I also wrote an article about the societal importance of scientific discovery to promote the event, but it's gotten lost in the depths of the internet. It's reproduced here with minor edits.

The video recording of my public talk (including a brave attempt at juggling!) can be found on YouTube and embedded here, and further information about this yearly event is scattered throughout the Soapbox Science Munich website.

My fascination with the world of quantum devices and my doctoral studies in theoretical quantum information are not why I want to get you excited about scientific research. Like many of you, I was drawn to science because of beautiful ideas, some of which I am lucky enough to share with the planetarium audiences of ESO Supernova, the Munich-adjacent museum and visitor center of the European Southern Observatory.

When you sit in the isolating darkness of a planetarium, your senses dulled and your focus only on the voice of your narrator and the vast ocean of stars emerging on the dome above you, it is hard to not sink into stunned awe of what you see. Though the night sky is often dim and backlit by light pollution in our cities, it once was the ever-changing constant of our world. As seasons changed, so too did the part of the night sky we could see every night. Different constellations would emerge and set, but always with a steady frequency we could learn to recognize.

We now believe that some of the first sparks of science, from the understanding of the yearly cycle of seasons to the reliable appearance of lunar eclipses and meteor showers, had come from our permeating curiosity about the intangible skies, which quickly found itself intertwined with mythology. And if you imagine yourself blanketed by the daily cover of the glimmering Milky Way, wouldn’t you also begin to find shapes in it and wonder — aptly — what they were? Thousands of years ago, civilizations across continents would follow the yearly appearance and disappearance of stars and constellations to predict the yearly season of flood or the best time for a harvest. But those times are long gone, aren’t they?

Yet we are all still fascinated by the structures around us. In the modern world that keeps speeding up, grasping the effect nature has on us (and we have on it) still reigns supreme in most of our minds. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic that had us all physically distance and focus on the essentials that help us persist, even today, in the age of the influencer, some of the most popular news shared was that on that was shared was that on science. From the most popular Facebook groups, through the climate protection movement, to some of the most fascinating news we could find — despite our different interests and professions, we all strive to understand the world around us.

And precisely that is the basis of scientific research, but also the only thing we can do to successfully make predictions about nature and, eventually, mold it to create a better future. Without the scientific understanding of electricity, the invention of mobile phones, the accessibility of vaccines, or even the existence of an efficient public transport system, life as we know it would change drastically.

But what we also know is that scientific research can be an expensive and difficult endeavor. The particle colliders at CERN cost us hundreds of millions of euro per year, and the telescopes that record the fabulous, intriguing images of galaxies, star clusters, and nebulae that I show planetarium visitors might not bring us direct technological advancement merely by the merit of existing. So — who pays for all this research? And, ultimately, who should be able to decide what we research and to what we, as the human civilization, devote our efforts?

Even if scientific research is so fundamental that it does not yet lead to a tangible result, you never know when it could. And when it does, it could change the world. From what we know now, most of the groundbreaking applications of scientific work were stumbled upon by scientists striving to solve an unrelated problem. In all likelihood, our best bet to come up with creative ideas or solutions is to work hard on an unrelated problem and then apply the knowledge we’ve gained. Gene therapy would be a distant dream if we had not learned how to sequence DNA, modern electronics impossible without our model of the atom, and the global navigational satellite system useless without basic research into the effects of general relativity.

But, regardless of how intriguing and exciting it might look from the outside, being a scientific researcher is almost never glamorous. The hours are long, the effort is vast, and the compensation might not be what you would hope for — a career in science often comes with isolation and cross-continental moves so frequent that they may make the happiest person in the world wonder about the purpose of their work. So, if you care about what they do, show appreciation for scientists who are working hard to make the world a better place. Not only to further your own knowledge and understanding of it, and not only because it can be fun (although it most certainly can!), but because engaging with scientists and valuing their research is a democratic responsibility for a society we should all want to live in. Even if we ourselves are not the ones spending the long hours in the lab, conducting hundreds of interviews, or pouring our heart and soul into academic papers that might only ever be read by a handful of our colleagues.

At its core, SoapBox Science is an event that brings you as close as you can get to a scientist as a person — a professional and individual who loves their work and wants to show you that same beauty they see. Even when it moves at the slowest of speeds, the research we do lets us discover the world as intricate, complex, and evermore fascinating. Each time I dim the lights of the planetarium at the start of a show, that is exactly what I want you to see: from my own excitement about the world and the magnificent machinery that powers it, I can help you build your own.

But at this year’s live event, instead of peering at the big, we will be looking at the tiny and my own field of research — quantum science. Join me to learn about the novel, revolutionary, epoch-defining changes it will bring us in the next decades. …Or will it?

The video recording of my talk can be found on YouTube (unfortunately, in abysmal quality) and information about more recent Soapbox Science Munich events is stored on their website.

In sync with the world bouncing back from the recent global crisis, I'm beginning to pick up the slack on two years spent waiting for everything to improve, and this is one of the projects I thoroughly enjoyed sinking my teeth into.

