Entries Tagged "psychology of security"

Page 9 of 26

Fear and the Attention Economy

danah boyd is thinking about—in a draft essay, and as a recording of a presentation—fear and the attention economy. Basically, she is making the argument that the attention economy magnifies the culture of fear because fear is a good way to get attention, and that this is being made worse by the rise of social media.

A lot of this isn’t new. Fear has been used to sell products (I’ve written about that here) and policy (“Remember the Maine!” “Remember the Alamo! “Remember 9/11!”) since forever. Newspapers have used fear to attract readers since there were readers. Long before there were child predators on the Internet, irrational panics swept society. Shark attacks in the 1970s. Marijuana in the 1950s. boyd relates a story from Glassner’s The Culture of Fear about elderly women being mugged in the 1990s.

These fears have largely been driven from the top down: from political leaders, from the news media. What’s new today—and I agree this is very interesting—is that in addition to these traditional top-down fears, we’re also seeing fears come from the bottom up. Social media are allowing all of us to sow fear and, because fear gets attention, is enticing us to do so. Rather than fostering empathy and bringing us all together, social media might be pushing us further apart.

A lot of this is related to my own writing about trust. Fear causes us to mistrust a group we’re fearful of, and to more strongly trust the group we’re a part of. It’s natural, and it can be manipulated. It can be amplified, and it can be dampened. How social media are both enabling and undermining trust is a really important thing for us to understand. As boyd says: “What we design and how we design it matters. And how our systems are used also matters, even if those uses aren’t what we intended.”

Posted on April 25, 2012 at 6:51 AM • View Comments

Amazing Round of "Split or Steal"

In Liars and Outliers, I use the metaphor of the Prisoner’s Dilemma to exemplify the conflict between group interest and self-interest. There are a gazillion academic papers on the Prisoner’s Dilemma from a good dozen different academic disciplines, but the weirdest dataset on real people playing the game is from a British game show called Golden Balls.

In the final round of the game, called “Split or Steal,” two contestants play a one-shot Prisoner’s Dilemma—technically, it’s a variant—choosing to either cooperate (and split a jackpot) or defect (and try to steal it). If one steals and the other splits, the stealer gets the whole jackpot. And, of course, if both contestants steal then both end up with nothing. There are lots of videos from the show on YouTube. (There are even two papers that analyze data from the game.) The videos are interesting to watch, not just to see how players cooperate and defect, but to watch their conversation beforehand and their reactions afterwards. I wrote a few paragraphs about this game for Liars and Outliers, but I ended up deleting them.

This is the weirdest, most surreal round of “Split or Steal” I have ever seen. The more I think about the psychology of it, the more interesting it is. I’ll save my comments for the comments, because I want you to watch it before I say more. Really.

For consistency’s sake in the comments, here are their names. The man on the left is Ibrahim, and the man on the right is Nick.

EDITED TO ADD (5/14): Economic analysis of the episode.

Posted on April 24, 2012 at 6:43 AM • View Comments

James Randi on Magicians and the Security Mindset

Okay, so he doesn’t use that term. But he explains how a magician’s inherent ability to detect deception can be useful to science.

We can’t make magicians out of scientists—we wouldn’t want to—but we can help scientists “think in the groove”—think like a magician. And we should.

We are not scientists—with a few rare but important exceptions, like Ray Hyman and Richard Wiseman. But our highly specific expertise comes from knowledge of the ways in which our audiences can be led to quite false conclusions by calculated means ­ psychological, physical and especially sensory, visual being rather paramount since it has such a range of variety.

The fact that ours is a concealed art as well as one designed to confound persons of average and advanced thinking skills—our typical audience—makes it rather immune to ordinary analysis or solutions.

I’ve observed that scientists tend to think and perceive logically by using their training and observational skills—of course—and are thus often psychologically insulated from the possibility that there might be chicanery at work. This is where magicians can come in. No matter how well educated, or how basically intelligent, trained, or observant a scientist may be, s/he may be a poor judge of a methodology employed in deliberate deception.

