Learn about the dark side of likes and shares; how cuttlefish memory stays sharp in old age; and bouba and kiki shapes. Likes and shares push people to express "moral outrage" by Steffie Drucker Brady, W. J., McLoughlin, K., Doan, T. N., & Crockett, M. J. (2021). How social learning amplifies moral outrage expression in online social networks. Science Advances, 7(33), eabe5641. https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.abe5641 “Likes” and “shares” teach people to express more outrage online. (2021, August 13). YaleNews. https://news.yale.edu/2021/08/13/likes-and-shares-teach-people-express-more-outrage-online Diaz, J. (2021, May 6). Want To Send A Mean Tweet? Twitter’s New Feature Wants You To Think Again. NPR.org. https://www.npr.org/2021/05/06/994138707/want-to-send-a-mean-tweet-twitters-new-feature-wants-you-to-think-again Mosseri, A. (2019). Instagram’s Commitment to Lead Fight Against Online Bullying | Instagram Blog. Instagram.com; Instagram. https://about.instagram.com/blog/announcements/instagrams-commitment-to-lead-fight-against-online-bullying Cuttlefish memory stays sharp in old age, making them the first animal with this trait by Cameron Duke Cuttlefish retain sharp memory of specific events in old age, unlike humans, study finds. (2021, August 17). EurekAlert! https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/925467 Schnell, A. K., Clayton, N. S., Hanlon, R. T., & Jozet-Alves, C. (2021). Episodic-like memory is preserved with age in cuttlefish. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 288(1957), 20211052. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2021.1052 You Probably Know Which Shape Is A Bouba And Kiki by Joanie Faletto Etchells, P. (2016, October 17). The bouba/kiki effect: how do we link shapes to sounds? The Guardian; The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/science/head-quarters/2016/oct/17/the-boubakiki-effect-how-do-we-link-shapes-to-sounds Do Sounds Have Shapes? (2015). Psychology Today. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/talking-apes/201505/do-sounds-have-shapes Huang, H. (2019, June 28). What’s the Neuroscience Behind the Bouba/Kiki Effect? NBB in Paris. https://scholarblogs.emory.edu/nbbparis/2019/06/28/whats-the-neuroscience-behind-the-bouba-kiki-effect/ Ramachandran, V. S., & Hubbard, E. M. (2018). Synaesthesia -- A window into perception, thought and language. http://cbc.ucsd.edu/pdf/Synaesthesia%20-%20JCS.pdf Maurer, D., Pathman, T., & Mondloch, C. J. (2006). The shape of boubas: sound-shape correspondences in toddlers and adults. Developmental Science, 9(3), 316–322. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-7687.2006.00495.x 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 the dark side of likes and shares; how cuttlefish memory stays sharp in old age; and bouba and kiki shapes.
Likes and shares push people to express "moral outrage" by Steffie Drucker
Cuttlefish memory stays sharp in old age, making them the first animal with this trait by Cameron Duke
You Probably Know Which Shape Is A Bouba And Kiki by Joanie Faletto
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/moral-outrage-online-cuttlefish-memory-sounds-have-shapes
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 how likes and shares push people to express moral outrage; the first animal we’ve found whose memory stays sharp in old age; and how you probably already know what certain nonsense words are shaped like.
CODY: Let’s satisfy some curiosity.
If it feels like social media has made everyone polarized and angry, you’re not imagining it. And a new study illustrates just how social media platforms actually lead to more moral outrage.
This might not come as a surprise — plenty of people have suspected that the way social media platforms are built encourages the spread of extreme viewpoints. The Yale University researchers behind this study suspected that this is because social media does two things: First, it rewards us for our outrage. When people get up on their social media soapbox, they get likes, comments and shares from people who agree. Second, it enforces social norms. If the people you follow are expressing outrage, you’re likely to go with the flow and express outrage too.
For their part, Facebook and Twitter have claimed their platforms are neutral, and that these conversations would happen offline too. But this new study provides hard evidence that discredits that claim.
The team taught a computer to analyze 12.7 million tweets from more than 7,000 Twitter users. Roughly half the data was collected from people who had tweeted about Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings in October 2018. The other half was collected from people who had tweeted about a 2017 viral video of a doctor being forcibly removed from a flight after refusing to give up his seat for crew.
Scientists had three criteria for what qualified as moral outrage: first, the tweet had to respond to an event that violated the author’s morals; second, it expressed anger or disgust; and third, it placed blame or called for punishment.
The data showed that the more likes and retweets a person got, the more outraged they grew in later posts. This was especially true for the more moderate group, which shows how easily social media radicalizes people.