Two years ago, in early 2020, I participated in the Political Data Science course run at the Bavarian School of Public Policy by Orestis Papakyriakopoulos (who has since gone on to Princeton), and found myself in a group project scenario. Thankfully, this one paired me up with Linlin Chen, a stunningly clever colleague whom I'm grateful to now call a friend.

Together we looked at the hot topic of the hour — COVID-19 lockdown policies — and on the example of US states, which gave us plenty of easily accessible and comparable data, we scrutinized their causes. You can find our analyses and conclusions in a nifty, interactive(!) presentation embedded above and stored here. Our (fairly simple) R code is also up on GitHub.

The dataset we used contained a variables we could collect from publicly available sources, including the following:

• CoronaNet Research Project (policy data);
• Data Repository by the CSSE at Johns Hopkins University (daily COVID-19 deaths per US state);
• US Bureau of Labor Statistics (new weekly unemployment claims);
• US Bureau of Economic Analysis (GDP per capita for each US state); and
• US Census Bureau (regionality of US states).

Using a panel data regression, we investigated the obfuscated interdependencies of these variables within their multidimensional set.

Some of the interesting results we found were that, on average, Democrats acted to enforce lockdown policies four days before Republicans, the GDP per capita of a state was not a statistically significant factor in this decision, and (all things being equal) California was the most trigger happy of the US states, while South Dakota was the least.

Of course, this analysis wasn't perfect, and neither was our dataset. The differing ways in which different US states tracked (and reported) COVID-19 deaths or new unemployment claims certainly affected our results, and the varying strengths of their lockdown policies (as well as their enforcement by individual counties) probably weren't comparable, but few things in policymaking can be called straightforward or easy.

In its very essence, policymaking is interdisciplinary and the best data analyses can do here is give us complex answers to complex questions. Strict lockdown policies were not always the best call — carrying with them the unintended consequences of more frequent instances of domestic violence or dire straits for entire economic sectors — and the tricky balance between enacting and enforcing a policy cannot be overlooked, either.
Knowing that future societal and political responses to COVID-19 safety measures were affected by those first, rushed acts of lockdown, looking at the data and better understanding the interplay between these major factors can help us take a step toward looking beyond the obvious.

Hey, I finally went through this rite of passage — I held my first science slam talk!

I talked to researchers in quantum physics, at an event organized by the Munich Center for Quantum Science and Technology, on 8 July 2019 at Microsoft Germany. But don't let that fool you! I didn't talk about quantum physics, I talked about how public policies are created and how important it is for experts in the field of quantum science and technology to speak up and have their voices heard.

While I've been studying political science and learning about technology regulation, I realized that very, very, miserably few public policies and regulations have been designed for new, second-generation quantum technologies. I think we should change that ASAP, and I also think that's something we can do, given enough oomph.
I think it's fair to say I'm not a natural comedian, but this was an interesting experience. ... And I became the "you did that science slam!" person. 😁

You can find details on this event and the information on my fellow 'slammers' here.

As the final crescendo of the Telling Responsible Stories course at the Munich Center for Technology in Society, my team and I released a podcast episode on how researchers, policy makers, philosophers, and the media deal with scientific uncertainty.

To make the topic tangible (and gorgeous), we discussed the case of 'Oumuamua, the first interstellar object to have ever been spotted in the Solar System. When this hunk of rock swooped into our neighborhood, astronomers had only a few months to gather all the data they could ever get. At the same time, journalists needed to carefully pick and choose what and how they report on (especially when some of the astronomers claimed it might be an alien spacecraft!), policy makers had to be convinced to steer money and telescopes into researching it as soon as possible, and for what? For something we might never know for certain? Why do we invest time, money, and attention to something that will forever remain out of our grip?

I'm super proud of my team's work and I'm sure you'll enjoy it, too, so give us twenty minutes of your time and let us transport you into interstellar space: link here.
(If listening doesn't work, we've also included a transcript.)

My brilliant team were Alison Boston, Annika Eßmann, and Maximilian Braun, and our colleagues also produces some interesting (yet very different) projects. Give them a listen over here.

Whoops, I don't use this anymore. You can check out my About instead.

If you're curious about what I'm using my time on these days, I'll keep it updated on /now.

Although I've been saying I tend to spread my tentacles in all directions, I've finally gotten to the point where keeping track of all of the projects I'm working on has become too much.  So I've finally made a /now page!

I encourage you to make a /now page of your own, so I can stalk your work without putting in the effort. :) Here are some more /now pages for good inspiration: https://nownownow.com/

I held a talk at the Quantum Technologies Meetup hosted by IBM in Munich on 2019/04/04. It was a gentle introduction to topological quantum codes as means of quantum error correction, adapted for a diverse audience.

For anyone who may be interested, the slides have been plopped down here. If you came by to say hello at the event, thank you for the lovely feedback and nice chats! You can always contact me with any questions — I'd be happy to help.

Download link

Another 5 sketches with take-home messages from some fascinating scientific papers!

