In the late 1960s and ‘70s, working with the New York City Planning Commission, the sociologist William H. Whyte conducted groundbreaking granular studies of the city’s public spaces, spending hours filming and photographing and taking notes about how people behave in public. Where do they like to sit? Where do they like to stand? When they bump into people they know, how long do their conversations last? […]

Whyte and his acolytes formulated conclusions that were, for their time, counterintuitive. For example, he discovered that city people don’t actually like wide-open, uncluttered spaces. Despite the Modernist assumption that what harried urban people need are oases of nature in the city, if you bother to watch people, you see that they tend to prefer narrow streets, hustle and bustle, crowdedness. Build a high-rise with an acre of empty plaza around it, and the plaza may seem desolate, even dangerous. People will avoid it. If you want people to linger, he wrote, give them seating — but not just benches, which make it impossible for people to face one another. Movable chairs can be better. Also: Never cordon off a fountain.

[…]

For his dissertation at the University of Toronto, Hampton studied an extraordinary early experiment in wired living. In the mid-1990s, a consortium that included IBM and Apple helped raise more than $100 million to turn a new suburban development in Newmarket, Ontario, a Toronto suburb, into the neighborhood of the future. As houses went up, more than half of them got high-speed Internet (this in the age of dial-up), advanced browser software for their computers, a tool for videoconferencing between houses and a Napster-like tool for music sharing. He treated the other homes as a control group. From October 1997 through August 1999, Hampton lived in a basement apartment in the new development, observing and interviewing his neighbors.

Hampton found that, rather than isolating people, technology made them more connected. […] [T]hey were much more successful at addressing local problems, like speeding cars and a small spate of burglaries. They also used their Listserv to coordinate offline events, even sign-ups for a bowling league. Hampton was one of the first scholars to marshal evidence that the web might make people less atomized rather than more.

Hampton crudely summarized his former M.I.T. colleague Sherry Turkle’s book “Alone Together.” “She said: ‘You know, today, people standing at a train station, they’re all talking on their cellphones. Public spaces aren’t communal anymore. No one interacts in public spaces.’ I’m like: ‘How do you know that? We don’t know that. Compared to what? Like, three years ago?’ ”

Turkle said that her decades of observation are pretty conclusive: “When you watch a mother texting as she pushes a stroller — and I follow that mother for blocks, I walk alongside — you know it. You know that the streetscape used to include mothers who spoke to their children.”

[…]

According to Hampton, our tendency to interact with others in public has, if anything, improved since the ‘70s. The P.P.S. films showed that in 1979 about 32 percent of those visited the steps of the Met were alone; in 2010, only 24 percent were alone in the same spot. When I mentioned these results to Sherry Turkle, she said that Hampton could be right about these specific public spaces, but that technology may still have corrosive effects in the home: what it does to families at the dinner table, or in the den. Rich Ling, a mobile-phone researcher in Denmark, also noted the limitations of Hampton’s sample. “He was capturing the middle of the business day,” said Ling, who generally admires Hampton’s work. For businesspeople, “there might be a quick check, do I have an email or a text message, then get on with life.” Fourteen-year-olds might be an entirely different story.

{ NY Times | Continue reading | Thanks Jane JL! }

The friendship paradox is the empirical observation that your friends have more friends than you do. Now network scientists say your friends are probably wealthier and happier, too.

{ arXiv | Continue reading }

Oxytocin and vasopressin are neuro-modulators that, like dopamine, are also produced by the hypothalamus and are stored in the pituitary gland for later release into the blood. These seem to have a role in forming bonds and feelings of attachment to others, particularly in romantic love, and high levels of these are released into the blood stream following orgasm in both men and women. Interestingly, they are also released during child-birth and breast feeding, again showing an interesting link the biology of romantic and maternal love. […]

Sexual arousal and romantic love also appear to be coupled with de-activation of regions of the frontal cortex (the front of the brain), which is largely involved in judgement, and this might explain why individuals might engage in sexual activity that they later regret

{ Anti Sense Science | Continue reading }

Playing Moderately Hard to Get

Undergraduate college student participants imagined a potential romantic partner who reciprocated a low (reciprocating attraction one day a week), moderate (reciprocating attraction three days a week), high (reciprocating attraction five days a week), or unspecified degree of attraction (no mention of reciprocation). Participants then rated their degree of attraction toward the potential partner. […] The results support the notion that playing moderately hard to get elicits more intense feelings of attraction from potential suitors than playing too easy or too hard to get.

