Decisiones tomadas en una segunda lengua parecen ser más racionales

Un reciente estudio ha demostrado que la toma de decisiones se ve afectada por la lengua en que se presentan los diferentes problemas. Concretamente, cuando los problemas a resolver, desde un punto de vista cognitivo, se presentan en una segunda lengua, distinta de la nativa, las personas parecen guiarse menos por las intuiciones y más por el procesamiento lógico.
Para llegar a esta conclusión, los científicos diseñaron cuatro experimentos de la economía experimental y evaluaron el comportamiento de 700 personas. Los participantes en el estudio tenían el castellano como primera lengua y sabían inglés.
Según los autores,  las personas, ante una segunda lengua, se ven menos influidas por sesgos de carácter intuitivo o emocional que cuando se enfrentan a los mismos problemas en su lengua nativa. Los humanos tienen una aversión a la pérdida que es un sesgo cognitivo y no está fundamentado lógicamente. Cuando los participantes resuelven tareas que promueven la aversión a la pérdida, o la aversión al riesgo, se ven menos afectados por estos sesgos si se hace en una segunda lengua. Es decir, las decisiones tomadas en una segunda lengua parecen ser más racionales y menos intuitivas.

The Benefits of Talking about Thoughts with Tots

 By Rebecca Schwarzlose, Rebecca Schwarzlose, Rebecca Schwarzlose, Rebecca Schwarzlose and Rebecca Schwarzlose

Every parent knows that toddlers are strange and inscrutable creatures. They are capricious and contradictory, particularly when trying to interact with other people. My two-year-old daughter is no exception. One moment she is worrying about a crying baby. The next, she is snatching away her friend’s toy and shouting, “Mine!” When I tell her not to do something, it feels like I’m talking to a brick wall. Yet a new study suggests that what I say to her today could shape her ability to reason about other minds for years to come.
For decades, scientists believed that theory of mind – the ability to reason about other people’s thoughts and emotions – doesn’t begin to mature until children reach the age of three or four. They came up with this age using a test called the false-belief task. The test probes whether a child can take the perspective of someone else. In one classic example, children are presented with the following scenario: Sally is playing with a ball. She puts it in a basket and leaves. While she’s gone, Anne moves the ball from the basket to a box. The child is then asked: “When Sally returns, where will she look for the ball?“
Most two- and three-year-olds answer that Sally would look in the box because that’s where they know the ball is. But by four or five, children typically say that Sally would look in the basket because that’s where she would think the ball is. It is a simple switch from an answer based on concrete facts to one based on presumptions about someone else’s knowledge or beliefs. Yet this modest development allows us to survive and thrive in an interconnected, social world. From office collaborations to divvying up chores and even navigating a busy traffic intersection, we rely on our ability to surmise the thoughts of others. How else could we predict what they are likely to do next?
While children’s performance on the false-belief task initially led scientists to conclude that theory of mind develops around age four, that assumption has since been overturned. Beginning in 2005, a series of clever studies found evidence of theory of mind in toddlers and even infants as young as ten months of age. These studies used modified versions of the false-belief task that measured children’s expectations nonverbally. For instance, since infants look longer at events that surprise them, developmental psychologists can use gaze time to infer the predictions of preverbal children. In modified versions of the false-belief task, toddlers and infants stared longer when someone searched for an object where it actually was, rather than where that person would have expected the object to be.