One pound of lead feels heavier than one pound of feathers (if in boxes of the same size) because psychology!
Details: A foolproof way to win a bet (feathers and lead)

If you're a woman with a natural menstrual cycle, your voice will become much more attractive when you're at a higher risk of conception! (And higher in pitch!)
Details: Women sound better when ovulating

Scientists taught pigeons to tell the difference between the art styles of Monet and Picasso! I guess it's not that hard to be an art critic.
Details: Even pigeons can differentiate between art movements

Chickens that were trained to respond to average opposite-sex human faces liked the versions with exaggerated features. Humans did, too! So... is beauty universal?
Details: Would a chicken think you're pretty?

Regular exercise (much more than reducing the time you spend sitting every day) works great against symptoms of depression up to 3 years in advance! As you get older, you get less depressed, but exercise just nails it for you.
Details: Exercising is investing into your mental health. No, really.

(Some of these make me cringe, but there's only one way to get better at this. 🙂)

What matters more when you're enjoying a music performance — sight or sound? Sight, by a large margin!
Hearing professionals perform doesn't help you guess who won the competition, but when you see them (without sound!), you can guess! Tricky, tricky.
(Source.)

Small (male) dogs lift their legs way up high when they pee, so nobody can tell their size just from the markings! Deceptive PR going strong.
Also I can't draw - but I have to start somewhere. 🌻
(Source.)

Higher aerobic fitness in kids shown to make them less likely to get hit by a car (in VR ). It's about the ability to #multitask more successfully, even when talking on the phone!
(Source.)

Basics of the complexity theory applied to songs by Donald E. Knuth — what do you sing when you just can't remember the words?
(Source.)

A classic work on the self-treatment of writers' block. The paper got published without revisions. 💗
(Source.)

This post was originally published on the Beeminder Blog, and it's here with slight edits. Beeminder is a goal-tracking service that lets you put your money where your mouth is, and I can't praise it enough. Go check it out!

Repetitio est mater stagni

Learning a skill should be easy:

• identify what you want to learn
• choose an exercise to practice it
• repeat ad infinitum
• ???
• profit.

This is the exact approach a lot of us take when deciding to learn to play a musical instrument, get better at a sport, become efficient in our chosen profession, or even just type faster — if we keep doing it, we'll get better at it.

What I can tell you is that you're less right than you would want to be, and that what you're doing to improve yourself right now might be perfectly useless.

Defining practice

The common scientific approach to practice assumes four components to make it work, and all of these components are crucial.

1. The motivation to get off your ass and work on it.

Don't have enough motivation to work on something? Well, you probably won't, then. (Statistically, the people who improve at a skill are those who explicitly plan to practice!)
The beautiful thing about the motivation to practice is that it forms a positive feedback loop — the more you practice, the better you get, and the happier it makes you to keep at it. Many studies have shown that even after a person has performed some task many times, and considers themselves to do it as well as they ever could, monetary incentives can push them to find new methods of performing the task, which leads to great improvements in speed and accuracy! This has been shown to apply in areas from typing speed to marathon running.
(And, as we know, negative reinforcement works even better than positive, as long as you're the type of person to talk yourself into a commitment contract...)

2. The way the task builds onto your preexisting knowledge.

Can you figure out, within a short learning period, how exactly you need to perform the task to succeed in it, based on your previous competencies? If you can't, chances are the practice will be a waste — or even detrimental to your progress.
But you don't want to spend most of your time thinking about doing something instead of doing it, do you? This point relies heavily on how well you plan for your task and the resources you have available. In short, adequate research and preparation are crucial for your success.

3. The immediate informative feedback on the success of your practice.

Now comes the good part.
Without knowing how you're doing, where you're failing, what you need to improve and how, chances are your practice regimen will (all else equal) help you improve at a certain aspect of your chosen skill, and that will be it. Your progress will stagnate and you will — dejectedly — conclude that this is the best that you can ever get at it. It's likely that your motivation will start to drop, too. Thus, instances of scheduled reevaluation of your methods and approaches are absolutely necessary to even keep you on track.

Various studies have shown that there is an overwhelming difference in the success of skill acquisition in students who have received some private tutoring, compared to those in a standard classroom environment, in self-teaching groups, or those learning from distributed material. You yourself are unlikely to be able to gauge how well you're doing at a skill you're just developing, or even how you can monitor for it — and coming to the wrong conclusion can completely derail your progress (think of wrongly learned behavioral patterns or sports injuries, for example).

If you really want to get good at something without wasting your time and effort, you'd do well to find an experienced mentor or tutor to judge your success and guide your hand.

4. Repetition.

...or, via the Law of Superiority from the always-relevant Murphy's Law:

The first example of superior principle is always inferior to the developed example of inferior principle.

Repetition without adjusting for your progress won't get you anywhere, but giving up before trying won't get you far either.
Coming off of a seminal (and often challenged) paper on The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance from the early 90s (which is a beautiful, palatable read that I thoroughly recommend), deliberate practice has been understood to stand for engaging in activities that have been specifically designed to improve your current level of performance. It's supposed to require your full focus and it's not supposed to be inherently enjoyable.

You can ask yourself two simple questions about what you practice:

• If you don't have to focus on it, are you really improving at it?
• If you enjoy it, are you really facing your shortcomings?

