IU Research & Creative Activity Magazine, V32, N1

VOLUME XXXIII

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NO. 1

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FALL 2010

Behavior

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E D I TO R ’ S N OT E S

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VOLUME XXXIII • NO. 1 • FALL 2010 EditoR Lauren J. Bryant A R T DIR E C TO R Kelly Carnahan A d v i s o r y B oar d John Carini Associate Professor of Physics IU Bloomington Yaobin Chen Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering IUPUI Claude Cookman Associate Professor of Journalism IU Bloomington Deborah Finkel Professor of Psychology IU Southeast Kirsten Grønbjerg Efroymson Chair in Philanthropy Professor of Public and Environmental Affairs IU Bloomington Michael Kowolik Associate Dean for Graduate Education IU School of Dentistry Shanker Krishnan Associate Professor of Marketing IU Bloomington Arthur Liou Associate Professor of Fine Arts IU Bloomington Portia Maultsby Professor of Folklore and Ethnomusicology IU Bloomington Eric Schoch Science Writer, Office of Public and Media Relations IU School of Medicine Published by the Office of the Vice Provost for Research Sarita Soni Vice Provost for Research IU Bloomington

it up straight. Pay attention. Don’t interrupt. Calm down. Smile. Say please. Say thank you. Better yet, write a thank you note.

Sound familiar? These were some of my mother’s rules of etiquette while I was growing up. Your mother’s were likely similar. Maybe you still hear her admonishments in your head as I do right now, sitting up straight at my desk.

To be honest, the echo of Mom’s rules gives me comfort as I try for the same persistence with my own children. A longtime mother myself, I’ve so often repeated the rules, for example, of behavior around grandparents, that my daughters now stop me before I start, answering with a resigned, “We know.”

I hope they know, because my daughters are adolescents, armed with hormones, drivers’ licenses, and attitudes. They are out there, defying parental gravity as they move in everexpanding orbits of activities and outings. What they do, where they go, how they behave is often up to them now, and it terrifies me. Every “experienced” parent of adolescents I know agrees, saying some version of, “Yes, you just have to hope that what you’ve taught them sticks.”

But has it? Research done over the last 10 years or so isn’t encouraging. As outlets from TIME magazine to the National Institutes of Mental Health have reported, the teen brain is half-, or maybe three-quarters, baked.

Using magnetic resonance imaging tools, neuroscientists have confirmed that the frontal lobe of the adolescent brain is a late bloomer. This lobe is the part of the brain we use for “executive functions” such as attention, organization, long-range planning, reasoning, and making judgments. It doesn’t reach its full development until around age 25. So teen brains are prone to unsound judgment.

With their teen freedom and their susceptible brains, most adolescents are facing situations with huge consequences: sexual advances, substance use, whose car they should climb into, and will it really matter if they don’t use the seatbelt just this once? Somehow, saying please and thank you seems like highly inadequate guidance.

I have no idea what’s sticking with my daughters. But recent research on the frontal lobe’s gradual emergence reminds me that it’s not too late—the developmental work is not done, neither theirs nor mine. As my daughters try on new behaviors for size, I’m learning new parenting behavior of my own: Stay calm. Be present when they are. Don’t interrupt when the words start to flow. Say thank you when things go right.

On second thought, maybe some things do stick.

Thanks, Mom. — LB

In Memo r i am

Eileen Bender, professor of English and longtime administrator at Indiana University South Bend, died on August 10, 2010. In addition to her contributions as an assistant and advisor to IU chancellors, deans, and presidents, Eileen served for 10 years as a member of R&CA’s advisory board. Her scholarly acumen and wide-ranging expertise enhanced this magazine’s pages in countless ways. We acknowledge her passing with sadness and gratitude.

Research & Creative Activity is published by the Office of the Vice Provost for Research. It is intended to stimulate greater awareness of and appreciation for the diverse scholarly and creative activities conducted across the campuses of Indiana University. For permission to reprint material from the magazine or for inquiries regarding its content, please contact the Editor, Research & Creative Activity, Office of the Vice Provost for Research, Indiana University, Franklin Hall 009, 601 E. Kirkwood Ave., Bloomington, IN 47405-7000; phone (812) 855-4152; e-mail rcapub@indiana.edu. Research & Creative Activity is a member of the University Research Magazine Association (www.urma.org).

All contents Copyright © 2010 The Trustees of Indiana University.

Visit research.iu.edu/magazine to read R&CA online.

TABLE OF CONTENTS 2 Abstracts

26 marginal politics

Feeling the heat | Got dirt? Get fit | IUN researchers find proteins that protect against colitis | Super-resolution, super vision | Proximity could be key to healing prayer | Bookmarks

by Lesa Petersen

6 looking forward: a q&a with Jorge v. José

29 Playlists for life

by Nicole Kauffman 31 MUSICAL JOURNEY OF A LIFETIME

9 a 7% solution

32 A CONSUMING STATE OF MIND

by Eric Schoch

by Jeremy Shere

12 multiple choice

36 UNDER THREAT

by Leigh Krietsch Boerner

by Elisabeth Andrews

16 animal learning

39 know thy [sexual] self

by Sara Schrock

by Karen Garinger

41 risk’s benefits

20 why we walk this way

42 unfriend my heart

by Jeremy Shere

by Lauren J. Bryant

22 GOOD VIBRATIONS

46 body language, robot style

24 ‘humanity where none exists’

by John Schwarb

49 SECOND LOOK [ F r o n t co v e r] Manners, Culture and Dress of the Best American Society by Richard A. Wells (Springfield, Mass.: Richardson & Co., 1893); Decorum: A Practical Treatise on Etiquette and Dress of the Best American Society by Richard A. Wells (Chicago: J.A. Ruth, 1877); True Politeness, or, The Book of Etiquette, for Ladies (London: Darton and Clark, 1838 – 1845). Courtesy The Lilly Library, IU Bloomington. Photo by Ann Schertz [ I n s i d e f r o n t c o v e r] Cover detail from Life and Its Purposes: A Book for Young Ladies by William Thayer Makepeace (Edinburgh: Gall & Inglis; London: Houlston & Wright; 1857 – 1869). Courtesy The Lilly Library, IU Bloomington. [ t o p ] Detail from Down With Escapism by Caleb Weintraub, 2006, acrylic on wood, 84" x 96"

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ABSTRACTS

Feeling the heat

Indiana University

fter a summer of scorching temperatures across much of the United States, Dan Johnson’s research is “hot,” so to speak.

“Heat waves are a growing concern, and current climate models indicate they will increase in duration and intensity,” says Johnson, a climate researcher and assistant professor of geography in the School of Liberal Arts at Indiana University – Purdue University Indianapolis.

Heat increases will happen “especially in the mid-latitudes, of which Indiana and the Midwest are a part,” he says. “One of the most likely disasters to strike the Central Indiana region is an extreme heat event of considerable duration and strength.”

Johnson and colleagues in the Institute for Research and Social Issues at IUPUI and at the Centers for Disease Control are using a three-year, $419,220 grant from NASA to study extreme heat vulnerabilities in U.S. cities.

Johnson says the majority of people don’t recognize heat as a dangerous threat but in fact, “heat waves are known to kill hundreds of people in the United States every year, and they are the leading cause of weatherrelated fatalities.” Heat-related deaths outstrip the combined effects of hurricanes, tornadoes, lightning, and flash floods.

With colleagues and students, Johnson is currently conducting studies on the impact of heat waves on vulnerable populations within urban areas, including Phoenix, Philadelphia, Dayton, and Indianapolis. Vulnerable populations include the very young, the very old, and low-income areas where air conditioning is sparse.

The researchers are using complex statistical modeling tools and computer visualization as well as satellite-based imagery to identify individual “hot spots” within cities and develop vulnerability maps based on past extreme heat events.

If we are ill-prepared for longer, more intense heat waves, Johnson says, the results could be “catastrophic.” The research team’s goal is to develop tools to assist emergency personnel in responding to heatwave incidents. They hope to have an impact on lowering heat-related mortality and the associated economic costs of the heat-related health effects on at-risk populations.

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Got dirt? Get fit

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hat affects urban dwellers’ fitness levels most? Good sidewalks? Adequate outdoor lighting?

Guess again. It’s the “interior condition” of their homes. That’s the conclusion reached by NiCole Keith, associate professor in the Department of Physical Education at Indiana University – Purdue University Indianapolis.

“At the end of the day, the interior condition of their houses seemed to be the only thing affecting their physical activity,” says Keith. “It was not at all what we expected.”

Keith’s study involved 998 African Americans ages 49 – 65 who lived in St. Louis and participated in the African American Health longitudinal study, which began in 2000. African Americans, notes Keith, are disproportionally affected by risk factors for cardiovascular disease. Physical activity can reduce the likelihood that people will develop risk factors for cardiovascular disease and also reduce the effect of the risk factors when they exist. African Americans, however, have relatively low rates of physical activity.

The study found that the inside of subjects’ homes had more to do with higher physical activity levels than the sidewalks, lighting, and other elements.

Keith says efforts to increase physical activity rates among city-dwellers may need to be taken inside. Much attention has been given to improving sidewalks and other aspects of the built environment outside, which Keith agrees is worthwhile, but if people already are active inside their homes, researchers should look at ways to take advantage of that activity.

“If you spend your day dusting, cleaning, doing laundry, you’re active,” Keith says. “This will inform interventions. A person won’t take

30 minutes to go for a walk, but they’ll take 30 minutes to clean.”

The study used a combination of selfassessments and objective assessments to gauge participants’ perceptions of their neighborhood and residences. Researchers based in St. Louis rated the interior and exterior of the dwellings and immediate vicinity, including such things as cleanliness, furnishings, noise, air quality, and conditions of the dwelling and those of nearby buildings.

The seasonally adjusted Yale Physical Activity Scale was used to assess physical activity. The scale was adjusted to take into consideration the self-assessments and objective assessments along with demographic, socioeconomic, health conditions, and physical measures involving subjects.

Keith said the findings were unexpected and raise more questions: “Are the types of people who take care of their bodies the same types of people who take care of their homes?”

Keith presented her findings at the American College of Sports Medicine annual meeting held in June, 2010. She was one of more than 30 researchers from Indiana University campuses who participated in the annual meeting. Co-authors of the study are Daniel Clark, IU Center for Aging Research and the Regenstrief Institute; and Douglas K. Miller, of the IU Center for Aging Research, the Regenstrief Institute, and director of the African American Health Project.

IUN researchers find proteins that protect against colitis

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esearchers at the Indiana University School of Medicine at IU Northwest have identified proteins that provide protection to mice suffering from inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), also known as colitis. An article by the researchers, Roman Dziarski, professor of microbiology and immunology, and Dipika Gupta, associate professor of biochemistry and molecular biology, was featured on the cover of the journal Cell Host & Microbe in August.

The intestinal immunity proteins found in the mice, referred to as peptidoglycan recognition proteins (PGRPs), are also found in humans.

These proteins, secreted by mucous membranes and skin, are potent bactericidal agents and constitute a first line of defense against bacterial infections.

Studies suggest that inflammatory bowel disease — the chronic inflammation of the gastrointestinal tract — affects one in 500 people.

“Many people are affected by colitis and, unfortunately, we don’t know the cause,” says Dziarski. “To try to help people with this disease, we first need to know what causes it and how it happens.”

Dziarski and Gupta have conducted more than 15 years of research to understand colitis and how the PGRPs play a role in protecting the body, including earlier published research that identified a role for the proteins in arthritis. In the current study, the researchers removed each of the four PGRP genes, one at a time, from the mice to understand the functionality of each protein.

“By inactivating each gene, we were able to see what happened to the mouse if they didn’t have the immunity protein,” Dziarski says. “As we expected, by inactivating the proteins, the mouse became much more sensitive to colitis. If the mice are more sensitive to colitis and don’t have

the gene, then this means the gene protects the host from developing colitis.”

Dziarski and Gupta found that the PGRPs influence the normal microbial flora in the gut. Deficiencies in individual PGRPs result in significant changes in the colon’s normal bacterial flora. Because bacterial flora in the gut can also have an influence on inflammatory diseases elsewhere in the body’s system such as in joints or the lungs, the effects of PGRPS on intestinal flora could have consequences in other inflammatory diseases as well.

Gupta notes the colitis symptoms in mice were very similar to what a human would experience. “We believe these proteins could open up unexplored medical research,” he says. “Future research on how to stimulate cells to overproduce these proteins, or ways to use them in the development of new drugs, may help in the treatment of patients with many diseases, including HIV/AIDs or those with compromised immune systems.”

Dziarski and Gupta’s collaborators include IU Northwest researchers Sukumar Saha, Xuefang Jing, Shin Yong Park, Shiyong Wang, and Xinna Li.

new laser-equipped microscope at Indiana University Bloomington’s Light Microscopy Imaging Center makes it possible to examine biological samples with unprecedented detail in three dimensions.

The $1.2 million DeltaVision OMX superresolution microscope from Applied Precision (Issaquah, Wash.) was paid for entirely with funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, through a National Institutes of Health program that supports high-end instrumentation at American centers of higher education.

“It’s a fantastic and unique acquisition for our university,” says IU Bloomington cell biologist Claire Walczak, the imaging center’s executive director. “This super-resolution microscope is one of only 16 in the world. It’s part of our vision to bring state-of-the-art technology to IU’s life-sciences researchers, to enable them to address questions they did not have the ability to ask previously, due to the lack of appropriate technologies.”

Walczak is a professor of biochemistry and molecular biology in the Medical Sciences Program in Bloomington, which is associated with the IU School of Medicine in Indianapolis.

Walczak also holds an adjunct appointment in the Department of Biology and is a member of the biochemistry program. The new microscope

Images by Jim Powers, Jane Stout, and Eric Workman

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Images of a fixed PTK (marsupial kidney cell line) cell in mitosis, at left, and a fixed HeLa cell in mitosis, at right, produced by the Light Microsopy Imaging Center’s new high-end, super-resolution microscope. More than 2,000 images were used to create the image at left; more than 3,000 images were taken to create the image at right. is exceptionally fast in collecting images of a biological specimen, enabling scientists to gather crucial data. The device uses laser light of four different colors to illuminate samples, while four extremely sensitive digital cameras capture images every 10 milliseconds at the speediest setting. The imager can produce as

many as 5,000 full-color images per minute for its major task of producing high-resolution images. Known as a “structured illumination” microscope, the device will help IU scientists examine how proteins are distributed inside continued, page 4

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Super-resolution, super vision

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ABSTRACTS

continued from page 3

Indiana University

cells with unprecedented resolution.

Most high-technology light microscopes reach the limits of resolution at 250-300 nanometers — the diameter of a small bacterial cell. The new OMX microscope can produce clear images down to 100 nanometers in the lateral dimension. Resolution along the z-axis (perpendicular, or coming out of the page) is somewhat lower but still tremendously improved relative to previous technologies.

“We envisioned this device would be most useful for microbiologists, cell biologists, and neurobiologists at IU,” Walczak says, “but we expect scientists from many other fields will come up with creative ways to take advantage of it.”

IU scientists get a reduced rate when using the LMIC’s many microscopes, due to support from the Office of the Vice Provost for Research at IU Bloomington, the College of Arts and Sciences, the Medical Sciences program, and the School of Optometry. Jim Powers, manager of the Light Microscopy Imaging Center, is responsible for training IU researchers — as well as visitors — to use the device.

“The imaging center is a user-oriented resource,” Powers says. “Scientists rent time on our devices and receive training to use them, but after that, we expect they’ll be able to work independently.”

The arrival of the DeltaVision OMX microscope has spurred Walczak, Shaw, and Powers to consider LMIC’s future needs. Partly because of the DeltaVision OMX’s size, the LMIC is now out of physical space. In addition, because the device produces so much data (4,000 images takes up about 1.5 gigabytes of hard-drive space), Walczak and Powers say one priority is to improve the center’s information technology infrastructure through continued collaboration with IU’s Information Technology Services. Walczak and Powers want to ensure that the large data sets produced by the OMX imager can be stored rapidly — as well as protected from power outages and other catastrophes.

“We have some new things to think about, and lots of new things to see,” Walczak says.

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Proximity could be key to healing prayer

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n international study of healing prayer suggests that prayer for another person’s healing may help, especially if the one praying is physically near the person being prayed for.

Candy Gunther Brown, associate professor in the Department of Religious Studies, College of Arts and Sciences, at Indiana University Bloomington, led the small study of “proximal intercessory prayer,” or PIP. The study was published in the September 2010 issue of the Southern Medical Journal.

PIP is a term coined by Brown and her co-authors to describe “direct-contact prayer” that often involves touch. “We chose to investigate ‘proximal’ prayer because that is how a lot of prayer for healing is actually practiced by Pentecostal and Charismatic Christians around the world,” Brown says. “These constitute the fastest-growing Christian subgroups globally, with some 500 million adherents, and they are among those most likely to pray expectantly for healing.”

In the study, Brown and colleagues measured surprising improvements in vision and hearing among two dozen men and women in economically disadvantaged areas of Mozambique, where eyeglasses and hearing aids are not readily available.

Subjects were recruited from the Iris Ministries and Global Awakening groups because of their reputation as “specialists” in praying for those with hearing and vision impairments, according to Brown.

The researchers used an audiometer and vision charts to evaluate 14 rural Mozambican subjects who reported impaired hearing and 11 who reported impaired vision, both before and after the subjects received proximal intercessory prayer. The study focused on hearing and vision because it is possible to assess them with hearing devices and vision charts, allowing a more direct measure of improvement than simply asking people whether they feel better. Auditory and visual impairments are “relatively less sensitive to psychosomatic factors,” too, notes Brown.

Iris and Global Awakening leaders “administered PIP” by placing their hands on the recipient’s head, sometimes embracing the person. Afterward, the study’s subjects exhibited statistically significant improvements in hearing and vision. Brown and her co-authors describe the gains in hearing as “highly significant”— two subjects with impaired hearing lowered the threshold at which they could detect sound by 50 decibels. Three subjects had their tested vision improve from 20/400 or worse to 20/80 or better. These improvements are much larger than those found in previous suggestion and hypnosis studies.

Scientific research on intercessory prayer in recent decades has generated a firestorm of controversy.

Critics charge that attempts to study the efficacy of prayer are unscientific and should be abandoned because the mechanisms are poorly understood.

