One of my favorite techie sites, Lifehacker, made a short video showing how to update your Facebook notification settings. Use these settings to limit the torrent of email you receive from your Facebook friends. Link to video.

Facebook, “…lavishes you with attention from the people that you love the more you disclose about your life,” says Cory Doctorow in a Ted talk.The disconnect between disclosure and negative consequences (in time or because you never find out) frustrates adults trying to warn kids about the dangers of saying too much on Facebook or any other internet application. (It makes it hard to caution about the dangers of smoking and poor diet too.)

Like me, Cory is unimpressed with the available monitoring programs for watching your children. We both believe they don’t work that well; it is too easy for kids to get around. He goes in another direction as well; it teaches kids that surveillance by authority figures is okay. In fact, he goes on, any of the tools that we would like our kids to have in order to protect themselves (encryption, proxy servers, cleaning out cookies) defeats not only those who want to steal our childrens’ information, it also defeats the parental monitoring and control programs.

As a start, he would like us to promote privacy and educate our children so that the default question is, “Why do you need to know that?”

via BoingBoing

Yes, psychologists can make fun of ourselves. This video is a hilarious take on a undergraduate student explaining why she wants to pursue a Ph.D in clinical psychology. Some of the satire is so right on that it hurt to watch it, and it hurts to share this with you. But it is also funny, and that is enough.

Yes, I am still paying off student loans, and business expense eat into my take-home pay. Very few people call me doctor, and even when they do, I say it is okay to just call me Marc. Clinical psychology is about empathy, understanding and relationship; it is not about social standing.

And I suppose, truth be told, that the video is making fun of psychologists. My sharing it with you is psychologists laughing at ourselves.

Please let me know what you think in the comments.

Tell a three-year-old child that a prize is under the red cup, when he saw you put it under the yellow cup, and he will believe you and look under the red cup. Researchers from University of Virginia in Charlottesville studied how children react when they know their parents are not telling the truth. The kids believe their parents when the parents speak a lie, but they did not believe their parents when their mom or dad merely pointed to the wrong cup.

This makes complete sense to me. I remember, as a young boy, needing to get the wax washed out of one of my ears. The nurse, being silly, I am now sure, told me to plug my other ear so that the water would run out the far side of my head. I knew she was lying. I knew my ears do not connect across the inside of my head. I looked to my mom, who gave no hint at what I should do. I gave an internal shrug, told myself that she was a nurse, that this was an important medical procedure, that I was wrong to have wax in my ears and to cost our family money to get it fixed, and that I ought to follow instructions. I complied; I stuck my finger in my other ear, and got laughed at for my troubles. All these years later, my obedience still bugs me, I feel silly and stupid. And yet I understand why I did as I was told.

Now, before I (and you, dear reader) believe smugly that we, as adults, would never fall for this; that we would believe our own eyes before ever trusting an authority figure, remember Soloman Asch’s experiments about social conformity from the 1950′s (link). You, as the subject in the experiment, and a bunch of other “subjects” (really confederates to the researcher) would be shown three lines of different length. The the researcher would ask the confederates first what line was longest, for example. The confederates would all give the same wrong answer. Thirty percent of subjects would go along with any one wrong answer, and seventy-five percent of the subjects agreed with at least one wrong answer.

If adults will agree with strangers, of course three-year-olds will agree with their parents. And of course I believed the nurse. Now, think of the bravery of the one juror who would not convict Rod Blagojevich, the ex-governor of Illinois accused of plotting to sell Barack Obama’s senate seat. Think of the courage that juror must have had (NPR report). That person must have known that the whole nation thought he was guilty. And she refused to go along. She stood by her convictions. She did not submit.

Studies on conformity were done in the 1950s in large part to answer the question of why so many regular, ordinary German citizens obeyed unlawful and unethical orders. Why did they become mass murderers? The research, and our human history, shows the bravery of people who stand up against wrongs, such as the Blagojevich juror, Martin Luther King, Jr., Susan B. Anthony, and many more. There is hope for us as a people to do the right thing, and knowing how easy it is for us to conform, despite the lies we tell ourselves about being an individual, will help us overcome our biases and our weaknesses.

Monitor on Psychology (link)

Facebook is giving users the options to connect to its servers using HTTPS (the S stands for secure). This is a new feature, you must change your account settings for this to work; Facebook is not making it automatic. Also it is rolling out over the next few weeks, so your account may not have it yet. To set it, go to Account, choose Account Settings (not Privacy Settings). Then, under the Settings tab, select Account Settings, and then Secure Browsing (if your account has the new feature).

Facebook launched a new feature called Groups. On its face, it offers a way to limit who you share information with. In an interview posted on Cnet, Mark Zukerberg said,