The role of innate talent

In the nature vs nurture showdown, some things (such as our height) are mostly out of our hands. The recent research into the genetic predispositions for excellence at certain tasks shows that, for some of us — even though they can be learned, to some extent — abilities such as having perfect pitch just come naturally.

It's easy to see (in most cases, barring some athletic disciplines with obvious, objective prerequisites) that some of us might get an easier start when it comes to a certain skill, but if you're looking to become an expert at it and spend a decade or more perfecting your performance, the strongest factor determining your success will be practice. Not just how much you practice, but how you practice. Motivating yourself, knowing what you're doing, pushing yourself out of your comfort zones, and working at it diligently for long enough, often enough, without stopping the search for a better approach — that's how you become an expert.

At some skills, you won't be able to catch up with others. You wouldn't say that multilingual children have a genetic advantage to reach fluency in more than one language, but as an adult, you'd struggle quite a bit to reach their level of fluency. This is simply due to the brain changes that occur in children who grow up in multilingual environments. Expert pianists will maintain their music-related skills well into old age, while old amateurs won't be able to catch up. Chess mastery is considered to require a certain level of maturity to achieve, and young children starting chess training tend to need additional years to catch up with those starting off at a later age.

On the topic of chess, expertise has been shown to not only change the way a player's mind works quantitatively, but also qualitatively. The way you approach a task gets vastly different as you get better at it, and you get to see it in a new light as your procedural memory takes care of the basics and you get to focus on the good stuff.

But to get good at it, you'll need to practice.

Dogfood

I can blather about this endlessly, but it won't mean much unless I use it in (my own) practice. (This part should be interesting for the Beeminder users looking for some practical examples!)

1. Motivation

Finding sufficient motivation to create a practice regimen is as simple as jotting down a Beeminder goal. I studied music in high school, but never the instrument I really wanted to play, the viola. I got my hands on one after graduation, but found very quickly that I could never manage a steady period of regular practice. It was a source of personal embarrassment and 'maybe-one-day's. In September last year (on the day I stumbled straight through the looking glass) I told myself that I will be learning to play the viola for an average of 2 pomodoros per week. Zero derailments since then, and I'm enjoying it more than I would have expected.

2. Preexisting knowledge

You need to understand what you can accomplish and how if you want to quantify your expectations. Having completed a degree in music theory, I concluded that I'm perfectly capable of focusing mainly on the playing aspect when it came to getting better at this awesome instrument. In the first few weeks of going back to the basics, I did my research, got my hands on good books with both exercises and theory, bought a sheet music stand, and planned out my route through the materials. I decided to master technical exercises one at a time (keeping track of the effort, not the results!), and supplement my practice with reading.

3. Feedback

Sticking to a game plan without reevaluating your goals doesn't get you far. Any language learner can already nod at this. As a simple example, if you start learning a new language through Duolingo, you'll make great progess for a while. But constantly practicing a language on a tree you've already mastered gives you diminishing returns. Challenge yourself on Clozemaster and it's a whole new story. And when you start participating in regular language tandems, that's when you realize how much of a difference it makes to have a mentor who can tell you exactly what you're doing wrong and how to fix it.

For me, I check my basic playing technique once a week. And last week, in a fated moment of clarity, I realized I'm just as unable to guide myself through the process of successfully acquiring a new skill as anyone else. My bow hold, the thing I thought I knew by heart how to do right — isn't. With the correct bow hold, only a few hours of practice made a big difference. I would have done so much better for myself had I had an expert tell me what I'm doing wrong and how to fix it.
(Needless to say, that's my next step!)

4. Repetition

Don't stop! Even if you think there's no chance to drop this beautiful practice habit that you've developed, don't cut yourself so much slack as to stop monitoring your progress. There's nothing wrong with having maintenance goals, and that's the best way to make sure you stay on track. But don't listen to me, see what a true veteran has to say.

In closing, if you're taking these principles and applying them to a skill you're trying to develop, definitely report in with your experiences — I'd love to know how they work in the real world!

Narcissism is one of those epithets nobody wants to earn — it's a character trait highly associated with vanity and egoism, brandished by the people we tell ourselves we would never think to consider as friends. But what does the observer know about the experiment they're in?
It turns out narcissists are able to charm the socks off of anyone they meet — if they feel like it — but not more than that. Stick around for an overview of the narcissists' arsenal and the scientific observation of how nice guys — spoiler alert — really finish first.

What's a narcissist?

As a personality type (as opposed to a clinical diagnosis), Google Dictionary agrees with scientific literature and defines narcissism as

extreme selfishness, with a grandiose view of one's own talents and a craving for admiration.

Keeping the clinical diagnosis out of the game, all of the research I will present here focuses on the sub-clinical narcissist; the friend, neighbor, coworker, or acquaintance who just might not be the kindest guy you've ever met. Clinically, the narcissistic personality disorder may be diagnosed in people who exhibit the following symptoms:

• a grandiose sense of self-importance, uniqueness, and superiority,
• preoccupation with fantasies of success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love,
• a need for constant admiration from others,
• responds to criticism, indifference, or defeat either with indifference, shame, or aggression,
• entitlement without reciprocity and exploitativeness,
• a lack of empathy to feelings and needs of others,

but that's way too cumbersome to deal with in large-scale studies that investigate the general notion of narcissism.
The handy tool used by most psychologists to discover and characterize narcissistic traits is called the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (R. N. Raskin, C. S. Hall; 1979), it examines the symptoms of narcissistic personality disorder, and in its full form it consists of 40 pairs of statements from which the interviewee is asked to choose the one that better reflects their personality.

