Learn about why your creep radar is probably terrible; the science of spontaneous human combustion; and the one belief that determines employee honesty. In this podcast, Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer discuss the following stories from Curiosity.com to help you get smarter and learn something new in just a few minutes: Your Creep Radar Is Probably Terrible — https://curiosity.im/2XkLxo8 Does Spontaneous Human Combustion Really Happen? — https://curiosity.im/2MJVUOk Employee Honesty Depends on One Belief — https://curiosity.im/2MJosY8 Want to support our show?Register for the 2019 Podcast Awards and nominate Curiosity Daily to win for People’s Choice, Education, and Science & Medicine. After you register, simply select Curiosity Daily from the drop-down menus (no need to pick nominees in every category): https://curiosity.im/podcast-awards-2019 Download the FREE 5-star Curiosity app for Android and iOS at https://curiosity.im/podcast-app. And Amazon smart speaker users: you can listen to our podcast as part of your Amazon Alexa Flash Briefing — just click “enable” here: https://curiosity.im/podcast-flash-briefing.
Learn about why your creep radar is probably terrible; the science of spontaneous human combustion; and the one belief that determines employee honesty.
In this podcast, Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer discuss the following stories from Curiosity.com to help you get smarter and learn something new in just a few minutes:
Want to support our show? Register for the 2019 Podcast Awards and nominate Curiosity Daily to win for People’s Choice, Education, and Science & Medicine. After you register, simply select Curiosity Daily from the drop-down menus (no need to pick nominees in every category): https://curiosity.im/podcast-awards-2019
Download the FREE 5-star Curiosity app for Android and iOS at https://curiosity.im/podcast-app. And Amazon smart speaker users: you can listen to our podcast as part of your Amazon Alexa Flash Briefing — just click “enable” here: https://curiosity.im/podcast-flash-briefing.
Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/spontaneous-human-combustion-your-terrible-creep-radar-and-employee-honesty
CODY: Hi! We’re here from curiosity-dot-com to help you get smarter in just a few minutes. I’m Cody Gough.
ASHLEY: And I’m Ashley Hamer. Today, you’ll learn about why your creep radar is probably terrible; the science of spontaneous human combustion; and the one belief that determines employee honesty.
CODY: Let’s satisfy some curiosity.
Your Creep Radar Is Probably Terrible — https://curiosity.im/2XkLxo8 (Ashley)
Research suggests you're really bad at figuring out who's a creep. And knowing why could help you be a little less biased. So let’s talk about how we judge other people.
The typical advice says that if someone comes off as a creep, you should avoid them. That seems logical, but it's also dead wrong — at least, according to one small but persuasive Canadian study. To figure out how reliable our first impressions are about who's creepy and who's not, the researchers needed to find pools of both certified creeps and certified good guys. They came up with a clever solution. For the creeps, they gathered pictures of criminals from the "America's Most Wanted" list, and for non-creeps, they used photos of past Nobel Peace Prize winners. Then they showed the photos to a small group of volunteers to see if they could tell one from the other. The results? In this experiment, participants did slightly worse than if they'd flipped a coin. They correctly identified 49 percent of the wanted criminals as untrustworthy. Not good, and the findings imply some bad stuff about human nature. According to psychologist Julia Shaw, quote, “Creepy people were generally thought to be lanky men with poor hygiene who behaved awkwardly. Attractive people were deemed to be trustworthy, be they Nobel Laureates or criminals,” unquote. This is an example of something called the halo effect, which is a deeply rooted bias where we assume that people who are more attractive are generally more trustworthy, ambitious, healthier, etc. But it has a flip side, the devil effect, which makes us think that people who are undesirable in one way are likely undesirable in other ways. In short, your creep radar is essentially an ugly, ill-kempt dude alarm, and chances are it's pretty unfair, causing you to misjudge people who don’t have attractive features and good muscle tone. That's true whether you're evaluating them as a potential conversation partner, a candidate at a job interview, or the accused at a criminal trial. The bottom line is your instincts about creeps aren't keeping your safe; they're just making you more biased against people who don’t look like Hollywood movie stars. Be aware of that next time you judge someone as menacing and weird in a split second.
Does Spontaneous Human Combustion Really Happen? — https://curiosity.im/2MJVUOk (from Saturday) (Ashley) [FREELANCER]
Let’s talk about spontaneous human combustion. Is it really possible for someone to burst into flames? While skeptics say no, stories of spontaneous human combustion date back as far as the 1400s. A knight named Polonus Vorstius was said to have drunk two ladles of wine before spewing out a flame and becoming consumed by fire. Another of the earliest written accounts came in 1633, when Danish anatomist Thomas Bartholin described how a woman in Paris “went up in ashes and smoke" while she slept, but left her straw mattress unaffected by the flames. News accounts of people becoming engulfed in flames, seemingly without an outside cause, have also cropped up many times in the last century.
