El cronista y escritor latinoamericano Eduardo Galeano comparte sus anotaciones de su libro Espejos: Una historia casi universal, en la Biblioteca Pública de la ciudad de Los Ángeles. Una version de la hsitoria que relata la gran aventura de la existencia humana.
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Por Asociación
¿Que tal si te digo que conozco a alguien a quien deberías conocer? Pues esa es la idea que By/Association plantea. By/Association es un servicio privado de presentaciones. Individuos son elegidos por su creatividad excepcional, visiones de mundo y redes sociales multi-disciplinarias. Luego estos son introducidos los unos a los otros creando conversaciones que impactan su crecimiento y que transforma el mundo que los rodea.
Me capta la atención las reglas de interacción que propone By/Association:
1. No egos.
2. Valora cada conexión.
3. Muestra curiosidad y pasión.
4. Diviértete. Reírse es muy bueno.
5. Asistir a los encuentros establecidos.
Aquí les presento varias ideas de trasfondo sobre el servicio.
Manifesto
“Innovation is an emergent phenomenon that happens when a person or organization fosters interaction between different kinds of people and disparate forms of knowledge.” —Murray Gell-Mann
By/Association seeks to reinvent the traditional notion of “networking” by enabling substantive interactions and long-term relationships.
By/Association is for people who want to make their lives, ideas, and networks richer by meeting other remarkable people. It’s not about getting help with your current need or project. It’s about connecting to people that make you better — to inspire more action, better ideas, and new ways of seeing the world.
The impact you have in your life is shaped by the people you meet. We simply seek to accelerate that process in a powerful, meaningful way.
Connection Theory
Every introduction made through By/Association is intended to foster meaningful long-term growth for our members. The community is organized on a system of “currencies” derived from the concept of “new wealth.” The process is human-driven by our Connectors, who craft introductions from sets of shared and complementary “currencies.” We continually refine ongoing connections through feedback from our members.
Some of what inspires us:
1.New ‘wealth’ - Traditionally, wealth has been based on money, family name, education, etc. But this definition of wealth is exclusionary, and even destructive. We believe that as we move into a conceptual age, the valued currencies around ‘new wealth’ should be based on creativity, innovation, and social benefit.
2.Social Origins of Good Ideas - Ronald S. Burt of University of Chicago explains that “people who live in the intersection of social worlds are at higher risk of having good ideas.” In other words, the more people you know who aren’t just like you, the better chance you have of thinking and behaving differently.
3.The Straddle - Technology should exist as a means to facilitate and enhance real-world interactions, and should not be treated as an end in itself. We believe in networking that is actually social.
4.Better Filters - Communication is now more efficient than at any other point in human history, but forces us to accept irrelevant interactions. Quality still trumps quantity. The movement towards an increasingly fleeting and fragmented world must be balanced by smart filters. And we believe these filters should be ‘human’ in nature.
5.Littlewood’s Law - According to Cambridge University professor J.E. Littlewood, mathematically, individuals can expect a miracle (an exceptional event of special significance) to happen to them at the rate of about one per month. We would like to guarantee those odds for you.
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
Curas colaborativas
¿Alguna vez haz padecido de una condición de salud y luego de una larga búsqueda tu medico y tu han encontrado el tratamiento correcto para alivarte? O padeces de alguna enfermedad a la cual no encuentras cura? Pues no estas solo. Los amigos de CureTogether han creado un espacio colaborativo que ayuda a personas rastrear y comparar data de salud, para entender mejor sus cuerpos, tomar decisiones informadas a cerca de su tratamiento y a la vez contribuir con las investigaciones globales.Alexandra Carmichael y Daniel Reda lanzaron CureTogether en Julio del 2008 para ayudar a seres conocidos que padecian de dolor cronico. Comenzando con 3 condiciones, el programa de expandio rapidamente a 391 condiciones de salud a peticion de miles de pacientes que han solicitado que sus condiciones sean añadidas a los estudios. Actualmente hay 4,695 personas activamente colaborando en la busqueda de curas. Es un esfuerzo de unificar experiencias. CureTogether creen que en estas expereincia colectivas contienen respuestas que le serviran a millones de personas para sobrepasar sus barreras de salud Esta iniciativa ha sido reconocida por el Mayo Clinic y otorgada el premio iSpot para ideas que transformaran la manera en la que hacemos salud. Dato curiosos, CureTogether es financiado por sus fundadores, inversiones caritativas y no auspicia ni recibe ingresos de esfuerzos promocionales. Un ejemplo creativo e innovador que utiliza la colaboracion como eje central.