For practical purposes, you can save yourself the trouble — narcissists (people who score highly on the Narcissistic Personality Inventory test) tend to look neat and wear expensive, flashy clothing. In fact, the study Portrait of a narcissist: Manifestations of narcissism in physical appearance (S. Vazire et al.; 2008) hints at exactly that: you might be able to guess at narcissistic personality traits of a person just by looking at them.

And if you're feeling particularly adventurous, you can find the Narcissistic Personality Inventory test here.
Are you narcissistic? I'd love to know.

Another common personality trait model that you might have heard of is the Big Five. In this model, personality is described in five sectors, using common language:

• openness to experience,
• conscientiousness,
• extraversion,
• agreeableness,
• and neuroticism.

It's commonly shown that narcissists score very high on extraversion and low on agreeableness. (For the reader who's diligent and has much more free time than I do, here's the Big Five test in a convenient format.)

Why should we care?

Wouldn't it be great if everyone was judged accurately, based on merit and effort?

Narcissists are incredibly successful at leaving good first impressions. The authors of the paper Why Are Narcissists so Charming at First Sight? Decoding the Narcissism–Popularity Link at Zero Acquaintance (M. D. Back et al.; 2010) had a large group of volunteers interact and judge each other's personalities — following that, they varied the amount of information available to the volunteers: from a video recording to a photograph of the clothes worn by the individuals. Narcissists came out on top! They were able to charm in any form available. Additionally, in many studies (example) they are even rated as more attractive at first glance!

However, the thing that's really strange is how The performance of narcissists rises and falls with perceived opportunity for glory (H. M. Wallace & R. F. Baumeister; 2002). If they are promised a reward for doing a task well, narcissists will try harder and score better than the average. But if there's no reward involved... yep, lower than average. The effort they put into a task varies depending on the potential admiration they might earn from others — if the task is presented as very challenging, they will try at it even harder.

Following that, it shouldn't be surprising that in most cases, in groups of newly-acquainted peers, it will be the narcissists that will come out on top as leaders. The same regularity may be applied to many hierarchical structures — at-first-glance charming narcissists are often determined as leaders in groups of executives.
You can find more on this chilling finding (that may or may not explain a lot about everything from your boss at work, to the world political situation) in the paper titled Leader Emergence: The Case of the Narcissistic Leader (A. B. Brunell et al.; 2008).

Downsides to being a narcissist?

Quite a few, actually.

• Brains of narcissists exhibit a hypersensitivity to distress during social exclusion.
• The mad geniuses of the study Narcissists’ social pain seen only in the brain (C. N. Cascio et al.; 2015) hooked up their volunteers onto an fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) scanner and had them play Cyberball. If you've never heard of it, don't worry. It's a virtual ball-toss game used explicitly for the investigation of social rejection. These guys told their subjects that they will be tossing a virtual ball between themselves and two other subjects. They neglected to tell them that the other subjects were computer-controlled players. Then they had the computer-generated players stop tossing the ball to them. Cruel but effective. In conclusion, narcissists suffer much more from this behavior than the average person.
• They're impulsive and get aggressive after failure.
• Narcissists ascribe their successes to ability, and upon failure react with anger and anxiety (see here), due to high impulsivity (see here). Some studies on this topic connect this effect to sexual aggression in particular, and some even touch upon the phenomenon of impulsive buying.
• Sadly, it's genetic.
• The paper A behavioral genetic investigation of the Dark Triad and the Big 5 (P. A. Vernon et al.; 2007) showcases the results of a twin study and presents some evidence for the heritability of narcissism (as well as psychopathy!).
• Narcissists know people don't like them as much as they like themselves.
• But they still believe that they are liked much more than they actually are. The details can be found in this meta-study.
• After a while, people stop liking them.
• This is beautifully illustrated in You probably think this paper's about you: narcissists' perceptions of their personality and reputation (E. N. Carlson et al.; 2011). Even narcissists' close friends have much lower opinions of them than the people they'd just met.

Do nice guys finish last?

Nope!
Every dog has its day, and as narcissists' reputation dwindles and they are seen as more exploitative and less charming, those with low Narcissistic Personality Inventory scores come on top.

As mentioned above, narcissists score very high points with the people they'd just met... but over time, that opinion drops. This may be due to the illustrations of the narcissists' negative personality traits, but it may also be due to the switching off of the charm. If there's no new admiration to gain from the relationship, is the relationship really worth it for them? Indeed, this pattern seems likely.

