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Need a Favor? Talk To My Right Ear
Hugh Pickens writes "The Telegraph reports that scientists have found that if you want to get someone to do something, ask them in their right ear. Known as the 'right ear advantage,' scientists believe it is because information received through the right ear is processed by the left hand side of the brain which is more logical and better at deciphering verbal information than the right side of the brain. 'Talk into the right ear you send your words into a slightly more amenable part of the brain,' say researchers. The team, led by Dr. Luca Tommasi and Daniele Marzoli from the University of Chieti in central Italy, observed the behavior of hundreds of people in three nightclubs across the city where they intentionally addressed 176 people in either their right or their left ear when asking for a cigarette. They obtained significantly more cigarettes when they made their request in a person's right ear compared with their left. 'These results seem to be consistent with the hypothesized specialization of right and left hemispheres,' say researchers. 'We can also see this tendency when people use the phone, most will naturally hold it to their right ear.'"
...and I thought it was because I was right-handed!
Seems like the classic example. More people are right handed then left handed, left handed people are more assertive.. who knows.
"Maybe this world is another planet's hell"
Aldous Huxley
this isn't common knowledge by now, I noticed this years ago when I started using cell phones (especially the old analog ones). With a lot of noise, I could hear the person on the other end better if I held the cell phone next to my right ear.
I wonder if handedness has any influence at all?
Correct the data for laterality (right hand preference in majority of the population), then maybe the results will be interesting. Even then, the explanation is bull. Unlike sight, the auditory system doesn't work cross-hemispherically. Sound from the right side is carried by the auditory nerve into the right portion of the temporal lobe.
This article suggests that the experiments were conducted by the very people who were proposing the hypothesis. That's not very scientific - this should have been double blind. Any number of factors can effect the success rate of getting the cigarettes - including if the researchers believed they were likely to be more successful.
-- Sorry, I can't think of anything funny to say here.
Generally 176 is a sufficiently large sample for statistical purposes. There are methods to calculate how likely it is that the observed differences weren't just random luck. In other words, you can calculate the chance of getting the observed results when there is no real difference. When this chance (called a p-value) is low (one common significance level is 5%), you can conclude that it wasn't just luck and another factor was at work.
More stuff: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypothesis_test
indeed, the corpus callosum does connect the two hemispheres -- but remember, not everything in the brain is "active" -- much of it is passive, and it's not just "excitatory" -- it's also inhibitory. a lot of the signals on one side do not get routed to the other, to use a computer term.
at the same time, remember that the left-brain/right-brain stuff is pop psychology. one simple scientific finding, that language is primarily left-lateralized, got turned into this gigantic thing that just isn't true or in any way demonstrable.
At least this one is nicer than the brain melting suffered from the ones that read the Dune prequels.
This is why successful leaders tend to prefer advice from their "right hand man". Who listens to their "left hand man"? No one - that's who!
"Talk to the hand"
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Ugg, how is it that the parent is modded down but the GP is modded insightful? The GP is basically just saying "well, that doesn't feel like enough to me", while the parent points out accurately that it very easy to determine what the probability is that the results are due to chance. Since the article states that the researchers obtained "significantly" more cigarettes, I'm assuming that this is at least based on the common level of 5%. You can have a small sample size that is highly statistically significant if the skew is large enough. Unfortunately, even on slashdot, most people don't understand statistics.
That said, hypothesis testing just determines the probability that the results are NOT due to chance. Thus, it's totally possible that the results are due to something different that what the researchers propose - maybe they were just friendlier when asking from the right side.
My girlfriend is left handed, BUT she has dextrocardia, a condition in which her heart is on the left side of her chest. Her liver is also mirrored. Persons with this condition often show mirroring in all of their organs, including the brain. She talks with the phone against her left ear...which I suppose would make sense according to this study.
The method wasn't very scientificy, sample size was small and they skewed the results by "knowing" what kind of results they want.
I would have invented way more elaborate scheme to get an excuse to blow my grant money to nightclubbin
Bot Assisted Blogging
The parent is modded down because it's a Anon Cow post, and most mods seem to mod/read with their normal reading hiddens turned on. Chances are that it's simply not being looked at enough yet to get modded up. Having said that, as the parent of this is a +5 already, those mods should be modding the parent up as well.