Saturday, October 10, 2009
La Teoría de la Diversión
"Life is like a piano... what you get out of it depends on how you play it."
A veces crear cambio en el comportamiento de las demás personas es más simple de lo que pensamos. El equipo creativo de Volkswagen ha creado una campaña dirigida a transformar el comportamiento humano para bien en cualquier escenario. Le han llamado The Fun Theory. Incluso han creado un a competencia llamada el "Fun Theory Award" en la que otorgaran 2,500 Euros para buscar métodos divertidos que promuevan cambio en el comportamiento.
Friday, October 09, 2009
Open Video - Colaboración en medios visuales
Realmente estamos viviendo momentos excitantes en cuanto a colaboración y cooperación se refiere. Aquí otro ejemplo de los esfuerzos para acortar barreras a la comunicación y al intercambio de ideas y formas de expresión de la comunidad. Me refiero al Open Video Alliance, un consorcio de precursores de los formatos colaborativos como lo son el Information Society Project de Yale Law School, Kaltura, Miro Community, Participatory Culture Foundation, iCommons, Red Hat y Mozilla entre otros. En la coalición se encuentran representadas universidades, organizaciones civiles, empresas e individuos. Es curioso ver que el gran ausente en este tipo de trabajo colaborativo es el sector gubernamental. Más adelante analizaremos esa ausencia.
Por ahora, les presento el vídeo de promoción del primer evento celebrado del 19 al 21 de junio de 2009 en NYU Law School. ¿Y que es esto de Open Video? Pues observe, ¡en 12 lenguajes!
El poder de las metáforas Pt.2
Continuando con el tema de metáforas, a continuación un vídeo del Prof. George Lakoff que de manera simple explica la relación entre enmarcar ideas, las metáforas y nuestro cerebro. El vídeo sirve antesala a un artículo que presenta los conceptos de las "metaforas primarias" y la teoria de la "mente encarnada" o "embodied mind".
The astonishingly deep effect of primary metaphors in our lives (excerpt)
By Jody Radzik
In 1980, cognitive linguist George Lakoff and philosopher Mark Johnson described the notion of the embodied metaphor in their landmark book, Metaphors We Live By, mapping out the brain’s amazing exaptation of its motor functions into the fundamental units of human cognition. In 1999, they wrote another landmark book, Philosophy In The Flesh, in which they further describe the “embodied mind,” the veritable (and largely cross-cultural) syntax and grammar of human reason, and use the notion to incisively critique a good cross-section of Western philosophy. Now, in 2009, these ideas are beginning to surface in more mainstream media, including a recent article written by Drake Bennett in the Boston Globe.
Metaphors aren’t just how we talk and write, they’re how we think. At some level, we actually do seem to understand temperament as a form of temperature, and we expect people’s personalities to behave accordingly. What’s more, without our body’s instinctive sense for temperature--or position, texture, size, shape, or weight--abstract concepts like kindness and power, difficulty and purpose, and intimacy and importance would simply not make any sense to us. Metaphors like this “don’t invite us to see the world in new and different ways,” says Daniel Casasanto, a cognitive scientist and researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands. “They enable us to understand the world at all.”
An embodied metaphor, or primary metaphor, is a mental reflection of an action or condition of the physical body. For instance, you “engage” “in” a “heated” conversation with your coworker, until you “cut” him “off,” or “short.” In “essence”, there is no “way” to “avoid” “using” an embodied metaphor “in” “communicating” a notion. All human cognition “rests” “on” them like an ocean “on” its seafloor. (That was an example of a descriptive metaphor.) Now, these ideas are beginning to bear fruit in experimental psychology, and the implications of what is being discovered have the potential to reach into almost every aspect of human social life. To whit, very simple physical manipulations can have profound effects on our subsequent cognition.
