Learn about how naked mole-rats invade neighboring colonies and steal babies, the average person is hiding 13 secrets, and people use more jargon when they're insecure about their status.
Learn about how naked mole-rats invade neighboring colonies and steal babies, the average person is hiding 13 secrets, and people use more jargon when they're insecure about their status.
Naked mole-rats invade neighboring colonies and steal babies by Grant Currin
The Average Person Is Hiding 13 Secrets, According to a Study by Anna Todd
People use more jargon when they're insecure about their status by author Kelsey Donk
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Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/insecure-people-use-more-jargon
[MUSIC PLAYING] CODY GOUGH: Hi. You're about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from curiosity. com. I'm Cody Gough.
ASHLEY HAMER: And I'm Ashley Hamer.
NATALIA REAGAN: And I'm Natalia Reagan. Today you learn about how naked mole rats invade neighboring colonies and steal babies, and how many secrets the average person is hiding.
ASHLEY HAMER: You'll also learn about how people use more jargon when they're insecure about their status.
CODY GOUGH: Let's conciliate some curiosity.
NATALIA REAGAN: Gather around. I'm about to tell you a dramatic tale. It involves a monarchy that rules over a stratified society, violent underground battles, brutal conquest, kidnapping, and murder. No, it's not a new season of Game of Thrones. It's research on naked mole rats. Get ready to hear the dramatic tale of these ruthless rodent warriors.
If you've never seen a naked mole rat, well, the name paints an accurate picture. These small rodents are almost completely hairless, thus, the naked part. They have tiny eyes and live underground, like a mole. And they have huge incisors, like a rat. No false advertising here.
Zoologists have been interested in these animals for decades, particularly, for their unique social life. Naked mole rats live in colonies that include as many as 300 individuals. A single breeding pair sits at the top of the social structure, like a king and a queen. And the legions of workers take care of everything else.
Back in the early '90s, a team of researchers spent three summers studying naked mole rat society in Meru National Park in Kenya. They would find a colony, collect all of its members, and then mark the individuals by either clipping a toe or inserting a tiny radio frequency transponder chip under the skin.
Every now and then, the researchers would come across a naked mole rat that had already been marked even though the researchers hadn't been to its colony yet. Sometimes, they'd even have battle wounds. This happened in 26 colonies over the course of the whole study.
The researchers concluded that colonies were attacking each other by digging tunnels into their neighbors' burrows. Half the time, the victims were able to flee to a distant part of the burrow and reestablish normal life, at least for a while. But the victims weren't always so lucky. Colonies that were displaced entirely were never heard from again.
That study happened more than 25 years ago. But new genetic technology is opening the book once more. Thanks to DNA evidence, researchers have confirmed that the invaders actually kidnapped pups from the vanquished colony and raise them as their own. They say this didn't happen enough to have much of an effect in the populations they studied. But it might be more common than their data let on. That's because pup napping has to happen pretty quickly after birth. So they were lucky to document any cases at all.
So don't underestimate this bald, nearly blind, underground animal. If you take a walk in Kenya, there might be a medieval saga in the making right beneath your feet.
CODY GOUGH: Hey, so I hear we've been playing some classic Cody clips every Thursday on Curiosity Daily. And who am I to stop that tradition? So here's a little something that I recorded a long time ago. I'm going to sit back and knock back a can of Mountain Dew. Talk to you soon.
Do you have a secret? Here's a fun fact. According to a 2017 study, the average person has around 13 secrets, and 5 of them will never come out to anyone. The researchers say that it isn't the number of secrets you keep that really matters though. It's the burden of those secrets and the real effects they have on you. I'm glad I don't have to deal with this.
ASHLEY HAMER: You don't have any secrets?
CODY GOUGH: Or do I?
ASHLEY HAMER: Ooh.
CODY GOUGH: You'll never know.
[LAUGHTER]
Do you?
ASHLEY HAMER: No. I feel like I need to have more secrets. I feel like that would be good for me, to just stop telling people everything.
CODY GOUGH: According to this research, that may not be the case.
ASHLEY HAMER: Hmm.
CODY GOUGH: This study out of Columbia Business School showed that when a subject thought about their secrets, they actually acted as if they were burdened by physical weight. This happened even when the subject wasn't hiding a particular secret at that moment.
There's more research to back this up. A 2012 study showed that quote, "people who recalled, were preoccupied with, or suppressed an important secret, estimated hills to be steeper, perceived distances to be farther, indicated that physical tasks would require more efforts, and were less likely to help others with physical tasks," unquote.
So even if you're not actively hiding a secret, everything could be harder just by thinking about it. The recent paper notes that our minds are constantly trying to resolve issues or reach goals that we haven't achieved yet.
But here's the thing, a secret is a goal that can never be accomplished. That leaves one solution. Just don't think about your secret. Hopefully, someday in the near future, researchers will figure out the secret to doing just that.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yet again, scientists have discovered something we all suspected. People use more jargon when they're insecure about their status.
CODY GOUGH: Did I tell you about the custom podcast that I built while I was on paternity leave?
ASHLEY HAMER: No, Cody. What did you do? I used a table saw to cut a 45-degree angle and some 2 by 2 furring strips to build base traps, acoustic absorbent base traps. Then I installed a 40-foot tunable white LED strip light with 1344 LEDs, with an RF remote. And then about a 16-inch laminated spruce board, and mounted it on a shelf track by drilling some holes with a counter sink to mount the desktop on a closet made. And then I stained it before I applied a couple of layers of polyurethane. And I started to set my microphones running through a dbx Preamp and also routed through a PROFX8 mixer. It's a good time.
