Tag: Studies

An Ambitious 20-Year Study Aims to Explain Human Behaviors and More Must-Reads

Posted on by robbie

 

This Audacious Study Will Track 10,000 New Yorkers’ Every Move for 20 Years, Vox
Doctors, sociologists and psychologists utilize longitudinal studies to analyze how we change over time, but their research presents a segmented view of human behavior. A groundbreaking project at New York University, recording everything that happens in 4,000 households over 20 years, will take a more interdisciplinary approach to its data. By the study’s end, we might see, for example, how sleep affects relationships or how genetics dictates what we buy.

The Janitor Felt Invisible to Georgetown Students — Until One Changed His Life, Washington Post
As students rush to class, it can be easy to forget who maintains a college’s pristine façade: the gardeners who tend the quad or the chefs who prepare the dining-hall fare. At Georgetown, one student’s friendship with a janitor led him to create a Facebook page featuring profiles of university staff, from window-washers to repairmen. The stories they shared were so popular, students raised thousands of dollars to help out a few of them, including funding a janitor’s dream to open his own jerk-chicken restaurant and buying a cashier a round-trip ticket to his native South Sudan to visit the family he hasn’t seen in 45 years.

How Did Walmart Get Cleaner Stores and Higher Sales? The New York Times
For years, Walmart executives looking to bolster the bottom line hacked away at labor costs. The results showed: dirty bathrooms, near-empty shelves and nonexistent customer service depressed sales. How did the retail giant make a turnaround? Last year, they upped wages and invested in training. Sales reversed course and climbed upward, showing that employees are only a monetary drain when they are treated that way.

Can the Use of Virtual Reality Reduce Racial Bias?

Posted on by robbie

How can you change a person’s view of race? Try changing the color of his or her own skin.
Researchers discovered that making white people feel that they are wearing brown skin is associated with a decrease in racial bias. Researchers Lara Maister, Mel Slater, Maria V. Sanchez-Vives, and Manos Tsakiris write in Trends in Cognitive Science, “Ownership of an outgroup body has been found to be associated with a significant reduction in implicit biases against that outgroup.”
How did researchers convince study participants that they were in an “outgroup” or minority body?
In the first technique — the “Rubber Hand Illusion” — participants watched a screen that showed a brown-skinned rubber hand being touched while their own hands were touched in a similar way. In the second, called the “Enfacement Illusion,” white participants watched a video in which the face of a dark-skinned person was being stroked with cotton, while having their own faces touched in a similar fashion. In both of these scenarios, test subjects showed signs of reduced racial biases.
In the third experiment, “Full Body Illusions,” participants played virtual reality computer games in which their avatars either had brown, white or purple skin. Those that played the game with brown-skinned avatars demonstrated reduced bias against black people in a subsequent test, while those who’d played the game with white or purple skin showed no change.
Researcher Slater tells the Huffington Post, “Generally using these techniques, it is possible to give two sides of a conflict an experience of what it is like to be a member of the ‘other side,’ This should help to build empathy.”
Unfortunately, real world applications have yet to be developed. But in light of all the recent civil unrest in this country, organizations such as police departments and schools could definitely benefit from these findings and any subsequent usage of them  — leaving a lasting impact on this nation.
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