Nathan Taylor

It appears that the US is intuitively following the findings of economists – to their moral detriment.

As I’ve written in the past, capital punishment has a deterrence effect. It provides information to potential criminals as to the consequence of their actions. One execution has been estimated to prevent between eight to twenty four murders.

BUT it doesn’t matter if the person being executed is guilty or innocent! So long as someone is killed for every murder (and it is likely they were the murderer) then it provides sufficient disincentives to would be murderers.

I find this hard to believe. Who would differentiate between a life time in prison or being executed, and consider the difference enough of an incentive not to murder someone? Seriously. I’ve watched a few episodes of Oz and not many of the characters lasted very long anyway!

Regardless, the US has executed more than 1200 offenders between 1976 and now. Michael P. Stafford explains that

“During this same period, almost 140 convicts on death row have been exonerated of their crimes. These figures are troubling.   The number of individuals on death row that have been exonerated is almost 12% of the total number of offenders executed.   As George Will noted in 2000, capital punishment in America “is a catalog of appalling miscarriages of justice, some of them nearly lethal. Their cumulative weight compels the conclusion that many innocent people are in prison, and innocent people have been executed.””

Well, at least it is more probable than not that the people they are killing are guilty – its not like more than 50 per cent of people are guilty.

Unbelievable!

What we are doing with our body influences our mental judgements of events.

There is a great deal of research that highlights how our physical actions and physical experience in a moment influences the way in which we assess the experience of a moment in time.

A study conducted by Michael Slepian of the Interpersonal Perception and Communication Laboratory at Tufts University and his colleagues decided to test whether sensory experiences of toughness might affect the way we categorize sex-ambiguous faces (rather like that of Leonardo di Caprio in my opinion!)

The idea is to test whether the social stereotypes of males being ‘tough’ and females being ‘soft’ would be influenced by sensory experience. To do so scientists used a computer generated image to create eight faces that were androgynous, combining male and female characteristics. These images were then shown to 71 participating students. The students were also given either a soft or a hard ball to squeeze while viewing the images. Those students squeezing a hard ball more frequently rated the images as male than those squeezing a soft ball.

It was the same image.

In another study, 48 students were asked to write down, on two sheets of blank paper stapled together with a sheet of carbon paper between them, the sex of the eight computer generated faces mentioned above. One group of students was asked to press down lightly so that the carbon paper could be reused while the second group was asked to press hard to ensure two copies of their results were made. Those who pressed down hard were more likely to categorize the faces as male than those who pressed softly, and vice versa.

Science blogs describes this as:

“abstract concepts grounded in sensory metaphors.”

What emerges from this research is that we, as humans, are not objective decision makers. Rather our thinking is deeply grounded in our experience of ‘now’ in all its glory. It is amazing to strip back these environmental factors, which do not impinge on our conscious experience of thinking, and understand what really influences our thinking.

This is a great speech by Wadah Khanfar, the head of Al Jazeera. He shares his optimism about revolutions in the Middle East and how, because they are being self directed by the Arab people rather than imposed by foreign powers, they will create a more dynamic and vigorous region.

I hope that he is right.

There is amazing footage of an ant spiral below. It comes from a species of army ant, Labidus praedator. Robert Krulwich explains:

“These ants are completely blind so they get about by sniffing trails left by the ants in front of them. They, in turn, leave chemical trails of their own. The system works smoothly when everybody’s going in a straight line in one direction… 

But when the lead ants start to loop, bad things can happen…If the ant-in-front loops and intersects with its old trail, the whole crowd then turns in on itself and everybody gets caught in the endless circle.”

watch?v=prjhQcqiGQc

Watching the death spiral of these ants, I cannot help but think of human behaviour. How many atrocities, and even amazing social triumphs like we are witnessing in Arabia at the moment, are a result of our social programming. At an animalistic level, are we hardwired to inevitable conclusions?

I find the study of the human brain, as revealed by psychology, neurology and even humble economics, is fascinating. It helps appreciate how we, as humans, may also end up sniffing each other’s tail until we collapse from exhaustion.