Metaphors aren’t just how we talk and write, they’re how we think. At some level, we actually do seem to understand temperament as a form of temperature, and we expect people’s personalities to behave accordingly. What’s more, without our body’s instinctive sense for temperature--or position, texture, size, shape, or weight--abstract concepts like kindness and power, difficulty and purpose, and intimacy and importance would simply not make any sense to us. Metaphors like this “don’t invite us to see the world in new and different ways,” says Daniel Casasanto, a cognitive scientist and researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands. “They enable us to understand the world at all.”
An embodied metaphor, or primary metaphor, is a mental reflection of an action or condition of the physical body. For instance, you “engage” “in” a “heated” conversation with your coworker, until you “cut” him “off,” or “short.” In “essence”, there is no “way” to “avoid” “using” an embodied metaphor “in” “communicating” a notion. All human cognition “rests” “on” them like an ocean “on” its seafloor. (That was an example of a descriptive metaphor.) Now, these ideas are beginning to bear fruit in experimental psychology, and the implications of what is being discovered have the potential to reach into almost every aspect of human social life. To whit, very simple physical manipulations can have profound effects on our subsequent cognition.
El poder de las metáforas Pt.1
Cuando escucho la palabra metáfora, inmediatamente me viene a la mente una gema de película llamada "Il Postino" del año 1994. En éste film italiano, un cartero humilde de una pequeña aldea costanera de Italia descubre el concepto de la metáfora con la ayuda del maestro Pablo Neruda y armado de metáforas sale a la conquista de su amada.
Pero las metáforas no solo nos embriagan de amor, sino que, según hallazgos científicos recientes, son la manera por la cual aprendemos, razonamos y hacemos sentido del mundo que nos rodea. El campo de "Experiential Learning" y de "Outdoor Education" ha sido pionero en el uso de las metáforas como herramienta para presentar y facilitar experiencias de aprendizaje y para reflexionar y transferir estos nuevos conocimientos para crear cambios duraderos en las vidas de los participantes. Autores como Michael Gass, han descrito a profundidad el poder de la metafora la experiencia vivida.
A continuación un articulo que detalla varios de estos experimentos y las implicaciones que estos resultados tienen en nuestro comportamiento.
Thinking literally - The surprising ways that metaphors shape your world.
By Drake Bennett - Boston Globe
WHEN WE SAY someone is a warm person, we do not mean that they are running a fever. When we describe an issue as weighty, we have not actually used a scale to determine this. And when we say a piece of news is hard to swallow, no one assumes we have tried unsuccessfully to eat it.
These phrases are metaphorical--they use concrete objects and qualities to describe abstractions like kindness or importance or difficulty--and we use them and their like so often that we hardly notice them. For most people, metaphor, like simile or synecdoche, is a term inflicted upon them in high school English class: “all the world’s a stage,” “a house divided against itself cannot stand,” Gatsby’s fellow dreamers are “boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” Metaphors are literary creations--good ones help us see the world anew, in fresh and interesting ways, the rest are simply cliches: a test is a piece of cake, a completed task is a load off one’s back, a momentary difficulty is a speed bump.
But whether they’re being deployed by poets, politicians, football coaches, or realtors, metaphors are primarily thought of as tools for talking and writing--out of inspiration or out of laziness, we distill emotions and thoughts into the language of the tangible world. We use metaphors to make sense to one another.
Now, however, a new group of people has started to take an intense interest in metaphors: psychologists. Drawing on philosophy and linguistics, cognitive scientists have begun to see the basic metaphors that we use all the time not just as turns of phrase, but as keys to the structure of thought. By taking these everyday metaphors as literally as possible, psychologists are upending traditional ideas of how we learn, reason, and make sense of the world around us. The result has been a torrent of research testing the links between metaphors and their physical roots, with many of the papers reading as if they were commissioned by Amelia Bedelia, the implacably literal-minded children’s book hero. Researchers have sought to determine whether the temperature of an object in someone’s hands determines how “warm” or “cold” he considers a person he meets, whether the heft of a held object affects how “weighty” people consider topics they are presented with, or whether people think of the powerful as physically more elevated than the less powerful.
