Three articles for the last month of 2010. Two of them are arguably about psychology. The other one is about a weird way of getting rid of drug-resistant strains of bacteria. We’ll start with that one first.

Bacterial infections that are increasingly resistant to currently available antibiotics is becoming a prevalent problem, especially in many hospitals where the bugs are able to attack patients already weakened by disease. This article from The Seattle Times looks at a way to treat one of these superbugs, known as C-diff, which can cause severe diarrhea in patients. Affected patients can use an expensive course of antibiotics to kill the bug but this also kills all of the other benign bacteria in the patient’s gut and after that C-diff can still come back.

So some doctors have tried a different sort of treatment. Instead of administering drugs, they transplant fecal matter from a healthy person directly into the colon of the sick person. Many such doctors have found that their patients’ conditions improved rapidly after the transplant and that the benign bacteria inside the intestine of the patient mirrored that of the donor. The flip side is that such treatments are still relatively rare and there have been no comprehensive studies about whether and how it works so more research is needed.

But the best part about the article is that it goes into the grisly details of such a transplant is actually carried out. The donor, who is usually a close relative, brings in a fresh stool sample that the doctor then liquefies and drips into the patient’s colon while doing a routine colonoscopy. You have to admit that it feels pretty weird to know that you’re donating literal shit to a family member.

The next article discusses a point that I think happens to be pretty obvious when you think about it: when someone is consciously trying to convey a specific impression of themselves to another person that they’re talking with, they end up thinking that the other has less of the trait in question. For example, if you’re trying to make the other person think you’re smart, you’ll also tend to think that the other person is less smart. It may be an obvious observation, but it still takes an experiment to prove it as this post from the BPS Research Digest shows.

Bryan Gibson and Elizabeth Poposki, both of Central Michigan University, conducted a series of experiments involving hundreds of undergrad students. Generally, the students were told that they had to hold an interview with another student (who was in fact a stooge of the experimenters) while trying to convey a specific impression, such as being happy, extroverted or confident, to that student. After that, the participants were asked to rate both themselves and the person they conversed with on a variety of traits.

The researchers consistently found that whatever trait was chosen, the participants tended to rate their partner lower on it than themselves after the interview, but not on other traits that were not chosen. The effect still occurred when the subjects were led to believe that they could hear and see their conversation partners via webcam but the partner couldn’t see or hear them. Simply said, when you try to manipulate others into having a specific impression of yourself, you’re also subconsciously altering your own impression that you have of other people.

Finally, the Freakonomics blog has a fascinating post about how some behavioral biases once thought to be universal in humans might not be so universal after all. The post refers to a recent paper written by Joseph Henrich, Steven J. Heine and Ara Norenzayan of the University of British Columbia about how many conclusions in behavioral psychology may be erroneous due to oversampling what is effectively only a small subset of humanity, educated people in rich countries.

The paper points out that even such well-known biases as the Müller-Lyer optical illusion may not be truly universal as once thought. It turns that US-based test subjects reported the most bias while viewing the illusion while the San foragers of the Kalahari Desert seem to be completely unaffected. Another example is the Dictator Game, in which one participant has the unilateral power to decide how to share a pot of money with another player. The US and Canada-based participants offered nearly half, but participants from more exotic locations tended to offer much less.

More surprisingly, people from some cultures even seemed to exhibit biases in the completely opposite direction. For example, in cooperation games, players from the US tended to punish free-riders who didn’t contribute to the group but took part of the reward anyway. But participants from Oman also punished  players who contributed more than their fair-share to the group in an apparent act of moral outrage. Of course, not every finding in behavioral psychology is now wrong as it seems that there are some biases that are truly universal, but this article reminds us that it always pays to be careful and to make sure to prove that behaviors really are consistent across cultures rather than simply assuming it to be the case.