Learn about why people protest and riot, according to social psychology; and how scientists stimulated the brains of blind people to make them “see” shapes. Then, test your knowledge with this month’s edition of the Curiosity Challenge.
Learn about why people protest and riot, according to social psychology; and how scientists stimulated the brains of blind people to make them “see” shapes. Then, test your knowledge with this month’s edition of the Curiosity Challenge.
Why social psychology says people protest and riot by Kelsey Donk
Scientists made blind and sighted people "see" shapes by stimulating the visual cortex by Cameron Duke
Episodes referenced in Curiosity Daily trivia segment with Michelle in Raleigh
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://www.amazon.com/Curiosity-com-Curiosity-Daily-from/dp/B07CP17DJY
Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/why-people-protest-according-to-psychology-how-scientists-made-blind-people-see-shapes-and-mays-curiosity-challenge
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 people protest and riot, according to social psychology; and how scientists stimulated the brains of blind people to make them “see” shapes. We’ll wrap up by testing your knowledge with this month’s edition of the Curiosity Challenge.
CODY: Let’s satisfy some curiosity.
Every time there’s a protest or a riot, it’s common to hear complaints about the “mindless violence” and claims that they’re just “a convenient excuse for criminal behavior.” But social psychologists wouldn’t agree. There’s been a ton of research on this, and scientists have identified predictable triggers for protests and riots. They’re not mindless and they’re not just an excuse — they actually follow a pretty logical pattern. So here’s why research suggests people protest and riot.
According to Dutch social psychologist Bert Klandermans, protests follow their own principle of supply and demand. The demand in this case is the number of people who sympathize with the cause. The supply is the opportunity to protest. The third element in this model is mobilization. It’s the thing that brings supply and demand together into action.
Sounds simple enough, but each of those elements has a lot of different ingredients. Like, the people who form the demand can be united by demographics like age, race, or social class, or they can be united by shared grievances. When a big group of people feels vulnerable or helpless because of a shared identity, that can be enough. It could be just one issue, whether it’s geographic, political, sexual, racial, or religious.
The supply, or opportunity to protest, comes down to how well the movement is organized. Lots of people angry about the same thing isn’t enough to form a protest — movements need to get the word out in order to assemble at the same place and time. Demand doesn’t achieve anything without supply, and supply won’t achieve anything without the people’s demand.
A single event can catapult that ratio into action, and boom — you’ve mobilized a protest.
But why do people protest? Why not just vote or call up their politicians? Social psychology can also tell us about that.
One reason is a lack of trust in government. It’s normal to feel angry when you feel you’ve been lied to or taken advantage of by those in power. And speaking to current demonstrations: in 2019 the Pew Research Center estimated that one-third of Americans had “low faith” in government. So this data point checks out. [Cody added: check] There’s also the communal aspect of the protest itself. There’s the shared intensity of emotion, the anonymity of the crowd, and the efficiency of making your voice heard as a group.
And even the more destructive aspects of riots have logic to them. Research performed after riots around the world finds that the areas and industries that are targeted are usually symbolic to the cause, while those that aren’t are usually left alone. Emphasis on “usually” — obviously, there are exceptions.
Protests can sometimes feel like chaos, but they happen for a reason. It’s definitely not just mindless behavior.
Scientists recently made people see shapes that weren’t there just by stimulating the vision center of their brains. This is a breakthrough that could be a big step toward creating a visual prosthetic to help blind people see.
Acquired blindness is blindness you aren’t born with. And it’s generally caused by damage to either the eyes or the optic nerves. But a lot of times, the region of the brain that processes vision, the visual cortex, is still fully functional. That might mean that one day, we could restore people’s sight by sending signals straight into the visual cortex.
Researchers have been working on this for a lot longer than you’d think. 1968 was when scientists first implanted patients’ brains with electrodes attached to radio receivers, which made them “see” points of light called “phosphenes.” That term refers to any impression of light that comes from inside your body — it’s the same thing you might see if you press on your eyeball or “see stars” when you hit your head.
Now, researchers have learned to manipulate phosphenes by actually “drawing” shapes on people’s brains. For this study, researchers at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston recruited four sighted people and two blind people, all of whom already had electrodes in their visual cortices for unrelated reasons. Ideally, a visual prosthetic would use electrodes implanted in a grid of neurons in a specific region of the visual cortex called the retinotopic map. This is the area that receives signals from retinal nerves. Because these nerves are laid out on the surface of the cortex in a way that corresponds to what the brain actually sees, you could stimulate these electrodes like pixels on a screen to make people “see” an image. The problem is that neurons aren’t exactly like pixels, and “printing” a shape by stimulating all the necessary neurons at one time only seems to generate a big blob of light.
The researchers in this study didn’t have a whole grid of electrodes — they just had the few that were already implanted. But they realized that by stimulating two electrodes at once and carefully altering the current, they could create the impression of a third “virtual” electrode that moved between them. With that technique, they were able to “draw” shapes on the visual cortex that subjects could see. They might see a point of light draw a letter “Z” or a backward “R”. All just from electric current in their brains!
The next step is to do this with many more electrodes on many more neurons. We’re still pretty far from inserting images Inception-style into the brain. But we’re also closer to it than we’ve ever been.
It’s time once again for the Curiosity Challenge! Every month, I call up a listener and put them to the test by asking three questions from stories we ran on Curiosity Daily in the previous month. For this Curiosity Challenge, I talked to Michelle in Raleigh, North Carolina. She’s a zoologist, science communicator, and Curiosity Daily fan who, full disclosure, is a Twitter pal who’s been seriously feeding my newfound interest in birding. Anyway, without further ado, here’s this month’s Curiosity Challenge.
[CLIP 2:26]
Wasn’t that great? Michelle did her homework. If you’d like to play next month, OR if you have a question you’d like us to answer on the show, shoot us an email at podcast at curiosity dot com, or leave us a voicemail at 312-596-5208!
CODY: Before we recap what we learned today, here’s a sneak peek at what you’ll hear next week on Curiosity Daily.
ASHLEY: Next week, you’ll learn about how people can hear body language in your voice;
Why peanut butter gets gum out of hair;
The perks of making major life decisions by flipping a coin;
Two types of injustice, and how you respond differently to them;
And more! Okay, so now, let’s recap what we learned today.
[ad lib optional]
CODY: Today’s stories were written by Kelsey Donk and Cameron Duke, and edited by Ashley Hamer, who’s the managing editor for Curiosity Daily.
ASHLEY: Today’s episode was produced and edited by Cody Gough.
CODY: Have a great weekend, and join us again Monday to learn something new in just a few minutes.
ASHLEY: And until then, stay curious!