Time has an interesting article on bystander pschyology (subtitled: why some witnesses of crime do nothing). For those not in the know: the current wide-receiver's coach and a janitor saw Jerry Sandusky (an extraordinarily celebrated coach at Penn State) in compromising situations over a decade ago, but never called the police. From the article:

(We) would like to believe that no matter how small or scared we were, if we saw a child being raped, we'd step in and stop it, or at the very least call 911 immediately. But social psychology research on "bystander" behavior suggests that many of us might actually turn away.

The most famous instance of witness apathy involves the 1964 murder of 28-year-old Kitty Genovese in New York City. News accounts — and later, social psychology texts — said the victim and her screams were ignored by 38 witnesses as she was stabbed to death on a Queens street. (Genovese's killer was denied parole this week.)

But while research has shown that many such witnesses do fail to intervene, in part because they assume others around them will do so, it turns out that the popular account of the Genovese case is largely urban legend. There were not in fact 38 witnesses, but many fewer, and most onlookers said they did not see or hear the full assault; many of the witnesses did call police.

Still, says Mark Levine, a social psychologist at Lancaster University in the U.K., the Genovese story is a "very powerful parable. It taps into something people feel about human psychology, probably mistakenly: that somehow, when we're with other people, we lose our rational capacity or personal identity, which controls our behavior."

I love craigslist

I once owned eBay stock, and they were scared of craigslist.

Similar to Microsoft's fear of the open-source movement.

This inspiring article from Wired magazine, tells you why it would be great to work for this company, and why its competition just can't figure it out.

... what you see at the most popular job-search site: another wasteland of hypertext links, one line after another, without recommendations or networking features or even protection against duplicate postings. Subject to a highly unpredictable filtering system that produces daily outrage among people whose help-wanted ads have been removed without explanation, this site not only beats its competitors—Monster, CareerBuilder, Yahoo's HotJobs—but garners more traffic than all of them combined. Are our standards really so low?

But if you really want to see a mess, go visit the nation's greatest apartment-hunting site, the first likely choice of anybody searching for a rental or a roommate. On this site, contrary to every principle of usability and common sense, you can't easily browse pictures of the apartments for rent. Customer support? Visit the help desk if you enjoy being insulted. How much market share does this housing site have? In many cities, a huge percentage. It isn't worth trying to compare its traffic to competitors', because at this scale there are no competitors.

Each of these sites, of course, is merely one of the many sections of craigslist, which dominates the market in facilitating face-to-face transactions, whether people are connecting to buy and sell, give something away, rent an apartment, or have some sex. With more than 47 million unique users every month in the US alone—nearly a fifth of the nation's adult population—it is the most important community site going and yet the most underdeveloped. Think of any Web feature that has become popular in the past 10 years: Chances are craigslist has considered it and rejected it. If you try to build a third-party application designed to make craigslist work better, the management will almost certainly throw up technical roadblocks to shut you down.

 This is a great article, and reads really well.

The Tipping Point

I know I am late to the party, since this popular book by Michael Gladwell was published almost a decade ago. The book attempts to present a synthesis of many disparate ideas to ponder over the question: "Why do some ideas catch fire?", or as he would probably like it phrased "What makes an idea tip?"

The book itself is enjoyable, as it talks about Paul Revere's midnight ride, the Mavens, the Connectors, and the Salesmen, the fascinating rule of 150, Bernie Goetz and how cleaning up graffiti on subway walls reduced crime in New York, Hush Puppies, the stickiness of Sesame Street and Blue's Clues, Peter Jennings demeanor during Ronald Reagan's candidacy, six degrees of separation etc.

He cites a number of interesting social and psychological research studies, and being the master storyteller that he is, beautifully integrates them into his narrative.

I think he makes a great journalist.

However, I think he would make a bad scientist.

This is pure extrapolation from the one data point I am familiar with. The six degrees of separation reference to Stanley Milgram is bad science. He repeats some of the same stuff in his famous article "Six Degress of Lois Weisberg".

The myth suggests that Milgram gave 160 people in Omaha, Nebraska a package that had to be delivered to a stockbroker who worked in Boston, through the smallest number of intermediaries. He found that "chains varied from two to 10 intermediate acquaintances, with the median at five" in his 1967 paper - which apparently is the basis for the "six degrees" supposition. The big problem for me as a scientist was that only 24 of the original 160 chains was completed - and hence the conclusion probably suffers from a heavy survivorship bias.

Milgram carried out an earlier study where starters were from Wichita, Kansas and were supposed to reach a divinity student on the east coast, and the completion statistics there were more miserable. The measurement error must have been quite large to suggest such a strong conclusion.

Sure, we might indeed be separated by six degrees. But Milgram's study does not definitively prove it.

In fact there are other glaring problems with Milgram's study as this very interesting and more academically rigorous article points out.

PS: I swear I wrote this blog a long time ago, and thought that I would publish it later. In the meantime, I bumped into this article by Steve Pinker (via nanopolitan). It is amazing that he comes to the same conclusion towards the end of his book-review:

Readers have much to learn from Gladwell the journalist and essayist. But when it comes to Gladwell the social scientist, they should watch out for those igon values.

Fareed Zakaria's "The Capitalist Manifesto"

I just finished reading Fareed Zakaria's article in Newsweek entitled "The Capitalist Manifesto". As I was trying to ask myself, "So what do you think?", I started googling to see what the critics had to say. While I don't agree with all the criticism, some of it is really spot on.

As Derek Thompson writes in the Atlantic:

"In the pantheon of political and economic commentators, there is perhaps no one who writes so lucidly with such utter calm and reasonableness as Fareed Zakaria. His columns aren't Cracker Jack boxes bursting with goshwow revelations. They're mugs of warm milk that go down nice and smooth, filling you with a kind of zen peace and a dozy satisfaction that everything is going to be alright. He can be Obama with a pen and history PhD."

Really, since I read "The future of freedom", I strongly admire Zakaria as a writer and a commentator. In large part, I share his politics, and agree with him more often then not. For example, the manner in which he "contextualizes" hyperbolic utterances by important people makes sense.

During extraordinary times, people will sometimes take the ridiculous seriously.

While I agree with his diagnosis, I am not quite convinced of his medicine. Unfortunately, I don't have a silver bullet myself, but to expect self-regulation to be the most important pillar seems like asking for too much. To expect the backbone of the current compensation structure to be broken by people who derive the most benefit from it, is like expecting an emperor to abdicate the throne in favor of democracy.

Possible, sure. Probable, naah!