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| Are Twitter tweets too fast-paced to let nobler emotions sink in? |
Researchers probing the workings of the brain have found that it takes longer for feelings of social compassion and admiration to register on our neural circuits - and they worry that the rapid-fire effect of texting and tweeting could have "potentially negative consequences" for our moral fiber.
The findings serve as fresh fuel for the debate over social networking's effect on the human psyche: Just this month, we've seen how social-network surfers can improve their office productivity, help catch criminals or head off a potential suicide (with an assist from celebrity Demi Moore!). We've also heard about Twitter torments, Facebook failures and social-network stress.
The brain-scan study, conducted by scientists at the University of Southern California and due for publication online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, takes a different perspective.
Rather than looking at the effects of Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc., the researchers studied how the some of the noblest emotions we can summon - admiration for the virtues of others, and compassion for others' distress - are processed. The potential connection to the pace of online social networking and other digital media emerged as a follow-up observation.
Here's how the experiment was done: Thirteen interview subjects were told five kinds of stories about anonymous men and women:
- Stories about personal virtue in the face of adversity (for instance, dogged dedication to an important cause).
- Stories about performing a rare and difficult feat that didn't involve overcoming adversity (such as a virtuosic musical performance).
- Stories about social or psychological pain (someone dealing with grief or despair, for example).
- Stories about physical pain (such as a sports injury).
- Non-emotional stories about ordinary life (which served as the experiment's control factor).
After the subjects heard all the stories, they were put into MRI brain-scanning machines and asked to recall the stories as well as the emotions associated with those stories. The researchers then looked for differences in brain activity as the various stories were recalled.
Immordino-Yang et al. / PNAS
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| This chart shows how blood-oxygen levels in the brain's anterior insula varied over time for four emotional conditions: admiration for virtue (AV, green); admiration for skill (AS, yellow); compassion for social pain (CSP, blue); and compassion for physical pain (CPP, red). |
The stories that focused on social interactions registered in parts of the brain that were close to but not identical to the areas activated by tales about great skill or physical pain (in the posteromedial cortices, if you must know). It took several seconds longer for the emotional response associated with virtue or psychological distress to peak (10 to 12 seconds for psychological pain vs. six seconds for physical pain). The response lasted longer as well.
That means it may take longer for the impact of a social or psychological situation to sink in, compared with a situation that involved sheer physicality, the researchers said.
"For some kinds of thought, especially moral decision-making about other people's social and psychological situations, we need to allow for adequate time and reflection," Mary Helen Immordino-Yang of USC's Brain and Creativity Institute said in a news release.
Her colleagues in the experiment, all from USC, included team leader Antonio Damasio, Hanna Damasio and Andrea McColl. In the paper, the researchers said their findings "could have important implications for the role of culture and education in the development and operation of social and moral systems."
Heavy reliance on a rapid stream of info snippets through television, online feeds and social networks may cut down on the time required for feelings of admiration or compassion to sink in fully, the researchers said.
"The rapidity and parallel processing of attention-requiring information, which hallmark the digital age, might reduce the frequency of full experience of such emotions, with potentially negative consequences," they said in the paper.
Immordino-Yang put it another way: "If things are happening too fast, you may not ever fully experience emotions about other people's psychological states, and that would have implications for your morality."
She stressed that the research doesn't indict Twitter, Facebook or any other specific social-networking tool. "It's not about what tools you have, it's about how you use those tools," she said.
Other researchers said they weren't so worried about online means of communication, which at least let you withdraw your fingers from the keyboard and reflect on what's being said. (Just ask Demi Moore about that.) USC media scholar Manuel Castells said he was more concerned about "fast-moving television or virtual games."
"In a media culture in which violence and suffering become an endless show, be it in fiction or in infotainment, indifference to the vision of human suffering gradually sets in," he said in the USC news release.
Antonio Damasio, who is the director of the Brain and Creativity Institute, agreed. "What I'm more worried about is what is happening in the juxtapositions that you find, for example, in the news," he said. "When it comes to emotion, because these systems are inherently slow, perhaps all we can say is, 'Not so fast.'"
Is it time to put down the smart phone and pick up a good book? Or do a good deed? Let me know what you're thinking by leaving a comment below - or sending me a tweet if you must. And if you're looking for more about morality, check out these mind-blowing ideas from the Origins Symposium in Arizona.
Update for 8:30 p.m. ET April 15: WalletPop's Josh Smith truth-squads the suggestions about Twitter's immorality and quotes Antonio Damasio as saying, "The claim that Twitter makes us immoral is not ours, and has nothing to do with the study." Twitter was specifically referenced in the news release based on the study, but not in the study itself or in Damasio's quotes. (When the study is published, you can find it by clicking here.) As I note above, Damasio voiced more concern about the effects of rapid-fire news blurbs. Smith says that "twittering won't make you any less moral than the next guy, unless of course you're following Satan."
