Nate Barksdale Writing + Design.

There’s a dark side to expanding the horizons of the possible (or, rather, of the probable).

Ads quoting negative behavior en masse reinforces negative behavior. Petrified Forest National Park A/B tested two versions of a sign imploring people not to steal pieces of petrified forest from the park. One mentioned large amounts of petrified forest taken away on an annual basis, the other one simply asked the visitors not to remove petrified wood. The first one actually tripled the theft ratio as it showed stealing petrified wood as something commonplace. Same effect was observed after airing an ad that implored women to vote, but mentioned that 22 million single women did not vote last year. That kind of information actually portrays not voting as more socially acceptable.

Originally published at culture-making.com.

University of Colorado psychologist Geoffrey Cohen has done a couple of studies showing an easy way to help black students perform better on standardized tests. Simply having them spend 15 minutes writing about a value they held dear (family, music, sports, politics, friends, art), either right before the exam or just several times a semester, led to a jump in test scores compared to peers (majority culture students did not experience a similar boost).

Meanwhile, a study from Radbound University Nijmegen showed that students playing a computerized word game performed better if they took a step backward before each round than if they took a step to the side or no step at all. The physicality of adding distance to widen one’s view apparently triggers a mental analogue.

:: via VSL:Science, 27 and 28 May 2009

Finally, a joint Canadian–American study suggests the ways that exposure to brands can elicit certain types of improved performance: “Participants primed with Apple logos behave more creatively than IBM-primed and controls; Disney-primed participants behave more honestly than E!-primed and controls.”

:: via The Annals of Improbable Research

Originally published at culture-making.com.

I find this hypothesis to be a little too clean, a bit of wishfully rationalistic sleight of hand that ignores the huge role that psychology, folklore, and culture in general play in forming people’s approaches to medicine. Incidentally, snake oil has gotten a bad rap, says Scientific American.

Behavior | From eating vultures to clear up syphilis to treating H.I.V. with garlic and beetroot, quack medicine persists in folk remedies around the world, writes Ewen Callaway in New Scientist. Now an Australian study describes the cascades of human gullibility that help explain why.

Put simply, person X uses snake oil to treat her goiter, arthritis or what have you. Seeing this, friends assume snake oil works and more follow suit. Since it doesn’t work and X persists in using snake oil, more gullible people are exposed to the folly and fall for it than if X had been quickly cured with effective treatment.

Four out of five hucksters couldn’t have done better. [New Scientist]

Originally published at culture-making.com.

On cultural artifacts, the science of child development, and the child’s development of science.

Science is fueled by passion, a passion that is often attached to the world of objects much as the artist is attached to his paints, the poet to her words. From my first days at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1976, I saw this passion for objects everywhere. My students and colleagues told how they were drawn into science by the physics of sand castles, by playing with soap bubbles, by the mesmerizing power of a crystal radio.

Since this was the early days of computer culture, there was also talk of new objects. Some people identified with their computers, experiencing these machines as extensions of themselves. For them, computers were useful for thinking about larger questions, questions of determinism and free will, of mind and mechanism …

Objects don’t nudge every child toward science, but for some, a rich object world is the best way to give science a chance. Given the opportunity, children will make intimate connections, connections they must construct on their own …

If we attend to young scientists’ romance with objects, we are encouraged to make children comfortable with the idea that falling in love with things is part of what we expect of them. We are encouraged to introduce the periodic table as poetry and LEGOs as a form of art.

Originally published at culture-making.com.

High church attendance correlates with lower rates of depression—unless, this study suggests, you’re an Asian or Latino/a teenager. I’m not convinced that the correlation has to imply causality—could it be that, in certain cultural combinations, depression drives one to youth group, rather than vice versa? But the story does get at the complex cultural tensions: majority/minority, adolescent/adult, church/secular.

One of the few studies to look at the effects of religious participation on the mental health of minorities suggests that for some of them, religion may actually be contributing to adolescent depression. Previous research has shown that teens who are active in religious services are depressed less often because it provides these adolescents with social support and a sense of belonging.

But new research has found that this does not hold true for all adolescents, particularly for minorities and some females. The study found that white and African-American adolescents generally had fewer symptoms of depressive at high levels of religious participation. But for some Latino and Asian-American adolescents, attending church more often was actually affecting their mood in a negative way.

Asian-American adolescents who reported high levels of participation in their church had the highest number of depressive symptoms among teens of their race.

Likewise, Latino adolescents who were highly active in their church were more depressed than their peers who went to church less often. Females of all races and ethnic groups were also more likely to have symptoms of depression than males overall.

Setting all other factors aside, the results suggest that participating in religion at high levels may be detrimental to some teens because of the tensions they face in balancing the conflicting ideals and customs of their religion with those of mainstream culture, said Richard Petts, co-author of the study, who did the work as a doctoral student in sociology at Ohio State University.

Originally published at culture-making.com.