While children typically master the standard false-belief task around the age of four, the timing can range from three to nearly six years of age, depending on the child. Parent-child interactions seem to factor into the timing of this milestone in individual children. Studies have shown that when mothers refer more often to mental states (thoughts, emotions, and desires) in conversations with their young children, these children tend to perform better on theory of mind tests a few years down the line. But is this effect just a matter of learning a few keys words a little sooner or can it lead to long-lasting differences in theory of mind ability?
Rosie Ensor, Claire Hughes, and their colleagues at University of Cambridge tackled this question by testing children over the course of eight years. They first visited the homes of two-year-olds during a family meal and recorded how often the mother and child used ‘thought words’ such as know, forget, think, idea, interest, and understand. One year later, they administered standard false-belief tests and a verbal comprehension test to each child. About three years after that, they gave the kids more false-belief tests and also recorded how often the mothers and children used ‘thought words’ when they read a picture book at home together. Four years after that, when the children were ten and eleven, they administered another verbal comprehension test and ran the children through a different theory of mind test called the Strange Stories. Finally, the authors studied the correlations between these measures and modeled their relationships to one another.
The scientists published their results recently in the journal Child Development. They found that the number of times mothers used ‘thought words’ with their two-year-olds predicted the children’s performance on theory of mind tests at six and ten years of age. The effect wasn’t a reflection of language mastery or the fact that mothers who use many ‘thought words’ with toddlers will tend to do the same when their children are older. Neither the children’s verbal comprehension scores nor the mothers’ use of ‘thought words’ with their children at age six could account for the results.
Will talking to a two-year-old about others’ thoughts and beliefs make a child better at social reasoning down the line? It’s hard to say. These latest results are based on correlations and can’t prove that one thing causes another. Still, they are intriguing and suggestive. Encouraging young children to think about others’ beliefs and feelings may strengthen theory of mind abilities or simply get children into the habit of considering others’ thoughts in ways that persist into their middle-school years.
It’s even possible that the effect lasts beyond the tween years. We all know adults who don’t seem to understand or consider the thoughts and feelings of others. A recent study confirmed that adults differ in their ability to reason about other people’s mental states. It may be that the early discussions we have with children about thoughts and feelings – even before we realize that they are listening – can set the stage for subtle differences in this type of reasoning into adolescence and even adulthood.
For now, it’s clear that a toddler’s understanding of other minds is a complex and evolving landscape. I see it everyday in the kindnesses and cruelties of my daughter. The world is a social labyrinth that she must learn to navigate as she grows and gains her independence. But maybe, by talking about thoughts and beliefs with her today, I can prepare her and give her the tools she’ll need to find her way tomorrow.
Are you a scientist who specializes in neuroscience, cognitive science, or psychology? And have you read a recent peer-reviewed paper that you would like to write about? Please send suggestions to Mind Matters editor Gareth Cook, a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist and regular contributor to NewYorker.com. Gareth is also the series editor of Best American Infographics, and can be reached at garethideas AT gmail.com or Twitter @garethideas.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)

