The Origins of Kindness:

Listen to our interview with science historian Oren Harman. He's our guest in this Science Forum discussion.

Harman is a professor at Bar Ilan University in Israel.

If evolution favors the survival of the fittest, how did kindness and selflessness evolve? The search for that answer is the subject of Harman's new book, The Price of Altruism.

It tells the story of George Price, a scientist who developed an equation that explains how natural selection can favor altruistic behaviors.

As Harman writes, George Price's life and work were full of contradictions.

Disappointed by his findings, because they implied that seemingly selfless behaviors are in fact selfish, Price decided to prove his own science wrong. He became an evangelical Christian and gave away everything he owned to the poor and homeless.

Price took his own life in 1975.

Oren Harman is taking your comments and questions. Come join the conversation. It's just to the right.

Like it or not, the golden arches of McDonalds are one of the most easily recognised icons of the modern world. The culture they represent is one of instant gratification and saved time, of ready-made food that can be bought cheaply and eaten immediately. Many studies have looked at the effects of these foods on our waistlines, but their symbols and brands are such a pervasive part of our lives that you'd expect them to influence the way we think too.

And so they do - Chen-Bo Zhong and Sanford DeVoe have found that fast food can actually induce haste and impatience, in ways that have nothing to do with eating. They showed that subliminal exposure to fast food symbols, such as McDonalds' golden arches, can actually increase people's reading speed. Just thinking about these foods can boost our preferences for time-saving goods and even nudge us towards financial decisions that value immediate gains over future returns. Fast food, it seems, is very appropriately named.

Zhong and DeVoe asked 57 students to stare at the centre of a computer screen while ignoring a stream of objects flashing past in the corners. For some of the students, these flashes included the logos of McDonald's, KFC, Subway, Taco Bell, Burger King and Wendy's, all appearing for just 12 milliseconds. We can't consciously recognise images that appear this quickly and, indeed, none of the students said that they saw anything other than blocks of colour. 

The students were then asked to read out a 320-word description of Toronto and those who had subconsciously seen the fast food logos were faster. Even though they had no time limit, they whizzed through the text in just 70 seconds. The other students, who were shown blocks of colours in place of the logos, took a more leisurely 84 seconds.

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The English language is full of metaphors linking moral purity to both physical cleanliness and brightness. We speak of "clean consciences", "pure thoughts" and "dirty thieves". We're suspicious of "shady behaviour" and we use light and darkness to symbolise good and evil. But there is more to these metaphors than we might imagine. The mere scent of a clean-smelling room can take people down a virtuous road, compelling them to choose generosity over greed and charity over apathy. Meanwhile, the darkness of a dimmed room or a pair of sunglasses can compel people towards selfishness and cheating.

These new results are the latest from psychologist Chen-Bo Zhong. Back in 2006, he showed that people who brought back memories of past wrong-doings were more likely to think of words related to cleaning, or to physically crave cleaning products. He called this the "Lady Macbeth effect". Subsequently, another group found that it works the other way too. People judge moral transgressions more leniently if they had previously washed their hands or if they had been primed with words related to cleanliness, like 'pure' or 'immaculate'.

Now, Zhong, together with Katie Liljenquist and Adam Galinsky, have expanded on these studies by showing that clean smells can make people behave more virtuously. They ushered 28 volunteers into a room that was either unscented or that had been lightly sprayed with a citrus air freshener. In either case, they had to play a trust game, where a "sender" has a pot of money and chooses how much they want to invest with a "receiver". The investment is tripled and the receiver decides how much to give back.

The volunteers were all told that they had been randomly chosen as receivers. Their anonymous partner had invested their entire $4 pot with them, which had been tripled to $12. Their job was to decide how much to give back. On average, they returned a measly $2.81in the unscented rooms but a more equitable $5.33 in the scented ones. The single spray of citrus nearly doubled their tendency to reciprocate.

In a second experiment, the trio again ushered 99 students into either a scented or unscented room. They were given a pack of miscellaneous tasks, including a flyer requesting volunteers for a charity called Habitat for Humanity. Those in the citrus-scented rooms were more likely to be interested in volunteering, and almost four times more willing to donate money to the cause.