Additionally, your relationships with others tend to be more enjoyable if your impressions of how they feel about you agree with their actual feelings; regardless of whether the impressions are good or bad! So narcissists are definitely out of luck there.
For more on this topic and many mental cartwheels, take a look at the paper Meta-accuracy and relationship quality: Weighing the costs and benefits of knowing what people really think about you by E. N. Carlson (2016) — and then let me know how the cartwheels are going for you. :)

What should you take out of this? Charm fades, not all that looks cool is gold, and slow-and-steady wins the race.

Also, turtles are pretty neat.

What we know as human society is held together by interpersonal relationships – on one hand, it's the give-and-take equilibria between persons or social groups and the expectations of reciprocally beneficial behavior, and on the other, the feelings of closeness, trust, and personalistic self-disclosure.

The study I'm about to present to you is something you have probably already seen floating around the internet, said to hold the key to forming close personal relationships in a few dozen carefully designed discussion questions. Let's start with the basics. Is it overblown? Yes and no. The study I'm referring to is the Experimental Generation of Interpersonal Closeness: A Procedure and Some Preliminary Findings (A. Aron et al.; 1997), and in it the authors present a superficially reliable-looking method of creating close relationships. Id est, interpersonal relationships of two strangers who end up reporting a substantial amount of closeness in their relationship after a guided 45-minute conversation. But it's a far stretch to say that such an accomplishment truly creates reliably long-lasting relationships, regardless of the immense immediate effect.
Most of this research paper is dry, scarce with information, and devoid of enthusiasm (not all of it, though!), so to get to its main points without giving up on social science and friendships in general, I recommend opting for my summary instead.

Closeness

In short, the chief idea of the research presented in this paper was the experimental generation of close interpersonal relationships. As you can imagine, experimenting on actual, naturally-forming close relationships does bring up some ethical questions... but making strangers like each other and then playing with their relationships apparently doesn't! There are two conclusions you can already reach through this – psychologists really like playing god, and you should try to avoid being one of their test subjects.
To define closeness, or intimacy of a relationship, they use something called "the inclusion of other in the self," which represent a state in which each subject of a relationship feels their innermost self to be validated, understood, and cared for by the other. Some other definitions of closeness — such as the one I would use for friendships — take interpersonal closeness to include behavioral interaction. In other words, the time spent together and common activities undertaken – behaving close. However, most can agree on closeness having to involve some aspect of feeling close to have any chance of enduring and improving.

Onto the results!

These manipulative geniuses chose a handful of university-level psychology classes early in the semester, divided the student volunteers (who didn't know each other) in pairs, and asked them to engage in an exercise designed to increase their closeness. They modified some of the pairings and introductory information, and looked at how this may influence their results. Before getting right onto the results, let me inspire you by mentioning that in their preliminary study on stranger pairs going through a similar exercise, most reported a high postexperiment rating of closeness, and one of the couples even got married. (Psychologists playing god.)

The exercise that the student strangers engaged in involved 36 questions divided in three sections and designed to make them discuss gradually more personal feelings and experiences on everything from childhood memories, hobbies, and daily life. After just 45 minutes (each 12-question session was capped at 15 minutes), they were asked to report on the closeness of the relationship they had just developed with this (until-recently) stranger.
The experiment proved to be extremely successful.

If you want to try it yourself with a consenting stranger, you can find the whole procedure documented on pages 12 and 13 of the original paper (here), or on about a million internet pages with cringy and deceitful titles.

Things that made no difference in the success of the experiment:

• agreement on important issues,
• small-talk,
• expectation of mutual liking (or no expectation whatsoever),
• making the generation of closeness an explicit task.

Thing that mattered:

• a gradual escalation of self-disclosure and intimacy-related behavior by both partners.

That's it. Seriously. Compared to a survey on the closeness of the "closest, deepest, most involved, and most intimate relationship" given to a similar group of students, the closeness achieved by this experiment overshot that which was reported in the survey by about a third of the students. Does that mean that some close, naturally-forming relationships don't get nurtured as lovingly as was achieved in a 45-minute conversation?
When considering these results, keep in mind that the experiment was designed to provide just a temporary feeling of closeness, not a long-lasting relationship.

Additional interesting facts

• Those with dismissive-avoidant personalities didn't get as close

• The dismissive-avoidant is one of the attachment types in the study of social attachment in adults. It pertains to people who feel more comfortable without close social relationships, highly value their independence, they suppress and hide their feelings, and deal with rejection by distancing themselves from its source.
  The other personality types in adult attachments include secure, and two other insecure types: anxious-preoccupied and fearful-avoidant. These three personality types all reported on a higher (and similar) level of closeness achieved than the dismissive-avoidants. For more information on the attachment type personalities, see the paper on the Attachment styles among young adults: A test of a four-category model (K. Bartholomew, L. M. Horowitz; 1991).

• Anxious-preoccupied partners weren't satisfied with the achieved closeness

• This result reflects the definition of this attachment type clearly. For more information, see the previous bullet point, or even the Wikipedia page on the Attachment styles in adults.

• If closeness isn't an explicit task, introverts don't get as close as extraverts

• However, if the partners were explicitly told that their task is to become close to each other, both extraverts and introverts will report on a similar level of achieved closeness.

• In extravert-introvert pairs, extraverts report on greater closeness than introverts

• This implies that introverts might not perform worse in social situations – they just perceive their relationships to be less close, on average.