Several studies have produced contradictory findings. The title of the study by Brown and her colleagues— “Study of the Therapeutic Effects of Proximal Intercessory Prayer (STEPP) on Auditory and Visual Impairments in Rural Mozambique”— makes reference to a widely discussed 2006 “STEP” (study of the therapeutic effects of intercessory prayer) paper, which concluded that prayer itself had no effect, but that certainty of receiving prayer adversely affected health. The STEP study, however, like most previous research on the efficacy of prayer, focused on distant intercessory prayer rather than proximal prayer. It also included only one group of Protestant intercessors: Silent Unity, a “New Thought” group whose leaders have explicitly rejected prayers of supplication or petition as “useless.”

Brown’s study focused on clinical effects of PIP and does not attempt to explain the mechanisms by which the improvements occurred. Recognizing the limitations of the research conducted in “lessthan-ideal field conditions,” the study co-authors nevertheless conclude that “future study seems warranted to assess whether PIP may be a useful adjunct to standard medical care for certain patients with auditory and /or visual impairments, especially in contexts where access to conventional treatment is limited.”

The World Health Organization estimates that 278 million people, 80 percent of whom live in developing countries, have moderate to profound hearing loss in both ears, and 314 million people, 87 percent of whom live in developing countries, are visually impaired. Only a tiny fraction of these populations currently receive any treatment.

“If empirical research continues to indicate that PIP may be therapeutically beneficial, then— whether or not the mechanisms are adequately understood—there are ethical and nonpartisan public policy reasons to encourage further research,” Brown says. “It is a primary privilege and responsibility of medical science to pursue a better understanding of therapeutic inventions that may advance global health, especially in contexts where conventional medical treatments are inadequate or unavailable.”

Brown and her colleagues carried out the study as part of a larger research program, funded by the John Templeton Foundation Flame of Love Project, on the cultural significance and experience of spiritual healing practices. www.istockphoto.com

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Bookmarks erman has a thing for blondes in tank tops, and Enshalla loves Obsession perfume.

Then there’s El Diablo Blanco.

Herman is a male chimp, and Enshalla is a Sumatran tiger. El Diablo Blanco was a human zoo chief executive named Lex Salisbury. All three are characters in Thomas French’s new book Zoo Story: Life in the Garden of Captives (Hyperion). French, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist now teaching at the Indiana University School of Journalism in Bloomington, was at Florida’s Lowry Park Zoo in 2003 when Salisbury and others set out to turn the midsized zoo into a destination. After producing stories about the zoo for the St. Petersburg Times, French decided to expand his project into a book.

The book opens with a tale of bringing 11 wild African elephants across the Atlantic Ocean in a cargo jet.

“There’s nothing more spectacular or unnatural than making elephants fly,” French says.

“It was a really powerful thing [and] the heart of the theme of the book, which is about how zoos represent a deep-seated desire we have as a species to both exalt and control nature.”

It’s a story that has resonated with readers across the country. Zoo Story made the New York Times’ best-seller list and led French to a mid-August appearance on the popular TV program The Colbert Report. Interest in the book also came from National Public Radio, Sirius Satellite Radio, People and Parade magazines, and newspapers nationwide.

“I was hopeful that people would respond

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to it, because the issues in the book are global,” says French. “The book is really about extinction and the role zoos can play in dealing with extinction. It’s about our species’ relationship with other species on this overcrowded planet. It’s about the intersection of commerce and conservation.

“But more than that, it’s a really powerful story with great characters, some of whom walk on four legs and some who walk on two.”

French spent six years researching and reporting intensively at Lowry Park Zoo. As a result, he believes he was able to tell the stories of everyone, including the animals.

For example, French chronicles a coup attempt by other chimps against Herman at a time when the zoo was at the breaking point when it came to resources and staff. “It was really a remarkable instance of what primatologists called ‘Machiavellian intelligence,’ and there were some people who felt Lex’s never-ending push to the top had a role in that,” French says.

Salisbury’s ambition ultimately led to his downfall. For example, Salisbury decided to bring in 15 patas monkeys — the world’s fastest land monkey and one of the most elusive of the species. Believing the monkeys could not swim, Salisbury placed them on an artificial island surrounded by a wide moat. Within 15 minutes, all of the monkeys swam across the moat and escaped.

hen Samrat Upadhyay started his second novel, Buddha’s Orphans (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), the director of Indiana University’s Creative Writing program in Bloomington had a powerful image in mind — an infant abandoned in Kathmandu’s city park while his mother commits suicide in a nearby pond.

“I didn’t know exactly what shape the novel would end up taking, but there was enough energy and potency in that image that I thought it was worth pursuing,” says Upadhyay, whom the San Francisco Chronicle once dubbed “a Buddhist Chekhov.”

The result is Buddha’s Orphans, a densely layered love story within a multigenerational family saga, all set against the backdrop of half a century of Nepali history. Upadhyay is the first Nepali-born author to write in English and have his work widely published in the West.

Upadhyay’s work has received widespread recognition. His first novel, The Guru of Love, was named a New York Times Notable Book, a San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year, and a finalist for the Kiriyama Prize, while his short story collection The Royal Ghosts won the Asian American Literary Award, the Society of Midland Authors Book Award and was declared a “Best Fiction” by the Washington Post.

In Buddha’s Orphans, a servant woman finds the abandoned baby and names him Raja. Raja’s abandonment leads to a chain of events that eventually unites him with Nilu, a daughter of privilege he’s fated to love.

While Raja grows up on the streets, Nilu leads a rocky existence as the daughter of an alcoholic mother in a crumbling mansion. The two

“It was one of those stories that journalists and the public can’t resist ... a bunch of monkeys making a fool out of the zoo director,” French says. Eventually, journalists began asking many more questions about Salisbury’s management of the zoo and his involvement in a for-profit nature preserve.

“Ultimately, the other alphas of Tampa decided to take Lex down,” French says.

After six years watching and studying the zoo, French told Colbert during their conversation on Colbert’s show, “You start to see people’s primal behavior underneath.”

cross paths as children, as young lovers, and again, after both fear their marriage is over following an unspeakable loss.

Woven throughout the story are themes of the bonds between generations of families, Buddhist concepts of universal connections and suffering, and metaphorical themes of orphans who have been emotionally abandoned just as Raja is physically abandoned on the novel’s first page.

Upadhyay says the three years of work that went into Buddha’s Orphans were the most intense he’s experienced. After a sixto-eight month editing process with his publisher, he thought he’d take a break from writing, but story ideas continued.

“This novel exhausted me so much that I thought I would take a long writing break,” he says, “but I didn’t actually.” Upadhyay is working on a new story collection and is in the early stages of his next novel.

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Indiana University

Looking Forward

A Q&A with Jorge V. José Vice President for Research at Indiana University

Photo by Chris Meyer, courtesy of Indiana University

R &C A : Welcome to Indiana University. What was most attractive to you about coming to IU? J o s é: Thank you, I just arrived Sunday. I’ve had appointments every day, so I am not unpacked yet, but that’s OK. Being busy is part of the job!

IU is a very good university with a very good reputation. To me, it’s attractive to be a part of developing more connections, collaborations, and interactions on and between the different campuses of the university. I feel there is a lot of potential and opportunities. And the people are very nice in Indiana, so that’s attractive, too!

Coincidentally (or perhaps not), the research enterprise at IU has been overseen by more than one physicist. (More than 30 years ago, Research & Creative Activity magazine

was begun by former Dean of Research and Graduate Development Homer Neal, who is now Samuel A. Goudsmit Professor of physics at University of Michigan, and physicist George Walker was IU’s vice president for research from 1991 to 2003). What is the connection between being a scientist — or more specifically, a physicist — and a research administrator?

I believe most vice presidents of research at AAU [Association of American Universities, a group of 63 leading public and private research universities in the United States and Canada] institutions are scientists or engineers. In fact, I don’t think I have ever met a vice president of research who was not a scientist. You can understand why. Federal agencies such as the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation provide a lot of external funding to universities for proposals related to science, but they also expect a lot from researchers. Research administrators need to know what it takes to get funding — the process of applying for proposals; the regulations, which have become so much more strict in recent years, etc. To help faculty be more successful in their search for money, it really helps if you have done it yourself. I’ve been involved with the NIH, NSF, DOE, etc., so I have some idea of what it takes.

At Northeastern University, you were the founder and director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Research on Complex Systems, and you have studied quantum chaos.

How does this kind of scientific expertise help you understand how a complex system such as IU might work?

Well, I’m sure the chaos part will help! (Laughter). One part of a complex system is that you have entities which have their own minds about how they want to behave. However, when you put them all together, in spite of the fact that all the entities would like to do their own thing, they actually do things collectively. They behave in ways that are called emergent behaviors.

This perspective does help me as administrator: How do we get entities, in this case large groups of people, to do things that individually they wouldn’t do, but as groups they end up doing?

The SUNY Buffalo campus has architecture and engineering schools in its portfolio, while IU has long been known

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n August 2010, Jorge V. José joined Indiana University as vice president for research. Before coming to IU, he served as vice president for research at the University at Buffalo, the largest campus in the 64-member State University of New York (SUNY) system.

José is also James H. Rudy Distinguished Professor of physics and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Prior to his positions at IU and SUNY Buffalo, he was Matthews Distinguished University Professor and chair of the physics department at Northeastern University in Boston.

A native of Mexico City, José received his doctorate, master’s, and bachelor’s degrees in physics from the National Autonomous University of Mexico. He has conducted research in phase transitions, soliton physics, disordered systems, high temperature superconductivity, classical and quantum Josephson junction arrays, quantum and classical chaos, and quantum phase transitions. Most recently, his research has focused on computational neuroscience.

As IU’s vice president for research, José is responsible for research development, research compliance, and research administration across IU’s campuses. Shortly after arriving on the job, José took a few moments on a Friday afternoon to share some thoughts about overseeing research at IU.

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for arts and humanities-related professional schools in fields such as music and journalism. How would you compare the research portfolios of SUNY Buffalo and IU? SUNY Buffalo is the most comprehensive university in the SUNY system, and the SUNY system is the largest in the United States. It has an engineering school, a medical school, a school of architecture, a law school, and the humanities are very good too, particularly English and literature. IU is similarly comprehensive and diverse, although it’s spread out in different places. At Buffalo, everything is about five miles apart.

The diverse components of IU make it very interesting, but one would also like to see IU as a whole.

As you know, a major trend in federally funded academic research is toward “big science,” that is, large-scale, multidisciplinary collaborations. What are your thoughts about how to encourage collaborative activity in an eightcampus statewide system such as IU? Yes, you’re right. About 50 percent of funding from NIH is going toward multidisciplinary collaborations — that means billions of dollars. Many of the problems of the 21st century will not be solved by specialists in one area or by one group of people. We really need collaboration from different disciplines, or else it is not going to be possible to solve problems in energy, health, the environment, and other areas. Here at IU, I would like to encourage and catalyze more multidisciplinary collaborations. Of course, to be successful in multidisciplinary research, you have to start with very strong disciplines or else you won’t succeed. At IU, many areas and disciplines are very strong, so it’s a matter of getting more people to collaborate with each other to tackle very significant problems.

Indiana University

How do you do that?

You have to provide them with seed funding. When I arrived to Buffalo, there was not much multidisciplinary activity, so I created a seed funding program that funded only people who had never collaborated with each other before. They had to work with people from different disciplines to put together a project.

Then they had to identify a funding agency and write a proposal within 18 months. As a result, a cultural change took place, to the extent that for every dollar invested, we got $19 back. I look forward to achieving similar things here.

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In a 2008 article on SUNY Buffalo research spending, you said, “The fact is, you have to move fast to stay still, because the competition is fierce.” What did you mean by that?

That’s correct. First of all, getting funding is very hard, and there are many other people after that funding. So just to keep funding levels at what they are today, you really have to move fast. In order to improve, you have to be much faster than others. During the time I was at Buffalo, we increased research funding by more than 30 percent. To do that, we had to move

in different directions, into areas that others had not moved into. One thing we did was to pursue more industrial support, more support from corporations and businesses. We also went into areas such as national security and pursued more money from the Department of Homeland Security. We put together teams with expertise to tackle problems that could be identified as important, not only today but in the future. We must always be thinking two or three years ahead: What is going to be interesting in two or three years from now? We must always be thinking about what is in the wind. It’s about innovation, innovation, innovation.

As you make the move to head up the research activities at IU, how do you sort between all the information, suggestions, and ideas that are surely coming from many quarters?

Being the new person here is good news and bad news. The good news is, I haven’t been here for years, so I’m fresh. Sometimes it is good not to know everything, because if you know everything, you might become less optimistic.

I think it is very important to talk to people, to hear from people. It’s very important to hear what they wish to do — what they would like to and what they think cannot be done. So I will spend a lot of time talking to lots of people to find out what to do, and what not to do. But at the end of the day, I will have to decide: What is it that one needs to do to move the university to the next stage?

You’re being asked these questions in the summer, but this magazine issue is published in October. What do you think will transpire in overseeing IU’s research portfolio over the first several months on the job?

We need to develop what is going to be our strategic plan. We have to develop a plan of what can be done, and I would hope to have some ideas of what to do relatively soon, within a few months. By that time, I hope we are on the way to implementing what needs to be done.

And looking longer range, perhaps one or two years?

There are things that need to be done quickly using seed funding. We have to start to develop internal solicitations. Then people will submit projects, we’ll review them, and the best will be funded, but it will be many months before they get results. And some internal proposals may not get approved the first time.

I’m sure it will be a few years before we really start to see quantitative results, using metrics that allow us to say, yes, we have moved from here to there. After we have set up the foundation for what we are going to do in the future, we can expect to start to see results in two to three years.

What kind of results?

Significant transformational results. As a scientist, you are always optimistic!

A 7% Solution Standing at the podium at a national diabetes prevention conference in April 2010, Ann Albright of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention didn’t mince words. “This is a game changer. This is a day in which we really are able to change the face of the prevention of Type 2 diabetes,” said Albright, director of CDC’s Division of Diabetes Translation. “We really are going to be able to deliver on something that is incredibly important.”

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lbright was announcing a new diabetes prevention initiative, spearheaded by the CDC and two partners, the YMCA and health insurer UnitedHealth Group, just eight years after the publication of a landmark study in the New England Journal of Medicine. That study demonstrated that with the right program and coaching, people at high risk for diabetes could successfully lose enough weight for a long enough time to significantly reduce their risk.

More specifically, the intensive lifestyle intervention, which recommended 150 minutes of exercise per week and a weight loss goal of just 7 percent, reduced the incidence of diabetes by 58 percent. This was — and is — significant at a time when obesity has reached epidemic proportions in the United States, when some 24 million Americans have Type 2 diabetes, and when an estimated 60 million Americans are prediabetic, most of them without even knowing it.

It’s another epidemic in the making.

Diabetes Translation Research Center. The center was created with a mission to “address the gap between developmental and clinical trial research and ‘real-world’ implementation relevant to diabetes.” The diabetes prevention study published in the NEJM in 2002 was conducted at 27 sites, including Indianapolis, where Marrero, the J. O. Ritchey Professor of medicine, was principal investigator. Ackermann, a physician and associate professor of medicine, joined the IUSM in 2003.

During the past decade, Ackermann, Marrero, and their colleagues have made the IU School of Medicine a leader in researching and designing real-world diabetes prevention programs that work. That effort has required addressing some significant problems. First, if you can’t give everyone their own lifestyle coach, how do you translate the program into a group setting, and where? And second, who pays for it?

The answer to the first question turned out to be an unconventional research partner — the YMCA.

Real-world research It would seem to be a no-brainer to take the prescriptive techniques of the NEJM study and implement them broadly, except for one problem. In the study, the participants were provided with individual coaching and counseling, but it’s impossible to provide one-on-one lifestyle coaching to millions of prediabetic Americans.

Which brings us to Indiana University School of Medicine researchers David Marrero and Ronald Ackermann, the director and associate director, respectively, of the school’s

The Y factor The YMCA was a good match because it’s everywhere. There are nearly 2,700 YMCAs across the country, with 57 percent of American households within three miles of a YMCA. The YMCA-United Health program is being implemented in seven cities in 2010, adding 25 more cities over the next two years.

“It’s in our DNA to be involved in healthy living,” said Jonathan Lever, national director of Activate America for the YMCA, during the diabetes conference in April. “We have the reach to make a difference.”

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by Eric Schoch

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Photo by Eric Schoch

Indiana University

David Marrero, left, and Ronald Ackermann are director and co-director, respectively, of the IU School of Medicine’s Diabetes Translation Research Center. The center is located in the Health Information and Translational Sciences building along Indianapolis’s downtown canal, a favored route for runners and walkers. Exercise is an important part of the successful diabetes prevention program Marrero and Ackermann have helped to design.

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In Indianapolis, the diabetes prevention research reported in 2002 was conducted at the National Institute for Fitness and Sport, a highly respected, but not inexpensive, facility next to the Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis campus. The study’s lifestyle coaches had master’s degree-level training. The one-on-one counseling was accompanied by incentives for the participants, such as free shoes, water bottles, and modest cash rewards for achieving certain goals.

Moving the program to a community-based organization meant changing some aspects of the program, Ackermann says. There were no more incentives, for example. Dropping them reduced participation of those referred to the program to about 65 percent, down from about 95 percent in the original study. More significantly, the program changed from one-onone coaching to group sessions of about 10 people.

What didn’t change, Ackermann says, was the core curriculum of 16 sessions, 60 to 90 minutes each, focusing on detailed behavioral strategies to reach a 5 to 7 percent weight loss by carefully tracking and reducing fat consumption and exercising at least 150 minutes a week. These sessions are not simple lectures, but intensive intervention programs with regular

assignments and feedback, designed to give people tools they need to change their eating and exercise lifestyles.

The DPP Lifestyle Change Program Manual of Operations, developed in 1996 at the University of Pittsburgh, runs more than 460 detailed pages of advice, facts, and strategies. (For example: Avoid tasting foods when cooking, and if you do it, immediately cleanse your mouth with water or a breath mint.

Or: Do some role-playing to practice friendly but firm ways to ask for low-fat alternatives when ordering at restaurants.)

So could an intensive, costly, one-on-one diabetes prevention program necessitating behavior change be successfully implemented at a community-based organization in group sessions?

In a word: Yes. Proof positive In the October 2008 issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, Ackermann and Marrero reported results of a study in which a group of prediabetic individuals followed the core diabetes prevention curriculum at a YMCA using trained lay instructors, while a control group received standard diabetes prevention advice.