Here’s my essay on the security mindset.

Posted on April 6, 2012 at 5:35 AM • View Comments

Lost Smart Phones and Human Nature

Symantec deliberately “lost” a bunch of smart phones with tracking software on them, just to see what would happen:

Some 43 percent of finders clicked on an app labeled “online banking.” And 53 percent clicked on a filed named “HR salaries.” A file named “saved passwords” was opened by 57 percent of finders. Social networking tools and personal e-mail were checked by 60 percent. And a folder labeled “private photos” tempted 72 percent.

Collectively, 89 percent of finders clicked on something they probably shouldn’t have.

Meanwhile, only 50 percent of finders offered to return the gadgets, even though the owner’s name was listed clearly within the contacts file.

[…]

Some might consider the 50 percent return rate a victory for humanity, but that wasn’t really the point of Symantec’s project. The firm wanted to see if—even among what seem to be honest people—the urge to peek into someone’s personal data was just too strong to resist. It was.

EDITED TO ADD (4/13): Original study.

Posted on April 4, 2012 at 6:07 AM • View Comments

Self-Domestication in Bonobos and Other Animals

Self-domestication happens when the benefits of cooperation outweigh the costs:

But why and how could natural selection tame the bonobo? One possible narrative begins about 2.5 million years ago, when the last common ancestor of bonobos and chimpanzees lived both north and south of the Zaire River, as did gorillas, their ecological rivals. A massive drought drove gorillas from the south, and they never returned. That last common ancestor suddenly had the southern jungles to themselves.

As a result, competition for resources wouldn’t be as fierce as before. Aggression, such a costly habit, wouldn’t have been so necessary. And whereas a resource-limited environment likely made female alliances rare, as they are in modern chimpanzees, reduced competition would have allowed females to become friends. No longer would males intimidate them and force them into sex. Once reproduction was no longer traumatic, they could afford to be fertile more often, which in turn reduced competition between males.

“If females don’t let you beat them up, why should a male bonobo try to be dominant over all the other males?” said Hare. “In male chimps, it’s very costly to be on top. Often in primate hierarchies, you don’t stay on top very long. Everyone is gunning for you. You’re getting in a lot of fights. If you don’t have to do that, it’s better for everybody.” Chimpanzees had been caught in what Hare called “this terrible cycle, and bonobos have been able to break this cycle.”

This is the sort of thing I write about in my new book. And with both bonobos and humans, there’s an obvious security problem: if almost everyone is non-aggressive, an aggressive minority can easily dominate. How does society prevent that from happening?

Posted on February 17, 2012 at 6:25 AM • View Comments

Biases in Forensic Science

Some errors in forensic science may be the result of the biases of the examiners:

Though they cannot prove it, Dr Dror and Dr Hampikian suspect the difference in contextual information given to the examiners was the cause of the different results. The original pair may have subliminally interpreted ambiguous information in a way helpful to the prosecution, even though they did not consciously realise what they were doing.

[…]

This one example does not prove the existence of a systematic problem. But it does point to a sloppy approach to science. According to Norah Rudin, a forensic-DNA consultant in Mountain View, California, forensic scientists are beginning to accept that cognitive bias exists, but there is still a lot of resistance to the idea, because examiners take the criticism personally and feel they are being accused of doing bad science. According to Dr Rudin, the attitude that cognitive bias can somehow be willed away, by education, training or good intentions, is still pervasive.

Posted on January 31, 2012 at 11:13 AM • View Comments

A Theory of Online Jihadist Sites

Very interesting:

The counterterrorism community has spent years trying to determine why so many people are engaged in online jihadi communities in such a meaningful way. After all, the life of an online administrator for a hard-line Islamist forum is not as exciting as one might expect. You don’t get paid, and you spend most of your time posting links and videos, commenting on other people’s links and videos, and then commenting on other people’s comments. So why do people like Abumubarak spend weeks and months and years of their time doing it? Explanations from scholars have ranged from the inherently compulsive and violent quality of Islam to the psychology of terrorists.