What they have found is that, in fact, we do. Metaphors aren’t just how we talk and write, they’re how we think. At some level, we actually do seem to understand temperament as a form of temperature, and we expect people’s personalities to behave accordingly. What’s more, without our body’s instinctive sense for temperature--or position, texture, size, shape, or weight--abstract concepts like kindness and power, difficulty and purpose, and intimacy and importance would simply not make any sense to us. Deep down, we are all Amelia Bedelia.
Metaphors like this “don’t invite us to see the world in new and different ways,” says Daniel Casasanto, a cognitive scientist and researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands. “They enable us to understand the world at all.”
Our instinctive, literal-minded metaphorizing can make us vulnerable to what seem like simple tweaks to our physical environment, with ramifications for everything from how we build polling booths to how we sell cereal. And at a broader level it reveals just how much the human body, in all its particularity, shapes the mind, suggesting that much of what we think of as abstract reasoning is in fact a sometimes awkward piggybacking onto the mental tools we have developed to govern our body’s interactions with its physical environment. Put another way, metaphors reveal the extent to which we think with our bodies.
“The abstract way we think is really grounded in the concrete, bodily world much more than we thought,” says John Bargh, a psychology professor at Yale and leading researcher in this realm.
Philosophers have long wondered about the connection between metaphor and thought, in ways that occasionally presaged current-day research. Friedrich Nietzsche scornfully described human understanding as nothing more than a web of expedient metaphors, stitched together from our shallow impressions of the world. In their ignorance, he charged, people mistake these familiar metaphors, deadened from overuse, for truths. “We believe that we know something about the things themselves when we speak of trees, colors, snow, and flowers,” he wrote, “and yet we possess nothing but metaphors for things--metaphors which correspond in no way to the original entities.”
Like Nietzsche, George Lakoff, a professor of linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley, and Mark Johnson, a philosophy professor at the University of Oregon, see human thought as metaphor-driven. But, in the two greatly influential books they have co-written on the topic, “Metaphors We Live By” in 1980 and “Philosophy in the Flesh” in 1999, Lakoff and Johnson focus on the deadest of dead metaphors, the ones that don’t even rise to the level of cliche. They call them “primary metaphors,” and they group them into categories like “affection is warmth,” “important is big,” “difficulties are burdens,” “similarity is closeness,” “purposes are destinations,” and even “categories are containers.”
Rather than so much clutter standing in the way of true understanding, to Lakoff and Johnson these metaphors are markers of the roots of thought itself. Lakoff and Johnson’s larger argument is that abstract thought would be meaningless without bodily experience. And primary metaphors, in their ubiquity (in English and other languages) and their physicality, are some of their most powerful evidence for this.
“What we’ve discovered in the last 30 years is--surprise, surprise--people think with their brains,” says Lakoff. “And their brains are part of their bodies.”
Inspired by this argument, psychologists have begun to make their way, experiment by experiment, through the catalog of primary metaphors, altering one side of the metaphorical equation to see how it changes the other.
Bargh at Yale, along with Lawrence Williams, now at the University of Colorado, did studies in which subjects were casually asked to hold a cup of either iced or hot coffee, not knowing it was part of the study, then a few minutes later asked to rate the personality of a person who was described to them. The hot coffee group, it turned out, consistently described a warmer person--rating them as happier, more generous, more sociable, good-natured, and more caring--than the iced coffee group. The effect seems to run the other way, too: In a paper published last year, Chen-Bo Zhong and Geoffrey J. Leonardelli of the University of Toronto found that people asked to recall a time when they were ostracized gave lower estimates of room temperature than those who recalled a social inclusion experience.
In a paper in the current issue of Psychological Science, researchers in the Netherlands and Portugal describe a series of studies in which subjects were given clipboards on which to fill out questionnaires--in one study subjects were asked to estimate the value of several foreign currencies, in another they were asked to rate the city of Amsterdam and its mayor. The clipboards, however, were two different weights, and the subjects who took the questionnaire on the heavier clipboards tended to ascribe more metaphorical weight to the questions they were asked--they not only judged the foreign currencies to be more valuable, they gave more careful, considered answers to the questions they were asked.