Doing the numbers While Schenetzke was willing to pay for the program at the Y’s non-member rates, the key to widespread participation is making such programs part of the health-care reimbursement system. The IU scientists say the research makes it clear that even modest weight loss significantly reduces the risk of dia-

betes (16 percent for every two pounds of weight loss), and that the results would be cost effective.

“We know we can prevent diabetes, we know we can reduce that incidence significantly by almost 60 percent. The question is, How do the costs of the program get covered?” says Marrero. “The program is cost effective, it can save money. It’s all that and a bag of chips, as my dad used to say.”

If current trends continue, it’s projected that the $205 billion spent on direct total medical costs for diabetes patients in the United States in 2007 will grow to $338 billion by 2020.

“It’s big-ticket, big-dollar expenditures stuff. If we don’t stop, it will blow us out of the water,” says Marrero.

The economics of reimbursing the costs of diabetes prevention would work. In a 2006 study, Ackermann and colleagues reported that according to their model of costs, reimbursements, and health-care outcomes, if Medicare were permitted to reimburse for group diabetes prevention programs starting at age 50, a combination of coverage by the federal program, private insurers, and relatively small payments by patients or employers would more than pay for itself for both insurers and Medicare.

Medicare cannot yet reimburse for programs targeting people under age 65, but UnitedHealth Group isn’t waiting.

It’s implementing diabetes programs through the prevention program with the YMCA and through a diabetes control program with the Walgreens pharmacy chain.

“We want people to understand this is prevention that will be paid for. We are buying outcomes, because if we do not get that 5 to 7 percent weight loss, we will not get the risk reduction,” said Deneen Vojta, senior vice president of the UnitedHealth Center for Health Reform and Modernization, at the April diabetes conference.

As the IU research starts to be implemented on a national scale, Ackermann nonetheless sees the problem as much larger than effectively preventing diabetes among high-risk people willing and able to participate in an intensive 16-session program at the YMCA. The diabetes risk is increasing in every age group in parallel with obesity trends, Ackermann points out, and that tide must be reversed.

“We need environmental policies and social policies and things that go along with [such policies] that make it the norm to live a healthier life, easier to eat healthy foods, easier to be physically active in the workplace and around the home,” Ackermann says. “Our society needs to change, and if this program is the only thing making that change, it’s going to take a long time. I don’t think it can by itself.”

Nevertheless, the IU School of Medicine-tested program suggests that, with the right tools people can be convinced to change, just enough, to make a difference.

Eric Schoch is a science writer in the Office of Public and Media Relations at the IU School of Medicine in Indianapolis.

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After six months, the intervention group participants had seen a mean weight loss of about 6 percent, or 12.5 pounds, compared to 2 percent, or 4 pounds, for the control group — a clinically significant difference. During follow-up visits at 12 months, the differences persisted.

These results caught the attention of officials at the National Institutes of Health. Intrigued, they asked the IU group to resume follow-up efforts. By then, eight months had passed and the average weight loss for the intervention participants had dropped to about 5 percent, but was still significantly higher than the control group.

The researchers decided to put everyone into the prevention program, and they made 12 more visits in eight months.

At the end of 28 months, the original intervention group participants were back to more than 6 percent weight loss, and those who had moved from the standard advice control group into the intervention program were showing more than 3 percent weight loss.

In the wake of this research, the Indianapolis YMCA incorporated the diabetes effort into its regular programming.

For Indianapolis resident Marilyn Schenetzke, 67, the program worked. Worried that her weight, her history of gestational diabetes, and a family history of diabetes put her at increased risk for the disease, she signed up for the 16-week program at the Jordan YMCA in hopes that the program would succeed where others had not.

“You name it, I’ve done it,” Schenetzke says. What she did this time was lose 49 pounds and keep it off, within a range of about five pounds. The program format worked for her: a small supportive group, discussions about the psychological aspects of eating and overeating, and lessons on keeping careful written accounts of what she ate and the calorie counts of each food.

What also worked for Schenetzke was the focus on health: “The focus isn’t on getting in a bathing suit or losing weight before you go to your high school reunion,” she says.

Then there was the exercise — at least 150 minutes per week. Schenetzke did it, “and that was a big change for me, because I’ve always hated exercise.

“I still hate it,” she continues. “But I was committed to doing what they told me I needed to do, and I was really determined that I wasn’t going to be obese anymore. Before I took the class, if I took a shower I was out of breath. Now I can walk for a mile, a mile and a half, even two miles, with no problems. It’s a big difference.”

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Indiana University

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Multiple

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Choice

by Leigh Krietsch Boerner

Strawberry or vanilla?

The child of an engineer, Busemeyer had always been interested in math, but he found himself wanting a profession that affected people more. He wanted to be a scientist and have some kind of great scientific idea. “I liked psychology, and I wanted to be doing something more with humans than engineering,” he says.

Busemeyer effectively combined his two main interests by deciding to pursue mathematical psychology, a discipline in which scientists develop mathematical models to try to explain how we decide.

“I developed a theory of decision making called decision field theory, which provides a more psychological description of the decision-making process,” he says. Busemeyer’s theory contrasts with economic theories, which provide the foundation for microeconomics and management theories as well as statistical decision theory.

“The history is, economists were developing rational theories, while the psychologists were doing experiments to show that the rational theories failed. But the psychologists never came up with their own theories,” Busemeyer says.

To a psychologist, something is considered rational if it follows very specific axioms, one of which is called transitivity. To grasp transitivity, consider common ice cream preferences. Most people prefer vanilla to chocolate and chocolate to strawberry. So given a choice between vanilla and strawberry, rational theory would say that vanilla wins every time.

But in reality, people will often choose strawberry over vanilla. “When you actually study decision making in a laboratory, humans don’t obey these rules of rational decision theory,” Busemeyer says.

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ow does a person decide to study how humans decide?

For Jerome Busemeyer, it really wasn’t much of a choice. To him, how we decide is the ultimate essence of being a person.

“That’s how we get in trouble, that’s how we get rich, that’s how we make wars, that’s how we get married. Decision making is the most important human activity,” says Busemeyer, professor of psychological and brain sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences at Indiana University Bloomington and a faculty member in the interdisciplinary cognitive science program.

Yet understanding decision making is a very complex process. Psychologists develop laboratory tests that present subjects with a series of decisions, and researchers analyze the results to see if they fit the current models. Scientists make new models that fit the data better, then test these models in the laboratory. Psychologists like Busemeyer are constantly coming up with new models and theories to predict our decision-making processes.

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Still, psychologists weren’t coming up with theories to replace the rational ones, so Busemeyer decided he would. With his colleague Jim Townsend, he came up with a new approach.

“I’ve tried to develop a mathematical theory comparable in rigor to the economic theory, that better describes the actual psychological decision making process rather than the ideal,” Busemeyer says.

Say you have to make a medical decision, Busemeyer suggests. You have a bad back, and your doctor has offered a couple of treatment options. You could have surgery, which would be invasive and painful and may or may not make your back better. Or you could continue on your current course, which is to get physical therapy. This is OK, but it means that you still have

sion, you might not think through all the consequences. If you deliberate longer, it may cost you time and effort to collect the information, but you make a more accurate decision. So I’ve tried to develop a theory that’s more dynamic in nature than the traditional economic theories.”

The development of this theory is probably what Busemeyer is best known for. So far, that is. Because he has an updated theory now, and it’s a bit more unconventional. He calls it quantum cognition.

Certainly uncertain Quantum cognition is not the idea that our brain acts as a quantum computer. That’s something completely different that

“

[Quantum theory] captured my intuition about the real ambiguity people have when they’re trying to make a decision.

I’ve always been interested in why decisions are uncertain, why they are probabilistic, why we change our minds.”

Indiana University

Jerome Busemeyer, professor of psychological and brain sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences at IU Bloomington

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pain, and it keeps you from doing certain things you like to do like jogging and bowling. And the pain might get worse. Your choice is a gamble. Either way could lead to continued back pain. So what do you do?

The classic model for making this decision offers a very static kind of analysis, Busemeyer says. “You have a fixed set of probabilities of things that will happen, you have a fixed set of evaluations, and you just multiply the probabilities by the evaluations.”

Then you just pick the best outcome, and you’ve got your decision. But does it really happen like that? Busemeyer doesn’t think so.

“Decision making is a dynamic process that evolves across time,” he says. “As you’re thinking about different consequences and collecting information, at some point your preferences become strong enough, and you feel confident enough to make the decision.”

This gradual process is crucial to an accurate description of decision making, according to Busemeyer, and it’s a central part of his decision field theory model.

“The evolution process is critical for decision making. In fact, how much time you take to make the decision can affect the type of decision that you make,” he says. “If you make a decision very quickly, you might make an inaccurate deci-

Busemeyer says he doesn’t necessarily agree with. Instead, his idea was to take the mathematics that describe quantum phenomena and apply them to decision making.

Busemeyer first became interested in quantum theory when predoctoral student Jay Myung joined his lab. Myung earned an undergraduate degree in physics and a master’s degree in biochemistry before getting his PhD in mathematical psychology. (Mathematical psychologists are very open to different students, Busemeyer notes. As long as they have a math background, they can learn the psychology.) When Myung went to the blackboard one day and told Busemeyer all about quantum mechanics, Busemeyer was fascinated.

“It really piqued my interest, so I started reading quantum theory as kind of a hobby. I didn’t like not knowing anything about what seemed so interesting to Jay,” Busemeyer says.

In physics, quantum theory is a way to describe the behavior of objects that are very, very small. An object the size of, say, a baseball, obeys classical Newtonian physics: when you drop the ball, it goes down. You can see where the ball is and how fast it’s going, the act of looking at the ball doesn’t disturb the ball, and so on.

But when the objects are the size of electrons and photons, which are particles of light, different rules apply. Rules like the Heisenberg uncertainly principle, which says you can know an

“It captured my intuition about the real ambiguity people have when they’re trying to make a decision,” Busemeyer says.

“I’ve always been interested in why decisions are uncertain, why they are probabilistic, why we change our minds.”

Imagine you’re sitting on a jury, Busemeyer says, and you have to make up your mind about the guilt or innocence of the defendant. You hear evidence from each side, the prosecution and the defense, as the trial progresses. Ideally, you start out with the belief that the defendant is not guilty. But as time goes on, what are you thinking?

“Your belief, your probability of thinking the defendant is guilty or not guilty, is changing across time,” Busemeyer says.

“You can imagine different levels of guilty or not guilty. At one point, you’re in a clear state that the person is guilty, at another point, you’re in a clear state that the person is not guilty. You jump back and forth between clear states. That’s the classic model.”

So if the trial stopped at a given time, you would have a certain level of belief, say eight out of 10, that the defendant is guilty. But in a quantum model, things are quite different, and more accurate, in Busemeyer’s view. Instead of being in a clear state of thinking the defendant is guilty, the quantum model says you’re in an ambiguous state. “[The quantum model says that] at any moment in time,

your belief is smeared-out, like a wave,” he says. “You’re kind of thinking they’re guilty, and you’re kind of thinking they’re not guilty. You’re feeling both at the same time. You can’t say you’re clearly in one state.”

This is the idea of superposition, and it has become a main tenet of Busemeyer’s quantum cognition idea.

As a juror in the above scenario, at any moment, you could be asked by the judge for your verdict. Classic theory says that at the specific time the judge asks you, you are in a clear state of knowing your decision.

“If you say guilty, you were in the clear guilty state, and the judge happened to catch you when you were in that clear state,” Busemeyer says. “But in a quantum model, when that judge asks you that question, you are not in any crystal-clear state.”

Instead, the act of the judge asking you what your verdict is forces you to make up your mind and so creates the state of your belief, which didn’t exist before the judge asked you. It’s a subtle idea, Busemeyer says, but an important one. Instead of just recording a decision you already had, as in the classic model, the judge is actually causing your decision to come into existence.

“In the quantum model, you’re not in any particular confident state. You have the potential to be anywhere,” Busemeyer says. “Some states are more likely than others, have more potential than others, but you feel both the guilt and innocence at the same moment in time, and you can’t say whether you’re for one or the other.”

But because you were forced to make a decision, you instantly jump to a specific state, one that wasn’t there a moment before. While this superposition — being in multiple states at the same time — is the quantum idea in physics, Busemeyer says it’s a potent psychological idea, too.

According to Busemeyer, the superposition/quantum idea captures how we think when we’re trying to make a decision. It expresses the uncertainty, both in the usual and quantum definitions of the word, that we have in trying to decide.

“My original decision field theory was trying to capture this uncertainty in a classical dynamical process that evolves across time,” Busemeyer says. And while he was satisfied with that idea, he now likes quantum theory, “because I think it captures my feeling when I’m really conflicted about a decision,” he says. “It’s a different kind of logic.”

So is quantum cognition that great scientific idea that Busemeyer aimed for as a kid?

“Well,” he says, “I think this quantum cognition idea is the best bet I have for realizing my dream.”

Leigh Krietsch Boerner is a doctoral student in chemistry at IU Bloomington, a freelance science writer, and certain in her preference for strawberry ice cream.

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Photo by Ann Schertz

electron’s position, or you can know its velocity, but you can’t know both at once. Or wave particle duality, which says sometimes a photon acts like a particle, but sometimes it acts like a wave. Or superposition, which says if there are multiple states that a particle can be in, it’s possible for the particle to be in all the different states at the same time.

When these unusual properties were first observed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, physicists had to work out a whole new type of math to describe their behavior. That new math was dubbed quantum theory. When Busemeyer learned about it, he immediately thought that some quantum ideas could also accurately describe results he was seeing in the lab.

He was particularly interested in the concept of superposition.

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Indiana University

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Polar_Bear_Swimming.JPG

by Sara Schrock

Learning principles Timberlake’s commitment to studying both learning and behavior took root in graduate school at the University of Michigan, when he became interested in an empirical principle of reinforcement proposed by David Premack. Simply stated, the Premack principle predicted that, given two behaviors, a high probability behavior (something done frequently under conditions of free choice) could reinforce a lower probability behavior (something less preferred or less likely). For example, if you want your child to make her bed more often (bed-making has a low baseline probability for most children), Premack’s principle suggests that you tell your daughter she can go out to play with her friend (playing is a high probability response) after she makes her bed.

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ill Timberlake has always been curious about animals. “My mother admitted that she regretted the day I was no longer confined to a stroller on our walks,” he says. “It started taking us an hour to walk a block because I didn’t want to hold her hand and was always looking around, especially at the animals.”

That natural curiosity has continued throughout Timberlake’s 40-year career in research and teaching on the learning and behavior of animals, which includes co-founding the internationally known Center for the Integrative Study of Animal Behavior at Indiana University Bloomington.

Timberlake is a professor of neuroscience and cognitive science in the College of Arts and Sciences’ Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at IU Bloomington. He also is an adjunct professor of biology and director of the Behavior Systems and Learning Lab. In his research, Timberlake and his students have studied animal species ranging from ring doves and chickens to polar bears, penguins, and domestic Norway rats. Along the way, his research has helped to reframe abstract laws of learning that guided research in psychology for more than a century and clarify how theorists and practitioners can take into account the different systems of behavior that species bring to learning problems.

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Photo by Ann Schertz

“

A ‘behavior systems’ approach emphasizes the importance of evolutionary ecology in determining what kinds of learning occur and how they are expressed.”

William Timberlake, professor emeritus of psychology, cognitive science, and neuroscience in the College of Arts and Sciences at IU Bloomington

Indiana University

Although Premack’s approach did not explain why certain behaviors reinforced others, it was treated as a practical empirical guide to modifying behavior.

Soon after arriving at IU Bloomington, Timberlake began a research collaboration with IU colleague James Allison that revised and expanded Premack’s principle. Essentially, the researchers found that the relative probability of two behaviors was not the key variable to producing reinforcement. Instead, they showed that restricting access to the more probable behavior below its preferred level can serve to reinforce that behavior.

For example, if your daughter likes to play with her friend for an hour every day, you could restrict play time to 15 minutes each day. This schedule pushes play time below your daughter’s preferred level, so to get more play time, she’ll make her bed more regularly.

Timberlake and Allison called their analysis of reinforcement the “response deprivation approach.” Their theoretical paper on the subject, published in Psychological Review in 1974, had a significant impact on the behavioral research field.

“The response deprivation hypothesis stimulated much research and significantly contributed to the development of behavior regulation theories of reinforcement,” says Michael Domjan, former chair of the University of Texas psychology department and author of a widely used introductory learning textbook.

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Evolution, ecology, and behavior Timberlake’s work on baselines of behavior led him to question other theories of behavior, particularly as they applied to rats. He began to compare predictions expected under simple conditioning theories with what could be expected of rats based on their evolutionary ecology.

A World War II-era study by researcher J.B. Calhoun — undertaken when the U.S. government noticed that more than half of the food stored for troops around the globe was being eaten by rodents, particularly rats — affirmed that rats are highly social organisms, living in burrows connected to each other and to food locations by paths. These paths provided quick escape routes from predators as well as opportunities for social interaction with other rats. Subsequent work on both wild and “domesticated” rats clarified that rats learn what foods to eat by checking food odors on the breath and fur of adults they encounter.

The prevailing view of conditioning at the time—the stimulus substitution view—said rats would approach and manipulate or gnaw on an experimental cue that predicted (or, substituted for) the imminent delivery of food. Based on observations of rats’ social foraging, however, Timberlake and then-undergraduate student Doug Grant predicted that rats in the lab would act as if they were in a colony — first approaching and sniffing the breath and coat of a stimulus rat, only approaching a food source when the stimulus rat was withdrawn.

To test this prediction, Timberlake and Grant presented a predictive stimulus rat (constrained to a platform) to a subject rat for 10 seconds before delivering food in a nearby place.

As the researchers expected, the subject rats approached the constrained rat, sniffed it at both ends and the middle, and waited patiently beside it until it was removed, only then heading for the food source.

“It worked like a champ,” says Timberlake. “It only took a short period of training to get the rats to predict when food was coming based on the presence of another rat.”

In contrast, when exposed to either a rat-sized wood block, a juvenile rat (in the wild, young rats are largely ignored as inexperienced predictors of food sources), or an adult rat not predicting food, the subject rats rarely approached or greeted any of these, but spent their time hanging around the food location.

These results — published in the leading journal Science — encouraged Timberlake to continue his explorations into what he called a “behavior systems” approach to learning. This approach “emphasizes the importance of evolutionary ecology in determining what kinds of learning occur and how they are expressed,” Timberlake says.

