Teamwork


Chimpanzees are our nearest animal relative, according to their and our DNA profiles. That makes them a tempting model for behavioral studies, although much more expensive than mice. They, like us, live in social groups, show violence to other social groups, and have an internal group hierarchy.

Although they form alliances and have some empathy for their particular “friends”, do they really like being team players? Bullinger, Melis and Tomasello of the Max Planck have published the results of a study to see (1). They employed the well-used technique of the subjects pulling a platform towards themselves to get access to food, or a tool, as the experimental methodology. Of course, they had to start off with pairs who were compatible otherwise, well, who knows, nothing might have got done – rather like Congress discussing the debt ceiling.

The study showed that the chimps preferred to work on their own except when there was a distinctly higher payoff for cooperation. The authors concluded that the chimps were happy to use their colleague as a “social tool” and didn’t find teamwork a reward in itself.

The comparison with us was made and the conclusion was that they don’t share our human motivation towards finding teamwork a satisfying experience for its own sake even when there is no reward for collaboration.

I suspect that conclusion has been too easily reached. Most of us work in a group to benefit in multiple ways. If there is no perceived benefit at all, most of us will go our own way with a “me first” attitude only ameliorated by remembering our manners as taught to us while young. Too often, our failure to cooperate lets us down unnecessarily.

  1. Bullinger et al, Animal Behaviour, doi:10.1016/j.anbehav.201108.008

Chatting To Machines


More and more often, when we call a service provider in frustration because something isn’t working as it should and used to, we go through a phone tree. Most of these are prerecorded human speech. However, in many circumstances we find that we are talking to a computer.

How do we know if the reply is from a human or not? Well, we’re good at listening to the responses and can’t be fooled, can we? The aim of the robot designers is to get their robot to pass the Turing Test. Not heard of it? It’s a simple test that a judge looks at text responses from a human and a machine. If the judge is fooled, the robot graduates.

Bad news; to date none have graduated. For some years there has been a contest for The Loebner Prize for someone to build a robot terminal that cannot be distinguished from humans by a panel of judges. Data from the past ten years has been analyzed by Lortie and Guitton from Laval U in an attempt to understand why judges judge as they do (1). You see, some humans were judged to be robots after a conversation with the judges.

Most of the effort of the IT brigade has been to build on what makes a robot appear to be human. The authors came up with the thought that fresh light might be shed on the problem by looking at why some humans seemed to be robots.

So what makes a judge decide on whether they are talking to a human or a machine? First of all they like to hear lots of chat with personal questions and lots of polysyllabic words. Machines are, after all, known to be brief up to the level of brusque if not rude. Not too much laughter or cheerfulness though, that’s not good. We humans wouldn’t be so casual.

Setting things up to get the judge to ask lots of questions was a sure-fire winner. Judges, like the rest of us, like to think that the entity that we are communicating with is actually interested in us, and what we have to say. Hence the conclusion that the judges' predujices play a major role in their "impartial" judgments.

It would seem valuable to use this research for training some customer service personnel rather than programming more companiable robots

  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0025085




Veggies Fighting Back


Many of us in the developed world are either taking care about what we eat or are feeling guilty about not doing enough in that direction. Our annual checkups mean that we have to wait on our low-density lipid numbers (“bad Cholesterol”) with the same trepidation that we waited for our math test results in high school.

On days that our self-control is winning, we munch through our brown rice and green veggies and feel that we’re doing our bit. But all may not be as well as we think. Chen-Yu Zhang and his team at Nanjing U have turned up some surprising and unsettling data (1,2).

As we chomp through our veggies, our digestive system processes them and we end up with lots of short lengths of plant RNA floating around in our system. Zhang and his team checked on 31 healthy subjects and identified 40 different brands of these micro-RNAs floating around.

So far so good, but here is the interesting result. They showed that these micro RNAs from the plants can bind to our messenger RNAs and modify their effectiveness in gene expression. They focused on one in particular, the microRNA known as MIR168a, which is found in greens such as cabbage and broccoli, and showed that it can bind to about 50 of our genes.

One in particular caught their eye and that is the LDLRAP1, which we have in our liver, and which MIR168a binds to and inhibits its ability to keep our bad cholesterol low. It’s unsettling to hear that eating our greens may screw up our LDL numbers.

More importantly, it throws open the whole area of how our food may be interacting with our body control systems. Clearly, there is a lot of mileage in research into the effects of diet on our health in terms of cell control mechanisms.

  1. L. Zhang et al, Cell Research advance online publication 20 September 2011; doi: 10.1038/cr.2011.158
  2. http://the-scientist.com/2011/09/20/plant-rnas-found-in-mammals/

Sticky Stories


With political “discussions” frequently coming to an impasse in many democratic chambers and with the US warming up for a year of electioneering, it is important to listen carefully to the arguments put forward. The spin-doctors are often being outshone by the fictions that have become firmly fixed in the minds of most of us.

How is it that we become attached to these fictions even after we have seen/read evidence to the contrary? Green and Donahue of U of North Carolina set out to look at this in some detail (1).  They started from the knowledge that a journalist who writes a story that is later proved to be untrue suffers damage to their reputation, but do the untruths hang on once they have had life breathed into them?

A group of 160 lab rats were fed a story and some were told at the outset that it was fictional, some others were told after they had read it that there had been an unintentional error, while some others were told that they were intentionally deceived. In all cases they were unhappy with the author and endeavored to correct the untruths by marking up the text.

This sounds good, but they weren’t very good at getting rid of the inaccuracies. The fact that they had gained a low opinion of the author didn’t mean that they rejected the whole thing. The “mud sticks” attitude appears to be live and well.

Once an idea has been planted, it will keep growing it seems, even when we know it to be incorrect. Perhaps it is the doubt that was cast that survives in the face of the real facts. It would be interesting to find out at which stage of the informing process that the attitudes become fixed.

I wonder that if the error were immediately pointed out so we won’t have processed the information and made it our own, the attitude wouldn’t have had time to become established.  Perhaps, the longer that it has been lurking round our neurons, the more difficult it is clean out completely.

We will all need to work on or skepticism and not let our guard down.

  1. M.C.Green and J.K.Donahue, Media Psychology, 14, 312, (2011).