Similar results have proliferated in recent years. One of the authors of the weight paper, Thomas Schubert, has also done work suggesting that the fact that we associate power and elevation (“your highness,” “friends in high places”) means we actually unconsciously look upward when we think about power. Bargh and Josh Ackerman at MIT’s Sloan School of Business, in work that has yet to be published, have done studies in which subjects, after handling sandpaper-covered puzzle pieces, were less likely to describe a social situation as having gone smoothly. Casasanto has done work in which people who were told to move marbles from a lower tray up to a higher one while recounting a story told happier stories than people moving them down.
Several studies have explored the metaphorical connection between cleanliness and moral purity. In one, subjects who were asked to recall an unethical act, then given the choice between a pencil and an antiseptic wipe, were far more likely to choose the cleansing wipe than people who had been asked to recall an ethical act. In a follow-up study, subjects who recalled an unethical act acted less guilty after washing their hands. The researchers dubbed it the “Macbeth effect,” after the guilt-ridden, compulsive hand washing of Lady Macbeth.
To the extent that metaphors reveal how we think, they also suggest ways that physical manipulation might be used to shape our thought. In essence, that is what much metaphor research entails. And while psychologists have thus far been primarily interested in using such manipulations simply to tease out an observable effect, there’s no reason that they couldn’t be put to other uses as well, by marketers, architects, teachers, parents, and litigators, among others.
A few psychologists have begun to ponder applications. Ackerman, for example, is looking at the impact of perceptions of hardness on our sense of difficulty. The study is ongoing, but he says he is finding that something as simple as sitting on a hard chair makes people think of a task as harder. If those results hold up, he suggests, it might make sense for future treaty negotiators to take a closer look at everything from the desks to the upholstery of the places where they meet. Nils Jostmann, the lead author of the weight study, suggests that pollsters might want to take his findings to heart: heavier clipboards and heavier pens for issues that they want considered answers for, lighter ones for questions that they want gut reactions on.
How much of an effect these tweaks might have in a real-world setting, researchers emphasize, remains to be seen. Still, it probably couldn’t hurt to try a few in your own life. When inviting a new friend over, suggest a cup of hot tea rather than a cold beer. Keep a supply of soft, smooth objects on hand at work--polished pebbles, maybe, or a silk handkerchief--in case things start to feel too daunting. And if you feel a sudden pang of guilt about some long-ago transgression, try taking a shower.
These phrases are metaphorical--they use concrete objects and qualities to describe abstractions like kindness or importance or difficulty--and we use them and their like so often that we hardly notice them. For most people, metaphor, like simile or synecdoche, is a term inflicted upon them in high school English class: “all the world’s a stage,” “a house divided against itself cannot stand,” Gatsby’s fellow dreamers are “boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” Metaphors are literary creations--good ones help us see the world anew, in fresh and interesting ways, the rest are simply cliches: a test is a piece of cake, a completed task is a load off one’s back, a momentary difficulty is a speed bump.
But whether they’re being deployed by poets, politicians, football coaches, or realtors, metaphors are primarily thought of as tools for talking and writing--out of inspiration or out of laziness, we distill emotions and thoughts into the language of the tangible world. We use metaphors to make sense to one another.
Now, however, a new group of people has started to take an intense interest in metaphors: psychologists. Drawing on philosophy and linguistics, cognitive scientists have begun to see the basic metaphors that we use all the time not just as turns of phrase, but as keys to the structure of thought. By taking these everyday metaphors as literally as possible, psychologists are upending traditional ideas of how we learn, reason, and make sense of the world around us. The result has been a torrent of research testing the links between metaphors and their physical roots, with many of the papers reading as if they were commissioned by Amelia Bedelia, the implacably literal-minded children’s book hero. Researchers have sought to determine whether the temperature of an object in someone’s hands determines how “warm” or “cold” he considers a person he meets, whether the heft of a held object affects how “weighty” people consider topics they are presented with, or whether people think of the powerful as physically more elevated than the less powerful.