Subsequent research on species ranging from grasshopper mice to bantam chickens made it clear that the evolutionary ecology and related response-and-stimulus repertoires of a species are critical determinants of behavior in learning experiments. For example, rats are path-followers even when it is not efficient in searching for food while kangaroo rats are not, so maze-like paths to food make rats look “smart,” while fixed spatial locations for food make kangaroo rats look “smart.”

“Timberlake’s behavior systems approach managed to integrate two previously independent lines of research,” observes Ralph Miller, a distinguished professor and chair of the psychology department at the State University of New York,

Pacing polar bears, sucking walruses Among animals in zoos, it is not uncommon for many species to engage in repetitive stereotyped behaviors. For example, starting in mid-afternoon, a polar bear may pace back and forth in one small area at the back of the exhibit or swim endless laps in a pool. In another exhibit, a walrus may repetitively suck on its flipper or on the caulking around the underwater viewing window.

“These repetitive behaviors are called stereotypies, and they’re disturbing to many zoo visitors,” Timberlake says, noting that the behaviors can be harmful to both the animal and the environment. The cause of these behaviors, however, is not entirely understood.

“Stereotypies are usually attributed solely to the stress of captivity and artificial environments,” Timberlake says, “rather than being carefully examined to understand how they may relate to species foraging systems.”

Recently, IU Bloomington graduate student Eduardo Fernandez (now a postdoctoral researcher at the Washington Zoo in Seattle) and Timberlake saw an opportunity to apply knowledge of evolutionary ecology and behavior systems to reduce or eliminate stereotypies among zoo animals.

“A big ‘voila’ moment occurred when we were watching some underwater footage of one of the polar bears in late afternoon,” says Timberlake. “The bear swam back and forth in the pool, on its back in one direction, nose breaking the surface, then nose to the pool bottom in the other direction, then repeat, and repeat, and repeat.”

It suddenly occurred to Timberlake that the behavior of the bear resembled that of rats running doggedly in an activity wheel for several hours prior to the arrival of their daily food ration, so he asked when the bears were fed.

When the zookeepers confirmed that the bears were fed one large meal a day around 5:30 p.m., Timberlake guessed that the polar bear stereotypies were associated with the mammalian circadian feeding clock. The bears’ behavior was what would be expected of a large hunting carnivore who daily searches for food.

“Fernandez and I call the search stereotypies preceding the appearance of food ‘open-loop foraging behaviors,’” says Timberlake. “To reduce them, we needed to help zookeepers find a way to reliably close or disrupt the loop.”

To reduce the polar bears’ pacing and circular swimming, the researchers threw tiny bits of food (half-inch bits) into the exhibit every five or 10 minutes, keeping the bears busy and interested. “When we tried it with one bear, the bear decreased its stereotyped pacing and increased its use of the exhibit space,” says Timberlake. He notes that he would also like to try occupying a polar bear with an imitation seal to stalk, but he hasn’t quite figured out how, yet.

The two scientists (and student volunteers) also tried to reduce swimming and sucking stereotypies in walruses. In their natural habitat, walruses find food by searching through sand beds on the ocean floor for marine mollusks, using their flippers and tusks to stir sand and squirting water from their mouths. In the zoo, food was often presented by just tossing a food item into the water. After initial interest, the walruses would swim in circles or suck on the window caulking (or in the case of one walrus, its front flipper).

“We tried to devise a way to introduce food that might better produce foraging behavior shown in the wild,” Timberlake says, “rather than simply tossing a bucket of mollusks into the pool.” The most successful strategy for feeding the walruses turned out to be a large plastic “boomer ball” toy with multiple holes filled with food pieces. In one brief trial, a walrus manipulated the ball with its flippers and sucked on it to ingest the food, decreasing its stereotypies.

A rich legacy Timberlake’s curiosity about what organisms bring to learning situations in the laboratory has led to research collaborations with many students and colleagues. “Because of my students,” Timberlake says, “I often wind up doing something interesting that I hadn’t previously considered, like the ability of rats to intercept cat odors, reason causally, use complex mixtures of spatial mechanisms, and show a circadian basis for the addictive qualities of drugs. I owe my students a great debt for keeping things interesting.”

In 1990, with the help of colleagues and two successful five-year National Science Foundation grants for researchtraining groups, Timberlake and Ellen Ketterson, who is Distinguished Professor of biology and gender studies at IU Bloomington, founded the interdisciplinary Center for the Integrative Study of Animal Behavior and the Animal Behavior Program to foster the study of animal behavior across departments and programs ranging from anthropology and psychology to neuroscience and robotics. Beginning in 1994, Timberlake also collaborated with colleagues to obtain NSF funding to train undergraduates each summer as part of the NSF’s Research Experiences for Undergraduates. The CISAB program is now the longest continuously funded NSF REU site.

“At Bill’s prodding, we developed a core curriculum in animal behavior and created a graduate minor and graduate certificate in animal behavior,“ says Ketterson. “The curriculum includes an interdisciplinary seminar, a course in professional ethics, and a seminar to introduce new students to participating faculty and their research — all a part of Bill’s vision for the program.

“Because of Bill’s efforts, the educational opportunities in animal behavior at IU are richer by far.”

Sara Schrock is a freelance science writer in Bloomington, Ind.

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Binghamton. “He has been in the forefront of translating principles of learning into ecological situations.”

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Indiana University 20

Why we walk this way

by Jeremy Shere

Anthropologist Kevin Hunt’s research on the origins of human bipedalism takes him from IU Bloomington classrooms to wooded chimp habitats in east Africa.

ape-like brain, apish long limbs, and a squat, wide-hipped torso. But the fossilized remains clearly showed that Lucy was bipedal — a trait that separated her from other apes and pushed the advent of upright walking well before humans developed big brains and began using stone tools.

Beyond establishing the fact that the earliest human walked on two legs, though, Lucy did little to broach the question of why. Why did Lucy and her cohorts move toward upright walking while the apes from which they’d branched off continued to trundle around using their knuckles?

By the time Hunt began his research, several theories had taken root. One posited that bipedalism evolved as a way of freeing up the hands for gathering and carrying food. Another theory — known as the thermoregulatory, or heat stress, theory — held that because temperatures are hotter closer to the ground, ancient humans stood up as a way of cooling off. Walking upright may have exposed less of our ancestors’ bodies to the blazing African sun. Other theories included the influence of monogamy among early humans, threat displays (where apes rear up on their legs and wave their arms in a threatening manner to ward off enemies), and even the notion that bipedalism began as a sort of fashion that simply caught on and was propagated through sexual selection.

As Hunt knew well when he began his research, none of these theories were supported by observations in the field.

Some researchers had gathered data by studying chimps in zoos — a method complicated by the fact that what chimps do in captivity bears little resemblance to their natural behavior.

But like many young anthropologists at the time, Hunt subscribed to the heat-stress hypothesis, or at least found its logic compelling. It didn’t take long, though, for Hunt’s field research to poke holes in the theory. Camped out at his observation post day after day, Hunt recorded the chimps’ every move, paying special attention to what happened when they

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Photo by Kevin Hunt

Into Africa During graduate school at the University of Michigan in the mid-1980s, Hunt realized that the best way to explore the history of bipedalism was by studying modern-day chimps. If he could observe how and why chimps occasionally reared up on two legs, Hunt reasoned, he would better understand the conditions under which early humans first began walking upright.

At first, though, Hunt had no intention of actually going to Africa. He was an anatomist, not a field researcher, and was hoping to crib off the work of the Jane Goodall-types out in the jungle. “But when I started casting around for data about chimp locomotion, there just wasn’t any,” Hunt recalls. So he was left with no choice but to brave the bush and see for himself how chimps behave in the wild. While still a graduate student, he set off for two sites in Africa: Mahale Mountains National Park and Gombe Stream National Park, both in Tanzania, to study chimp groups.

Hunt was hardly the first anthropologist to venture into Africa in search of clues about the lives of ancient humans and the origins of bipedalism. Darwin thought bipedalism might be related to tool use. When South African anthropologist Raymond Dart discovered an African fossil skull known as the Taung child in the 1920s, its combination of a small brain and evidence of upright walking threw doubt on the idea that such an ape-like creature used tools. Scientists are still puzzling over the question.

Interest ratcheted up in 1974, when anthropologists discovered the partial skeleton of a 3 million-year-old hominid dubbed Lucy. In most ways, Lucy was an ape — she had a small,

Photo by Aaron Bernstein, courtesy of Indiana University

W

hen Kevin Hunt was in high school in the 1970s, he noticed something odd about people — they walk upright. Why, the curious science-minded teen wondered, do humans walk around straight and tall on two legs when virtually every other animal on earth — including our evolutionary cousins, the apes — moves around hunched over on four limbs?

“It seems natural to most people, but I was always struck by how peculiar it is that we walk the way we do,” says Hunt, professor of anthropology in the College of Arts and Sciences and director of the Human Origins and Primate Evolution Laboratory at Indiana University Bloomington. “I find bipedalism bizarre.”

Hunt’s curiosity has carried him through a career-long quest to discover the evolutionary origins of bipedalism. Along the way he has spent years tracking wild chimpanzees through African jungles, helped cast doubt on several leading explanations of bipedalism, and crafted a powerful theory of his own.

“How we came to walk upright is still a mystery, but we’re getting closer to finding the answer,” Hunt says. “The more opportunity we have to study chimps in the wild, the closer we’ll get.”

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Indiana University

were in the sun. After two years and more than 18,000 observations, he came to the conclusion that the heat-stress hypothesis didn’t hold up, for one very simple reason.

“The chimps weren’t in the sun,” Hunt says, shaking his head. “The hypothesis was that when chimps moved into the sun, they’d stand up to minimize sunlight falling on their bodies. But before I was there two months, I could see that this wasn’t happening, because in general, chimps stay in the shade.”

Hunt’s fieldwork didn’t directly support any of the other popular theories, either. Watching chimps move, he was reminded of lab studies that showed their walking was an inefficient, impractical means of long-distance locomotion. Early humans like Lucy, with their wide hips and short legs, would have encountered similar difficulties. The idea that early, chimp-like humans stood up in order to pick and eat seeds from tall African grasses fell apart before the observed fact that rather than stand, chimps sit and bend the grass down to get at the seeds.

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Not like the movies While Hunt did not immediately uncover the secrets of upright walking, it wasn’t long before he discovered that observing chimps in the wild bore little resemblance to Hollywood’s treatment of famous primatologists such as Jane Goodall. In the movies, the hero is usually a solitary scientist alone in the pristine jungle communing with the apes. In reality, Hunt says, much of a field researcher’s time is spent in camp dealing with the mundane details of managing finances, dealing with local authorities, and shoring up supplies. “You have to create a mini-village with people always around, because if you leave camp unattended, animals will eat all your food,” he says.

Even getting close to and observing chimps is mostly tedious work, Hunt admits. While documentaries about Goodall are full of exciting, blissful, sometimes scary moments, the footage is culled from more than 20 years of film.

“It can be exciting when you get chased by elephants or come across a water buffalo or run into poachers or terrorist rebels, but the chimps themselves are not terribly exciting,” Hunt says. “They wake up, scratch, pee, poop, walk slowly, pass gas, climb trees, and eat fruit.” Chimps do exciting things like fight only a fraction of the time. Mostly, Hunt says, they just sit around not doing much of anything.

Yet despite their low-key lifestyle, Hunt learned to marvel at wild chimps for their amazingly human characteristics.

Once, Hunt followed two male chimps into a clearing, where they rested and groomed each other. Later, when one of the two males he had been following got up to head into the forest, just before disappearing into the foliage, he offered the subtlest of gestures to his companion, who promptly rose and followed the leader into the bush. “It struck me as an entirely human exchange,” Hunt says. “Chimps’ emotional lives are very similar to ours. They have the same facial expressions, the same desire

for social interaction and companionship.”

At other times, though, Hunt was reminded of just how different humans and chimps are. Once, while following a large male into a riverbed, Hunt watched as the chimp picked up a sizeable log with one hand and flung it several feet in a typical social display. When the troupe had moved on, Hunt waded into the river and found the log. Assuming it was rotten and therefore lightweight, Hunt was astonished to find that he could barely lift the log with both hands.

“A full-grown male chimp may be three times as strong as a man of similar size, and we’re not sure why,” Hunt says.

What Hunt is sure of, though, or at least strongly suspects, is that chimps’ bodily proportions may hold the key to explaining the evolution of bipedalism.

Unraveling the mystery When Hunt returned from his first African adventure and began poring over the data he’d collected, he noticed something peculiar. Although only a hundred or so observations of chimps involved bipedalism, out of tens of thousands, they exhibited a clear pattern. Whenever chimps were standing up on two legs, they were feeding. They were either on the ground reaching up to pick fruits, or balancing on slender branches while hanging onto an overhanging limb with one hand and gathering fruit with the other.

Good Vibrations W

hen it comes to mating behavior among insects, it’s often all about good vibrations.

Entomologist Randy Hunt specializes in the study of vibrational communication among insects, particularly the signals used by leafhoppers and treehoppers, which involve complex transmission, using plants, of vibrations that far exceed the range of human perception. According to Hunt, the mating signals of these insects can help address some important questions in evolutionary biology.

Recently, Hunt, associate professor of biology at Indiana University Southeast, and colleagues from University of Missouri and University of Wisconsin completed a multi-year study, supported by the National Science Foundation, in which they used treehoppers as a model system to study speciation. Speciation is the process by which new species evolve. In the study, recently published in the Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, Hunt and his colleagues recorded male treehoppers from across the eastern United States, evaluating variations in the

Jeremy Shere is a freelance writer in Bloomington, Ind. He is working on a book about alternative energies.

Male Enchenopa binotata

that specialize on redbud trees. When two leafhopper males are competing for a female, one of them “usually emits a loud, hoarse call that overlaps normal signals exchanged by the other male and female,” Hunt explains.

The exact conditions that prompt the jamming haven’t been determined, though, nor has the impact of the jamming on mating success. But size may matter.

“At present, we’re attempting to assess whether relative male size determines if a male will adopt a jamming strategy and the effectiveness of that jamming in gaining a mating advantage,” Hunt says.

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males’ mating signals according to the host plant on which the insect was situated.

“We studied the question of whether male mating signals covary more with geography or host plant usage,” Hunt says.

The researchers found that the “advertisement signals” of male treehoppers did vary significantly, depending on the host plant. For example, a male on a Viburnum lentago shrub will emit a different-sounding mating signal than a male on, say, a walnut tree. The researchers found especially strong shifts in the signal frequency, which is one of the treehopper traits that plays a critical role in mate recognition.

“Host plant use explains most of the variation in signals among the several species studied,” Hunt says.

Hunt notes that other studies also have shown that plants can affect the properties of a signal and that plants differ in which frequencies they transmit best. Such signal variation supports the idea that changes in mating signals, due to shifts in host plants, play an important role in the process of new species forming. Signal changes, driven by the plant, could affect how females respond and select preferred males. And when females change their mating selection, new species of treehoppers may emerge.

Hunt and his students are now “going in some new directions,” he says. For the past year, they’ve been examining whether reproductive interference involving the use of “vibrational jamming signals” occurs in certain species of leafhoppers

set up camp, and began studying chimps there. In the decade and a half since, Hunt has identified 31 chimps belonging to a single troupe — the largest such social group known to science.

“It’s possible that there are two groups sharing the same territory, which seems unlikely because chimps are so violent toward rivals,” Hunt says. “But there’s a chance we may have found a group of peaceful chimps. Because the area is so open and resources are so spread out, the chimps may have found that they’re best served by working together instead of warring.”

As for supporting his hypothesis, Hunt has made limited progress. Due to ongoing terrorism and other regional problems, his time in the field has been sporadic, and without direct observation, it’s difficult to move knowledge forward.

But Hunt remains hopeful that he’ll soon be able to spend more time with the chimps.

“I’m still compelled by the fact that somehow, at some point in our long history, we stood up and began walking around on two legs,” Hunt says. “The more I watch chimps in the wild, the closer I feel I come to understanding how and why that happened.”

Photo courtesy of Randy Hunt, IU Southeast

“It struck me, even based on such a small sample, that bipedalism may have had something to do with the ability of early humans to reach food,” Hunt says. “Our earliest ancestors’ short legs and wide hips, which weren’t good for walking long distances, also meant they had a lower center of gravity, which would have helped them balance while moving around on two legs in trees with thin branches.”

Hunt’s theory, now known as the “postural feeding hypothesis,” was also supported by the fact that Lucy and her ilk — known as Australopithecus afarensis — had ape-like long arms and curved fingers and toes specially adapted for gripping.

In short, Hunt’s theory supposed that bipedalism evolved when a particular species of ancient ape found itself stranded in a relatively dry habitat with smaller trees and discovered it was advantageous to be able to balance on fragile branches while foraging for food. Apes better able to stand tall while balancing found more food and thus had a higher likelihood of surviving and passing on their genes to the next generation.

Apes who weren’t as good at standing and balancing got less food, and so eventually died out.

One problem with Hunt’s hypothesis was that it was based on so few direct observations. To shore up the postural feeding theory, he needed to observe chimps in dry, lightly wooded habitats. In 1996, Hunt found a promising spot in east Africa,

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Photo courtesy of Caleb Weintraub

‘Humanity where none exists’

Indiana University

D

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escribed as spooky, mysterious, and a sort of mashup of Lord of the Flies, the Book of Revelations, and Walt Disney, Caleb Weintraub’s paintings are nothing if not arresting. On large colorful canvases, most of Weintraub’s works feature children and babies behaving in anything but innocent ways. The shocking contradictions — children with cartoon party-plate faces wielding automatic weapons, fancily dressed toddlers viewing adults’ heads mounted on the wall — are meant to call into question “the shabby construction that makes up our memory and our morality,” Weintraub says in his artist’s statement. Depicting a world where social roles and structures are overturned, Weintraub points to the “excesses and complacency that cause us to be vulnerable.”

Weintraub’s paintings are meditations on a future, stripped of pretense, that use “manipulations of palette, mark, and expression to make remarkable the unremarkable and insert humanity where none exists,” according to the artist.

In a November 2008 interview on DailyServing.com, an online forum about contemporary visual arts, Weintraub said, “Some people feel that they have to be tortured or act tortured to make art worth looking at, but I don’t feel that way. As far as I’m concerned, to make art all a person has to do is learn how to think, and then care to respond. The dilemmas I deal with in my paintings are big dilemmas, they are everyone’s dilemmas, and they’re ones that paintings won’t solve but awareness might.”

