Learn about crowdsourced fact checking; why humans and monkeys choke under pressure; and a mantis shrimp punching robot. Join Cody and Ashley for a special live stream celebrating Curiosity Daily’s 1,000th episode! Leave us a voicemail at 312-596-5208 or email a voice recording to curiosity@discovery.com and share your favorite fact you've learned from the podcast, and you may hear your message on the stream! Register for free here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/curiosity-dailys-1000th-episode-celebration-tickets-191163133077 Crowdsourced fact checking might actually work on social media by Steffie Drucker Study: Crowds can wise up to fake news. (2021, September). EurekAlert! https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/926824 Allen, J., Arechar, A. A., Pennycook, G., & Rand, D. G. (2021). Scaling up fact-checking using the wisdom of crowds. Science Advances, 7(36). https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.abf4393 Edelman, G. (2021, September 9). Can the Wisdom of Crowds Help Fix Social Media’s Trust Issue? Wired. Retrieved September 27, 2021, from https://www.wired.com/story/could-wisdom-of-crowds-help-fix-social-media-trust-problem Monkeys choke under pressure just like humans do, which gives us a chance to better understand it by Grant Currin Levy, M. G. (2021, September 2). You’re Not Alone: Monkeys Choke Under Pressure Too. Wired; WIRED. https://www.wired.com/story/youre-not-alone-monkeys-choke-under-pressure-too/ Smoulder, A. L., Pavlovsky, N. P., Marino, P. J., Degenhart, A. D., McClain, N. T., Batista, A. P., & Chase, S. M. (2021). Monkeys exhibit a paradoxical decrease in performance in high-stakes scenarios. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 118(35), e2109643118. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2109643118 Scientists just built a mantis shrimp punching robot for the US Army by Cameron Duke Mantis Shrimps. (2021). Qld.gov.au. https://www.qm.qld.gov.au/Explore/Find+out+about/Animals+of+Queensland/Crustaceans/Common+marine+crustaceans/Mantis+Shrimps#.U7ZwLPmSxMg Small, mighty robots mimic the powerful punch of mantis shrimp. (2021, September 9). EurekAlert! https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/927975 Steinhardt, E., Hyun, N. P., Koh, J., Freeburn, G., Rosen, M. H., Temel, F. Z., Patek, S. N., & Wood, R. J. (2021). A physical model of mantis shrimp for exploring the dynamics of ultrafast systems. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 118(33), e2026833118. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2026833118 Follow Curiosity Daily on your favorite podcast app to learn something new every day withCody Gough andAshley Hamer. Still curious? Get exclusive science shows, nature documentaries, and more real-life entertainment on discovery+! Go to https://discoveryplus.com/curiosity to start your 7-day free trial. discovery+ is currently only available for US subscribers.
Learn about crowdsourced fact checking; why humans and monkeys choke under pressure; and a mantis shrimp punching robot.
Join Cody and Ashley for a special live stream celebrating Curiosity Daily’s 1,000th episode! Leave us a voicemail at 312-596-5208 or email a voice recording to curiosity@discovery.com and share your favorite fact you've learned from the podcast, and you may hear your message on the stream! Register for free here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/curiosity-dailys-1000th-episode-celebration-tickets-191163133077
Crowdsourced fact checking might actually work on social media by Steffie Drucker
Monkeys choke under pressure just like humans do, which gives us a chance to better understand it by Grant Currin
Scientists just built a mantis shrimp punching robot for the US Army by Cameron Duke
Follow Curiosity Daily on your favorite podcast app to learn something new every day with Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer. Still curious? Get exclusive science shows, nature documentaries, and more real-life entertainment on discovery+! Go to https://discoveryplus.com/curiosity to start your 7-day free trial. discovery+ is currently only available for US subscribers.
Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/crowds-fix-fake-news-choking-under-pressure-punching-robot-shrimp
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 whether crowdsourced fact checking actually works; what monkeys choking under pressure tells us about why humans do, too; and why scientists built a mantis shrimp punching robot.
CODY: Let’s satisfy some curiosity.
To counter misinformation, social media platforms have started turning to fact-checkers. But if fact-checkers can only check a small fraction of the many, many posts shared each day, what hope do we have in the fight against fake news? That dilemma is why a new MIT study is such a breath of fresh air: it found that large groups of ordinary people were just as good as professional fact-checkers at assessing news stories’ accuracy. To cut down on misinformation, we just need the wisdom of crowds.
To test the power of crowdsourced fact-checking, MIT scientists compiled 207 news stories flagged by Facebook’s algorithm for further scrutiny. These stories were either flagged because they were going viral, they concerned sensitive topics like health, or they were believed to contain misinformation. The team recruited 1,100 U.S. residents to read just the headline and lead sentence of 20 stories each. Participants answered seven questions about each piece in order to rate factors like its truthfulness, reliability, and objectivity. Those scores combined with those of other participants into an overall accuracy grade for each story.
