Is liberalism contagious?

The NYT says it’s not.

Professors will be happy (or maybe sad) to know that they actually exert little to no influence on their students, when it comes to shaping their political ideology (and maybe everything else).

Apparently our political views are shaped by the time we’re 15! It’s a bit ironic that by the time we’re old enough to understand the implications of our political ideology, we’ve likely already been indoctrinated one way or another. I’m sure parents must exert the most influence- but I’d be curious to see where the rest of it comes from. Your friends (i.e. your friend’s parents)? What we read? Who we see on TV? I’d also be interested in seeing this same study done at the elementary school level and with more than just political ideology (morality, religion, etc). Apparently, kids really are sponges…

Why we laugh

I recently received the following Link in my inbox. The video’s rather descriptive title is “Scarlet takes a tumble” (fast forward to 2m30s). Scarlet is YouTube’s celebrity-du-jour, creating a small sensation with over 750,000. Having predicted the content of the video, I tried my best to suppress my laughter. I could not. Which led me to wonder- why is this funny? Or more specifically, why do laugh when people fall?

A quick Google search reveals some interesting answers. William Fry, a “laughter researcher” out of Stanford discusses two necessary characteristics of laughter:

1. A “non-serious” frame of reference: for something to be funny, our brain should register it in a non-serious context. Hence, the reason we don’t think someone falling to her death is that funny. Because Scarlet, herself, posted this video, we infer that she probably didn’t suffer serious consequences from the fall.

2. Incongruity: We laugh when something happens that is incongruous/inconsistent with what we predict should happen in real life. Falling is not something we expect to happen in a regular day, hence it is inconsistent with one’s expectations- triggering laughter neurons in our brains. When we see someone fall, our brain triggers neurons that mirror the activity of the falling person- stimulating these “incongruity instincts.” So when Scarlet falls, we laugh. This also might explain why we laugh when we fall.

So now you know what the producers of America’s Funniest Home Videos (AFV) have been capitalizing on for years. Speaking of AFV, have you noticed that “boomers” (parents) seem to find this show a lot more funny than we do? Over the last 30 years, the evolution of humour has been dramatic. What youth find funny now is often a lot darker (and more sarcastic) than the humour of our parent’s generation. I wonder if there’s a neurological explanation for this evolution. Maybe as a “jaded” generation, we have different expectations for what we consider “incongruent.” Obviously, Scarlet’s tumble still fits into that category.