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In Western films, the gunslinger that draws first always gets shot. This seems like a standard Hollywood trope but it diverted the attention of no less a scientist that Niels Bohr, one of history's greatest physicists. Taking time off from solving the structure of the atom, Bohr suggested that it takes more time to initiate a movement than to react to the same movement. Perversely, the second gunslinger wins because they're responding to their opponent's draw.

Now, Andrew Welchman from the University of Birmingham has found that there's something to Bohr's explanation. People do indeed have a "reactive advantage", where they execute a movement about 10% more quickly if they're reacting to an opponent. Of course, ethics committees might frown on scientists duelling with the pistols in the name of discovery, even if the people in question were graduate students. So Welchman designed a laboratory gunfight, played out using buttons rather than guns.

Two opponents faced each other and had to press a series of three buttons as quickly as possible. To begin with, they held a central "home key" with their trigger fingers and they had to wait for a short spell before before starting the round. The point where they were allowed to begin varied from trial to trial and the players weren't told how long it would be. There was no starting pistol or countdown. Either player could start the race but if they went too soon, an alarm would sound to signal a false-start.

These button-mashing duels revealed that, on average, the players completed their sequence 21 milliseconds faster if they reacted than if they initiated. That's an improvement of around 9%, and most of this advantage came at the very beginning, when they pressed the first button. It's an interesting result and like all good scientists, Welchman systematically considered and ruled out several possible explanations for it.

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We spend a lot of time wondering about what other people think of us. Do they find us attractive, intelligent, capable or trustworthy? Considering how often we mull over such questions and how confidently we arrive at conclusions, we are remarkably bad at answering them. We have a nasty tendency to use our own minds as a starting point when reasoning about other people's and we rely too heavily on stereotypes and other expectations. In short, we are rubbish telepaths. 

Mind-reading is still the stuff of science-fiction (or quackery) but Nicholas Epley is more interested in the everyday version of the skill, where we try and intuit what others think. Regular readers may remember him from last month's post about how people rely on their own attitudes and beliefs when divining the mind of God. Now, together with Tal Eyal, Epley's back with research that tries to teach us how to be better mind-readers.

It's all about detail, or lack of it. We see ourselves in lots of detail, focusing on every single quality or imperfection. Others view us through a much broader and abstract lens. When it comes to ourselves, we're experts, privy to a wealth of knowledge that others don't have. We're also psychologically close, always aware of our state in the here and now.

In practice, when thinking about our attractiveness, we tend to focus on how our hair sits, the small wrinkles on our faces or the specific hue of our clothes, while others tend to notice higher-level features like ethnicity, height or overall presentation. You know that your hair looks much better today or that you've got a new spot, while a potential date knows none of these things. The same applies to other areas - presenters might rate the quality of their talks by fretting over every word or slide, while audience members pay more attention to overall content and delivery style.

It's this disparity between the way we see ourselves and the way others see us that makes us bad telepaths. The trick to more accurately working out how others see us is to view ourselves through a wide-angle lens rather than a microscope.

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One of the most engaging and clearly-written pieces of science journalism over the last year or so was published in Wired magazine last week. Amy Wallace's, "An Epidemic of Fear: How Panicked Parents Skipping Shots Endangers Us All," is part interview with rotavirus vaccine developer, pediatric infectious disease physician, Dr Paul Offit, and description of the anti-vaccination movement in the United States.

Wallace's work is the centerpiece a collection of smaller articles providing science-based information about vaccination that also refutes common anti-vaccination myths including "How To Win An Argument About Vaccines" and "The Misinformants: Prominent Voices in the Anti-Vaccine Crusade".

Wired's follow-up discussion of the issue includes, "A Short History of Vaccine Panic," for those of us who "have a day job" and not enough time to read Paul Offit's 2008 book, "Autism's False Prophets."

I have to admit that it wasn't until I began blogging four years ago that I realized just how vocal the anti-vaccination movement was in the United States. I come from a time (just on the tail end of the Baby Boom) where I still have relatives who were afflicted with polio and other now-preventable infectious diseases. The devastation of these childhood illnesses makes the risks (yes, I agree there are some risks) of vaccination itself inconsequential.

