The problem that CalTech economist Antonio Rangel and his team were grappling with was the "free-rider" problem. This occurs because people want public goods, but don't want to pay for them. So they lie about how much they value a given good such as health care or public parks. So, for example, a swimmer might benefit a great deal from a public pool. But she wants to pay as little as possible for it, so she lies about how much it will benefit her. This may not affect the public's decision to build the pool, but it could affect how much she pays for it.

Economists have long believed this is an unsolvable problem. But Rangel says fMRIs can actually force people to tell the truth about what their values are when it comes to public goods.

A release from CalTech explains the researchers' methods:

As part of this experiment, volunteers were divided up into groups. "The entire group had to decide whether or not to spend their money purchasing a good from us," [economics professor Antonio] Rangel explains. "The good would cost a fixed amount of money to the group, but everybody would have a different benefit from it."

The subjects were asked to reveal how much they valued the good. The twist? Their brains were being imaged via fMRI as they made their decision. If there was a match between their decision and the value detected by the fMRI, they paid a lower tax than if there was a mismatch. It was, therefore, in all subjects' best interest to reveal how they truly valued a good; by doing so, they would on average pay a lower tax than if they lied.

"The rules of the experiment are such that if you tell the truth," notes Krajbich, who is the first author on the Science paper, "your expected tax will never exceed your benefit from the good."

In fact, the more cooperative subjects are when undergoing this entirely voluntary scanning procedure, "the more accurate the signal is," Krajbich says. "And that means the less likely they are to pay an inappropriate tax."

This changes the whole free-rider scenario, notes Rangel. "Now, given what we can do with the fMRI," he says, "everybody's best strategy in assigning value to a public good is to tell the truth, regardless of what you think everyone else in the group is doing."

And tell the truth they did-98 percent of the time, once the rules of the game had been established and participants realized what would happen if they lied. In this experiment, there is no free ride, and thus no free-rider problem.

"If I know something about your values, I can give you an incentive to be truthful by penalizing you when I think you are lying," says Rangel.

While the readings do give the researchers insight into the value subjects might assign to a particular public good, thus allowing them to know when those subjects are being dishonest about the amount they'd be willing to pay toward that good, Krajbich emphasizes that this is not actually a lie-detector test.

"It's not about detecting lies," he says. "It's about detecting values-and then comparing them to what the subjects say their values are."

"It's a socially desirable arrangement," adds Rangel. "No one is hurt by it, and we give people an incentive to cooperate with it and reveal the truth."

"There is mind reading going on here that can be put to good use," he says. "In the end, you get a good produced that has a high value for you."

From a scientific point of view, says Rangel, these experiments break new ground. "This is a powerful proof of concept of this technology; it shows that this is feasible and that it could have significant social gains."

And this is only the beginning. "The application of neural technologies to these sorts of problems can generate a quantum leap improvement in the solutions we can bring to them," he says.

Indeed, Rangel says, it is possible to imagine a future in which, instead of a vote on a proposition to fund a new highway, this technology is used to scan a random sample of the people who would benefit from the highway to see whether it's really worth the investment. "It would be an interesting alternative way to decide where to spend the government's money," he notes.

Wait, what? The government is going to do brain scans on the public to determine what we "really" value and then tax us accordingly? Or possibly even choose which public works projects to undertake? The only place this can lead is some kind of terrifying, dystopian welfare state where the government spends more money on fMRI machines than anything else.

via CalTech

Wired's Noah Shachtman has a great post on this over at Danger Room, explaining how it fits into the Air Force's broader strategy to engage with people online and "counter negative opinions" about the armed services. I applaud the military for encouraging its officers and enlisted people to communicate more online - nothing wrong with using blogs for public debate. But there is just something FUBAR about how the Air Force can turn anything into a rigid and overly-complicated flow chart - even the act of chatting informally online.

via Danger Room

While plenty of studies have already shown that friendships have become much more casual in an era of "friending" random people on MySpace, this new study takes that idea further. Its authors describe how reality TV and social networking sites feed into each other, creating a world where many people think of themselves and their friends less as real people and more like iconic celebrities. The researchers call this a shift toward having "mediated" selves, as if all social interactions take place via the media.

According to PhysOrg:

These heavy [reality TV] viewers also produced a significantly larger number of mediated selves and had a greater intimacy toward, and urge to interact with, the mediated social images of others.

All of these, say the researchers, are commonly considered celebrity behaviors . . .

"Promiscuous frienders may be reproducing the fame-seeking behavior that is modeled by reality TV characters," [researcher Michael] Stefanone says, adding that these behaviors are believed to reflect the systematic processing of messages and behaviors modeled within the [reality TV] genre.

But if you regard this study as picking up on an early stage in a greater social change regarding friendship, it's easy to see how the good kind of real-life promiscuity might be involved too. If we all begin to see ourselves as mediated people, as celebrities, we're less likely to need intimacy before taking the plunge into the sack. We'll imagine that we "know" somebody already because we've seen them online and so we don't need all those "take me out to coffee" preliminaries before getting busy.

We're All Stars Now [via PhysOrg]

Also, you can check out a PDF of the study.

Healey writes:

The BMI range of Marvel women is much less varied than that of all other groups and tends to the low end of the "normal" BMI range. This result is surprising, considering that many of the women sampled are martial artists or extremely capable physically and should, if anything, have a BMI that indicates a higher body fat level than is actually present.

The BMI range of Marvel men is more varied and tends to just over the upper limit of the "normal" BMI range. However, it is still less varied than that of the "real world" male and female groups.

We stress that given the physical and biological vagaries of the Marvel Universe and the relatively small sample sizes involved, these results are not conclusive. Data comparing male and female athletes from both world might provide more accurate comparative results, and we suggest this as a point for further research.

However, advance data indicates that Marvel women are portrayed as having a disturbingly low BMI compared to the healthy BMI range of their male counterparts. Furthermore, the range of body types expressed by Marvel women is surprisingly small. The distribution of BMIs in Figure 1 is by far the sharpest, with little variation from the mean compared to Marvel men, and far less variation than we see in actual men and women. This is true to a lesser extent for males in the Marvel universe as well.

The Marvel male is predisposed to be on the heavy side of healthy, which can be explained by the increased muscle mass of intense physical acitvity. The average Marvel female is approaching underweight despite a presumably active lifestyle. This may corroborate sociological and literary observations that in the Marvel Universe, women must fulfil criteria for being attractive by Western standards before fulfilling the criteria of biological realism.

The "real" age of Marvel Universe persons is frequently altered by the powers or mutations of individuals, non-Euclidean time, cryogenics, magic, biochemical solutions, alternative dimensions, radiation, cloning and resurrection. The 20-29 year old age range was chosen as the most appropriate range comparison for the apparent physical age of most adult Marvel characters.

Comparative Sex-Specific Body Mass Index in the Marvel Universe and the Real World [paper]