Learn about why signaling your status makes it harder to make new friends; the evolutionary reason why humans have so much back pain; and how pretending to understand babies can make them smarter.
Learn about why signaling your status makes it harder to make new friends; the evolutionary reason why humans have so much back pain; and how pretending to understand babies can make them smarter.
Signaling your status makes it harder to make new friends by Steffie Drucker
Why do humans have so much back pain? Thank evolution by Grant Currin
Keep Pretending To Understand Babies—It Makes Them Smarter by Anna Todd
https://curiosity.com/topics/keep-pretending-to-understand-babiesit-makes-them-smarter-curiosity
Subscribe to Curiosity Daily to learn something new every day with Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer. You can also listen to our podcast as part of your Alexa Flash Briefing; Amazon smart speakers users, click/tap “enable” here: https://curiosity.im/podcast-flash-briefing
Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/blame-evolution-for-back-pain-showing-off-your-status-doesnt-make-friends-and-make-babies-smarter-by-pretending-to-understand-them
CODY: Hi! You’re about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from curiosity-dot-com. I’m Cody Gough.
ASHLEY: And I’m Ashley Hamer. Today, you’ll learn about why signaling your status makes it harder to make new friends; the evolutionary reason why humans have so much back pain; and how pretending to understand babies can make them smarter.
CODY: Let’s satisfy some curiosity.
When it comes to making friends, you might think showing off your most expensive stuff would make the best first impression. But new research says that’s exactly the wrong approach. It turns out that luxury status signals make it harder to make new friends.
To find this out, researchers at the University of Michigan created several hypothetical scenarios.
In one scenario, they asked residents of a swanky suburb to imagine they were driving to a wedding reception where they hoped to make some new friends. Would they take their luxury car or something less flashy? More than two-thirds picked the luxury vehicle. A second group was asked to imagine they saw someone arrive to a wedding reception in either a luxury ride or a more basic car. When they were asked how closely this person matched their ideal of a new close friend, the would-be friends were far less interested in a person driving the luxury car than the more basic vehicle.
In another experiment, scientists asked 62 college students to pick a partner to have a “getting-to-know-you” conversation with. The students were asked to choose their partner — supposedly in the next room — from two virtual profiles. Those profiles revealed stuff like what type of car and brand of winter jacket each person owned, among other things. The fancier candidate, who drove a new BMW and wore a Canada Goose jacket, was only picked a quarter of the time. They even repeated this experiment by first asking a new group which car they’d want to put in their profile, then asking the exact same people which friend they’d choose based on two profiles. Most chose the BMW for themselves, but chose the friend with the more basic car!
What’s going on? Why do people think showing off their high status will make friends, but end up choosing friends that are more down to earth? The researchers call this mismatch the “status signals paradox,” and there’s a logic to it.
Usually, advertising status is a good thing. The study even found that when they changed the goal of the wedding reception to making business contacts instead of making friends, everybody was suddenly in favor of the luxury car. Because people want to be viewed in a positive light when making new friends, they mistakenly assume these same strategies will work there too. But potential friends also want to be seen in a positive light, and if they see that you’re in a higher league than they are, they may not even bother. After all, no one likes to be seen as the lesser friend.
Wealth and status are good qualities in a business associate, but in a friend? It turns out we’re all just looking for someone who’s approachable and relatable. So save the bling for the networking events — new friends just want to meet the real you. For my part, I am going to continue taking all business-related video calls from my full professional podcast setup with my expensive microphone fully visible in the shot. Sorry not sorry.
Why do humans have so much back pain? Believe it or not, you might have evolution to thank. Because researchers have the strongest evidence yet that back pain can be at least partly blamed on our evolutionary history.
And if you’ve never had back pain, then consider yourself lucky. More than 50 percent of people in the developed world experience it at some point in their lives, and it’s one of the biggest causes of disability worldwide. For a long time, scientists have pointed out how many of our most common ailments probably came about because of how our bodies evolved. We’re using a body plan originally used for swinging around in trees to walk around on two feet. That puts a lot more stress on the spine than it did for our tree-dwelling ancestors, and that has caused some problems.
But until recently, there hasn’t been hard evidence to support this hypothesis. That’s why a team of bioarchaeologists decided to compare the shape of human vertebrae to that of the great apes. According to their research, many back problems can be traced to vertebrae that either changed too little or too much.
The team looked into a couple of conditions that affect the lower spine. That included disc herniation, where the rubbery discs between vertebrae poke through the bones, and spondylolysis [SPON-dill-low-LYE-sis], which involves a stress fracture in thin parts of the vertebrae that connect them to each other. Both cause back pain, and while they’re common problems in humans, they aren’t something our great ape cousins have to worry about. That led scientists to suspect that they’re relics of our recent evolutionary history.
To test the hypothesis, they used a cutting-edge technique called 3D shape analysis to compare human lumbar vertebrae to those of great apes. And they found a few key differences.
Compared with healthy humans, humans with disc herniation had vertebrae that were rounder with shorter connecting sections — a shape that looked more like that of great apes. The researchers say this particular shape may be less supportive, leading to more disc herniation.
On the other end of the spectrum, people with spondylolysis tend to have wedge-shaped vertebrae that are taller in the front and shorter in the back. They say this difference in shape may raise the likelihood of stress fractures. Importantly, that shape is less like great apes. In fact, people who aren’t prone to have spondylolysis have vertebrae that look more like the great apes than people with the condition.
In other words, according to the researchers, these two spinal conditions are both caused by our evolutionary history — but in two different ways. Disc herniation happens when vertebrae are too ape-like, while spondylolysis comes from vertebrae that have evolved too far away from our tree-dwelling ancestors. Basically, the human body is a work in progress — and we’ve still got some kinks to work out.
If you want your baby to reach their full potential, then don’t wait until you can understand them to have a conversation. According to research, pretending to understand what babies say can actually make them smarter.
For a 2014 study, researchers observed a group of mothers and their infants and categorized the mothers’ responses in one of two ways. “Redirective” responses involved turning the babies' attention elsewhere, like showing them a toy or pointing out something in the room. “Sensitive” responses involved a verbal reply or imitation by the mother. For example, if an infant utters "da-da-da," a mother’s “sensitive” response would be something like, "Da-da is working. I am ma-ma."
At a later date, the mothers took a survey to track how their infants' speech had progressed. The babies whose mothers had given them sensitive responses showed, quote, "increased rates of consonant-vowel vocalizations."
In other words, their baby's babbles were starting to sound more like real words. These babies were also more likely to direct said "words" towards their mothers instead of simply out into the world. The researchers think that’s because they had learned to use vocalizations in a communicative way.
Studies like these could be huge for how we approach communication and language development. The researchers say this study challenges the idea that human communication is innate and can't be influenced by feedback from a parent. So respond to your baby like they’re a normal functioning adult. They may thank you one day.
Let’s recap today’s takeaways
[ad lib optional]
CODY: Today’s stories were written by Steffie Drucker, Grant Currin, and Anna Todd, and edited by Ashley Hamer, who’s the managing editor for Curiosity Daily.
ASHLEY: Scriptwriting was by Cody Gough and Sonja Hodgen. Curiosity Daily is produced and edited by Cody Gough.
CODY: Join us again tomorrow to learn something new in just a few minutes.
ASHLEY: And until then, stay curious!