Serving others always helps me connect with humanity in a positive way. The service makes me feel good and gives me a sense of accomplishment. It helps the person in need and they too feel thankful and happy because a project gets finished. Until MIT or Caltech figures out a way to make human-computer interactions that accurately express these kinds of emotions, give me the genuine smile of a real human being... :) ;) :)
this article was too long...could you break it up into 140 word blocks so I can easliy assimilate it?
i think the technology has forced people not to pick up the books unless they are programming based.
Alan, interesting article. I feel the tech revolution we are in has pluses and minuses. Great to read your article and can respond and others can join in, yet too much of a good thing turns bad - as the brain scans suggest. We do need time to digest information and effectively respond. Like an engagement vs. an elopement. Time spent during an engagement is a good time of sorting the relationship as the wedding planning gets underway - negotations on all sides - you'd be surprised how the couple's relatives can weigh in and either pull them apart or give them more resolve to unite!
Wow. It's amazing how much people are focusing on the mental rather than the physical nowadays. I'm a pretty sympathetic person, but I found the brain scans pretty shocking.
Evil? No. Just stupid.
I don't really have any opinion on the evilness of Twitter, Facebook, or texting per se, but I have a couple of strong opinions about the research. 1st of all--13 subjects? That either is a typo or the whole thing is invalid due to a ridiculously small sampling size. Heck, they have almost as many variables as they have test subjects. And even if the data was valid, that's a stretch to infer any connection between the results and moral integrity. Mr. Boyle, can I make a suggestion--when writing "Science" articles try thinking like Joe Friday. Just stick to the facts. Lastly, please tell me this wasn't the most interesting piece of research you found to cover at USC because science doesn't come much softer without a Hannah Montana sticker set involved.
[ALAN ADDS: Yup, it's 13. Six women and seven men. These sorts of studies often start out with a small sample size. It's pretty tough (and expensive) to put legions of experimental subjects through an MRI, but I'd have to say that sample size does seem small for drawing such a big conclusion. Eventually, other researchers will put together various findings to come up with a bigger pool to analyze, I think. And speaking of Hannah Montana, here's some more USC research that might tickle your fancy or get your goat: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29723926/ ]
Old media probably thinks twitter is evil.
OK, don't overreact. Twitter may be shallow, but it is not any more evil than news outlet exploitation, is it?
[ALAN ADDS: Touché!]
What should also be looked at is at what age they were first introduced to such content. Psychologically, before puberty the human brain has difficulty making barriers between make-believe and reality. Growing up, my parents were always paranoid about movie and ESRB ratings. The result? Yeah, I've given hundreds of "fake people" a dirt nap in COD4 and Crysis. Yeah, I've spent a crapload of time on Facebook, and I'm a Wiki addict. And yet, the sight of a homeless person or a flag-draped coffin almost immediately makes me want to cry. Whether I'm an anomaly or simply a big sap is uncertain, but I figured I'd toss that out there.
Evil? No. Vapid? Oh, yes. Unless you're a close friend whose water might break at any second, spare me your random thoughts.
Between us, my wife and I have our share of Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn accounts and pages. At the same time, we run a website that chronicles our journey around the world (2.5 years and counting). On our blog, we attempt to share a more human side of the world through our photos and stories.
While we use tools like Facebook and Twitter to help us promote our longer form work, these interfaces also demand that we keep the pump primed with short, gratifying sound bites regarding what's happening during our paripatetic journey.
While we use the short bits to draw people in to read the longer, more thoughtful pieces on our website, we often find it challenging to determine - and maintain - the ideal balance.
Daniel Noll
Uncornered Market
www.uncorneredmarket.com
Brian in NJ, you speak for me, bro.
Talk about frivolous research. If I was an alum of USC who contributed to my alma mater, I'd ask the Dean or whatever what he was spending my money on. I guess since alot of this research money comes from federally funded grant money (the taxpayer's dollar) maybe I should write my own representatives. In the situation we're in, we could be focused on something a lot more productive and much more beneficial to humanity.
This study seems to have two big weaknesses: 1, who's to say which emotions are "nobler" or more valuable and, 2, the shortness of a message is no index of the amount of time the author of the message spent contemplating it. Yes, the messages travel at light speed, but that doesn't mean the people sending them aren't taking time to think and feel when they're composing them. It's hard to believe such a study is thought to have anything valuable to say about cyber-behavior's relationship to human thought and feeling. In fact, the longer I contemplate it, the more the whole study seems completely asinine. Should I take a long time plotting some way to deliver actual analog @!$%#-slaps? Or shall I be content to press the 'submit' button and get on with my life while these dopey scientists waste their time. Oh, and scientists, 'submit' means to submit the comment, it does not indicate 'submission' to some evil electronic tyranny.
tWITTER IS COOL BUT IT WOULD BE SOME MUCH BETTER IS YOU COULD HAVE IT ALL mYSPACE FACEBOOK AND TWITTER ALL IN ONE, AND EVEN MYYREARBOOK.
"Physical separateness can never be overcome by electronics, but only by "conviviality", by "living together" in the most literal physical sense. The physically divided are also the conquered and the controlled. "True desires" - erotic, gustatory, olfactory, musical, aesthetic, psychic, & spiritual - are best attained in a context of freedom of self and other in physical proximity & mutual aid. Everything else is at best a sort of representation."