ASHLEY HAMER: Is that an XLR microphone?
[LAUGHTER]
CODY GOUGH: It is. It is an XLR, not a USB.
[LAUGHTER]
Come on, we're professionals here.
ASHLEY HAMER: Oh, good. Because I was feeling insecure about my status, so I wanted to join in. Well, this new study comes from researchers at Columbia Business School and the University of California. And they wanted to know whether having a low status increased a person's use of jargon, like what Cody just did. In other words, do people just use jargon when they feel like they need to prove themselves?
So in one of the studies, students getting their masters of business administration participated in a mock startup pitch. They had to choose between descriptions of their startup, that were either full of jargony words and phrases or plain English words.
When the MBA students thought they were competing against established business owners, they used more jargon than when they thought they were competing against undergraduate college students. That suggested that having a low status makes people feel more of a need to fill their sentences with jargon.
Then, researchers analyzed the graduate school dissertations of 64,000 students. They found that titles by grad students at lower status schools included more jargon than dissertation titles by grad students at elite schools. Why? Well according to the researchers, jargon is a form of status compensation. Set in a nonjargony way, it means it helps people make up for being low on the social ladder.
In one of the experiments, low status participants who chose to use jargon instead of plain English, reported being more focused on how the audience would judge them. Since jargon, by definition, is the language used by people in a particular group, it makes sense that people in lower status positions would use jargon to make themselves seem like established group members. They're trying to speak the language.
What isn't clear is whether jargon actually works that way. The researchers think it might backfire and actually lower the status of the speaker. Past research has shown that investors with lots of industry knowledge are less likely to invest in business models that use lots of jargon. So it's probably best to stick with the KISS method for now. Keep it simple, smarty.
ASHLEY HAMER: Let's do a quick recap of what we learned today.
CODY GOUGH: Well, we learned that you don't have to be a Greyjoy to behave like one. Case in point, naked mole rats live in large societies and even have full-out battles with other groups, that include stealing the young of other groups to raise as their own. Savage.
NATALIA REAGAN: Goodness, gracious. Yeah, I love naked mole rats. They're fascinating animals. Fun fact, they don't generally get cancer. They live very long time. Most rodents don't live an exceptionally long life. And they can live up to 30 years.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah, they're really popular in biomedical studies actually, which is good or bad, depending on what you think. But they're amazing animals. They really are.
And we also learned that on average, people have about 13 secrets, five of which never come out. And those secrets aren't good for you. They can actually feel like a physical burden. So the best way to avoid that weight is just not to think of your secret. Just don't think about it, if only it were that easy
NATALIA REAGAN: I wonder how that works for those people that have to have a lot of government secrets, like, it's secrets are part of your job. Imagine being an FBI agent, you're just constantly-- do you just live in a massage parlor? That sounds wrong, but you know what I mean. You know what I mean? All that stress. Ayayay.
ASHLEY HAMER: That's a really good point. And I feel part of the reason that secrets are so hard to keep is because you feel like you should tell people. And maybe if it's part of your job, you don't feel that. I would hope so. At least the people around you, your partner and your family probably already understand that you can't tell them. That's what I would hope. But I don't know.
NATALIA REAGAN: I did sit next to an FBI agent once on a plane. And it was one of the most interesting conversations ever. I couldn't stop asking him all the questions, which I'm sure he was like-- I wonder if he just goes, don't tell her the secrets, don't tell her the secrets, don't tell her the secrets.
[LAUGHTER]
ASHLEY HAMER: I love that idea.
NATALIA REAGAN: Well, I actually didn't want to do this one but I'm acquiescing right now. We also learned that the more insecure you are in your title or your role, the more jargony words you're going to use.
So I'm an anthropology professor, and I love to talk about australopithecines, and paranthropus and things of that sort. But sometimes it's nice just calling them upright walking hominins, which then you have to go and break it down even again, like apes walking on two legs.
So you just got to just break it down to a certain point. And it is tough as a scientist to know-- you have to know your audience and when you can throw the jargon around. Because sometimes, I can't go to my conference and go, an ape in pants and/or an ape walking on two legs. But when you know your audience and what kind of jargon or how much jargon you should be using, that's important.
Because even when I teach, at a certain point, I do want them to know some of these terms and phrases. But I don't want it to be like that's the most important thing. For me, core concepts are key. But I don't know. I think it is really easy to throw jargon around to feel a little highfalutin.
ASHLEY HAMER: Right. I have made the hugest journey on this as a science communicator. Back when I was just starting out, and I wanted people to take me seriously, and I wanted everybody to know that I understood this stuff, I used the big words. And it was more like I was writing for a scientist audience, when I wasn't. I was writing for people who are just like me. And it's really important to use words that people just like me can understand.
So I can see in my writing over the years, the sentence structure is getting simpler, the vocabulary getting simpler. And it's clearer. It's better writing. So if that's you, don't be afraid to just say what you mean, instead of trying to sound smart because you're going to let on that you don't know as much as you do. Right? Yeah.
NATALIA REAGAN: Today's stories were written by Grant Curran, Anna Todd, and Kelsey Donk. And edited by Ashley Hamer, who's the managing editor for Curiosity Daily.
ASHLEY HAMER: Scriptwriting is by Natalia Reagan and Sonja Hodgen. Today's episode was edited by Jonathan McMichael. And our producer is Cody Gough.
CODY GOUGH: Join us again tomorrow to learn something new in just a few minutes.
ASHLEY HAMER: And until then, stay curious.
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