Again, I’m a little late on this one, so apologies. Three articles for this one, two on different aspects of human nature, and one on cloning. It does seem that I’m focusing a lot on biology these days, but that’s because such articles are more interesting in how they shed light on the human condition and have more potential to fundamentally alter how we view life and the universe than yet another article showcasing some new technological development.
The first article is from The Economist and deals with measuring the difference between the levels of prejudice that people admit to and that they actually seem to have. It summarizes the findings of two different groups of researchers, one at the University of Chicago and the other at York University in Canada, who looked into the matter.
The first group used a technique called conjoint analysis which was developed in the field of market research to measure how much people actually valued the different traits of a product relative to each other, such as the size of a screen or its price for example. For their experiment, the researchers told the volunteers that they would be rating the overall desirability of potential team-mates for a trivia competition and provided them with such details as their educational level, IQ, previous experience with the game and a photo which showed whether the potential team-mate was slim or fat. Afterwards, they were asked how important each piece of this information was in determining how they assigned the ratings.
Unsurprisingly, while the volunteers stated that body weight was the least important factor in their decision making, analysis showed that it was actually the single most important attribute. The volunteers seemed to be willing to sacrifice quite a bit in attributes that should impact the performance of the team-mate in the trivia game, such as IQ, in order to have a thin partner. Similar results were obtained when the volunteers were asked to rate how much they valued a job when shown such information as the starting salary, holiday time, location and the gender of the boss. Although the volunteers indicated that the gender of the boss wouldn’t matter to them, in fact, they were willing to effectively pay a 22% tax on their starting salary in order to have a male boss, for both male and female volunteers alike.
The researchers at York University used student volunteers who self-identified as not being black. They were separated into two groups. The first group was put into a situation involving two actors, one white and one black. The black actor would “accidentally” bump into the knee of the white actor while leaving the room, and after he had left the white actor would make a racist remark. The volunteer was later asked which of the two he or she would pick to be a partner for a subsequent test.
The second group, instead of being put into a similar situation directly, was instead asked to read a passage describing it or shown a video of the incident. What the researchers found was that while the second group thought that they would be offended by the prejudice demonstrated in the situation if it had happened to them, the first group who actually did go through it did not seem to shun the white actor as a result of what they saw. As the article notes, people seem to be a lot more prejudiced that they’re willing to admit, which is all the more reason for all of us to put a bit more thought and care in how we treat people different from ourselves.
The second article appeared in The Times and covered a claim by Newcastle University researcher psychologist Dr. Thomas Pollet that wealthy men give women more orgasms. This conclusion was arrived at from publicly available data based on answers given by 1,534 Chinese women in a survey. They found that one of the main variables correlated with how often a woman reported that she had orgasms was the income of her partner. The richer the male partner was, the more often the women said they experienced orgasms during sex.
One interesting twist to this appeared in a post made on QT3, which I also mentioned to another blogger who briefly wrote about this article, The Sycologist. Since the data used was available online, the QT3 poster, Sidd Budd, ran the numbers himself while examining more variables. His conclusions differed markedly:
The three variables that had the greatest explanatory power for female self-reported frequency of orgasm were female education, female age, & female happiness. More frequent orgasms were associated with more education, younger age, & higher happiness. None of the other five variables — including male income — were significant predictors of female orgasm frequency after accounting for the three variables above.
I repeated the exact same analysis using male respondents with female partners. The authors of the published study ignored this subset of the survey, but all that was different from the group above was that a male was being asked the questions, rather than a female.
Five variables explained male self-reported frequency of orgasm. These variables were male education, male age, male happiness, male health, & female income. More frequent orgasms were associated with more education, younger age, higher happiness, better health, & higher partner income.
As the poster took care to note, he doesn’t yet have a Ph.D. after his name and I’m not qualified at all to judge who’s right and who’s wrong, but in my opinion it makes for a great example of how important it is to have many independant pairs of eyes scrutinizing the data and the associated claims in order to arrive at the truth. The great thing about science is that as Sidd Budd has demonstrated, it’s relatively easy to do this given the right set of skills and tools.
Finally, the last article appeared on NBC6 and is about a couple in the U.S. who had a deceased pet dog cloned. Except that the process apparently cost more than US$150,000 and was done in Korea, the article is a little light on the details. I would have appreciated more information on how it was now, whether or not the family had the puppy tested to ensure that it was really a clone instead of a look-a-like and whether the clone is expected to have any health problems or a reduced life expectancy.
As the article does take care to note, a cloned dog is far from the original as it would not have gone through the same life experiences. As someone who dearly loves his pet dog though, I can see both the appeal in doing something like this and also the uneasiness of a clone that looks exactly like the original but that you know for a fact is a different animal. Unnerving to say the least but if the story pans out, a sure sign of things to come.