Weintraub is assistant professor of fine arts at Indiana University Bloomington. He received his BFA in 2000 from Boston University School for the Arts and his MFA in 2003 from the University of Pennsylvania. His work has been shown at the Peter Miller Gallery in Chicago; the Axel Raben Gallery and Jack the Pelican Presents in New York; and the Projects Gallery in Philadelphia.

BRAVE NEW WORLDS [o pp o site page ] Situation Room, 2009, oil and acrylic on canvas, 36" x 48"

In the Thick of It, 2008, acrylic and oil on canvas, 84" x 144" The Unlikely Resurrection of General Burnside on Account of His Estimable Whiskers, 2009, oil and acrylic on double-primed Prime Archival paper, 85" x 114 1/12"

[ B el o w, L eft ]

[ B el o w , R ight ] Down With Escapism, 2006, acrylic on wood, 84" x 96"

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[ ab o v e ]

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Voter turnout in the United States consistently lags behind most Western democracies. When only a slight majority of the populace participates, what can stimulate political behavior?

Photo by Ann Schertz

Marginal Politics

by Lesa Petersen

I

Indiana University

n the 2008 U.S. presidential election, Hispanic, African American, Asian American, and young voters came to the polls in larger numbers. Yet, despite this increase, U.S. Census Bureau data showed that overall voter turnout—approximately 64 percent—was only 1 percent higher, and statistically unchanged, from 2004. Increased voter turnout from youth and racial minorities was noteworthy, but decreases in voter turnout among white Americans and older voters offset the difference. America waves a banner of democracy throughout the world, but our voter turnout consistently lags behind most Western democracies.

“Political behavior is an important foundation for American democracy,” says Yvette Alex-Assensoh, professor of political science in the College of Arts and Sciences at Indiana University Bloomington. Low political participation is an indication that our democracy is at risk, she says. It’s also a focal point of her research: What stimulates political behavior—voting, contacting political officials, protesting, donating money, organizing political movements, attending community meetings—in a political structure that inspires only a slight majority of its populace to participate?

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A Nation of Cities To understand the motivations behind, and consequences of, political behavior, political scientists must stop looking at voters out of context, says Alex-Assensoh, who holds a law degree as well as a Ph.D. in political science and is presently dean in the IU Bloomington Office for Women’s Affairs. Traditional

political science models that have been used to frame and study political groups have focused on individual behavior. Until recently, they’ve failed to consider the major influences of the contexts in which American citizens live, work, study, and worship, she says.

“Political behaviors are structured by laws and institutional arrangements that partially predetermine the nature of that behavior,” says Alex-Assensoh. “That’s why political behavior must always be studied as an individual act that occurs within contexts, structures, and legal arrangements.”

A citizen’s family, neighborhood, schools, and activities can tell us a lot more about civic engagement than age, sex, education, and other conventional parameters can by themselves.

Political science researchers have always been interested in the role of religion, for example, but they haven’t looked at what’s going on inside the churches, notes Alex-Assensoh. Encouraging a congregation to vote, instilling a sense of shared political concerns, and providing mobilization resources—such as a van for transporting church members to the polls—are examples of how the interconnectedness of peers and values shapes political activity.

In America, particularly in urban areas, those peers and values are often strongly defined but also detached from a larger, inclusive political dialogue. U.S. cities are largely characterized by racial, ethnic, and class segregation—and political fragmentation, says Alex-Assensoh. In short, the ways in which we are not interconnected also can tell us a lot.

“The blessing of diversity provides an opportunity to shape

Photo by Ann Schertz

As a political scientist and dean of women’s affairs at IU Bloomington, Yvette Alex-Assensoh focuses on understanding how to negotiate greater political access and engagement for immigrants and women, among other groups.

Alex-Assensoh and the book’s co-authors offer bipartisan solutions for redressing these challenges and encouraging civic engagement, such as using nonpartisan commissions for establishing new political boundaries for congressional and state legislative districts or promoting recognition of a young person’s first vote as a significant rite of passage.

The Party Spoiler Even when American citizens enjoy political inclusion, access to balanced opinions, and an engaged community, they can experience a deep sense of insignificance when casting only one vote in a giant two-party democracy. Our choices and our power are limited by the lack of optional parties and the framework of our electoral system, Alex-Assensoh says. “In most Western democracies, there are more options regarding political parties.

Historically, we have had few choices beyond two parties, with little stability among the independent parties,” she says.

Alex-Assensoh knows well, however, that political behavior is subject to change, and she notes a recent trend toward political identification as Independent. “We are witnessing interesting times in American politics. Governors and legislators are changing their partisan identification to Independent rather than campaigning proudly under either the Democratic or Republican Party banners,” Alex-Assensoh says. “This behavior among political elites raises tantalizing questions about whether the movement toward the political label of Independent could result in more support for independent parties.”

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policy and improve the quality of American life as well as the quality of democracy in our country,” she says. “Yet, as a nation of cities, we have become too complacent in our respective comfort zones.”

Alex-Assensoh’s recent work looks at the impact of immigration on the efforts of Hispanics, African Americans, and Asian Americans to gain fuller democratic inclusion in American politics. Earlier this year, Alex-Assensoh’s new book Newcomers, Outsiders, and Insiders: Immigrants and American Racial Politics in the Early Twenty-first Century, written with three co-authors, was published by University of Michigan Press. Alex-Assensoh and her colleagues found strong evidence that racial political behavior in America operates within a complex multiracial hierarchy. Racial groups in America are positioned from high to low on different strata, Alex-Assensoh explains. When it comes to education, for example, Asian Americans outrank all others including whites, but in the income category, whites outrank all others including Asians.

“Despite the election of President Barack Obama, the evidence does not show that America is postracial,” says AlexAssensoh.

In 2002, Alex-Assensoh was invited by Harvard University Professor of Public Policy Robert Putnam to serve on the American Political Science Association’s Task Force on Civic Engagement. More than two years of research and writing led to the book Democracy at Risk (Brookings Institution Press, 2005), which explored how U.S. electoral laws and institutional arrangements undermine American democracy.

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back to school To comprehend the myriad influences on political behavior, Alex-Assensoh’s research spans disciplines including geography, sociology, history, and law. “Political science very much borrows from other disciplines. We’re like the mutt,” she says.

“Provocative and important questions are at the so-called boundaries of disciplines,” Alex-Assensoh adds. “Interdisciplinary research allows me to address questions in more comprehensive ways and to learn more about other disciplines along the way.”

When one of those disciplines proved to be essential to her research, Alex-Assensoh decided to get another degree. “I had received a National Science Foundation grant to study the political implications of racial school segregation, focusing specifically on how school-related contexts shape high school seniors’ political attitudes and behavior,” she explains. “After collecting the data, I was struck by the impact of the Supreme Court on structuring many of the decisions that school boards and others had to make. In many respects, legal opinions serve

times about who can squeak the loudest, who can send the most tweets.” Many high school students aren’t thinking about political messages independently.

“Schools need to provide access to all sides of political issues, and school desegregation has an important effect on that access,” she says.

The Study of Power In her administrative work as dean for the Office for Women’s Affairs, Alex-Assensoh has the opportunity to help design and implement policies that facilitate the advancement of women faculty, staff, and students at IU Bloomington. Political science is essentially the study of power, Alex-Assensoh says, and her work as the OWA dean “focuses on locating points of power and understanding how to negotiate and institute policies and processes that inherently yield accessibility and advancement for women, in ways that enhance everyone’s opportunities.

IU is a leader in some areas of expanding opportunities for women, but there is still much work to do.”

“

The blessing of diversity provides an opportunity to shape policy and improve the quality of American life as well as the quality of democracy in our country.”

Indiana University

Yvette Alex-Assensoh, professor of political science in the College of Arts and Sciences at IU Bloomington

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as checks on the ability of mayors to democratize education.”

Alex-Assensoh wanted a better grasp of legal language and opinions, so with the support of her husband A.B. Assensoh, a professor in the College of Arts and Sciences Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies, their two sons, and their toy poodle “Puff,” she entered the IU Maurer School of Law in 2003 and earned her J.D., cum laude, in 2006.

She is currently completing the results of the NSF project and working on a new project that examines the enormous impact of Supreme Court decisions on the efforts of African American mayors to address affirmative action, police brutality, and racial school desegregation.

Schools can play a critical role in shaping political behavior, Alex-Assensoh notes. Young people are bombarded by politics more than any other generation, “but that’s not necessarily a good thing,” she says. “They may be more in tune, but there are concerns about the content of the political messages and the extent to which sound bites without critical analysis can engender a kind of cynicism.”

The political behavior of young people is especially influenced by what they see and hear in the media, where “the squeaky wheel gets the oil,” Alex-Assensoh says. “It’s some-

Alex-Assensoh was recently named an ACE Fellow by the American Council on Education for the 2010–11 academic year.

In that role, she’ll work on a project for IU Bloomington and shadow senior leaders, including President Lou Anna Simon at Michigan State University. Alex-Assensoh is particularly interested in learning more about academic restructuring, nontraditional presidential leadership, and mutually beneficial local, state, national, and international partnerships in higher education. She also has been named a fellow in the Academic Leadership Program, a program that selects and encourages faculty with strong leadership ability across the Big Ten conference to accomplish more by working collectively.

Collaboration and collective efforts among increasingly diverse groups are key to meaningful political engagement, says Alex-Assensoh. And although American democracy has clear faults, she also believes it has a solid foundation.

“Despite the fact that democracy in America is at risk, there is hope,” she says. “Americans are blessed with a constitutional democracy that is old enough, tested enough, tried enough, and capable enough to be revived.”

Lesa Petersen is a freelance writer, editor, and graphic designer in Bloomington, Ind.

Playlists for life I

t’s no secret that music permeates just about every aspect of society. It’s used in advertising, for exercise, to dance, to relax. It’s even piped through speakers in stores to subtly persuade shoppers to spend more money.

Indiana University ethnomusicologist Judah Cohen has made a career of studying the uses of music — specifically, how people create sound or tailor it to their senses of community and self and how they communicate with it.

“People express themselves through sound,” he says.

“That’s as important to understanding society as anything.”

Cohen is the Lou and Sybil Mervis professor of Jewish culture in the Borns Jewish Studies Program and an associate professor in the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology in the College of Arts and Sciences at Indiana University Bloomington. His focus has been mostly on music as it pertains to aspects of Judaism, but more recently, he has been investigating the connection between music and world health issues. Cohen’s third book, tentatively titled The Culture of AIDS in Africa: Music, Dance, and Drama in the Fight Against HIV/AIDS, co-edited with medical ethnomusicologist Gregory Barz of Vanderbilt University, is forthcoming next year.

Early music Growing up in Maplewood, N.J., Cohen says his own life as a musician peaked with his performance of “Rhapsody in Blue” with his high school orchestra, but a connection with the cantor of his synagogue fostered an interest in how music represents Jewish tradition and expression. While preparing

Cohen for his bar mitzvah, the cantor introduced him to different ways to chant prayers.

“The chants seemed old, extremely old,” Cohen says. “They are in a section of the Hebrew Bible considered to be a key part of Jewish tradition. They’re a central part of the feeling of that tradition.”

The chanting, Cohen says, “brings out a sense of theology.”

Different chants exist for different parts of a service — chants from the Torah, from the five books of Moses, from the Prophets. For the most part, no instruments accompany except in special cases, such as occasional organ music during a Friday night service.

Cohen said he became aware of how different the musical world inside the synagogue was from the musical world outside. The music during service allows the members of the synagogue to “recognize themselves as a community,” he says.

But synagogue members also use music outside of the service to help situate themselves within the rest of society.

Cohen attended Yale College with plans to major in biology, but a “sink-or-swim” neurobiology class convinced him to pursue a double major in music and religious studies. Not that Cohen was too surprised: “Those subjects seemed to be a kind of theme in my life,” he says.

History’s soundtracks His undergraduate senior thesis project set Cohen on a firm path toward graduate school and a life as a researcher. He received a Kathryn Peterson Grant for Research to go to St.

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by Nicole Kauffman

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Indiana University

Photo by Ann Schertz

People express themselves through sound. That’s as important to understanding society as anything.”

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Judah Cohen, Lou and Sybil Mervis Professor of Jewish culture in the Borns Jewish Studies Program and associate professor of folklore and ethnomusicology, College of Arts and Sciences, IU Bloomington

Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands, where he had spent part of his early childhood, to explore the small Jewish community there.

The St. Thomas synagogue leaders had been planning to create an archive to mark the bicentennial, so they asked Cohen to help them construct a history of the congregation. The result was the book Through the Sands of Time: A History of the Jewish Community of St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands, published by Brandeis University Press/University Press of New England in 2004.

During this year of intense research spent scouring shelves at the public library, poring over old newspapers, and interviewing old members of the 250-person community, Cohen began applying to graduate schools. He earned his Ph.D. in music from Harvard University; his dissertation became his second book, The Making of a Reform Jewish Cantor: Musical Authority, Cultural Investment (IU Press, 2009). Among other things, Cohen wanted to know how Jewish musical leaders negotiate tensions inherent in what he calls “a dichotomy of musical behavior.”

Social justice is a core value of Judaism, and folk-singing is a popular form of expression for social justice. But while Jewish summer camps have long embraced folk music as a way to spread the message of social justice, cantorial schools have stressed that folk singing is inappropriate and a threat to the tradition. Cantors facilitate prayer; they do not perform prayers.

“Showpersonship” is not encouraged, Cohen says. Even so, today, in Judaism’s largest movement, leaders are trying to “bridge the gap” between two forms of music often seen in opposition to each other.

“Cantorial schools no longer denigrate folk singing,” Cohen says. In fact, Reform Judaism’s cantorial school now requires guitar competency. Similarly, song leaders have made attempts to learn more about liturgical music and to try to be more sensitive to the text and the lyrics of the folk songs they sing.

Cohen describes his field of ethnomusicology as “the study of people making music.” Each person’s life — history, in general — has musical soundtracks, he says, and he aims to study how those soundtracks emerge from a person’s understandings of the world. “I ask the people I study, ‘What do you do? How do you do it? What brings you to your actions?’” Cohen says.

Cohen has spent years seeking answers in Jerusalem, Wisconsin, and New York for his study of music in Reform Judaism and in Uganda for his study of music and how it relates HIV/AIDS. Music makes good medicine Cohen’s focus shifted toward world health in 2004 when his wife, Rebecca Cohen, now a doctor in Bloomington, was in her third year of residency at the Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx, New York.

“Residents are offered the opportunity to do an international health elective in Uganda. These days it’s in Kisoro; while my wife was there, it was in Mbarara,” Cohen explains.

The couple decided together to go to Mbarara, in southwest Uganda. They were motivated in part by the television show “ER,” which at the time had a story line about a doctor who goes to the Congo to share his skills.

In Mbarara, Cohen saw firsthand how HIV-positive drama groups (affiliated with The AIDS Support Organization, known as TASO) created and presented shows to secondary schools and local villages about the importance of being tested for HIV and demonstrating how those who test positive can still lead useful lives. The shows, presented by a total of seven regional groups, include choral singing, traditional folk songs, and traditional instruments to get the messages across.

Organizations that use music to influence people do so with local music, although Cohen notes that there are always new definitions of “local music.” A style that the population can relate to is most effective. Think of TASO’s approach as

Nicole Kauffman is a freelance writer and editor in Bloomington, Ind.

Musical journey of a lifetime

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f you were looking for an expert on why individuals choose to make the music they do, you might not need to look further than Todd Rundgren. Rundgren, a legendary rocker and music producer known for hit songs such as “Hello, It’s Me,” is also known for his pioneering, not always popular choices, inside the studio and out.

This fall, the musician is in residence on the Indiana University Bloomington campus as the Class of 1963 Wells Professor, teaching two weeks of a one-credit honors course for students who are Wells and Hutton Honors Scholars.

“He really can call himself Professor Rundgren. This is not a gimmick,” says Glenn Gass, professor in the IU Jacobs School of Music whose relationship with Rundgren helped make the Wells professorship possible. “Todd is a treasure trove of memories, knowledge, and stories. This class allows him to share his experiences with students who really want to hear what he has to say.”

IU Distinguished Professor of Sociology Bernice Pescosolido was also instrumental in planning the honors course, called The Ballad of Todd Rundgren: Musical Journeys of a Lifetime. In the classroom, Rundgren will talk with students about authenticity and identity in musical composition and performance. In the second week of his residency, Rundgren’s topic is “WhIM (What Is Music?),” which the Rundgren course syllabus describes as a discussion of “the various origins of music-making, … utilizing the widely varying paths by which individuals discover and incorporate music into their lives.”

In addition to learning about the culture, politics, and economics of the contemporary music business, students in the course will visit Professor of Anthropology Nicholas Toth at IU’s

Stone Age Institute to view some of the earliest tools used for making music. Rundgren is known for his own use of new technological tools as a music producer, including producing a double album in 1972, on which he played all of the instruments.

On Aug. 1, 1981—the evening MTV debuted—Rundgren was ready with a music video for “Time Heals,” which premiered on MTV the same evening. Always a fan of technology, Rundgren made his music available through online downloads about 10 years before iTunes existed.

“Everyone had dial-up connections then,” Gass says.

“Rundgren’s fate is always to be a few years ahead of his time.”

Rundgren has stayed true to his pioneering muse, Gass says.

“He refused to take the easy way. He paid a price for that, but in the long run, I think that’s why he’ll matter more than stars who may have had more hits.”

During his stay in Bloomington, Rundgren will give a public lecture titled “LONGHAIR: Todd Rundgren on the Beatles Effect” and an evening recital titled “CLUSTER: The Birth of the T Chord.”

The rocker, who has been described as “a one-man Beatles,” participated in the Ringo All-Star Band and co-produced the power pop band Badfinger with George Harrison.

Bernice Pescosolido will conclude the IU honors course by leading a discussion reflecting on the cultural and sociological aspects of the popular music industry.

—JP

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A musical key Cohen knows his students at IU Bloomington listen to music more than they read, and that’s just fine with him.

He says while many people may consider much music

frivolous, or even inappropriate (think the popular comedic musical The Producers, which includes the song “Springtime for Hitler,” or many contemporary rap songs), those are just the kinds of issues that fascinate Cohen and excite him about teaching courses with titles such as Music and Spiritual Expression; Musical Theater and Ethnic Representation; and Musical Reponses to the AIDS Epidemic.