• Low ego-identity makes same-sex pairs closer, high ego-identity makes cross-sex pairs closer

• Same-sex friendships seem to serve as identity support for those individuals with low ego-identities, while for those with high ego-identities, they are a source of undesired conformity that might threaten their individuated identities.

• Most volunteers maintained some interaction after the experiment

• The experiment seems to have at least created some long-lasting effects. These would be incredibly useful if directly used in situations where getting to know someone and feeling accepted is important, such as in freshman activities, long conferences and workshops, or in social groups of withdrawn individuals.

• The participants enjoyed the experiment

• Humans are forever social creatures – the act of sharing ourselves with others, being accepted and approved of is what forms and maintains social bonds and — more importantly — our mental health (for an overview, see here).

The debate on the business of citation accumulation in scientific publishing is long and deep-rooted, but the science of citation accumulation — not so much. In this little post, I'm summarizing some of the interesting research done on the effect that titles have on the number of citations a scientific piece of text receives. This might be a good place to start the next time you're sending off your literary work of art into the world.

Title type

An analysis (Article title type and its relation with the number of downloads and citations; H. R. Jamali, 2011) that looked into the effect of the type of article title on the likelihood of the article being cited divided them into three main types: interrogative (i.e. containing a question), descriptive or neutral, and declarative (the title contains the main conclusion of the article).
They looked at all of the papers published in 2007 in six biomedical journals and found that the marketing of interrogative titles works! On average, the titles containing a question proved to be downloaded about twice as more than those that didn't. Before you start planning your next research question, let me bring you down by telling you that they were cited over a third less times than those titles that didn't contain a question.
The declarative and descriptive titles didn't show much difference in the number of downloads and citations – and naturally, the number of citations was positively correlated with the number of downloads of these articles. It appears as if the contents are what matters more than a marketing gimmick cleverly positioned in the title.

Title lenght

This one's easy. Articles with shorter titles receive more citations, on average. The paper (aptly?) titled The advantage of short paper titles (A. Letchford, H. S. Moat, T. Preis, 2015) presents an investigation into the number of citations received by journals that publish papers of a certain length – and shows that those characterized by shorter titles tend to receive more citations than the rest.
Additionally, the papers that are presented with longer titles have been shown to, on average, have more authors (Relation of title length of journal articles to number of authors; M. Yitzhaki, 1994) – more commonly found in journals specializing in harder science, as opposed to those in social science. A suggestion as to why this might be the case goes along the lines of the presence of keywords in titles; having more authors with different backgrounds will likely lead to more keywords having to be included in the title.
In the same tune, there exists a Relation of the title length of a journal article to the length of the article (M. Yitzhaki, 2002). Articles with titles that contain more significant words are found to have more pages, which means that there exists a greater chance of them containing useful information for more people. Somehow, looking at the citations they receive, that doesn't seem to be the case.

Readability

The chief goal of publishing a scientific text should be its clear communication to a scientific community or the general public. Sadly, that's not how the cards are stacked up for us.
A modest overview of this (one that I wholeheartedly recommend) can be found in the paper on Creative Obfuscation (J. S. Armstrong, 1982), where the old adage "If you can't convince them, confuse them." rings much more true than it should. Low clarity is related to an impression of higher prestige and research competence of the author of the scientific article. If you think this is too depressing, scroll down to the end of this post for a report on an exciting field experiment from 1973 that tested obfuscation as a method for influential scientific communication in the form of lecture talks. It should not make you feel better, but your cynicism might level up.
For an interesting view on the claim presented above, you can check out this paper on the Vagueness, Ambiguity, and the Cost of Mutual Understanding (I. Erev, T. S. Wallsten, M. M. Neal, 1991), where an experiment is used to show that the frequency of vague communication increases in a controlled setting when it is beneficial for the group. Communication that may be interpreted in many ways is likely to be interpreted such that the majority of the recipients will agree with the presented statement, facilitating the approval of a greater number of people. Obfuscation may work in a similar fashion.

Humor

If you're like me, you enjoy a good joke or a bad innuendo in a title of a research paper – you will be more likely to open and read it, and willing to consider that it might contain amusing, if not always useful information. That's all fun and games, but when you're publishing your own, don't make it very funny.
The study on the Amusing titles in scientific journals
and article citation (I. Sagi, E. Yechiam, 2007) had volunteer graduate students (not very many of them, though!) scroll through a decade's worth (about a thousand) of psychology papers from two major journals in behavioral science, and rate them for their pleasantness and amusement. Pleasantness here referred to "giving the sense of happy satisfaction or enjoyment," and amusement, or humor "the quality of being amusing or comic." The results were defeating: those papers that were rated as more than two standard deviations more amusing that average (highly amusing) were found to be cited approximately 33% less than those that scored low on the amusement scale. To bring the point home, they managed to analyze the number of citations received by about a dozen pairs of titles in the bunch that were written by the same author, published in the same journal, and scored high and low in amusement, respectably. The result was fascinating – they found a 62% difference in the number of citations, an effect much greater than the one found in the pool of all published articles. However, this may be because of the small sample used.

