Best. Methodology. Ever.

by Ethan on April 29th, 2009

Dr.  Simone Schnall at the University of Plymouth in the UK, has found some, er, interesting ways to study human’s visceral responses to our thoughts and  emotions. Specifically, she’s recently headed up two studies on the link between moral judgement and disgust. As I understand it (and I mostly don’t, as there are no plants or fungi involved), her work suggests our sense of morality is closely tied to, perhaps evolved out of, our sense of disgust. Which, when you think about it, makes sense–morality is deeply ingrained in our psyche, it had to come out of something less abstract, and we’re often viscerally disgusted when faced with something morally repugnant. The trick, though, is separating the two.

And that’s where the fun starts. In order to separate respondent’s moral judgment from their sense of disgust, the research team came up with sets of moral conundra to present to participants, while physically grossing them out in a variety of effective, but morally neutral ways.  For example:

A team led by Simone Schnall asked students walking outside on a college campus to answer questions about scenarios like this, rating them on a scale of 1 (extremely immoral) to 7 (perfectly okay). The catch was that they had rigged a trash can near the experimenters’ desk with fart spray. Some respondents read and rated the stories in the presence of a mild stink (four sprays of fart scent), some had a strong scent (eight sprays), and a lucky third group completed the experiment with no scent at all.

See kids, science is fun! In addition to using lab-grade fart spray, they tried a variety of other ways toset off  subjects internal gross-o-meter: having them answer the questionairre in a dirty, sticky office piled high with empty pizza boxes, making them watch a ‘disgustng’ movie first, or asking them to recall a disgusting memory. They all worked–when people were grossed out, they judged the charachters in the researcher’s morality thought-experiments more harshly.

And what were these fictional people up to? Breaking and bending a wide variety of taboos: keeping money from a found wallet, filming people without their consent, killing one person to save 5, having children with their cousins, and masturbating with kittens. Yes, I said masturbating with kittens. As in:

Matthew is playing with his new kitten late one night. He is wearing only his boxer shorts, and the kitten sometimes walks over his genitals. Eventually, this arouses him, and he begins to rub his bare genitals along the kitten’s body. The kitten purrs, and seems to enjoy the contact. How wrong is it for Matthew to be rubbing himself against the kitten?

Needless to say, folks who had just been fumigated with canned fart were in no mood to be lienient toward hypothetical kitten fetishists.

Adorable Bioluminescent Puppies will Haunt your Dreams

by Ethan on April 23rd, 2009

Researchers in South Korea have cloned a beagle, complete with an added gene that makes the dog glow bright red under UV light.  Why? Well, it’s mostly a proof-of-concept; bioluminescence genes are commonly used as markers in genetic research, since they’re fairly easy to work with and can be added without interfering with other cell functions. Head researcher Byeong-Chun Lee (his name may be familiar, as he was caught falsifying results in other cloning studies) says this is the first step toward engineering dogs that are better subjects for human disease studies. Which, frankly, sounds a lot less cute than glow-in-the-dark labrodoodles.

When Science meets Drinking

by Ethan on January 12th, 2009

Man, this made me happy. Spagghetilogic got bored over the holidays, and fed a bunch of cocktail recipes into PLYLIP to get a genuine phylogenetic tree, treating each ingredient as a gene or marker. What’s interesting is that there are a couple of cases of convergent evolution, mimicry, and so forth.

To wit:

Note that you can make out several different “kingdoms” of drinks after a close look at the tree. I can make out the Gin kingdom, the Orange Juice kingdom, and the Amaretto kingdom, for starters. Then we have the outliers, like a 110 in the Shade, which nobody in his right mind would drink. These are the platypuses and slime molds of the drink world.

Makes me wan to mix up a bunch of these to study their, err, gross morphology.

Bees like drugs too

by Ethan on December 26th, 2008

So, apperently, if you give honeybees cocaine, they will go back to their hives and totally bullshit about how great their latest pollen find was, via waggle-dance.

Also, the strongest pot has gotten about 3 times more potent in the last 20 years, but it hasn’t come close to the 30x increase in potency former drug czar John Walters tried to claim in 2002, presumably to scare aging hippies into believing today’s super-weed is a <i>totally different</i> and <i>way more dangerous</i> drug than the ‘reefer’ of which they have fond, blurry memories.

Snowmen Gone Wild

by Ethan on December 26th, 2008

This is utterly off-topic, but I did really enjoy the Smithsonian’s history of snowmen as pop-cultural icons for smoking, drinking and advertising laxatives. Be sure to check out the accompanying photo gallery for plenty of images of happy children assaulting snow-cops. Consider this my official holiday post.

h/t Boingboing.

Good PR Indeed

by Ethan on May 29th, 2008

After decades of running of being a terrible magazine, perennial Mad Magazine imitator Cracked has metamorphisized  into a sometimes funny, sometimes annoying web publication. Check out their 6 Most Badass Stunts Ever Pulled in the Name of Science, or at least the first page. No. 5, “Drs. Warren and Barry Marshall Drink Stomach-Eating Germs,” is one of my favorite semi-apocryphal science stories, second only to the laboratory urban legend about the undergrad who inadvertently overfilled an autoclave with still-frozen severed monkey heads.

Newsflash

by Ethan on May 28th, 2008

Making cyborg monkeys that can perform complex tasks via robotic arms wired directly into their brains is NOT OK. Not only are these folks going to have PETA all up on their asses, eventually the monkeys themselves will take their terrible revenge. Consider this your preemptive ‘I told you so.’

Via Boing Boing.