Rebecca Schwarzlose is a postdoc at Wayne State University where she studies the neuroscience of memory development and visual perception. You can find her at her blog, Garden of the Mind, or follow her on Twitter @gothemind.

Jared Diamond, Please Stop Propagating the Myth of the Savage Savage!

By John Horgan
Jared Diamond is one of the great science synthesizers and popularizers of our era, and he resists the biological determinism that infects so much modern theorizing about our species. That’s why I brought him to my school last year to talk about his latest book, The World Until Yesterday, which I praised on this blog. But I wish Diamond would stop propagating the Myth of the Savage Savage.

Jared Diamond and other prominent scholars exaggerate the violence of non-state, "traditional" societies and downplay the violence of "civilization."

In a Q&A in The New York Times Magazine, Diamond says: “In Weird–Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic–societies we take these things for granted that just didn’t exist anywhere in the world until a few thousand years ago. We encounter strangers, and it’s normal, and we don’t freak out and try to kill them.”
So the norm before civilization was for humans to kill strangers on sight? Really? That’s my question, not that of Times interviewer Amy Chozick. She follows up Diamond’s extraordinary comment by saying: “[The World Until Yesterday] has been criticized for saying traditional societies are very violent.”
Diamond replies: “Some people take a view of traditional society as being peaceful and gentle. But the proportional rate of violent death is much higher in traditional societies than in state-level societies, where governments assert a monopoly on force.”
Diamond is so intent on dispelling the Myth of the Peaceful Savage–the idea that before civilization all people were “peaceful and gentle”–that he has replaced it with an equally absurd idea, the Myth of the Savage Savage. According to this view, before the emergence of centralized governments backed up by professional armies, our ancestors were mired in a Hobbesian war of all against all. Other prominent proponents of this notion include the Harvard Hawks: Edward Wilson, Steven Pinker, Richard Wrangham and Steven LeBlanc. I call them the Harvard Hawks because they favor Hobbesian theories, not hawkish foreign policies.
Of course, some traditional societies—including horticulturalist ones that Diamond has studied in New Guinea–can be terribly violent. And modern WEIRD states have indeed reduced rates of interpersonal violence within their borders by establishing justice systems backed by police (although in the U.S. certain populations, especially the white and wealthy, benefit more from our legal system than others).
But the Myth of the Savage flies in the face of evidence that many societies of hunter-gatherers, or foragers—the most traditional of all traditional people—have had low levels of violence, particularly the organized, group violence called war. See my three posts last summer on studies of modern-day foragers as well as Paleolithic skeletons and Neolithic settlements.
Diamond and other defenders of the Myth of the Savage Savage also gloss over—to put it mildly—the violence of states, especially modern western ones. European nations, as they expanded around the world over the last millennium, often slaughtered and enslaved the “savages” that they encountered. See, for example, my recent column on how Columbus and other Europeans treated Native Americans.
“Civilized” states have also waged wars against other states, erupted into civil wars and slaughtered their own citizens. Look at the Napoleonic Wars, the American Civil War, and all the great wars and genocides of the Twentieth Century, which killed hundreds of millions of people.
Diamond, because of his prominence, has provoked a lot of criticism, from the liberal-left as well as the conservative-right. My sense, after meeting him at Stevens, is that he too quickly dismisses criticism as “nonsense,” a term he repeats twice in the Times Q&A.
I urge him to reconsider his views on rates of violence in traditional societies, especially those that predated civilization. He might take a look at War, Peace, and Human Nature, a collection of essays published last year by Oxford University Press and edited by anthropologist Douglas Fry, which dismantles the Myth of the Savage Savage.
Or, since Diamond loves to roam across disciplinary boundaries, he should read A History of Warfare by the great British military historian John Keegan. Keegan credits western societies with inventing the concept of total war, which led to the industrialized carnage of World War I and World War II and the insanity of the nuclear arms race.
I admire Keegan not only for his scholarship but also his optimism. He writes in A History of Warfare, “War, it seems to me, after a lifetime of reading about the subject, mingling with men of war, visiting the sites of war and observing its effects, may well be ceasing to commend itself to human beings as a desirable, or productive, let alone rational, means of reconciling their discontents.”
Surely Diamond and the Harvard Hawks—and all of us—can agree with Keegan that, in spite of our enormous capacity for savagery, we also have the capacity to transcend war once and for all.

La escritura

Eurasia estaba habitada por al menos cuatro especies humanas diferentes

La evolución humana puede ser más intrincada de lo que se cree. Una nueva investigación sugiere que en el Pleistoceno tardío, Eurasia estaba habitada por al menos cuatro especies humanas diferentes: sapiens, neandertales, un grupo poco conocido llamado denisovanos y una cuarta población aún por determinar, que quizás pueda ser el Homo erectus.

Estas especies incluso llegaron a tener descendencia común, mezclando sus genes. Te explicamos este importante descubrimiento paleontológico en el videoblog «Materia Oscura», sobre estas líneas.

Generosidad y felicidad

Las personas son tanto más felices cuanto más donan a las obras de caridad.