{ Interpersona | Continue reading }

photo { Danilo Hess }

A study on the effect of always agreeing with your wife had to be abandoned after it became intolerable for husband.

{ The Telegraph | Continue reading }

photo { Christopher Williams }

The eminent sociologist Erving Goffman suggested that life is a series of performances, in which we are all continually managing the impression we give other people. […]

But recently we have learned that some of our social responses occur even without conscious consideration. […] [L]ab experiments show that when people happen to be holding a hot drink rather than a cold one, they are more likely to trust strangers. Another found that people are much more helpful and generous when they step off a rising escalator than when they step off a descending escalator—in fact, ascending in any fashion seems to trigger nicer behavior. […]

Neuroscientists have found that environmental cues trigger immediate responses in the human brain even before we are aware of them. As you move into a space, the hippocampus, the brain’s memory librarian, is put to work immediately. It compares what you are seeing at any moment to your earlier memories in order to create a mental map of the area, but it also sends messages to the brain’s fear and reward centers. Its neighbor, the hypothalamus, pumps out a hormonal response to those signals even before most of us have decided if a place is safe or dangerous. Places that seem too sterile or too confusing can trigger the release of adrenaline and cortisol, the hormones associated with fear and anxiety. Places that seem familiar, navigable, and that trigger good memories, are more likely to activate hits of feel-good  serotonin, as well as the hormone that rewards and promotes feelings of interpersonal trust: oxytocin.

{ The Atlantic | Continue reading }

photo { Dennis Stock }

In 1780, Immanuel Kant wrote that “sexual love makes of the loved person an Object of appetite.” And after that appetite is sated? The loved one, Kant explained, “is cast aside as one casts away a lemon which has been sucked dry.”

Many contemporary feminists agree that sexual desire, particularly when elicited by pornographic images, can lead to “objectification.” The objectifier (typically a man) thinks of the target of his desire (typically a woman) as a mere thing, lacking autonomy, individuality and subjective experience.

This idea has some laboratory support. Studies have found that viewing people’s bodies, as opposed to their faces, makes us judge those people as less intelligent, less ambitious, less competent and less likable. One neuroimaging experiment found that, for men, viewing pictures of sexualized women induced lowered activity in brain regions associated with thinking about other people’s minds.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

Implicit gut feelings of newlyweds predict marital satisfaction. […] Findings of this study also suggest that satisfaction in marriage decreases over the 4-year time period, as is consistent with earlier studies.

{ United Academics | Continue reading }

I have a brother that appreciates curvier women, but is married to an athlete. He purposely positions himself outside of Lane Bryant when waiting for his wife to finish her shopping elsewhere in the mall. His not very subtle passive aggressiveness often works in motivating his wife to get in and out.

Hey. It beats tossing yourself over a rail and landing in an Auntie Anne’s kiosk.

{ Really?/Gawker | Continue reading }

related { Man Commits Suicide in Mall After Girlfriend Refuses to Stop Shopping }

art { Keith P. Rein }

Okay, if you want to know…

Will my date have sex on the first date?

Ask…

Do you like the taste of beer?

Because…

Among all our casual topics, whether someone likes the taste of beer is the single best predictor of if he or she has sex on the first date. No matter their gender or orientation, beer-lovers are 60% more likely to be okay with sleeping with someone they’ve just met.

{ okcupid | Continue reading }

photo { Maurizio Di Iorio }

What makes Spinoza’s philosophy unsustainable in Goldstein’s view is the fact that “in its ruthless high-mindedness, it asks us to renounce so many passions. (Among the passions we must renounce is romantic love, which, Spinoza deduces, will almost always end badly…)” Any love that is dependent on something that must inevitably change and cannot truly be possessed — such as another person — Spinoza explains, is asking for trouble.