At the same time, researchers gave all 207 stories to three professional fact-checkers. The pros did deeper research than the regular readers before making their evaluations. The three fact-checkers’ grades matched 49 percent of the time, and two out of three agreed 42 percent of the time. Nine percent of the time, there was no consensus.
Here’s the amazing part: when the researchers split the regular readers into politically balanced groups of 10 or more, the groups matched the performance of the pros. This was without any formal fact-checking training and with much less time spent reading each story. It’s clear that crowdsourced fact checking really works.
Social media giants like Facebook and Twitter have been dabbling with crowdsourced fact-checking programs. This study suggests they can be inexpensive and relatively effective — as long as the platforms prevent bad actors from gaming the system.
The scientists suggest that platforms should also use the crowdsourced scores to affect how their algorithm curates people’s news feeds. The lower a story’s accuracy rating, the more the algorithm should demote it.
In any case, when it comes to the fight against fake news, there is power in numbers.
Whether it’s an athlete missing a free-throw or a rock star forgetting the words to their big hit, choking happens when the stakes are high. And psychologists have no idea why. That’s the reason researchers invited a monkey named Earl into their lab to play some video games.
Earl is one of 3 rhesus monkeys [REE-sis] that recently helped answer a longstanding question in psychology: is choking under pressure unique to humans? Or is it something deeper, a flaw in the way brains have evolved? If Earl’s pitiful performance is any indication, it’s not just us homo sapiens that get the yips.
The game Earl and his friends were playing is very simple. Imagine a screen with a colored dot and a cursor the monkey can move with its arm. The goal is to put the cursor on top of the colored dot before time runs out. When a monkey succeeded, it got a reward. There was only one variable in this experiment: the size of the reward. The subjects knew before each trial if the prize they were playing for was small, medium, large, or gigantic.
If the gigantic prize led to a drop in performance, it would be the first evidence that monkeys choke, too.
The monkeys all did an okay job when the reward was small. They did a bit better for the medium reward and better still for the big one. But Earl couldn’t handle the pressure of competing for the gigantic reward. When it really counted, when it was all on the line, he went zero for eleven. Tragic. All three monkeys choked hard when the prize was unimaginably generous.
What happened? The researchers noticed that when the monkeys were playing for the gigantic prize, they became overly cautious. A monkey under pressure would take so much care not to overshoot the target that it ran out of time before getting the cursor all the way to the colored dot.
That’s amazing because it seems to be similar to what happens in humans. When a person chokes, they tend to overanalyze what they’re doing. Even if you’ve shot a billion free throws, you’re way more likely to miss the billion-and-first if you think about the steps as they’re happening. And that tends to happen when success is really, really important.
And if this whole segment has you thinking back to a time when you failed under high pressure, take heart in knowing it happens to everyone. Even elite athletes. Even Earl.
The mantis shrimp is a tiny sea creature that packs a mean punch. Their fists of fury are pretty impressive: they can accelerate as fast as a bullet shoots out of a gun. Now, scientists have managed to build a robot to match their punching power.
The punch of the mantis shrimp has fascinated humans for a long time. These animals weigh as much as a stick of gum, but they punch with enough force to crack a crab’s shell — or a glass aquarium.
How the shrimp are capable of such force has so far eluded scientists. Ultra-fast movements like this tend to be the exclusive domain of small creatures, but how that much power can be packed into such small animals has been a mystery.
To get to the bottom of it, scientists at Duke and Harvard Universities used high-speed imaging to watch mantis shrimp punch in slow motion. By watching it happen in detail, they learned that the mantis shrimp’s appendages work very differently than ours do. The mantis shrimp’s punching arm works a bit like a mousetrap: it stores elastic energy, then releases it all at once. That way, it’s able to create enough force to bust through even the toughest shells. Scientists have known that a physical latching mechanism was the key to the mantis shrimp’s mighty punches, but seeing it in such detail has allowed a much better understanding of how it works.
And now, the mantis shrimp isn’t the only pint-sized puncher around. It has a new competitor: the robo shrimp. The US Army provided the funds to build a prototype robot that can mimic the mantis shrimp’s knockout abilities. Their prototype is able to produce impressive levels of force that have never been seen at such a small robotic scale.
It’s unclear why the Army is interested in building tiny punching robots, but the gains for both engineering and biology are pretty impressive. It’s not all about the mantis shrimp: we now have a better understanding of how small animals like frogs and fleas are able to jump so high.
But in the future, if you get punched by a shrimp-sized robot, well — don’t say I didn’t warn you.
CODY: Before we recap what we learned today, [PLUG FOR 1000TH EPISODE LIVESTREAM]
Let’s recap what we learned today to wrap up. Starting with
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ASHLEY: Today’s writers were Steffie Drucker, Grant Currin, and Cameron Duke.
CODY: Our managing editor is Ashley Hamer.
ASHLEY: Our producer and audio editor is Cody Gough.
CODY: [AD LIB SOMETHING FUNNY] Join us again tomorrow to learn something new in just a few minutes.
ASHLEY: And until then, stay curious!