As for the musical sounds floating around in Cohen’s head on any given day, it could be whatever he’s been presenting in his classes, or songs of HooShir, the IU a cappella group he founded and serves as faculty advisor, or possibly, the current favorite tunes of his young children. All of those tunes and more represent Cohen’s personal soundtrack, the soundtrack to his life.

Cohen says he plans to continue studying musical discourse as it relates to the nature of disease and people’s sense of wellness. His goal, he says, is “to explore how music can be such a key part of experience.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Todd_Rundgren

comparable to that of Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS, which began in 1988 to raise awareness about AIDS and funding for services for people with AIDS in the United States, specifically among the American theater community.

The African drama groups began their performances with three- and four-part songs, followed by a skit, more songs, a personal testimony, then a folk song, a question-and-answer session, and a dance. A musical backdrop accompanied most of the art forms.

“During times of crisis, music multiplies because people express themselves in a way that they know,” Cohen says.

Why music? Music speaks to something deep within us, Cohen explains. Many believe music has a “mystical value” and a “cultural intimacy,” he says, and studies on medical health campaigns claim music “makes a message more palatable.”

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A Consuming State of Mind

by Jeremy Shere

Indiana University

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hen Raymond Burke was 16, he began working part time as a salesperson at a camera store near his hometown of Philadelphia. In the weeks leading up to Christmas, he found himself competing for commissions with a senior salesman who used hard-sell tactics to push cameras and accessories on customers rushing to finish their holiday shopping. Although Burke was less experienced, he had what turned out to be an advantage: a fascination with consumer behavior.

What, he wondered, drove customers to shop at his camera store instead of one across town? Once they walked in the door and started looking around, what was going on inside their heads? Did the appearance and physical layout of the store somehow influence what people bought?

To get a leg up on his more experienced competitor, Burke tried a simple strategy. Instead of a frontal assault aimed at getting customers to buy as much expensive stuff as possible, he took the time to talk with customers, to get to know them and plumb their needs and desires.

It worked. By the end of the frenzied shopping season, Burke and the senior salesman were neck and neck. But after the holiday, many of the customers who’d gotten the hard-sell returned their purchases. Most of Burke’s sales held.

“It was an important lesson in paying attention to what motivates and satisfies shoppers,” says Burke, who is now the E. W. Kelley Professor of business administration at Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business in Bloomington. “Ultimately, for any retail business to be successful, it has to create

a shopping environment that taps into and activates those motivations.”

Kindled by his camera-store experience, Burke pursued his interest in consumer behavior throughout his college years at the University of Miami, where he studied business and psychology, and graduate school at the University of Florida, where his research focused on consumer psychology. Today, Burke is a leading expert in the marketing research field.

“My work revolves around a deceptively simple question: What influences customers when they’re shopping?” he says.

“My job is to study those influences and provide tools for retailers to better understand their customers’ behaviors and desires.”

Shoppability In 2005, Burke published an influential article titled Retail Shoppability: A Measure of the World’s Best Stores. Simply put, “shoppability” describes the capacity of a store to translate consumer demand into purchases—that is, to connect what is in consumers’ minds with what is available on store shelves.

Scoring high marks for shoppability, though, is no simple matter. “Every customer who enters a store has a variety of goals, plans, desires, and interests,” Burke says. “Some are professional, some personal, some readily salient like ‘I’m out of toothpaste and need more,’ and some more general, like health concerns or plans for an upcoming dinner party.”

Stores that succeed in tapping into their customers’ concerns by designing environments that bring customers in and

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Tools of the Trade 1. The Customer Interface Lab at the Kelley School of Business, shown in this composite image, uses a variety of research tools, including virtual reality simulations, video observation, and eye tracking, to study the influence of the retail context on shopper behavior.

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2. As shoppers navigate through the aisles of a simulated store, their eye movements are unobtrusively recorded by an infrared camera. The patterns of visual attention are displayed as color-coded “heatmaps.� Red regions represent longer and more frequent eye fixations, while blue regions reflect lower levels of shopper interest. The green crosses indicate products that shoppers expressed an interest in purchasing.

3. Shoppers navigating through the store tend to look ahead and horizontally across the visual field as they search for desired products.

Shopper attention is often drawn to distinctive signs and product displays.

4. Magazines with striking visuals and relevant topics attract the most attention, but a higher shelf position is also important, especially for impulse purchase items.

All images courtesy of the Customer Interface Laboratory, IU Bloomington

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A virtual shopping experience

Indiana University

Computer graphic simulations are used to test shopper reactions to the physical stores of today and the virtual stores of tomorrow. In a study aimed at evaluating shopper interest in immersive 3-D shopping environments, consumers have the opportunity to visit a virtual specialty retail store (1 –3 ) and a mass retail store (4 – 6) . When shopping in graphically rich environments, shoppers tend to be influenced less by price and more by the assortment and brands of merchandise. Images courtesy of Ray Burke, Customer Interface Lab, IU Bloomington.

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keep them coming back are bound to profit. Stores that fail to engage their customers’ needs and desires are more likely to fail.

The mirror image trajectories of two retail giants — Kmart and Target — is a telling example. Once a venerable discount chain famous for its “blue light specials,” Kmart has fallen on hard times. The company went into bankruptcy in 2002, and since emerging in 2003, it has struggled to compete with other big-box discount-oriented retailers such as Wal-Mart.

Conversely, Target has grown, establishing itself as the second most profitable discount retailer in the United States (Wal-Mart is No. 1).

So why has Kmart declined while Target thrives? For Burke, a store’s performance is tied directly to how well it achieves the principles of shoppability, which include attractive product displays highlighting new items, helpful navigational aids, well-organized shelves and aisles, minimal clutter, and efforts to make the shopping experience convenient and fun, to name a few. While Target scores high in many of these categories, Kmart falls short.

“When you walk into a store, ideally you should see things that brand the place in a positive way, that clearly communicate that your needs will be satisfied,” Burke says. “When you’re in Target, you immediately know where you are, thanks to the red bull’s-eye logo that connects with all the advertising they’ve done to establish an identity as a retailer that promises competitive pricing and an upbeat, contemporary atmosphere.”

You don’t get the same messages in a Kmart store, he says.

“There, you walk in and see harsh fluorescent lighting, scuffed linoleum floors, and products that often seem haphazardly arranged on the shelves.”

Finding your way around Target is simple, thanks to the store’s spacious layout and easy-to-read signs, Burke continues, but wandering the aisles at Kmart often feels like navigating a maze. And while Target makes sure to stock the ends of aisles with new, attractively designed items, Kmart typically crams highly visible end-of-aisle shelf space with desperately markeddown items they haven’t been able to sell at normal prices.

Consequently, Kmart has the look and feel of a chain that is stuck in time, struggling to retain its once loyal customers.

Target, meanwhile, has gone in the opposite direction, becoming a highly shoppable retail destination.

Tools of the trade To learn more about the ins and outs of shoppability and help retailers improve the customer experience, Burke uses a wide range of high-tech tools developed in the Kelley School’s Customer Interface Laboratory (which Burke founded and directs).

Some of the tools include a panoramic dome and virtual-reality goggles that create a highly detailed virtual shopping experience. As customers navigate a virtual store, Burke and his colleagues use custom-built software to track where they look, what they see, and how they move.

For example, Burke and Alex Leykin, a research associate at the Kelley School of Business, recently conducted a study to help Time Warner determine the best way to display its maga-

Raymond Burke is the E. W. Kelley Professor of business administration at Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business in Bloomington.

Looking at pictures of the stores on Burke’s computer, it isn’t hard to see why. All three stores feature fresh, artfully arranged produce; places to sit, relax, and eat; and a fast and convenient checkout process.

Among big-box retailers, Best Buy scores high marks for shoppability. “Best Buy is a good example of a chain that changed its layout based on behavioral research,” Burke says.

“The setup used to be like Circuit City, with dozens of cramped aisles. But when they found that people visited only about 20 percent of the store, they changed to a circular, racetrack-like format that allows customers to see more of the merchandise.”

Consequently, Burke says, shopping at Best Buy has become a more pleasant, rewarding experience—and one more likely to generate customer loyalty.

Other stores, meanwhile, have gone out of their way to make shopping fun. The Fashion Show Mall in Las Vegas has multiple daily fashion shows with models showing off the latest styles — a great way to promote new items sold in the mall’s high-end apparel stores, Burke notes. Gallery Furniture, in Houston, is more like a fun park than a furniture store, featuring jewelry once owned by Princess Diana, Elvis Presley’s Lincoln Towne Car, and a café with free food. That might seem like kitschy overkill, but it works — while most furniture stores turn over inventory an average of three to five times a year, Gallery Furniture sells through its merchandise an astonishing 29 times annually.

For Burke, the secret behind the success of stores as different as Gallery Furniture, Best Buy, and Wegmans is the same one—a highly shoppable environment designed with customer psychology in mind.

“In many ways, shopping is a chore, something to tick off your list of daily errands,” Burke says. “Whatever a store can do to make the experience less taxing and even fun—to convert consumers’ often subtle and complex needs into purchases— will benefit both the store and the customer.”

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Putting it all together Beyond the lab, much of what Burke has learned about shoppability and consumer behavior comes from studying what stores do to draw in customers and how those customers respond. For a recent project, Burke and his colleague Neil Morgan captured data from more than 16,000 shopping trips made by 5,000 shoppers in 69 stores around the United States. For one month, shoppers participating in the study completed online surveys rating stores according to several categories, including cost and availability of merchandise, ease of finding items, shopping convenience, and enjoyment. Burke and Morgan used the information to flesh out the dimensions of shoppability and to create a “shoppability score card,” ranking stores by how well they fared compared to their competitors.

The results were illuminating. In the grocery category, for example, East Coast-based Wegmans, Whole Foods, and Central Market in Plano, Texas, all ranked near the top of the list.

Photo courtesy of the Kelley School of Business

zines near supermarket checkout counters. In the lab, using a virtual shopping system and eye-tracking technology, they recorded where customers looked as they navigated through the on-screen store and approached the on-screen checkout. The results showed that shoppers spend just a few seconds scanning each shelf display before moving on.

“If they see a product that connects with their needs or interests, then they’ll stop and and examine the merchandise.

The visual distinctiveness of the magazine covers, shelf placement, and category framing are all critical factors in attracting shoppers’ attention,” says Burke.

The research also revealed that shoppers’ gazes shift depending on how far away they are from the magazine rack.

From a distance, the eye is most likely to fall on the middle part of the display. But as shoppers approach the checkout line, they tend to focus on the top of the rack. Shoppers were less likely to notice magazines placed next to soft drink, gum, and candy displays commonly found near checkout counters.

“It may seem like a small thing, but when you’re competing with dozens of other similar magazines, shelf placement is crucial,” Burke says. “The same goes for virtually all retail items in any number of stores.”

Using another high-tech device—a 360-degree, ceilingmounted video camera—Burke also can track where and how shoppers move in actual stores. Using software that he created with Leykin, Burke turns the video footage into highly detailed heat maps showing where customers in a given store go, where they stop, and for how long. The data can reveal useful patterns.

“We learned that when people walk into a store, they don’t just start shopping right away,” Burke says, displaying footage on his monitor of customers moving through a clothing store.

“They typically walk in and then stop after about 20 feet and look around to get their bearings. That’s a good spot to put new items or navigational aids or an attractive display.”

Jeremy Shere is a freelance writer in Bloomington, Ind.

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Under threat

by Elisabeth Andrews

In the face of conflict, followers tend to rally ’round their leader, but what happens when that leader abuses power?

Indiana University

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onflict: It’s among the best guarantors of solidarity, says sociologist Stephen Benard. Faced with an outside threat, members of a group become more self-sacrificing and less concerned with individual attainment, contributing personal resources to community efforts to ensure group survival. The effect is so consistent and so pronounced that turn-of-the-century German sociologist Georg Simmel famously advised political groups to “see to it that there be some enemies” to maintain internal cohesion.

“The idea that people come together in the face of threats is a really old one,” says Benard, an assistant professor of sociology in the College of Arts and Sciences at IU Bloomington.

Research on how conflict between groups changes behavior within a group goes back at least 100 years. Among the observed effects of intergroup conflict is a “tightening-up” of

rules for group members. “What you have to do to be a good group member becomes more strictly defined,” Benard says.

He gives the example of political parties, which tend to tolerate more dissension when they are securely in power. If the opposing party begins to gain more influence, the threatened party often becomes more rigid, outlining more extreme positions and demanding total platform commitment from its members.

On the whole, people tend to praise this human instinct to band together to overcome obstacles, Benard says. But he sees a darker side to the phenomenon. “What I’m interested in is how people might abuse these tendencies,” he says.

Why cry wolf?

To answer that question, Benard’s research looks not only at

Risk-raisers and fear investors Benard’s research experiments include a way that participants can attempt to influence other group members’ behavior by

Photo by Ann Schertz

Stephen Benard is assistant professor of sociology in the College of Arts and Sciences at IU Bloomington.

manipulating the apparent risk of failure. At the beginning of each round, before deciding what to contribute toward the group’s survival, each member can first elect to spend part of his or her endowment on increasing the threat level that will be announced to the group. They don’t know what the actual risk is, but they can increase the risk by 5 percent with each lab dollar spent.

The first surprise for Benard was that, with only one or two exceptions over many hundreds of rounds of play, subjects always increased the apparent risk.

“We thought people would be willing to at least experiment with making the situation appear safer, but it virtually never happened,” he says.

Instead, the researchers were astonished by the overwhelming frequency of manipulation in the direction of increased risk. Round after round, the subjects chose to make the situation appear more threatening.

The researchers also found that this manipulation paid off.

“In general, as the apparent threat level went up, people contributed more toward group survival,” Benard says.

Benard and Barclay also looked separately at the behavior of the dominant and subordinate group members. They found that the dominant members — who started with 80 lab dollars in contrast to the subordinates’ 50 dollars — contributed more total money toward group survival. As a percentage of their endowments, however, dominant members’ contributions were less significant than those of the other group members.

Benard interprets these results in light of what he describes as “the social psychology of power”: The more power, the less concern for others. “As people get more powerful, they become less likely to take the perspective of others and less likely to be concerned with the well-being of others,” he says. “They are more concerned with their own outcomes.”

He compares the dominant member’s dilemma to that of a presidential candidate running in the primaries. The candidate needs to decide how much to invest in self-promotion versus supporting the party as a whole. “The thought is, if I build my-

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how people respond to threats but also how they attempt to manipulate a threat’s appearance to influence behavior. In particular, he’s interested in how dominant group members exaggerate threats when they believe their positions are in jeopardy. He also studies the ways in which group members become skeptical about such manipulations, displaying the sort of “threat fatigue” seen in the fable of the boy who cried wolf.

“We want to determine if, over time, people figure out that they are being manipulated and become less responsive. Do they become so unresponsive that they don’t realize when the wolf is actually coming to take the sheep?” Benard says. “We want to know not only when they become suspicious that they are being manipulated, but also how good they are at calibrating their responses and whether they overcompensate.”

With a grant from the National Science Foundation, Benard and his colleague Patrick Barclay at the University of Guelph have been systematically examining these issues through a series of experiments. Each study builds on the last to illuminate our notions of security, leadership, and belonging.

The experiments start with the same basic structure: Three people are in a group that faces some threat to its survival. The strength of the threat is chosen at random as a probability from one to 100 that the group will fail. Each of the members starts with an endowment of “lab dollars” that represents his or her personal resources. One member, by virtue of a larger endowment, holds a “dominant” position in the group. At the end of the experiment, the participants leave with an actual cash reward proportional to what they earn during the study. But if the group fails, they lose everything.

Participants can increase the group’s chance of survival through financial contributions. For each lab dollar a participant invests, the risk to the group decreases by half a percent.

The more contributed, the greater the chance of keeping whatever money is left over. But the more contributed, the less money will be left over. So each individual is concerned with making sure that other group members also contribute to the survival of the group. Ideally, from the individual’s perspective, the other two group members would contribute enough to ensure the group’s survival, and the individual could keep his or her entire original endowment.

“It’s like the idea that I wish other people would take the bus so I could drive in less traffic,” Benard explains. He says that people are willing to pitch in, however, as long as they believe that others will do the same.

“There’s a lot of research that suggests people will behave in a self-sacrificing, pro-social way as long as they are confident that others will too,” he says. “So the big question determining behavior is, ‘What do we expect others to do?’”

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Indiana University

self up enough, I may win,” he explains. “But what if my party loses? There’s not a lot of glory in being the leader of a political party that never wins an election.”

Benard and Barclay’s experiment had another wrinkle that complicated the relationships between the subjects. The dominant member could lose his or her position if, at the end of the round, the other two subjects had more combined money remaining. The subordinate with the most money would then become the dominant member. Under these conditions, the researchers found that the dominant group member invested more money than the subordinates on increasing the apparent threat level, not only in absolute but also in proportional terms.

“They’re not just spending more because they can,” Benard explains. The dominant group members were literally more invested in scaring the population.

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Power protectors The researchers were so intrigued by the dominant group members’ manipulations that they wanted to see if they could find out what was driving their behavior. Did the dominant status itself lead members to exaggerate the threats, or was it their concern with staying in power? They decided to investigate what happened when the dominant position was assigned randomly instead of being awarded on financial performance.

In a second study, they divided up the groups, with some competing for the dominant position and others having their status assigned with each round.

As the researchers expected, leaders spent more on increasing the apparent threat level when they had to compete to maintain their position. Conversely, the subordinates spent less on manipulating the threat level when they stood to benefit from combining their resources. In addition to inspiring leaders toward greater exaggeration, making dominance contestable also resulted in the groups failing more often.

As with most experiments, the setup doesn’t precisely mirror the real world of power politics, where competition for resources is only one aspect of determining leadership.

It’s similar enough, though, to suggest some mechanisms by which leaders attempt to manipulate other group members, Benard says. He draws the comparison to international relations, in which a country’s leader might exaggerate a threat from beyond the nation’s borders in an effort to win reelection.

“I could also imagine this trend at work in union politics, where a leader might play up the threat from the employer,” he adds. “Small groups can have similar dynamics too, like a neighborhood association, where the stated threat could be the risk of crime if the group doesn’t band together to put up more street lights.”

Benard’s research shows that this strategy is effective in helping a leader maintain his or her position but, ironically, groups wind up more vulnerable to those threats when leaders direct resources toward scaring people instead of protecting them.

“Increasing the threat level is, in the short term, prosocial, in that it persuades people to contribute more towards the group. But when you look at how the dominant member is spending resources on trying to maintain position, you see how that is money that could have been spent actually benefiting the group’s security,” Benard says.