In case you're wondering about other research into the effect of humor on the communication in a scientific setting, look no further; these three studies should cover the basic questions:

• Effects of humorous illustrations in college textbooks
• Relationship between Humor in Introductory Textbooks and Students' Evaluations of the Texts' Appeal and Effectiveness
• Enhancing online instruction with humor

They all present conclusions implying that the inclusion of humor in textbooks and during instruction leads to the increased enjoyment, participation, and appeal of the material, but causes a stark drop in the persuasibility of the material and the author's credibility. Sad news, but at least you can rely on my posts to keep you entertained.

Bonus field study on obfuscation

Now for the fun part; The Doctor Fox Lecture: A Paradigm of Educational Seduction (D. H. Naftulin, J. E. Ware, F. A. Donnelly, 1973):

Given a sufficiently impressive lecture paradigm, an experienced group of educators participating in a new learning situation can feel satisfied that they have learned despite irrelevant, conflicting, and meaningless content conveyed by the lecturer.

The authors chose an actor who looked distinguished and sounded authoritative, called him Dr. Fox and had him present several lectures on the Mathematical Game Theory as Applied to Physician Education, helped exclusively by the use of double talk, neologisms, non sequiturs, and contradictory statements.
The results were beautiful.
Most of his audience agreed that he gave a well organized lecture, provided enough examples to clarify his statements, stimulated their thinking, and presented the material in a very interesting fashion.

People are sheep and science is basically marketing.

Here we go again, it's that time of the year for the northern hemisphere — summer. Eternal sunshine. Blistering heat and daily temperatures reaching the heights needed to melt thoughts. Good news? It's done in a few months, and then we can all complain about the cold and rain again. Bad news? It's not just the weather that's being horrible — it's everyone around you, too.

A recent paper, Exploring the impact of ambient temperature on helping (Belkin & Kouchaki, 2017), takes a look at the mechanism by which uncomfortably warm environments change your behavior.

Let's be clear, individual helpful behavior is a crucial component of human nature — it's been proven to increase morale, creativity, productivity, and social commitment, among other things. The human system is one that works on the concepts of mutual trust and dependability - doing something for your fellow man without being explicitly rewarded for it. Fascinatingly, this tendency depends on ambient temperature.
Previous studies had shown that comfortable, warm enviroments make you think of your personal relationships as warmer, and they increase sharing and cooperative behavior. Comfortable cold environments encourage social inclusion and customer-oriented behavior in various organizations, whereas uncomfortably hot environments bring forth antisocial behavior. When you feel too hot, you become hostile and take away highly negative impressions from the situations you experience. The authors of the aforementioned study attempted to find out why.

They use the conservation of resources model (see Conservation of Resources: A New Attempt at Conceptualizing Stress by Stevan Hobfoll, 1989), which boils down to explaining human behavior by the inherent desires to obtain and protect valuable resources and avoid the stress of losing them. The authors hypothesize that because hot environments increase fatigue, the resources of alertness and energy will be in high demand, and ideas of prosocial behavior that doesn't benefit the subject will be discarded in favor of conservation of resources. They look into this through three studies — skip ahead if you want to get to the moral of the story without looking at the fluff.

Field data

The start of the work on this paper began by the authors being contacted by a Russian retail company, asking them to analyze the data on the helpful behavior of their employees during the extreme heat wave of the summer of 2010 (without air conditioning, naturally), and the comparatively mild summer of 2011. (Agreeing to this was very helpful!) The company had sent out independent observers to assess the behavior of its employees through a questionnaire. It could be shown that the heat wave had strong negative effect on the helpfulness of the retail employees. Interestingly, the heat wave didn't cause more employees to miss work, and the cleanliness levels of the stores looked alike. The only difference? Shitty customer

Controlled experiment

In a controlled experiment designed to attempt to replicate this data, paid subjects in the trial group were asked to imagine how they felt on an extremely hot day, helped by visual aids (which presumably means they were shown photos of people sweating profusely and cursing at the sky), and the control group was tasked with vividly remembering just the previous day. Both groups were put through the same tests, and afterwards asked to voluntarily fill out another survey, this time without financial compensation. Only about half of the trial group decided to fill it out, when compared to the control group, and even though their test results were similar, the trial group reported feeling much more fatigued and being in a much less positive mood.

Field experiment

Now, this is my favorite one. They found two equivalent university groups that had the same course held either in a hot room, or in a room of comfortable temperature. They made them fill out a decoy survey, and afterwards asked them to voluntarily fill out another survey for a local charity. The students from the hot room answered on average 4% of the questions, and those from the comfortable room over 20%! Almost all of the students from the comfortable room answered at least one question, whereas less than two thirds of the hot students did the same.

In conclusion, the depletion of energy caused by fatigue in uncomfortably hot environments decreases the postivity of the mood experienced by those in it, which makes them seriously unlikely to use that energy to help someone other their own selves. The sample sizes and methods aren't perfect, but this is one of those papers that just may change the way you think of human behavior and antisocial impulses — I recommend a read!
And the next time you act like a dick to someone — tell them you have an excuse.