About half of any group of people, when they see someone yawning, will begin yawning themselves. Now it turns out chimps, our closest primate relatives, do the same thing.
The really freaky thing is the other social characteristics that correlate with susceptibility to yawning:
In research on people, those subjects that perform contagious yawning also recognise images of their own faces and are better at inferring what other people are thinking from their faces. What is more, brain imaging studies have shown that people watching others yawning have more activity in parts of the brain associated with self-information processing.
“Our data suggest that contagious yawning is a by-product of the ability to conceive of yourself and to use your experience to make inferences about comparable experiences and mental states in others,”
An earlier study, from last year, also shows that monkeys can recognize unfairness:
Knowing when you have been ripped off is not solely a human skill, biologists have discovered. Monkeys can spot a raw deal when they see one, and if they are not treated fairly they throw a tantrum.
The finding confirms the idea that cooperative behaviour, which relies on the participants’ having a sense of fair play, appeared early in our evolutionary history.
This matters because when you are designing software to engage groups, you are triggering primal (which is to say emotional rather than intellectual) behaviors. An engaged group of users is unlikely, almost by definition, to behave rationally, because when we are in group settings, we are guided in part by the monkeymind.
1. Emil Durkheim on July 21, 2004 10:23 PM writes...
" An engaged group of users is unlikely, almost by definition, to behave rationally, because when we are in group settings, we are guided in part by the monkeymind."
Straight out of 1940's vintage Robert Heinlein, unsupported by anything at all, least of all the studies cited indirectly in this post.
And of course, directly contradicts all the other currently popular cocktail party philosophy holding that many minds make fewer mistakes.
Permalink to Comment2. Tama on July 22, 2004 12:05 AM writes...
Yahoo news also reports that some primates can happily stand upright as their regular posture (although this appears to be the result of severe trauma ... could bipedality be a traumatic response? ;).
Permalink to Comment3. Brian Yeung on July 22, 2004 2:00 AM writes...
Nick Yee recently posted on Terra Nova about mimicry and how it could be used to build empathy in MMOs.
Permalink to Comment4. Clay Shirky on July 22, 2004 5:51 AM writes...
And of course, directly contradicts all the other currently popular cocktail party philosophy holding that many minds make fewer mistakes.
No, because group decision-making is not a purely intellectual exercise. Surowiecki has, for effect, labeled crowds wise, and ditto Rheingold mobs smart, but the way groups arrive at decisions is often driven by aggregate emotional reaction.
Gary Klein's "Sources of Power" is a good read in this area -- he went out to study rational decision-making, and couldn't find any. Instead, he found story-telling and gut reaction.
So glossing interest in group decision-making as "making fewer mistakes" is taking the titles 'Smart Mobs' and 'Wisdom of Crowds' too seriously. No one is suggesting that groups operate on a purely intellectual plane when they make decisions.
Permalink to Comment5. Lawrence Krubner on July 26, 2004 9:48 PM writes...
Chimps are apes. They are not monkeys. It is a possible point of confusion to put "monkey" in your title and then have the first paragraph refer to apes. Apes are smarter than monkeys. Humans are descended from apes, chimps being our closest relatives.
There are only 4 species of great apes, so it is easy to remember them, and then, when you are looking at something that could be a monkey or an ape, all you have to do is rule out those 4 species and then you know you are looking at a monkey. The 4 species of great ape:
chimpanzee
bonobo
gorilla
orangatang
Chimps and bonobos look quite similar and differ mostly in sexual behavior.
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