{ Salon | Continue reading }

{ Men Feel Worse About Themselves When Female Partners Succeed, Says New Research }

Hyperlink cinema uses cinematic devices such as flashbacks, interspersing scenes out of chronological order, split screens and voiceovers to create an interacting social network of storylines and characters across space and time. […]

Krems and Dunbar wondered if the social group sizes and properties of social networks in such films differ vastly from the real world or classic fiction. They set out to see if the films can side-step the natural cognitive constraints that limit the number and quality of social relationships people can generally manage. Previous studies showed for instance that conversation groups of more than four people easily fizzle out. Also, Dunbar and other researchers found that someone can only maintain a social network of a maximum of 150 people, which is further layered into 4 to 5 people (support group), 12 to 15 people (sympathy group), and 30 to 50 people (affinity group).

Twelve hyperlink films and ten female interest conventional films as well as examples from the real world and classical fiction were therefore analyzed. Krems and Dunbar discovered that all examples rarely differed and all followed the same general social patterns found in the conventional face-to-face world. Hyperlink films had on average 31.4 characters that were important for the development of plot, resembling the size of an affinity group in contemporary society. Their cast lists also featured much the same number of speaking characters as a Shakespeare play (27.8 characters), which reflects a broader, less intimate sphere of action. Female interest films had 20 relevant characters on average, which corresponds with the sympathy group size and mimics female social networks in real life.

{ Springer | Continue reading }

First Genetic Evidence That Humans Choose Friends With Similar DNA

The discovery that friends are as genetically similar as fourth cousins has huge implications for our understanding of human evolution, say biologists.

{ The Physics arXiv Blog | Continue reading }

You cannot fix the bad boy. He’ll just break your heart and you’ll resent him forever.

{ Fearne Cotton | Continue reading }

If I could give one piece of advice as a relationships researcher, it would be this: Relationships take work. […] People who held high destiny beliefs were more likely to disengage from their relationships when they experienced relationship stressors and problems, perhaps because they take these as a sign that the relationship is not meant to be.

{ Psych Your Mind | Continue reading }

Mozart’s opera, whose proper Italian title is Il dissoluto punito ossia il Don Giovanni (The Punishment of the Libertine or Don Giovanni), has been admired by many enthusiastic opera-goers ever since its first performance in Prague on October 29, 1787. […]

Kierkegaard offers a deep meditation on the meaning of Mozart’s Don Giovanni in a splendid treatise entitled “The Immediate Erotic Stages or the Musical Erotic” found in his book Either/Or. […]

George Price offers this fine description of the “aesthetic” stage of life as he thinks Kierkegaard sought to depict it:

By its very nature it is the most fragile and least stable of all forms of existence. […] [The aesthetic man] is merged into the crowd, and does what they do; he reflects their tastes, their ideas, prejudices, clothing and manner of speech. The entire liturgy of his life is dictated by them. His only special quality is greater or less discrimination of what he himself shall ‘enjoy’, for his outlook is an uncomplicated, unsophisticated Hedonism: he does what pleases him, he avoids what does not. His life’s theme is a simple one, ‘one must enjoy life’. […] He is also, characteristically, a man with a minimum of reflection. […]

Kierkegaard also uses Faust as Goethe interpreted him, and Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew, as exemplars and variations of the aesthetic stage of existence. “First, Don Juan, the simple, exuberant, uncomplicated, unreflective man; then Faust, the bored, puzzled, mixed-up, wistful man; and the third, the inevitable climax, the man in despair—Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew.” Kierkegaard’s discussion of this aesthetic aspect of life “is mainly a sustained exposition of a universal level of human experience, and as such it is a story as old as man. Here is life at it simplest, most general level […] the life of easy sanctions and unimaginative indulgences. It is also a totally uncommitted and ‘choiceless’ life [Don Juan]. But, for reasons inexplicable to itself, it cannot remain there. The inner need for integration brings its contentment to an end. Boredom intervenes; and boredom followed by an abortive attempt to overcome it by more discrimination about pleasures and diversions, about friends, habits and surroundings [Faust]. But the dialectical structure of the self gives rise to a profounder disturbance than boredom; and finally the man is aware of a frustration which nothing can annul [Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew]. Were he constituted differently, says Kierkegaard, he would not suffer in this fashion. But being what he is, suffer he must— in diminishing hope and in growing staleness of existence.