What they have found is that, in fact, we do. Metaphors aren’t just how we talk and write, they’re how we think. At some level, we actually do seem to understand temperament as a form of temperature, and we expect people’s personalities to behave accordingly. What’s more, without our body’s instinctive sense for temperature--or position, texture, size, shape, or weight--abstract concepts like kindness and power, difficulty and purpose, and intimacy and importance would simply not make any sense to us. Deep down, we are all Amelia Bedelia.
Metaphors like this “don’t invite us to see the world in new and different ways,” says Daniel Casasanto, a cognitive scientist and researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands. “They enable us to understand the world at all.”
Our instinctive, literal-minded metaphorizing can make us vulnerable to what seem like simple tweaks to our physical environment, with ramifications for everything from how we build polling booths to how we sell cereal. And at a broader level it reveals just how much the human body, in all its particularity, shapes the mind, suggesting that much of what we think of as abstract reasoning is in fact a sometimes awkward piggybacking onto the mental tools we have developed to govern our body’s interactions with its physical environment. Put another way, metaphors reveal the extent to which we think with our bodies.
“The abstract way we think is really grounded in the concrete, bodily world much more than we thought,” says John Bargh, a psychology professor at Yale and leading researcher in this realm.
Philosophers have long wondered about the connection between metaphor and thought, in ways that occasionally presaged current-day research. Friedrich Nietzsche scornfully described human understanding as nothing more than a web of expedient metaphors, stitched together from our shallow impressions of the world. In their ignorance, he charged, people mistake these familiar metaphors, deadened from overuse, for truths. “We believe that we know something about the things themselves when we speak of trees, colors, snow, and flowers,” he wrote, “and yet we possess nothing but metaphors for things--metaphors which correspond in no way to the original entities.”
Like Nietzsche, George Lakoff, a professor of linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley, and Mark Johnson, a philosophy professor at the University of Oregon, see human thought as metaphor-driven. But, in the two greatly influential books they have co-written on the topic, “Metaphors We Live By” in 1980 and “Philosophy in the Flesh” in 1999, Lakoff and Johnson focus on the deadest of dead metaphors, the ones that don’t even rise to the level of cliche. They call them “primary metaphors,” and they group them into categories like “affection is warmth,” “important is big,” “difficulties are burdens,” “similarity is closeness,” “purposes are destinations,” and even “categories are containers.”
Rather than so much clutter standing in the way of true understanding, to Lakoff and Johnson these metaphors are markers of the roots of thought itself. Lakoff and Johnson’s larger argument is that abstract thought would be meaningless without bodily experience. And primary metaphors, in their ubiquity (in English and other languages) and their physicality, are some of their most powerful evidence for this.
“What we’ve discovered in the last 30 years is--surprise, surprise--people think with their brains,” says Lakoff. “And their brains are part of their bodies.”
Inspired by this argument, psychologists have begun to make their way, experiment by experiment, through the catalog of primary metaphors, altering one side of the metaphorical equation to see how it changes the other.
Bargh at Yale, along with Lawrence Williams, now at the University of Colorado, did studies in which subjects were casually asked to hold a cup of either iced or hot coffee, not knowing it was part of the study, then a few minutes later asked to rate the personality of a person who was described to them. The hot coffee group, it turned out, consistently described a warmer person--rating them as happier, more generous, more sociable, good-natured, and more caring--than the iced coffee group. The effect seems to run the other way, too: In a paper published last year, Chen-Bo Zhong and Geoffrey J. Leonardelli of the University of Toronto found that people asked to recall a time when they were ostracized gave lower estimates of room temperature than those who recalled a social inclusion experience.
In a paper in the current issue of Psychological Science, researchers in the Netherlands and Portugal describe a series of studies in which subjects were given clipboards on which to fill out questionnaires--in one study subjects were asked to estimate the value of several foreign currencies, in another they were asked to rate the city of Amsterdam and its mayor. The clipboards, however, were two different weights, and the subjects who took the questionnaire on the heavier clipboards tended to ascribe more metaphorical weight to the questions they were asked--they not only judged the foreign currencies to be more valuable, they gave more careful, considered answers to the questions they were asked.
