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Posts from March 2016

How Does Governmental Surveillance Change User Behavior?

How Does Governmental Surveillance Change User Behavior? published on

Evidence for deleterious effects of governmental surveillance on democratic discourse and expression of minority political views.

This study was set up to test the effect knowledge about governmental surveillance would have on participants’ (255 in total, sourced from a commercial survey firm) willingness to discuss and issue controversial and minority opinions. The participants were primed with the US’ continued airstrikes on ISIS as the political topic to be discussed and randomly selected to either be exposed to a message that would prime them to perceive themselves as under governmental surveillance or not. They were then asked to imagine coming across a (normatively neutral) post about the US airstrikes on ISIS in their Facebook news feed and asked about their perception of how other Americans would feel about this topic as well as their own willingness to publically express their own opinions on this topic, followed by questions about the extend they thought governmental surveillance was justified and their demographic information. While the results suggest a more nuanced effect than the often assumed blanket silencing, it does provide evidence that awareness of governmental surveillance significantly decreases participants’ willingness to express personal opinion within a hostile opinion climate for participants who approved of governmental surveillance as well as for those who disapproved, strongly suggesting a stifling effect on democratic discourse in general.

Original Source:
Elizabeth Stoycheff, Under Surveillance – Examining Facebook’s Spiral of Silence Effects in the Wake of NSA Internet Monitoring, Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, March 2016.
http://jmq.sagepub.com/content/early/2016/02/25/1077699016630255.full
http://m.jmq.sagepub.com/content/early/2016/02/25/1077699016630255.full.pdf

Is There A Neuroscientific Basis To Altruism?

Is There A Neuroscientific Basis To Altruism? published on

Evidence that certain brain-regions are strongly linked to altruistic behavior.

In this study, published in Social Neuroscience, Moore et al. use “continuous Theta Bust Stimulation (cTBS)” on a total of 58 subjects (30 female, 28 male), to temporarily disable, or at least dampen the activity in two parts of the prefrontal cortex, which had been linked to altruistic behavior in a previous study. To test the link, the participants were placed in an unsupervised Dictator Game, where they had to allocate money between themselves and players of high or low economic standing. Both tested areas of the prefrontal cortex resulted in an increase in generosity in general, but increasing generosity towards players with low and with high economic standing differentially–strongly suggesting that the cTBS-disabled areas of the brain exert an inhibitory influence on altruistic behavior in general and in more nuanced ways.

Original Source:
Christov-Moore, Leonardo, Taisei Sugiyama, Kristina Grigaityte, and Marco Iacoboni. Increasing generosity by disrupting prefrontal cortex. Social Neuroscience, just-accepted, 2016.
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17470919.2016.1154105
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/17470919.2016.1154105

How Do Modern Technologies Impact Family Life? What Are Effective Strategies To Mediate The Effects?

How Do Modern Technologies Impact Family Life? What Are Effective Strategies To Mediate The Effects? published on

Both parents and children wish for less technology to interfere with their family matters and agree on certain effective strategies to achieve this.

This study is based on survey conducted with 249 families across 40 U.S. states, asking them about their opinions on the role and use of modern ICT technologies such as smart phones, tablets and their connection to social networks, in a family context. In their questions, the researchers put a particular emphasis on family-established technology rules and their respective effectiveness. Leading into the results on respective effectiveness, the researchers found that both parents and children acknowledge the need for rules around technologies in general as well as in particular contexts. While parents worries mostly about negative developmental effects (“they just cannot put it down”) and content related issues (no graphic images etc.), children particularly disagreed with parental practices of over-sharing information about them that they deemed private (childhood pictures, videos etc.). The rules reported in the study could roughly be divided into two broad categories: activity constraints (explicit rules against certain activities such as the sharing of nude pictures, the use of certain social media etc.) and context constraints (contextual rules such as homework first, then computer games, no texting at the table etc.). With regards to effective rules, the researchers found that collaborative creation of rules, based on shared ideological understanding and principles of fairness produces better rule-adherence in general. Nevertheless, regardless of perceived fairness of respective rules, they also found that children are significantly worse at following context constraints than they are at following activity constraints.

Original Source:
Hiniker, Alexis, Sarita Y. Schoenebeck, and Julie A. Kientz. Not at the Dinner Table: Parents’ and Children’s Perspectives on Family Technology Rules. Proceedings of the 19th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing. ACM, 2016
http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2819940
http://media.wix.com/ugd/a0f093_3ca344c37a2a4271a32a8670eeec5abf.pdf

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