Next, the team had participants choose among pre-provided tweets to post to a fake social media site in order to get the most possible likes. In one scenario, the unknowing participants got more likes from outrage, and in another, they got more likes from following the crowd. In both scenarios, people were more likely to choose tweets with greater outrage.
The good news is that the tech giants have started to reckon with their role in creating so much anger online — and how they can help fix it. Both Instagram and Twitter have started using AI to make users reconsider posting something offensive or mean. There’s still a long way to go toward making our virtual world more virtuous, but it’s a start.
As we get older, we tend to become forgetful. This is true for all animals with one big exception: cuttlefish. According to recent research, their memory stays sharp as a tack, even into old age.
Lemme back up and talk about how memory works. We humans are constantly remembering and forgetting scenes from our lives, and those memories often contain useful information. This ability to remember events that occurred at specific times and places is called episodic memory, and these memories are stored in a brain structure called the hippocampus. This structure can deteriorate with age, and it takes episodic memories with it as it goes.
But cuttlefish don’t have a hippocampus. They store their episodic memories in a region specific to cuttlefish brains called the vertical lobe. And instead of declining steadily, the vertical lobe stays intact until the last few days of a cuttlefish’s life.
That suggests that cuttlefish wouldn’t become forgetful with age. But to really know for sure, you’d have to give them a memory test.
So, researchers at the University of Cambridge, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, and the University of Caen tested the memories of 24 cuttlefish. Half of those cuttlefish were about 10 to 12 months old, which is not quite to adulthood for this species. The others were 22 to 24 months old, which is roughly equivalent to a human in their 90s, according to the researchers.
First, the team offered the cuttlefish one of their favorite foods — live grass shrimp — at one location in the aquarium, and a less desirable food — prawn meat — at another location. One hour later, a morsel of prawn arrived at its original location. Three hours after that, prawn meat and grass shrimp arrived, again, at their original respective locations.
Here’s the trick: if a cuttlefish showed up at the prawn area one hour after the first meal, they’d get prawn but miss out on shrimp. If they waited and showed up in the shrimp area three hours later, they’d get both prawn and shrimp. That waiting period would demonstrate that they had formed episodic memories of which meal they had eaten and which one they preferred.
In the experiment, the old cuttlefish were just as good or better as the young cuttlefish at learning when their favorite foods would appear throughout the day. That suggests that, despite their age, old cuttlefish can form and recall episodic memories with the best of them. And that’s a fundamental difference between the brains of cuttlefish and mammals.
Who said you couldn’t teach an old cuttlefish new tricks?
Do sounds have shapes? Well, let’s put that question to the test. Imagine two shapes: one is round and blobby, the other one is sharp and pointy. Which one is the bouba [BOO-bah] and which one is the kiki?
If you’re like most people, you’d call the blobby shape the bouba and the pointy shape the kiki — even though these are nonsense words, and you had no idea which was which ahead of time. Why does this happen?
This surprising phenomenon is called, understandably, the bouba/kiki effect. It was first discovered in 1929 by the German American psychologist Wolfgang Köhler, although he didn’t use those words in his experiment. It didn’t matter: the majority of his participants still knew which shape was a “baluba” and a “takete” (or a “maluma” and a “takete” in later studies). Nearly 100 years later, famed neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran and Edward Hubbard repeated the experiment with the shortened nonsense words “bouba” and “kiki,” — except this time, they went cross-cultural. They performed the same study on American college students and Tamil [rhymes with “camel”] speakers in India. Regardless of the culture or language, 95 percent of participants did the same thing. Another study found that toddlers make the same associations — and that’s even before they can talk.
So, what’s going on? Well, the bouba-kiki effect is an illustration of sound symbolism. That’s the idea that certain sounds have certain primal meanings. “Bouba” has a round kind of sound, one that makes you round your lips and create a big, round space inside your mouth. “Kiki” has a sharper sound. To say the word, you have to bring your teeth together and place your tongue way up high near the roof of your mouth. So it makes some sense that we’d associate a round sound with a round shape and a sharp sound with a sharp shape.
According to V.S. Ramachandran, this is all a form of synesthesia, where one sense, like sound, stimulates other senses, like sight. He says that synesthesia may be an essential part of the human experience — one that our early ancestors naturally perceived as they matched objects to the sounds they resembled in order to create their first words. Later on, language got more complicated, and a lot of that symbolism got lost. But it’s still there — and if you don’t believe me, just ask someone which shape is a bouba and which is a kiki.
Let’s recap what we learned today to wrap up. Starting with
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ASHLEY: Today’s writers were Steffie Drucker, Cameron Duke, and Joanie Faletto.
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!