So what’s going on? Well, most of these examples have a few things in common: the person is usually immobile, and while the body is usually completely reduced to ashes, the surroundings are often unmarred by smoke or fire. Of course, the flame could come from other sources, like a lit cigarette or an electric spark, but this doesn’t explain why the victims burn so completely.
Theories range from digestive enzymes igniting a buildup of methane in the intestines, to too much static electricity in the body, to some external geomagnetic force or even a new subatomic particle called the pyroton. But so far, there hasn't been any good science to back up these ideas. There is ONE possible explanation for this that’s based in science, and it’s known as the wick effect. Fair warning, it’s pretty gruesome.
First, think about how a candle is made up of a wick surrounded by wax — an ignition and a fuel source. When you light the wick with a flame, the heat melts the wax closest to the wick. That liquid wax is drawn up the wick by capillary action until it reaches the flame and is vaporized, which creates more heat that keeps the cycle going.
The human body can be thought of as an inside-out candle: flammable clothing or hair acts as the wick, and body fat acts as the fuel source. As heat from the flame reaches the fat, it melts and soaks into the "wick," vaporizing and creating more heat to keep the body burning continuously. All the fuel the fire needs is right there, which could be why a victim's surroundings are left untouched save for a few grease stains — the leftovers from burning fat. It’s a theory as gruesome as the idea of spontaneous human combustion itself.
Employee Honesty Depends on One Belief — https://curiosity.im/2MJosY8 (Republish) (Cody) [FREELANCER]
New research suggests employee honesty depends on one belief. And keeping employees honest is pretty important, because dishonest behavior from employees costs companies an estimated $3.7 trillion worldwide. That cost is what inspired this research, according to lead author Julia Lee of the University of Michigan.
As reported by Futurity, Lee found that a lot of previous research on the topic of whether morality is driven by deliberation or intuition failed to take into account the theories people held about honesty and effort. According to her, this seemed pretty crucial in understanding why people behave dishonestly.
Lee and her coauthors conducted three studies to measure the impact of thinking that honesty takes effort. They wanted to see if that belief could predict later dishonest behavior, because if you think “well yeah, it takes a lot of work to be honest,” then you could use that belief to justify your behaviors.
In the first study, researchers found that the more an individual associated honesty with effort, the more likely they were to be dishonest. In the second, the researchers demonstrated that believing honesty takes effort increased dishonesty, compared with believing honesty is effortless. And the third study explored how the theories interacted with the strength of situations at hand.
Strong = finding a $20 bill on the floor in your office kitchen
Weak = finding $20 on the floor in your shared cubicleand you know it’s theirs and deciding whether to give it back because they know who you are
If you believe honesty takes effort, more likely to
Less likely to
The results show that the belief that honesty requires effort increased dishonesty only when the situation didn't present a strong temptation to cheat. But when the temptation to be dishonest was strong, that belief didn’t have much of an effect either way. [copied and pasted from article] And this research could be used to impact how educators teach ethics in business school. One takeaway is that when you think a decision takes effort, you can use that as a justification to do the wrong thing. [ad lib]
ASHLEY: Before we recap what we learned today, we want to thank some of our supporters for bringing you today’s ad-free episode. A very special thank you to Mary Rose, Sergio Moreno [SARE-jee-oh Mor-eh-no], Luke Chapman, Jared Breland, and Scott Gates!
CODY: Quick note that there will NOT be a special Saturday episode tomorrow, but NEXT Saturday you’ll hear the final episode in our 5-part miniseries about how science and technology are being applied to drive innovation and change the world. We will be back with our regularly scheduled programming this Sunday.
ASHLEY: Since you won’t be listening to a Saturday episode tomorrow, how about you spend a few minutes nominating Curiosity Daily to be a finalist in the 2019 Podcast Awards? It only takes a minute or two to nominate us, and you can check today’s show notes for a link with instructions. But basically, visit podcast-awards-dot-com, follow the instructions on the website to register, and then once you’re signed up, just click on the drop-down menus to vote for Curiosity Daily as one of the nominees.
CODY: We’d love to be finalists for the categories of People’s Choice, Education, and Science & Medicine. Voting in other categories is optional. Again, that’s podcast-awards-dot-com. It’s free to vote and really will go a long way in supporting our show. Anyway, now let’s do a quick recap of what we learned today.
ASHLEY: Today we learned that you probably think people are creepy just because they’re unattractive.
CODY: And that spontaneous human combustion MIGHT happen if humans burn up like a candle?
ASHLEY: And employees are more honest if they feel like being honest is effortless.
[ad lib optional]
CODY: Come hang out with us again Sunday to learn something new in just a few minutes. Until then, have a great weekend! I’m Cody Gough.
ASHLEY: And I’m Ashley Hamer. Stay curious!