Well! Get on the case boobs!
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
it puts this story in hilarious contrast:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/health/article3817270.ece
i don't know how true all of this is, but there's all sorts of anecdotes like this
for example: women usually have their left breast a little larger than their right breast. regardless of which is larger, and regardless of handedness, women, and all simians in fact, and even breastless fathers, tend to hold their babies with their right arms to their left breast. this places the babies head on the left side of the body, putting the baby closer to the left side sensory inputs, which are governed by the right side of the brain, the more emotional side, thus establishing more of an emotional bond
so i don't know about all this ear stuff, but there seems to be something, at best subtle, that is real about side preference and emotions and logic
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The extent of most Slashdot users statistics knowledge is to scream 'Correlation is not causation' at any science story. This might have something to do with the fact that anyone who uses the phrase is instantly modded +5 Insightful, but then again, correlation is not causation.
Right-ear advantage has been well-studied before (see Wikipedia's page on dichotic listening tests for details). I remember it being presented as fact in my intro linguistics course 10 years ago. I recall that class also noting, however, that people who learn tonal languages such as Mandarin as a first language have a left-ear advantage instead [citation needed].
I hold my phone to the ear that doesn't require me to reach around my fucking face.
But meh. Maybe that's why I'm so short with stupid people on the telephone.
If "una bella figura" like in the picture stepped up to me in an nightclub and asked for a cigarette I would start smoking right then and there. (Somebody already said it: Take your grant money nightclubbing)
I also hold the phone to my left ear despite being right-handed, but for a different reason: my right ear is deaf! I've often wondered if I perceive language and sound differently than others (besides the obvious lack of stereo). Perhaps doing a study with half-deaf people could give some interesting results.
You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it dissolve.
...and this EVEN explains why most men do the driving - our wives, knowing the secret right ear thing, prefer to sit on the right, making us drive and simultaneously compelling us to do their bidding! ...or it could just be some bullshit theory where the data was cherry picked to make some sort of pop science conclusion.
-Styopa
I guess that's why I keep annoying people at work. I don't hear much with my right ear as I had a hearing loss on that side years ago.
Maybe that's also why my ex left me. She could never get any favours!
"I'm not a vegetarian because I love animals. I'm a vegetarian because I hate plants." -- A. Whitney Brown
It may be too late in the discussion for this to get any notice, but I have access to the journal where this research was published and I thought I'd share a few details. In summary, it is much better science than the /. crowd seems to think, the researchers have done their homework, and I haven't seen any posts here that raise serious methodological issues that are not somehow addressed in the work. This wasn't just some guys hanging out in a night club asking for cigarettes.
Basically, they had three studies. The first was purely observational -- they "unobtrusively" observed interactions between people in the nightclub that started face-to-face and noted whether these progressed to talking in the right ear or the left ear. They adjusted for gender of speaker/listener, and other bias.
The second study (which they refer to as "quasi-experimental") involved a female aware of the study but unaware of the hypothesis who would approach subjects (equal # male and female) face-to-face and say something unintelligible. If the subject turned one ear, she would then ask for a cigarette in the ear they offered. She always asked the same question, and only asked people whom she had not seen smoking (to prevent social effects that might bias people toward sharing).
In the third study (also "quasi-experimental"), which is the one referred to most here, the female (still unaware of the hypothesis) now approached subjects from the front, but instead of allowing the subject to choose the ear, she selected left or right ear. Again, equal numbers of males/females were approached, and used the same question each time and still only approached subjects she had not seen smoking.
The second and third studies were performed at different times, so there's no effect of people getting sick of this chick bumming cigs, and there were a number of other controls. In the first study, there was a conclusion that there is significant bias toward offering a particular ear. In the second, there was no significant trend for complying with the request for a cigarette in right vs left ear. In the third, several trends were found -- the main result announced in the thread that the right ear resulted in more positive outcomes, and also (not surprisingly) that men were more likely to offer a cigarette to the female when asked.
Anyway, this is not junk science. There's a lot more to the study than the paragraph in the Telegraph told you about.