• Krakovsky, Marina

La mayoría de nosotros hemos experimentado alguna vez la satisfacción de gastar dinero en otra persona, sea a través de un regalo o un donativo. Un equipo internacional de psicólogos da cuenta ahora de que la relación entre el gasto generoso y la felicidad constituye un fenómeno válido en todo el mundo, incluso en países empobrecidos como India o Uganda. «Aquí, en Norteamérica, podemos pensar que podemos permitirnos el lujo de gastar dinero extra en otros, mientras que a los habitantes de lugares más pobres les resultaría preferible invertir en sí mismos sus limitados recursos», explica la autora principal del estudio, Lara Aknin, de la Universidad Simon Fraser. Y apunta: «Pero hemos visto que la generosidad es provechosa en los países ricos y en los pobres».
Esta conclusión brota de una encuesta realizada a 200.000 personas adultas de 136 países a quienes se les preguntaba sobre sus donativos y su bie­nestar subjetivo. Tras descartar ciertas variables (demográficas, ingresos familiares y otras), se observó una correlación positiva entre los donativos y la felicidad en 120 de estos países, tanto ricos como pobres. Según las respuestas, el refuerzo en el bienestar por haber donado en el último mes resultaba el mismo, aunque los ingresos del encuestado se hubieran duplicado.
A continuación se llevaron a cabo varios experimentos con el fin de verificar si la donación reforzaba el sentimiento de felicidad. Se pidió a participantes de Canadá y África del Sur, seleccionados al azar, que optasen entre comprar una bolsa sorpresa para sí mismos o para un niño enfermo que no conocían y que se hallaba hospitalizado en su localidad. Aunque el PIB y la renta per cápita en África del Sur son muy inferiores a los canadienses, quienes optaron por entregarle el obsequio al niño se manifestaron más felices que aquellos que gastaron el dinero en ellos mismos.
Según los estudios, publicados en mayo de 2013 en Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, los experimentos ofrecen una robusta coherencia transcultural, la cual respalda la idea de que la relación entre donar a otros y el bienestar propio constituye un rasgo universal de humanidad. De hecho, otra investigación apoya esta conclusión. Aknin y sus colegas publicaron en enero del año pasado, en PLOS ONE, quelos bebés sonreían con mayor frecuencia cuando compartían un regalo que al recibirlo. Además, en un conjunto de estudios publicados en 2012 en Nature, se demostraba que la donación resulta más espontánea que la codicia, pues esta última requiere una mayor capacidad para pensar.
Aknin opina que la donación suscita buenos sentimientos en todas las personas por la misma razón que la comida y el sexo: nuestro cerebro dispone de un sistema de recompensas inmediatas ante ciertas conductas fruto de la selección natural, que, a la larga, contribuye a la supervivencia. Ninguno de nuestros antepasados hubiese podido sobrevivir por sí mismo, señala Aknin. «Si la generosidad alentaba los vínculos sociales, es posible que fuera una estrategia adaptativa.»

How Many Friends Can Your Brain Handle?

SAN DIEGO — Being a social butterfly just might change your brain: In people with a large network of friends and excellent social skills, certain brain regions are bigger and better connected than in people with fewer friends, a new study finds.
The research, presented here Tuesday (Nov. 12) at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, suggests a connection between social interactions and brain structure.
"We're interested in how your brain is able to allow you to navigate in complex social environments," study researcher MaryAnn Noonan, a neuroscientist at Oxford University, in England, said at a news conference. Basically, "how many friends can your brain handle?" Noonan said.
Scientists still don't understand how the brain manages human behavior in increasingly complex social situations, or what parts of the brain are linked to deviant social behavior associated with conditions like autism and schizophrenia.
Studies in macaque monkeys have shown that brain areas involved in face processing and in predicting the intentions of others are larger in animals living in large social groups than in ones living in smaller groups.
To investigate these brain differences in humans, Noonan and her colleagues at McGill University, in Canada, recruited 18 participants for a structural brain-imaging study. They asked people how many social interactions they had experienced in the past month, in order to determine the size of their social networks.

Certain brain areas are enlarged and white-matter tracts were better connected in people with larger social networks

By Tanya Lewis and LiveScience

As was the case in monkeys, some brain areas were enlarged and better connected in people with larger social networks. In humans, these areas were the temporal parietal junction, the anterior cingulate cortex and the rostral prefrontal cortex, which are part of a network involved in "mentalization" — the ability to attribute mental states, thoughts and beliefs to another.
"These different brain regions are all singing different songs," Noonan said. "Networked areas are all singing the same song, and when they're connected better, they're singing more harmoniously with each other."
The researchers also tested whether the size of a person's social network was linked with changes in white-matter pathways, the nerve fibers that connect different brain regions.
Again, they found that white-matter tracts were better connected in people with bigger social networks. "The nerves were more like a Los Angeles freeway than a country road," Noonan said.
The researchers couldn't say whether social interaction caused these changes in brain structure and connectivity, or whether the brain determined how innately social someone was.
In the case of the monkeys, the researchers dictated the size of the animals' social network, so they concluded that social-group size was causing the brain differences.
It can be inferred that a similar process takes place in human brains, but to prove this, long-term studies are needed, Noonan told LiveScience.
The fact that some brain regions may be larger and more connected suggests other regions might be smaller in the brains of the more socially adept, Noonan said.
"If you're spending a lot of time in social environments using social skills and your brain's changing, maybe you're not learning to juggle in your free time or becoming proficient at the piano," she said. "The brain is just changing and optimizing to reflect your needs, and if that is thriving within a complex social environment, that is what your brain is reflecting."