Vaccination is a risk-benefit proposition but one where someone else's view affects us all. Lack of vaccination compromises "herd immunity" that keeps us all safe, for example, from diseases like smallpox that have been eliminated from the face of the earth. For example, I wrote most recently about a whooping cough outbreak in southwestern Colorado and prior calls in Durango for vaccination as a socially responsible act, much like cutting brush on one's property to protect a neighbor's house in a wildfire.

Others, such as my colleague, Orac, have commented on Wallace's article for its scientific and medical accuracy. However, I wanted to focus on the effectiveness of the writing as a scientific communication tool because much of the article gives the reader a concise view of issues and psychology that often take typical bloggers thousands of words to express (and still less effectively!).

ATHLETES who are on a winning streak often claim that they perceive their targets to be bigger than they actually are. After a run of birdies, for examples, golfers sometimes say that the cup appeared to be the size of a bucket, and baseball players who have a hit a few home runs say that the ball is the size of a grapefruit. Conversely, targets are often reported to be smaller than they actually are by athletes who are performing badly.

Research carried out in the past 5 years suggests that these are more than just anecdotes, and that performance in sports can actually affect perception. A new study by psychologists at Purdue University now lends more weight to this, by providing evidence that success rate in American football field goals affects how the size of the goal posts is perceived.

LANGUAGE contains many sayings which link our feelings and behaviour towards others to temperature. We might, for example, hold "warm feelings" for somebody, and extend them a "warm welcome", while giving somebody else "the cold shoulder" or "an icy stare". Why is that we have so many metaphors which relate temperature to social distance? According to the cognitive scientist George Lakoff, we judge others on the basis of warmth because abstract concepts, such as affection, are firmly grounded in bodily sensations.

There is evidence for Lakoff's hypothesis, which shows that these sayings are more than just metaphors. Last year, a by psychologists from the University of Toronto showed that participants who recalled an experience in which they felt socially excluded gave lower estimates of room temperature than participants who recalled a social inclusion experience. Hans IJzerman and Gün R. Semin of Utrecht University now show that the opposite is also true. In a paper published in Psychological Science, they report that temperature affects the perception of social relations and the language used to describe them.

When the going gets tough, thousands of people try to boost their failing self-esteem by repeating positive statements to themselves. Encouraged by magazine columnists, self-help books and talk-show hosts, people prepare for challenges by chanting positive mantras like "I am a strong, powerful person," and, "Nothing can stop me from achieving my dreams." This approach has been championed at least as far back as Norman Vincent Peale's infamous book The Power of Positive Thinking, published in 1952.

But a new study suggests that despite its popularity, this particular brand of self-help may backfire badly.  Ironically, it seems to be people with low self-esteem, who are most likely to rely on such statements, who are most likely to feel worse because of them. Joanne Wood from the University of Waterloo found that people with low self-esteem who repeated "I'm a lovable person" to themselves felt worse than people who did neither.

The effect may be counter-intuitive, but the theory behind it is very straightforward. Everyone has a range of ideas they are prepared to accept. Messages that lie within this boundary are more persuasive than those that fall outside it - those meet the greatest resistance and can even lead to people holding onto their original position more strongly.

If a person with low self-esteem says something that's positive about themselves but is well beyond what they'll actually believe, their immediate reaction is to dismiss the claim and draw even further into their own self-loathing convictions. The positive statements could even act as reminders of failure, highlighting whatever gulf someone sees between reality and the standard they set for themselves. In short, someone could repeat "I'm a lovable person" but they'd really be thinking "I'm actually not" or  "I'm not as lovable as I should be." Statements that contradict a person's self-image, no matter how rallying in intention, are likely to boomerang.

Neurological diseases can be strange in that they often have additional personality effects. If someone gets a cold, they sneeze a bunch but are basically the same person they were before the cold. In contrast, meningitis can include mental status and personality changes in its early stages -- including irritability and sleepiness. When a disease involves the brain, it can change who we are in addition to making us sick.

The authors argue that -- in addition to the movement difficulties associated with the disease -- Parkinson's may erode other parts of the brain resulting in the lying "deficit." (Whether you consider that a deficit or not is a matter of personal preference.)