Similar results have proliferated in recent years. One of the authors of the weight paper, Thomas Schubert, has also done work suggesting that the fact that we associate power and elevation (“your highness,” “friends in high places”) means we actually unconsciously look upward when we think about power. Bargh and Josh Ackerman at MIT’s Sloan School of Business, in work that has yet to be published, have done studies in which subjects, after handling sandpaper-covered puzzle pieces, were less likely to describe a social situation as having gone smoothly. Casasanto has done work in which people who were told to move marbles from a lower tray up to a higher one while recounting a story told happier stories than people moving them down.
Several studies have explored the metaphorical connection between cleanliness and moral purity. In one, subjects who were asked to recall an unethical act, then given the choice between a pencil and an antiseptic wipe, were far more likely to choose the cleansing wipe than people who had been asked to recall an ethical act. In a follow-up study, subjects who recalled an unethical act acted less guilty after washing their hands. The researchers dubbed it the “Macbeth effect,” after the guilt-ridden, compulsive hand washing of Lady Macbeth.
To the extent that metaphors reveal how we think, they also suggest ways that physical manipulation might be used to shape our thought. In essence, that is what much metaphor research entails. And while psychologists have thus far been primarily interested in using such manipulations simply to tease out an observable effect, there’s no reason that they couldn’t be put to other uses as well, by marketers, architects, teachers, parents, and litigators, among others.
A few psychologists have begun to ponder applications. Ackerman, for example, is looking at the impact of perceptions of hardness on our sense of difficulty. The study is ongoing, but he says he is finding that something as simple as sitting on a hard chair makes people think of a task as harder. If those results hold up, he suggests, it might make sense for future treaty negotiators to take a closer look at everything from the desks to the upholstery of the places where they meet. Nils Jostmann, the lead author of the weight study, suggests that pollsters might want to take his findings to heart: heavier clipboards and heavier pens for issues that they want considered answers for, lighter ones for questions that they want gut reactions on.
How much of an effect these tweaks might have in a real-world setting, researchers emphasize, remains to be seen. Still, it probably couldn’t hurt to try a few in your own life. When inviting a new friend over, suggest a cup of hot tea rather than a cold beer. Keep a supply of soft, smooth objects on hand at work--polished pebbles, maybe, or a silk handkerchief--in case things start to feel too daunting. And if you feel a sudden pang of guilt about some long-ago transgression, try taking a shower.
Thursday, October 01, 2009
La prueba de tres
Un día en la antigua Grecia (469-399 BC), un joven filósofo se acerco a su colega Sócrates y le dijo, "¿Sócrates, sabes lo que he escuchado de uno de tus estudiantes?"El maestro le respondió, "Detente un momento. Antes que me cuentes, me gustaría realizar una simple prueba. Se llama la prueba de tres."
"¿La prueba de tres?" pregunto el joven.
"Eso es correcto" continuó Sócrates. "Antes que hables de mi estudiante vamos a examinar lo que vas a decir. La primera prueba es Verdad. "¿Estas seguro que lo que vienes a decir es absolutamente cierto?".
"No", respondió el joven. "En efecto, lo acabo de escuchar."
"Muy bien." dijo Sócrates. "No sabes con certeza si esta información es cierta o falsa. Ahora hagamos una segunda prueba, la prueba de la Bondad. ¿Lo que me vas a decir sobre mi estudiante es algo bueno?"
El joven, un poco abochornado, se encogió de hombros, como si dijera que no.
Sócrates continuo, "Aun puedes pasar el examen, ya que falta la ultima prueba, la de Utilidad. ¿Lo que me vas a decir sobre mi estudiante es de utilidad para mi?"
"No, realmente no." dijo el joven filosofo.
"Entonces" concluyo Sócrates, "si lo que me vas a decir no es ni cierto, ni bueno, ni siquiera útil, ¿para qué me lo vas a decir?
El joven reflexionando y con un nuevo sentido de vergüenza se mantuvo callado y se alejo.
La próxima vez que alguien venga a donde ti para decir algo acerca de un compañero o colega juega el papel de Sócrates. Si por el contrario, sientes la necesidad de compartir algo de un compañero con otra persona pregúntate a ti mismo estas tres preguntas. Quizás lo que te van a decir o lo que vas a decir no valga la pena comunicar.
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