But no one seems to have noticed that the fervor of online jihadists is actually quite similar to the fervor of any other online group. The online world of Islamic extremists, like all the other worlds of the Internet, operates on a subtly psychological level that does a brilliant job at keeping people like Abumubarak clicking and posting away—and amassing all the rankings, scores, badges, and levels to prove it. Like virtually every other popular online social space, the social space of online jihadists has become “gamified,” a term used to describe game-like attributes applied to non-game activities. It turns out that what drives online jihadists is pretty much exactly what drives Internet trolls, airline ticket consumers, and World of Warcraft players: competition.

Posted on January 12, 2012 at 12:37 PM • View Comments

Feeling vs. Reality of Security in Sparrows

Sparrows have fewer surviving offspring if they feel insecure, regardless of whether they actually are insecure. Liana Y. Zanette, Aija F. White, Marek C. Allen, and Michael Clinchy, “Perceived Predation Risk Reduces the Number of Offspring Songbirds Produce per Year,” Science, 9 Dec 2011:

Abstract: Predator effects on prey demography have traditionally been ascribed solely to direct killing in studies of population ecology and wildlife management. Predators also affect the prey’s perception of predation risk, but this has not been thought to meaningfully affect prey demography. We isolated the effects of perceived predation risk in a free-living population of song sparrows by actively eliminating direct predation and used playbacks of predator calls and sounds to manipulate perceived risk. We found that the perception of predation risk alone reduced the number of offspring produced per year by 40%. Our results suggest that the perception of predation risk is itself powerful enough to affect wildlife population dynamics, and should thus be given greater consideration in vertebrate conservation and management.

Seems as if the sparrows could use a little security theater.

Posted on December 14, 2011 at 1:22 PM • View Comments

Walls as Security Theater

Interesting essay on walls and their effects:

Walls, then, are built not for security, but for a sense of security. The distinction is important, as those who commission them know very well. What a wall satisfies is not so much a material need as a mental one. Walls protect people not from barbarians, but from anxieties and fears, which can often be more terrible than the worst vandals. In this way, they are built not for those who live outside them, threatening as they may be, but for those who dwell within. In a certain sense, then, what is built is not a wall, but a state of mind.

The essay goes on to talk about the value of walls as security theater.

Posted on December 2, 2011 at 5:30 AM • View Comments

A Link between Altruism and Fairness

I write a lot about altruism, fairness, and cooperation in my new book (out in February!), and this sort of thing interests me a lot:

In a new study, researchers had 15-month old babies watch movies of a person distributing crackers or milk to two others, either evenly or unevenly. Babies look at things longer when they’re surprised, so measuring looking time can be used to gain insight into what babies expect to happen. In the study, the infants looked longer when the person in the video distributed the foods unevenly, suggesting surprise, and perhaps even an early perception of fairness.

But the team also say they established a link between fairness and altruism. In a second part of the experiment, the babies chose between two toys, and were then asked to share one of the toys with an experimenter. About a third of the babies were “selfish sharers”: they shared the toy they hadn’t chosen. Another third were “altruistic sharers”: they shared their chosen toy. (The rest chose not to share. They may have been inhibited by the unfamiliarity of the experimenter, or maybe they just weren’t that into sharing.)

What’s interesting about the second half of the study was that by and large it was the babies who had previously been surprised by the unfair cracker and milk distribution who tended to share the preferred toy with the experimenter (the altruistic sharers). The babies who shared the rejected toy hadn’t expressed much surprise over unequal distribution. This led the researchers to suggest that there’s a fundamental link between altruism and a sense of equity.

Both psychology and neuroscience have a lot to say about these topics, and the resulting debate reads like a subset of the “Is there such a thing as free will?” debate. I think those who believe there is no free will are misdefining the term.

What does this have to do with security? Everything. It’s not until we understand the natural human tendencies of fairness and altruism that we can really understand people who take advantage of those tendencies, and build systems to prevent them from taking advantage.

EDITED TO ADD (12/14): Related research with dogs.

Posted on November 18, 2011 at 5:50 AM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.