-Hakim Bey
The 'tech revolution' is all about selling humanity down the river. Twitter is about giving our minds and lives over to dead machines and computers. Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, so-called 'social networking', they all separate us from each other,and separate us from the natural world. They prevent us from taking collective positive action. Of course Twitter et all are all evil. As Hakim Bey says in T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, the real revolution can only take place face-to-face.
Yes, it is time for a good book. I realized I was losing attention span while deep in social networking so I started to force myself to read a real book every day. It has been a true pleasure to return to the world of books.
Problems with material presented online arise because there are cues missing that we'd be able to notice if it were face to face. The measure of how much or little is available for context setting is called "media richness". TV is greater than telephone is greater than plain text. The less media richness the more likely to make a mistake. In social psychology, the effect of the "fundamental attribution error" leads people to assume others intentions are more often sinister than they usually are. This could help explain what they claim to have found. However, it also explains the tendency noted decades ago for people to be more prone to "flaming" in email and public forums (back then the only one being Usenet). This has been going on for over three decades, and while some might argue that our "moral fiber" (an exceedingly subjective term when used as a value judgement) has declined during that time, the amount of decline far outstrips the amount of online interaction throughout most if not all of that span. As for the "fast paced" assertion, it is much faster to read plain text than to read web pages with different and/or variable fonts, different colors, flashing text, smiley faces, etc. -- the counter argument remains the same.
Blaming a particular and present set of circumstances for a widespread and long term social construct is ridiculous. The same has been done with video games, TV violence, rock and roll, pinball, and way back to ("trouble with a capital T and that rhymes with P and that stands for") pool halls. While the research may stand, blaming the source requires ignoring the effects of other far more salient constructs like upbringing, education and even free will.
As for the brain imaging portion, as with all fMRI work (including my own; I've since learned more about the technology), it is fatally flawed. An fMRI does not measure brain activity, it assumes cellular activity from a measure of blood flow. That assumption is fairly well supported, but by no means a safe bet in all cases. More important, brain cells and structures operate on two opposing forces, excitatory activity and inhibitory activity. Both require neural activity, and if the assumption holds, increased blood flow. Thus any place that "lights up" on an fMRI might be causing increased activity or decreased activity, and this imaging technique can't tell the difference. Sadly many of my colleagues don't understand the biophysics of the technique and see everything that lights up as "activation" or excitatory activity. If they understood it, they'd realize that the activity noted may be a combination of both forces, possibly even balancing each other out, and thus no "brain activity" could be implied.
The sexier the science is, the more likely it is to be published, noticed, reported on, promoted and rewarded. An fMRI is sexy. So much so that most studies using the technique mention it in the title, whereas other data collection methods usually aren't. Social networking sites are (for the present time) sexy also. The two together are a formula for cooking up something suitable to PNAS. Fortunately science, though frequently wrong, is self-correcting. Even if the results stand through subsequent study, the earlier data collection and analysis may well be found wanting. Such was the case with Eddington's solar eclipse photographs "proving" Einstein's gravity bending light hypothesis, and I'm confident that as more neuroscientists grow up with the technology (as opposed to the current crop who had it thrust upon them) the same will come about.
I don't know whether or not twitter is evil. I've never used it. I also don't know whether or not FaceBook is evil. I've also never been to their Web site.
What I do know is this: I'm a clinical psychologist, and I work with a great many couples in couples therapy. It's amazing to me how marriages are on the verge of collapsing due to correspondence with past romantic relationships who found each other on FaceBook. I'm smart enough to know that FaceBook isn't the problem, and I'm also not stupid enough to know that services such as FaceBook don't make it easier and more accessible for people to live out self-destructive fantasies.
I find it very interesting to read the messages. I have never been to Twitter, Facebook or any of the above,but I find the comments tell me a lot of what goes on. I thing I will stick to my books.
Could MSNBC please stop talking about easily the lamest social networking tool EVER?
Alan, I have a lot of respect for you, man. But it seems the 40 plus age group is the only set that thinks this thing is cool. It is embarrassing to watch you all trumpet something so... stupid. For the love of God, stop. Please. Thanks.
Even without scientific studies, I wonder whether mindfulness, patience and attention can be developed, or reflection, contemplation, and wisdom be valued, where there is an incessant craving for instant "information." Twitter will certainly have business, political, social and other uses. See the New York Times article on Tuesday, April 14 (Business Day, p. B1) on "Putting Twitter's World to Use."
i find it funny a and i have been saying it for a while now this only goes to prove it the more thecnology we have and depend on and use the more we become like it if we sit on a computer all day we naturally will start to become cold and emotionless like the computer and because many people wont even take a single step out of thier way to help antoher out it only furthers this cold behavior i think.
I liked the article. I am developing a concept where individuals interact slowly with high-quality responses and without the social networking overhead. Your article combined with another regarding social networking fatigue (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30111694/) would suggest that my work has merit. It will be another social experiment to see if consumers are attracted to ideas on the other end of the spectrum.