{ Søren Kierkegaard’s Interpretation of Mozart’s Opera Don Giovanni | PDF }

Sperm cells have been created from a female human embryo in a remarkable breakthrough that suggests it may be possible for lesbian couples to have their own biological children.

British scientists who had already coaxed male bone marrow cells to develop into primitive sperm cells have now repeated the feat with female embryonic stem cells.

The University of Newcastle team that has achieved the feat is now applying for permission to turn the bone marrow of a woman into sperm which, if successful, would make the method more practical than with embryonic cells.

It raises the possibility of lesbian couples one day having children who share both their genes as sperm created from the bone marrow of one woman could be used to fertilise an egg from her partner.

{ Telegraph | Continue reading }

art { Georges Hugnet }

Theories about the evolution of human sexuality have spawned some intriguing ideas. One of the more peculiar ones is that oral sex has an evolutionary function, namely to detect recent infidelity by one’s partner. Cunnilingus  for example, is supposed to allow a man to detect the presence of another man’s semen in or around the woman’s vagina. A recently published study aimed to test this theory and found that a man’s interest  in performing cunnilingus was correlated with his partner’s attractiveness. The authors argued that more attractive women are more likely to be targeted by other men for mate poaching, and that partners of such women have more reason to be concerned about sperm competition, and therefore use oral sex to detect possible infidelity, albeit unconsciously.

{ Eye on Psych | Continue reading }

related { Can you buy sperm donor identification? }

Saints may always tell the truth, but for mortals living means lying. We lie to protect our privacy (”No, I don’t live around here”); to avoid hurt feelings (”Friday is my study night”); to make others feel better (”Gee you’ve gotten skinny”); to avoid recriminations (”I only lost $10 at poker”); to prevent grief (”The doc says you’re getting better”); to maintain domestic tranquility (”She’s just a friend”); to avoid social stigma (”I just haven’t met the right woman”); for career advancement (”I’m sooo lucky to have a smart boss like you”); to avoid being lonely (”I love opera”); to eliminate a rival (”He has a boyfriend”); to achieve an objective (”But I love you so much”); to defeat an objective (”I’m allergic to latex”); to make an exit (”It’s not you, it’s me”); to delay the inevitable (”The check is in the mail”); to communicate displeasure (”There’s nothing wrong”); to get someone off your back (”I’ll call you about lunch”); to escape a nudnik (”My mother’s on the other line”); to namedrop (”We go way back”); to set up a surprise party (”I need help moving the piano”); to buy time (”I’m on my way”); to keep up appearances (”We’re not talking divorce”); to avoid taking out the trash (”My back hurts”); to duck an obligation (”I’ve got a headache”); to maintain a public image (”I go to church every Sunday”); to make a point (”Ich bin ein Berliner”); to save face (”I had too much to drink”); to humor (”Correct as usual, King Friday”); to avoid embarrassment (”That wasn’t me”); to curry favor (”I’ve read all your books”); to get a clerkship (”You’re the greatest living jurist”); to save a dollar (”I gave at the office”); or to maintain innocence (”There are eight tiny reindeer on the rooftop”)….

An important aspect of personal autonomy is the right to shape one’s public and private persona by choosing when to tell the truth about oneself, when to conceal, and when to deceive.

{ Judge Kozinski | Continue reading }

photo { Joel Meyerowitz }

Adults make eye contact between 30% and 60% of the time in an average conversation, says the communications-analytics company Quantified Impressions. But the Austin, Texas, company says people should be making eye contact 60% to 70% of the time to create a sense of emotional connection, according to its analysis of 3,000 people speaking to individuals and groups.

One barrier to contact is the use of mobile devices for multitasking. Among twentysomethings, “it’s almost become culturally acceptable to answer that phone at dinner, or to glance down at the baseball scores.” […] Young adults who are dissatisfied with their lives or relationships feel compelled to check mobile gadgets repeatedly to see what social opportunities they are missing—even when they don’t enjoy it, the study says. […]

Eye contact can be a tool for influencing others. Looking at a colleague when speaking conveys confidence and respect. Prolonged eye contact during a debate or disagreement can signal you’re standing your ground. It also points to your place on the food chain: People who are high-status tend to look longer at people they’re talking to, compared with others, says a 2009 research review in Image and Vision Computing.

{ WSJ | Continue reading }