Moreover, he asks, “Would you want to be in a group where someone was manipulating you?”

Finding the patterns Benard’s current study investigates that last question: How do within-group behaviors change when subjects begin to recognize that they are being manipulated? In the latest experiment, subjects learn at the end of each round not only whether the group survived but also the margin of survival.

That new information raises questions, Benard explains.

“The [subjects] begin to think, ‘They said the threat level was high, but not only did we succeed, we succeeded by this huge margin. Are we surviving by unrealistically high margins?’”

The experiment is still ongoing, and Benard has not yet begun to analyze its data. His earlier experiments, however, revealed that people appeared to become skeptical even when all they knew was whether or not the group survived.

“People played 40 consecutive rounds and, on average, tended to contribute less over time. It’s hard to coordinate a group.

If they have the slightest inkling that someone might not be pulling their weight, it tends to fall apart,” he says.

From what he’s seen so far, Benard is increasingly convinced not only that those who hold positions of power are inclined to exaggerate threats for their own benefit, but also that this tendency is ultimately detrimental to society. His research, he says, adds to a body of work indicating that organizations that tolerate manipulation and obfuscation are more vulnerable to structural breakdown and failure.

“Research in a lot of fields indicates that accountability is almost never a bad thing,” he says. “In general, anything in organizations that increases accountability or transparency is good.”

Benard’s future research plans include looking at whether the source of threats makes a difference to behavior — for example, whether people respond differently to human enemies versus natural disasters. As with his earlier studies, there are a lot of theories that could apply, but few researchers have taken the sort of systematic approach that Benard and Barclay have to examining these questions.

“There are a lot of patterns that people have seen consistently over time with case studies. So sociologists have the sense that these patterns are out there but we want to ask, What rules do they follow? My hope is that with these studies, we can do a better job of addressing problems of political manipulation and corruption.”

Elisabeth Andrews is a freelance writer in Bloomington, Ind.

Know thy [ s e x u a l ] self

by Karen Garinger sexual response (i.e., sexual dysfunctions). Last year, Janssen and co-researchers John Bancroft (former director of the institute), Cynthia A. Graham (research fellow of the institute), and Stephanie A. Sanders (associate director of the institute and professor in gender studies) published a review of almost a decade of research on this “dual control model” in the Journal of Sex Research.

Defining terms The science of sexual dysfunction receives a great deal of attention and has generated, among other things, a highly publicized, multibillion-dollar male impotence drug industry — yet our understanding of the factors that make some people more likely than others to experience sexual problems is limited. The same conundrum applies, according to Janssen, to risky sexual behavior. Prevention and intervention approaches tend to rely on the assumption that people are rational decision makers and give less attention to factors that may make people more likely than others to make decisions they regret later.

Janssen’s study of sexual risk-taking partly focuses on the question of how to best help people recognize and learn about their own sexual behaviors. But just settling the question of terminology is a fundamental challenge.

“Most commonly, the term ‘sexual risk-taking’ refers to behaviors that put people at risk for HIV, other sexually transmitted diseases, or unplanned pregnancies,” says Janssen. “But it could also include sexual infidelity. After all, individuals who are involved in an affair often know that what they are doing

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hen it comes to sexual behavior, there’s a lot of risky business to go around — teenagers having unprotected intercourse, married men or women cheating on their spouses, anonymous partners taking a chance on sexually transmitted infections by forgoing condoms. The physical and psychological forces that prompt these and other sexual risk-taking behaviors are an important subject of study for Erick Janssen and his colleagues at Indiana University’s Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction.

Janssen, associate scientist and the institute’s director of education and research training, is particularly interested in two tendencies manifested in everyone (though at widely varying levels): sexual excitation, described by Janssen as “the sensitivity to sexual cues,” and sexual inhibition, “the propensity for loss of sexual arousal due to potential threats.” Using questionnaires, Janssen and colleagues determine where subjects fall on the sexual excitation/inhibition scale and link this information to various aspects of male and female sexual functioning and behavior.

For the majority, propensities toward sexual excitation and inhibition are adaptive and not problematic, explains Janssen.

However, individuals with an unusually high propensity for sexual excitation or a low propensity for sexual inhibition are more likely to engage in high-risk or otherwise problematic sexual behavior. Conversely, individuals with a low propensity for sexual excitation or a high propensity for sexual inhibition are more likely to experience problems with impairment of

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Photo by Herbert Ascherman Jr.

Erick Janssen is an associate scientist and the director of education and research training at the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction at IU Bloomington.

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could jeopardize their primary relationship. The same applies to various forms of sexual aggression, where people use verbal or physical force, even though they are aware of potential negative consequences for others as well as for themselves.”

But what if the person isn’t aware of the consequences of his or her actions? Should the term sexual risk-taker apply to people who take part in potentially harmful acts without understanding the possible consequences? “Granted, some people don’t know that condoms can protect them, or perhaps they don’t have access to them,” Janssen points out. Likewise, it’s possible that a person may not think of negative consequences when using forceful strategies to have sex with someone.

“Maybe a person like this isn’t a true sexual risk-taker,” says Janssen. Still, “there is a subgroup of people who knowingly take risks.” These tend to be people with strong sexual impulses and weak “sexual brakes,” he says. “They do things even though they know they may regret them later.”

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Diversity rules Among the people who take risks and know it, Janssen is interested in the relationship between an individual’s sexual risk-taking and the levels of riskiness in his or her other behaviors. “Some people take risks in general, perhaps using alcohol and drugs heavily or not putting on their seatbelts,” he says, “but other people seem to take only sexual risks, such as the person with an important political job who is careful about everything but gets caught in a compromising sexual situation.”

Many of Janssen’s investigations of sexual excitation and inhibition focus on how casually or deliberately subjects select their sexual partners and whether or not they use contraceptives and barrier methods to reduce the likelihood of pregnancy and disease. He and his colleagues consistently find two things: first, people who score high on excitation are more

likely to have greater numbers of casual partners, and second, those who score low on inhibition are more likely to engage in high-risk sexual activity such as unprotected intercourse.

To date, more than 30,000 subjects have participated in Janssen’s studies. They come from countries all over the world as well as locally, from among Indiana University students, faculty, and staff, as well as community members from Bloomington and Indianapolis. Although men and women may differ widely in their levels of excitation and inhibition and in their engagement in risky sexual activities, Janssen notes that there is actually much more variability within each gender than between them. It’s a finding that underscores Kinsey Institute founder Alfred C. Kinsey’s early findings about the vast diversity of sexual behavior in the human species.

All in all, Janssen says, the mechanisms that lead to risktaking behavior remain poorly understood, especially the role that emotional states play in influencing such behavior.

Janssen believes that sexual arousal and desire should be considered emotions that affect how we behave, just as being angry or sad affects behavior. And just as people differ in how they express anger or sadness, people differ in how easily they become sexually aroused and in how much control they exhibit over this emotional state. Things become even more complicated when interactions between sexual and nonsexual emotions are thrown into the mix.

“I’ve been interested in how sexual emotions and other emotions interact for a long time,” Janssen says. “Some people lose their sexual interest when they are depressed, others do not.” In fact, the research by Janssen and his colleagues shows that some people are more likely to engage in risky sexual behaviors when they are in a negative mood. And that includes some forms of sexual aggression. “Why, for example, when some people are in wars, do they commit rape? Not everyone is capable of that,” Janssen says.

There are real paradoxes at the heart of much sexual behavior, says Janssen — for instance, though we like to think of sex as a feel-good moment, the reality is that a person can be sad, stressed, anxious, angry, and sexually aroused all at the same time. In short, sexual behavior does not work the same for everyone.

Janssen hopes that greater knowledge about the reasons for sexual risk-taking will ultimately have a positive impact on people’s lives.

“Know thyself,” he says. “This is the challenge for people with all kinds of risky behaviors, including people who gamble or drink too much: to recognize and redirect those impulses. If you use sex in unhealthy ways, you may be able to learn to steer your behavior in other directions. But you first need to become more aware of your tendencies.”

Karen Garinger is a senior writer and editor for the Office of the Trustees at Indiana University in Bloomington.

Photo courtesy of Alan Ewert

Risk’s benefits

L

ast spring, Alan Ewert was leading a group of hikers up Oregon’s Mount Hood when an ordinary snowfall turned vicious. “We had high winds and whiteout conditions,” says Ewert, the Patricia and Joel Meier Endowed Chair of outdoor leadership in the School of Health, Physical Education, and Recreation at Indiana University Bloomington. “As we went up the mountain, I noticed we were crossing a line between acceptable and unacceptable risk. It was time to turn around.”

Just where is that line? That question underlies much of Ewert’s research. He traces this interest to his days as an Air Force survival instructor during the Vietnam War. Many of his students were pilots training for duty in Southeast Asia, where they risked being shot down. “Teaching those pilots, who might have to try to survive in unfamiliar wilderness conditions, fed my curiosity about the interaction between people and the outdoors,” Ewert says.

Ewert left the Air Force and began teaching in the international wilderness education organization Outward Bound.

Founded in the United Kingdom in the 1940s, Outward Bound was conceived as a survival-training program for sailors whose ships were vulnerable to attack. Studies of the program’s early successes showed that older sailors, who had already developed resilience through life experience, fared better in disasters than younger ones. Ewert’s own research, much of it based on his observations of contemporary Outward Bound participants, also analyzes the relationship of resilience to risk.

After joining the IU Bloomington faculty, Ewert continued his association with Outward Bound. In a study of the effects of Outward Bound on returning veterans, he is working with selected U.S. veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The veterans take part in a five-day Outward Bound course that includes mountaineering, rock climbing, river running, and wilderness trekking.

“The idea is that structured outdoor activities will enable

them to deal with traumatic sights and events they’ve experienced, to talk about some of the issues they’re facing, avoid substance abuse, and reintegrate into society,” Ewert says.

He has found that Outward Bound activities resemble the veterans’ experiences in combat—for example, working in small groups and facing uncertainties together. The program unleashes strong responses from its participants. In a recent e-mail, a veteran who completed the program told Ewert, “I didn’t need the courage to face a daunting summit climb or overcome my fear of falling off the rocks. I needed the courage to face the demons inside. I’m not sure how or why, but that’s what I took from the program. It’s time to put all this stuff to bed and start living again. So thank you for giving me the courage I needed.”

Ewert notes that there are four major components of outdoor programs that involve a certain amount of risk, and they’re not what you might think. “They are building character, developing leadership skills, serving others, and recognizing that the social group plays a very powerful role,” he says.

Ewert has studied other groups involved in potentially risky wilderness activities. In a paper titled “Playing the Edge: Motivation and Risk Taking in a High-Altitude Wilderness-like Environment,” he described the motivations of climbers of Mount McKinley at Denali National Park in Alaska.

“What’s often overlooked is that for many individuals, the goal of working as a team and being in close contact with a natural environment while striving to accomplish a difficult and challenging goal (e.g., reaching the summit) may well be worth facing the danger,” Ewert writes.

This study also highlighted the importance of experience in developing a sense of control that mitigates risk. “The outdoor activities that I study and work in afford appropriate, not devil-may-care, risk-taking,” Ewert says. “The research shows pretty consistently that the more skilled you get, the less you feel a sense of risk. Not that the risk disappears, but you become more capable of dealing with it.”

—KG

Research & Creative Activity | F A L L 2 0 1 0

Outdoor education expert Alan Ewert, far left, instructs members of an IU Bloomington Conservation and Outdoor Recreation Education class on managing groups in high-risk environments —in this case, a high angle rock site in Colorado.

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Unfriend my heart

by Lauren J. Bryant

Indiana University

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n a moment of frustration during the 2009 movie He’s Just Not That Into You, Mary (played by Drew Barrymore) says: “I had this guy leave me a voice mail at work, so I called him at home, and then he e-mailed me to my Blackberry, so I texted to his cell.

“And now you have to go around checking all these different portals just to get rejected by seven different technologies.

It’s exhausting.”

Mary should have consulted Ilana Gershon. An assistant professor of communication and culture in the College of Arts and Sciences at Indiana University Bloomington, Gershon has written the book on rejection via new technologies. It’s called The Breakup 2.0: Disconnecting over New Media. Published in July 2010 by Cornell University Press, the book drew attention from the likes of Newsweek, Gawker.com, and a New Yorker magazine blog.

An anthropologist by training, Gershon often teaches about how meaning is affected by cultural context. To help students understand this point, Gershon routinely asks introductorylevel classes to describe the “rules” for a first date. One recent semester, on a whim, she asked the students about bad breakups instead.

She was surprised by the responses. “I expected answers in which someone said, ‘I found my girlfriend in bed with someone else’ or ‘we yelled at each other until three in the morning,’” Gershon says. Instead, she heard about “mediated breakups”— people dumping one another via e-mail, text message, or social networking sites.

As the students’ stories about new media breakups prolif-

erated, the idea for Gershon’s book was born. What happens when people start disconnecting via a medium that is entirely constructed for connecting?

“There are not many shared social expectations for how to use Facebook, texting, instant messaging, and the like,” Gershon says, “and that really becomes clear in a breakup.” For Gershon, breakups are a “perfect ethnographic moment” to reveal the social construction of new media use in action.

Beyond McLuhan In the 1960s, media analyst Marshall McLuhan famously said “the medium is the message.” He meant, generally, that the form of a medium (in McLuhan’s era, radio, telephone, TV) transforms the meaning of its message. But Gershon’s point is different.

“It’s not that the medium affects the message,” she says.

“People’s ideas about the medium itself shape the ways they engage with the message.” As Gershon writes in her book, we “send information through [our] choice of medium as much as by the content of [our] messages.”

Take texting, for example. Say Alice texts Bob that she wants to break up. Because cell-phone texting is a very informal medium, both Alice and Bob may take the message relatively lightly. Rather than “this is the end,” a text message about wanting to break up may be more like a warning, something akin to “we have to talk,” says Gershon.

On the other hand, Bob may be horrified by Alice’s breakup text. He “could look at the text and say, ‘Who does that?! Forget it, that’s it. I’m not dealing with that,’” Gershon says.

The new new No matter the form, new media, designed to enable connections, are clearly enabling new forms of disconnection, too.

After 72 in-person interviews and 400 surveys, however, Gershon says she uncovered a shocking lack of commonality about how new media should be used when it comes to breaking up.

“Throughout every single interview for the book,” she says, “people would say something about how they were using Facebook or how they were texting that made me think, ‘You do what?’”

In one interview, for instance, a female student told Gershon that she saved her “really bad text-message fights.” When the student accumulated “the right number” of these bad messages, she would “know it was time to break up.”

“It was so surprising,” Gershon recalls, shaking her head.

“I didn’t know anyone did that!”

As we determine how to send our digital Dear Johns, we are experiencing the newness of new media, according to Gershon. It’s hardly the first time that people have grappled with such newness. Gershon points all the way back to Socrates, who worried about “what writing does when we no longer communicate in oral language.” From Platonic dialogues to the iPad, humans have had to work out how to use new forms of communications.

Photo by Chris Eller, courtesy of the College of Arts and Sciences, IU Bloomington

Ilana Gershon is an assistant professor of communication and culture in the College of Arts and Sciences at IU Bloomington.

A social experiment Through our collective use of different communications media, we develop what Gershon calls “idioms of practice.” A code of etiquette emerges that comes to seem natural—think of how we now silence our cell phones upon entering a theater or church.

We used to get a lot of help in developing shared practices for using communications media. Industry (such as phone companies), government regulations (e.g., for ham radio operations), schools, and communities “put enormous effort into how to use technologies properly,” Gershon says, and enforced social norms and regulations regarding the use of communications technologies. For instance, a telephone operator would monitor overly talkative phone users or cut off someone using a party line inappropriately.

In the new media world of today, though, new norms have yet to exist and social etiquette is wide open. Take the unfriend/defriend debate. Facebook, with more than 400 milliion users, is all about “friending” others. But what’s it called when you decide to stop being friends?

It may seem a trivial question, but Gershon says she found real consternation over disconnecting a “friend” link on Facebook. “People don’t know which word to use to describe deleting a friend from one’s Facebook profile. There is no agreement yet over what words to use,” she says.

Similar questions persist regarding more serious Facebook breakups. Do you announce a shattered relationship with a status update or a wall post? Who changes their “in a relationship” status to “single” first, and when?

“People sense that there are right ways and wrong ways to change one’s relationship status on Facebook after a breakup,” Gershon says, “but there is no widespread consensus about what those ways might be.”

It’s almost, but not entirely, a new media Wild West. There was one point of agreement among the new-media users

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“In both cases, it’s informal texting,” she points out, but our individual understandings of what it means to use an informal medium to send such a message determine the different ways we react and interact after we get the message. In a new media breakup, it matters whether we choose to do the deed by e-mail, text, voice mail, or IM. “When you are breaking up,” Gershon says, “the medium is part of the message.”

Gershon uses the term “media ideologies” to describe our beliefs about new media technologies and what those technologies themselves communicate. In Alice’s media ideology, cell-phone texting is casual and superficial so, correspondingly, the messages it conveys aren’t all that intimate or upsetting.

Likewise, Bob believes cell-phone texting is casual and superficial, but for that very same reason, the use of the medium to communicate something as serious as a breakup insults him.

To illustrate media ideologies further, Gershon points to another common communications technology — e-mail. For Gershon, who is in her late 30s, and many others, e-mail is an informal medium that transmits primarily quick, off-thecuff messages. But for college students, Gershon discovered, e-mail’s resemblance to a traditional written letter makes it formal. College students today interpret e-mail as “a medium for expressing important information or for professional correspondence,” she says. In other words, college students’ media ideologies regarding e-mail’s formality affect both how they use e-mail and how they feel about the messages it delivers.

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Gershon studied: Face-to-face breakups are best. Face-to-face contact offers “the broadest bandwidth possible,” Gershon says.

“It gives you the most information you can have.” Aside from face-to-face, though, when it comes to relationships and new media, we’re in the middle of a social experiment.

“These new technologies are creating social problems,” Gershon says. “People are inventing how to solve these problems that new media pose on the fly. You and I are coming up with different solutions with our friends and family, in our different social spaces. The question is, How does it become widespread?”

Gershon isn’t sure. Institutions and communities once standardized our uses of communications technologies, but these days, Miss Manners can’t keep up with social media.

“People keep expecting things to be standardized, they keep thinking there will be an etiquette,” Gershon says, “and

there just simply isn’t one. Will there be? I don’t really know.”