The Right Wing Says Soy Makes You Gay

by Ethan on May 17th, 2008

Thanks to Bria for sending this my way. The article is old, but it’s some pretty amazing fear-mongering from a popular right-wing news blog thing. I’d never heard of ‘em before, but Wikipedia says it’s big. The guy says he’s warning parents about the risks of endocrine disrupters, but he gets it all wrong. For starters, apparently soy foods are the only source of estrogen mimics out there. Not biphenol-a, not DDT, not whatever DES might still be floating around out there. Just soy. Take a look:

Soy is feminizing, and commonly leads to a decrease in the size of the penis, sexual confusion and homosexuality. That’s why most of the medical (not socio-spiritual) blame for today’s rise in homosexuality must fall upon the rise in soy formula and other soy products. (Most babies are bottle-fed during some part of their infancy, and one-fourth of them are getting soy milk!) Homosexuals often argue that their homosexuality is inborn because “I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t homosexual.” No, homosexuality is always deviant. But now many of them can truthfully say that they can’t remember a time when excess estrogen wasn’t influencing them.

So, what is all that hippy food doing to our children? He mentions the toll endocrine disruptor can do to one’s fertility, and the sharp uptick in cancer amongst people who have been exposed to synthetic estrogens (not naturally-occurring phytoestrogens, like those in soy) early in life. But all of that pales in comparison to the fear of effeminizing little boys. And, apparently, here’s not difference between beingintersex, being a ‘feminine male’ and being gay. No matter that the assertion that gay men have a testosterone deficiency/estrogen surplus was disproved the moment someone developed a handy way to test hormone levels. Giving gay men extra testosterone just makes them want to have more gay sex, since testosterone tends to up your sex drive.

Honestly, I couldn’t stomach reading all 5 parts. I have a short attention span, and I’d need to artificially extend it to wade through all that psudoscience. Plus I can’t even figure out who this guy’s misinterpreting, because all his citation either lead back to the home page of the site, or to a 404 error. Which I guess says it all.

Global Warming Smackdown

by Ethan on May 8th, 2008

From the Wired Science blog, a group of climate scientists recently challenged their competition to a bet. On Realclimate.org, a group of 6 global warming believers offered 2500 Euros to the authors of a recent Nature paper if, by 2010, their global cooling hypothesis pans out. There was some serious smack talking in the offer:

That this cooling would just be a temporary blip and would change nothing about global warming goes without saying and has been amply discussed elsewhere (e.g. here). But another question has been rarely discussed: will this forecast turn out to be correct? We think not – and we are prepared to bet serious money on this. We have double-checked with the authors: they say they really mean this as a serious forecast, not just as a methodological experiment. If the authors of the paper really believe that their forecast has a greater than 50% chance of being correct, then they should accept our offer of a bet; it should be easy money for them. If they do not accept our bet, then we must question how much faith they really have in their own forecast.

I hope they take ‘em up on it. If the future of the Earth isn’t enough to keep your interest, maybe a large-sum professional wager can do it.

Cocktail Party Bibliography: The Homophobia Study

by Ethan on May 8th, 2008

For years now,  the UGA homopobia study has been one of my favorite pieces of social science, but I’ve never bothered looking it up before. A friend of mine’s dad worked on it, so I first got the rundown from her. Now, I’d like to sum it up for you, and give y’all the citation for the original article in case you want to look it up. I think I’ll do this from time to time, post a review/summary of a study I love or hate.

Long story short, this study looked at homopohbia in men, and asked the question we’ve all been thinking: are homophobic guys secretly into men?

The short answer is yes.

The researchers took a number of men (all white; I assume they didn’t want to bother controlling for cultural differences) who described themselves as fully heterosexual in preference and experience. They had the subjects fill out a questionnaire which asked them how they’d feel if they found out various people around them were gay, if a guy were to hit on them, etc. Using the results of that questionnaire, they chose  2  study group:  35  men who  were  homophobic, and a control group of  29  who did not have negative  emotional responses to  homosexuality.

Then, the hooked their volunteers up to a plethysmograph (a loop that fits around the penis and measures changes in its circumfrence, as a proxy for sexual arousal) and showed them porn. Both groups had similar responses to straight porn and lesbian porn, but there was a distinct gap in the way they responded to gay male porn.

The non-homophobic men were pretty bereft of hard-ons, with 66% having ‘insignificant’ arousal. Out of the remaining third, 10% were moderately aroused, and 24% had definite boners.

The homophobic men were much more into it. A mere 20% of them had insignificant changes in their penis metrics, while 26% were moderately aroused and a whopping 54% were definitely turned on. That’s some serious statistical significance.

What’s better, when the participants were asked later which videos had aroused them, all participants gave answers that matched the peter-meter measurements, with one major exception: the homophobic men consistently underestimated their response to the gay porn. Either they were lying, or they were in enough denial to not notice they  were turned on despite having their pants around their ankles and a bonerometer on their dicks. You be the judge.

Now, before the gloating goes too far, there’s a couple of points I want to cover. It’s possible, though less likely, that the homophobic guys got hard-ons because the gay porn made them nervous, or because a bunch of them were exhibitionists. Also, the study tells us noting about homophobic women. And lastly, I’d be interested in seeing a breakdown by religion–I want to know if people who are told by their clergy that gay folks are going to hell really internalize that message all the way to their crotches.

Anyway, I couldn’t find the article anywhere on the open web, so I’ll just give you the citation:

Henry Adams, Lester Wright Jr. & Bethany Lohr. “Is homophobia associated with homosexual arousal?”, Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 105 (1996), P. 440-445

Next time you find yourself arguing with a homophobe, you’ll have a handy trump card.
You can thanks me later.