Barking Up The Wrong Tree

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Making a request into someone’s right ear is more effective:

Hemispheric asymmetries and side biases have been studied in humans mostly in laboratory settings, and evidence obtained in naturalistic settings is scarce. We here report the results of three studies on human ear preference observed during social interactions in noisy environments, i.e., discotheques. In the first study, a spontaneous right-ear preference was observed during linguistic exchange between interacting individuals. This lateral bias was confirmed in a quasi-experimental study in which a confederate experimenter evoked an ear-orienting response in bystanders, under the pretext of approaching them with a whispered request. In the last study, subjects showed a greater proneness to meet an experimenter’s request when it was directly addressed to the right rather than the left ear. Our findings are in agreement both with laboratory studies on hemispheric lateralization for language and approach/avoidance behavior in humans and with animal research. The present work is one of the few studies demonstrating the natural expression of hemispheric asymmetries, showing their effect in everyday human behavior.

Source: “Side biases in humans (Homo sapiens): three ecological studies on hemispheric asymmetries” from Naturwissenschaften, Volume 96, Number 9, 1099-1106

Things you didn’t know about sex

How to quickly and easily improve your life

Things you didn’t know about sports

Things you didn’t know about happiness

Things you didn’t know about lies, liars and detecting lies

Things you didn’t know about negotiation, persuasion and influence

Things you didn’t know about marriage and relationships

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Do status expectations affect how we interpret interruption in conversation? Two experiments examined how interrupters and their targets are perceived in same- and mixed-gender dyads. In Experiment 1, participants listened to a brief audiotaped conversation in which one person interrupted the other five times. In Experiment 2, four confederates (two men and two women) systematically interrupted naïve participants while discussing an article. In general, interrupters gained in status and targets of interruption lost status. In addition, participants who were interrupted rated themselves as less influential than those who were not interrupted. As expected, interrupters, especially female interrupters, were liked less than those who did not interrupt. Theoretical implications are discussed.

Source: “Attaining Status at the Expense of Likeability: Pilfering Power Through Conversational Interruption” from Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, Volume 32, Number 4, 241-260

Does power make you hypocritical?

Are people who believe themselves to be powerful more effective liars?

How to quickly and easily improve your life

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Why do some individuals choose to drink alcohol, smoke cigarettes, and use illegal drugs while others do not? The origin of individual preferences and values is one of the remaining theoretical questions in social and behavioral sciences. The Savanna-IQ Interaction Hypothesis suggests that more intelligent individuals may be more likely to acquire and espouse evolutionarily novel values than less intelligent individuals. Consumption of alcohol, tobacco, and drugs is evolutionarily novel, so the Savanna-IQ Interaction Hypothesis would predict that more intelligent individuals are more likely to consume these substances. Analyses of two large, nationally representative, and prospectively longitudinal data from the United Kingdom and the United States partly support the prediction. More intelligent children, both in the United Kingdom and the United States, are more likely to grow up to consume more alcohol. More intelligent American children are more likely to grow up to consume more tobacco, while more intelligent British children are more likely to grow up to consume more illegal drugs.

Kanazawa is most famous for the book Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters: From Dating, Shopping, and Praying to Going to War and Becoming a Billionaire– Two Evolutionary Psychologists Explain Why We Do What We Do.

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