Anonymous no more One thing Gershon does know is that our uses of new media are changing what it means to be public. Our notions about public speech are shifting, she says, from anonymity to access.

She calls it a “sea change” in Americans’ understanding of public speech.

“Many people think about public speech in terms of anonymity — when you speak publicly, you are addressing an anonymous group,” Gershon explains. For example, if you write a letter to the editor of the newspaper, you understand that your words will be made public and read by others, but you don’t know anything about who those readers are. Likewise, editorial page readers are an undefined group of strangers who understand themselves as part of an anonymous audience.

Of tweets and texts I

f you’re mystified by the abbreviations, acronyms, or just plain abominable spelling that characterize today’s new communications media, it’s nt 2 l8 to learn. Here’s a rudimentary glossary: C h at: like chatting in real life, except not face to face. Online chat takes place in real time as people type and exchange words in chat rooms, on Web sites, and in stand-alone applications. Can take place with more than one person at a time.

Faceb o o k : arguably the world’s most ubiquitous social networking application, founded in 2004. According to Facebook.com, there are more than 400 million active users who spend more than 500 billion (with a ‘b’) minutes per month on the site. More than 25 billion “pieces of content” such as news stories, blog posts, and photo albums, are shared each month.

Fr ie nd s : contacts connected to your online profile in Facebook or another social networking application. In the social media world, these may or may not be people you know.

IM (in s ta nt me ss ag in g) : much the same as chat, but the conversation is often with just one other person. IM can take place using specific tools such as Microsoft Messenger or “enhanced” tools such as Skype that include voice and video along with text.

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Ne ws fee d : a personalized “tickertape” of postings from friends and others that continuously scrolls by on a user’s Facebook page. According to Facebook, the news feed is “not a real-time stream but is based on an algorithm determining popular and interesting content.

Factors include how many friends are commenting on a certain piece of content, who posted the content, and what type of content it is.”

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P r o fil e : an online biographical sketch that a user creates when he or she signs up on a social networking site. It may be quite stripped down and mostly hidden behind privacy settings, it may tell the world more than anyone wants to know, or it may be entirely fake.

S o c i a l me d i a : a catch-all term for the many applications, platforms, and tools that allow people to socialize online. It includes but is certainly not limited to blogs, microblogs (e.g. Twitter), video- and

photo-sharing applications (e.g. YouTube and Flickr), GPS-based applications (e.g. Foursquare), and, of course, Facebook.

S tat us up d at e : a quick posting on a social networking page of your “breaking news” or whatever it is that you feel like saying about what you are doing at any particular moment. Status updates can be automatically generated when you change something on your profile, as in “Alice went from being married to single.”

Te x t: This used to be a noun but is now often a verb, meaning to send a text message using a cell phone or smart-phone or similar device.

If you are over the age of 25, you likely use complete sentences and standard spelling. If you are 25 or under, u dnt.

T w it t er ( a nd T w ee t ) : a real-time message platform that allows users to share 140-character posts publicly. Twitter users “follow” one another by subscribing to someone’s Twitter message feed. A tweet is a message sent using Twitter, although it too may be a verb, as in “he tweeted me.”

Unfr ie nd/unfo l l o w ( al so p o ssib ly d efriend/d efo llo w ): Named the 2009 Word of the Year by the New Oxford American Dictionary, unfriend means to remove someone as a friend on a social networking site such as Facebook. On Twitter, users who cease reading a person’s message feed “unfollow” that person.

There is surprisingly vigorous debate regarding un- versus de-. Freelance lexicographer Michael Quinion, who produces the language Web site worldwidewords.org, says: “The main objection is that it ought to be defriend, which would parallel the standard English befriend. However, the dictionary’s editors found unfriend was much more common.”

Wa l l: a page on a Facebook account where a user adds new updates, photos, and other content. Facebook lets you write only on your friends’ walls, your own wall, and the walls on public pages of which you are a fan. Friends can see your wall, but not your news feed.

Wall-to-wall means the transcript of wall posts between two people, which you may see if the posters’ privacy settings allow it.

—LB

“

People’s ideas about the medium itself shape the ways they engage with the message. ...

When you are breaking up, the medium is part of the message.”

Ilana Gershon, assistant professor of communication and culture, College of Arts and Sciences, IU Bloomington

and joy, and that is all that matters.”

To deal with the complicated situations that access creates, an increasing number of people are not simply tweaking their profile pages but creating entirely fake Facebook profiles, Gershon says. One profile exists under the person’s real name and another under a nickname or pseudonym that only “real” friends know, effectively segregating the user’s publics.

Among “real” friends, though, lack of anonymity raises another issue. When audiences are no longer anonymous, members of those audiences have a new obligation to respond, or not.

Gershon recalls a conversation with two women who told her they read wall-to-wall conversations between their friends, though they would never admit to anyone else that they did so. Despite the fact that such wall-to-wall messages are public to friends, the women argued that “the authors of the [wall-towall] texts were not anticipating multiple audiences when they wrote, they were not imagining their conversations as public,” Gershon says. So, to respond to the public wall-to-wall writings would be “creepy.”

On the other hand, access to public speech is also creating new demands for intimacy, like the virtual gifts and long chains of ‘happy birthday’ posts that mark “Facebook birthdays” now. Likewise, a broken heart on a status update, a frowning emoticon, or a cryptic post with an unclear spin (“Jack went from being ‘in a relationship’ to ‘single’”) call upon people to get in touch.

Nothing endures but change The more new media communication options we have, Gershon says, the more social and ethical dilemmas we face regarding how to use them, brought about in large part by our very different understandings of the media themselves. Amid the online cacophony of tweets, texts, posts, and chats, “we are a long way from standardizing how people use these technologies,” she says.

“Things keep changing, and people are communicating information without even realizing it. People have to keep learning what the changes mean.”

Meanwhile, one thing is clear: our uses of new media are changing the ways we leave our lovers, so think before you click send.

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Today, however, anonymity is not a unanimous assumption when it comes to public speech. New media users no longer assume that anyone could be listening. Because we can choose who to add to our Facebook friends or who will fill our e-mail address books, we control who has access to our words, or so we think.

“You don’t, of course, because of the ways that e-mail forwards and the ways that Facebook postings are made visible,” Gershon says. “But you’re given the sense that you know who you’re addressing, and that you have a certain amount of control over who has access to your public speech.”

Controlling, or even the illusion of controlling, access to our public speech generates a new set of social problems. There is the “quandary of inclusion,” for instance. Do you allow your parents, your wife, your high-school sweetheart, your former fraternity brothers, and your manager at work access to the same profile page?

In short, when anonymity is erased, and accessibility is a given, Gershon says, what and who is public or private gets parsed in increasingly complex ways. In romantic relationships, access can get especially tricky, triggering arguments and fallout that would not have existed without the influence of social media.

Gwen, one of Gershon’s interviewees, was troubled by her boyfriend’s Facebook profile, which featured photographs of the boyfriend at parties interacting with other women. “We really didn’t have issues until I started seeing things on Facebook, like photos,” Gwen said in her interview. “Most of my arguments with him [were] about something he did [that] I would not have known about had I not been on Facebook. …

But he knows I’ll see it, which kind of adds to the whole thing.”

Gwen later decided not to be friends with boyfriends on Facebook. Another interviewee, Kathy, who stayed friends with her ex despite being deeply hurt by the breakup, developed a “master Facebook plan” to “put on a happy face” for her former boyfriend.

“Instead of saying ‘Kathy is sad and hurt …, I have to be all, ‘Kathy can’t wait for the weekend!’ or some lie like that, because he’s probably looking,” Kathy told Gershon. “The next part of my master Facebook plan is to have friends take a ton of pictures of me looking like I’m having an absolutely wonderful time.

“I’ll probably still feel like crap,” Kathy concluded. “However, my Facebook page will portray me as a bundle of happiness

Lauren J. Bryant is editor of Research & Creative Activity magazine.

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Body Language,

by John Schwarb You are Kelly Gordon’s family doctor. One week ago, you visually diagnosed her with genital herpes. Lab results confirmed your finding. A day before Kelly’s husband, Paul, is scheduled to come in for his annual physical, Kelly asks to be squeezed in for an appointment.

“I’ve been feeling anxious, especially since my test results were reported to the Department of Health. They contacted me about my partners, so I just told them Paul is stationed overseas. And then I remembered Paul is coming in for a physical tomorrow,” Kelly explains to you. “I just want to make sure that you won’t tell Paul about my condition.”

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Illustration courtesy of Karl MacDorman

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he continues, saying Paul is definitely not the source due to his traditional views on marriage, that he wasn’t dating anyone else even when they were going out, and that she had a one-night “fling or two,” though she’s not anymore.

“Paul knows I have an IUD. If I stopped having sex or asked him to wear a condom, he’d know something’s up,” Kelly says.

“He’d soon find out what, and I’m sure he couldn’t handle it.

He’d explode. I’d lose my marriage, the house, everything.”

Before walking out of your office, she again begs for your trust and confidentiality: “Just give me a couple of months to get my life sorted out and figure out how to tell him.”

What do you do, Doctor?

That’s the ethical dilemma participants faced in a recent experiment conducted by Karl MacDorman and his research team. And by using video clips of four different Kelly Gordons, they determined that what we see can be more important than what we hear.

MacDorman conducted the research with colleagues at the Indiana University School of Informatics on the Indiana

Robot Style

Building androids MacDorman, an associate professor in the Human-Computer Interaction Program at the School of Informatics and an adjunct associate professor with the Purdue School of Engineering and Technology at IUPUI, is a leading expert in the ever-evolving science of androids.

Just defining the term is a challenge. MacDorman has written that an android is “an artificial system designed with the ultimate goal of being indistinguishable from humans in its external appearance and behavior.” He uses such humanlike robots to test “hypotheses about human brains and behavior and as a testbed for theories about how neural or cognitive processes affect behavior.” The goal of android science, put simply, is “to better understand human beings,” MacDorman says.

“The ability to sustain humanlike relationships with people would be a milestone in the development of androids,” MacDorman continues. “Defining androids in terms of a goal and not the current state of the art allows us to distinguish androids from humanoids among presentday robots while recognizing that what it means to be an android is very much a moving target for researchers.”

In Japan, where MacDorman has done extensive work, android science is especially advanced, with humanlike versions having silicone-type skin and motors allowing for subtle movements. The Japanese are also skilled at building humanoid robots, some that can be purchased in a box like an American Barbie doll. These robots don’t resemble

humans in terms of skin tone or facial features, but they do have a head, arms, torso, legs, and can be programmed to perform jumping jacks or even play ping-pong. Programmable robots would be found on the likes of an automobile assembly line, for example.

In the United States, our first association with the word “robot” likely comes from the silver screen: the likes of R2D2 rolling across the floor making indistinguishable — yet oddly emotive — beeping noises or more recently, computer generated characters with humanlike skin and facial tics from Avatar or The Polar Express.

“From the standpoint of culture, the United States is far less accustomed to robots than Japan,” MacDorman says.

“In Japan, the integration of robots into everyday life is part of the national agenda, to address problems in health care and other areas resulting from the aging population and low birth rate.”

That integration can be detrimental to android science, however, because people get accustomed to androids, which initially seemed creepy. That sense of creepiness — called the “uncanny valley” by scientists — is important to android science.

“A heightened sensitivity to any nonhuman defect in the android’s behavior lets us know that there is something wrong with the android’s behavior that needs to be corrected,” MacDorman says. “That is why we can develop cognitive models that are more human by using androids, instead of using less human-looking robots.”

Our heightened sensitivity also shines a light back on real humans, and how we respond to various models — such as the four incarnations of Kelly Gordon.

Passing judgments The fictitious Gordon was portrayed in two different ways, by a human actress and by a computer-generated character.

The actress, of Asian descent, is shown in a computer-generated office with unmemorable wallpaper and a nondescript plant. She’s roughly in her 20s, wearing a pink shirt and dark pants, has long dark hair, and, in theory, is not a character who would sway a hypothetical doctor based on appearance.

(Scientists fall short of calling this a “neutral” character, however, as neutral is in the eye of the beholder. To further enhance this study, MacDorman says, several more characters will be developed to match the majority of participants

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University – Purdue University Indianapolis campus. Their study was published earlier this year in the journal Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments. MacDorman and his colleagues found that among men, decisions to grant Kelly trust were strongly affected by presentational aspects of the Kelly Gordon character.

“Much evidence has accumulated showing that nonverbal behavior can have a profound impact on human judgment in ways we are hardly aware of, and that extends to the digital realm,” MacDorman says. “Presentational factors of virtual characters influence people’s decisions, including decisions of moral and ethical consequence, presumably without their realizing it.”

In other words, as Kelly’s hypothetical doctor, you may well be responding to Kelly’s computer-generated simulation, not Kelly’s actual plight.

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“

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Photo courtesy of the IU School of Informatics at IUPUI

Much evidence has accumulated showing that nonverbal behavior can have a profound impact on human judgment in ways we are hardly aware of, and that extends to the digital realm.”

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— Ilana Gershon, Assistant Professor of communication and culture, College of Arts and Sciences at Karl MacDorman, associate professor, Human-Computer Interaction Indiana University Bloomington Program, and director of the Android Science Center at the School of Informatics, IUPUI

in terms of race, gender, and age.)

The computer-generated character, created by an animator from Pixar, is unmistakably digital. She has more angular features, including hands and forearms with sharp edges and an overtly defined neck and collarbone. This model also wears a pink shirt with a bare midriff (a factor that was noted in the study as possibly limiting the conclusion, because the bare skin could be perceived as promiscuous).

Each character presented her story in two modes—a “fluid” delivery in which voice and gestures perfectly matched and a “jerky” delivery in which body movements were not in sync. In the jerky form, five of every six video frames were eliminated, leaving each frame to run for six times its original duration.

In a survey of 682 men and women, all participants were given two questions to determine Kelly’s fate: Would they (as the hypothetical doctor) inform Paul of his exposure to genital herpes? Would they inform Paul that Kelly was the likely source?

Just over 43 percent of the participants chose to inform Paul of his exposure, and some 26 percent said they would name Kelly as the likely source. Of participants showing strong favoritism, 18 percent were for Paul (answering yes to both questions) and 49 percent were for Kelly (answering no to both questions).

The surprising revelation of the study was that the jerky form of the video was perceived more negatively by men more than by women. Far fewer male participants favored Kelly in the computer-generated jerky version. The results, MacDorman says, indicate that “human photorealism and motion quality” influence male decision making behaviors. The majority of female participants were not swayed by any of the presentational factors.

Does this finding confirm behavior generalizations across genders, axioms that women are better listeners and men judge by appearances? MacDorman is not about to make that leap, but he is intrigued by the moral and ethical issues raised by the study’s findings.

“Men may be more likely than women to allow a character’s appearance to influence their decisions. Another possibility is that people, the vast majority of whom are heterosexual, are more likely to allow the appearance of a character of the opposite sex to influence their decisions than a character of the same sex,” MacDorman says. “Which claim is correct? We’ll find out when we repeat the experiment with a male character in place of the female character.

“The evolutionary adaptation of selecting fertile mates with strong parenting potential could override sound judgment in dealings with the opposite sex,” he adds. “At this stage in our research, however, explanations of the results remain speculative.”

But the fact that males and females react differently to changes in a character’s visual presentation could affect the design of future androids used to facilitate medical decision making, crime reenactments, and many other scenarios.

“As we come to a better scientific understanding of how nonverbal behavior can be used to influence people without their knowing it, we will also need to consider how it might be exploited by humans who create virtual characters,” MacDorman says.

John Schwarb is a freelance writer and a site producer for PGATOUR.com in Florida.

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S E CO N D LO O K

B.F. Skinner at IU

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he American scientist B.F. Skinner was chair of the Department of Psychology at Indiana University Bloomington from 1945 to 1948. Arguably one of the most influential psychologists in the discipline’s history, Skinner established the theory of operant conditioning—essentially, how behavior is learned and shaped in response to consequences, either punishment or reinforcement. The term “positive reinforcement” emerged from the theory of operant conditioning.

In the image above, taken from Skinner’s autobiography, Skinner is in his IU laboratory, demonstrating his experimental apparatus with a pigeon. Originally a researcher who worked with rats, Skinner discovered pigeons as an experimental animal during wartime work and quickly adopted them as regular subjects for his research in operant conditioning. According to James Capshew, associate professor of the history and philosophy of science at IU Bloomington and former editor of the journal History of Psychology, Skinner obtained his

first pigeons in Minneapolis from a Chinese restaurant supplier. Pigeons have since become a standard organism in psychological research.

Skinner’s arrival at IU marked the beginning of a postwar renaissance in the IU Bloomington psychology department. Under Skinner’s leadership, the psychology department emerged as a major center for the experimental analysis of behavior. In 1946, the first meeting of the Society of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior was held in Bloomington. The business office for the Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior remains in Bloomington today.

Skinner moved to Harvard University in 1948. In later years, Skinner’s theories regarding human behavior became both more widely known and more controversial. He died on Aug. 18, 1990, at the age of 86, in Massachussetts.

“Demonstrating operant conditioning of a pigeon, Indiana, 1948” from B.F. Skinner, The Shaping of a Behaviorist, Part Two of an Autobiography. (New York: Knopf, 1979). Photo courtesy of IU Archives.

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Pink Gloves, Good Cause

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aunched in November 2009, the Pink Glove Dance video promoting breastcancer awareness and support for breast-cancer survivors has been seen more than 11 million times. The 2010 sequel, released in September, features dancing by more than 4,000 health-care workers and breast-cancer survivors from the United States and Canada, including faculty and staff from Indiana University’s Melvin and Bren Simon Cancer Center, School of Medicine, and School of Nursing in Indianapolis.

[1] Breast cancer surgeon Robert Goulet and nurses get their groove on in an operating room at the Melvin and Bren Simon Cancer Center [2] Nursing students jump on the Clarian PeopleMover platform [ 3] Staff put their hands

up on the third-floor inpatient unit at the Simon Cancer Center [4] Transportation service employees join the cause [ 5] Pink-gloved dancers take over the Simon Cancer Center lobby [6] Researchers reach out beside a titanium wall at Walther Hall, one of the IU School of Medicine’s newest research facilities.

The Pink Glove videos are produced by Medline Industries Inc., manufacturers of the pink gloves. Medline donates a portion of the proceeds from the sales of its pink glove products to the National Breast Cancer Foundation.

All photos courtesy of Medline Industries, Inc.