From an article in New Scientist:
To capture these signals and depict them visually, Pentland worked with MIT doctoral students Daniel Olguín Olguín, Benjamin Waber and Taemie Kim to develop a small electronic badge that hangs around the neck. Its audio sensors record how aggressive the wearer is being, the pitch, volume and clip of their voice, and other factors. They called it the “jerk-o-meter”. The information it gathers can be sent wirelessly to a smartphone or any other device that can display it graphically.
It didn’t take the group long to notice that they had stumbled onto a potent technology. For a start, it helped people realise when they were being either obnoxious or unduly self-effacing. “Some people are just not good at being objective judges of their own social interactions,” Kim says. But it isn’t just individual behaviour that changes when people wear these devices.
In a 10-day experiment in 2008, Japanese and American college students were given the task of building a complex contraption while wearing the next generation of jerk-o-meter – which by that time had been more diplomatically renamed a “sociometric badge”. As well as audio, their badge measured proximity to other people.
At the end of the first day they were shown a diagram that represented three things: speaking frequency, speaking time, and who they interacted with. Each person was indicated by a dot, which ballooned for loquacious individuals and withered for quiet ones. Their tendency for monologues versus dialogue was represented by red for Hamlets and white for conversationalists. Their interactions were tracked by lines between them: thick if two participants were engaged in frequent conversation and hair-thin if they barely spoke.
“We were visualising the social spaces between people,” Kim says. The results were immediately telling. Take the case of “A”, whose massive red dot dominated the first day. Having seen this, A appeared to do some soul-searching, because on the second day his dot had shrivelled to a faint white. By the end of the experiment, all the dots had gravitated towards more or less the same size and colour. Simply being able to see their role in a group made people behave differently, and caused the group dynamics to become more even.
I’m a little confused about the graph. Does “speaking frequency, speaking time, and who they interacted with” display how often each person was being a jerk to others? Or just how often people were interacting? In any group, some people are going to attract each other more than others. Obviously, “A” was at the least very assertive, if not wholly aggressive, given what the “jerkometer” measures. Yet the vagueness of “speaking frequency, speaking time, and who they interacted with” could just indicate a very chatty person. In which case, this could also be termed a “shut-up-o-meter.” (Still useful in real life.)
Late to the party – but you know, those technologies from the article are really, really creepy. (There are two devices discussed, only one of which appears in your excerpt) I’m not even sure that I’d like to have a better read on my friends and family at the price of lost privacy (which is the best possible use of the device described in the first half of the article) – but I’m horrified at the thought of having to wear a device like that at work and constantly self-monitor to make sure I providing the right signals. Even the “jerk-o-meter”, while it provides some useful tools, would really really suck if it were made part of a performance review. Imagine work plus having to constantly aim for corporate-approved metrics of interaction – not just being liked or good at your job, but trying to keep your speech and interpersonal contacts within approved numbers. Imagine working a crappy customer service job while also managing this stuff.
Plus there’s a whole philosophy of the self built into these devices. Ie, what my body displays (talking about the glasses from part 1) is the “truth” of my self. That is, maybe I’m showing body confusion signals (which are bad, bad, bad – especially if my boss or my professor sees them) but I’m consciously happy and challenged – I’m confused, but I’m learning. A crude range of body signals trump my conscious thoughts about my experience – body signals reveal the truth. This is akin to believing that what folks say when they’re drunk is more truthful than anything they may say sober: the idea that there’s a foundational, unconscious truth of the personality and that all else is mask. Instead of believing, for example, that personality is complex and that all parts of it create the whole.
Plus, imagine wearing something like that at a job interview or when talking to your boss. I disagree with my boss a lot, right? We have fairly different political views and certain differing views about our institution. But in the brave new world of monitored communication, I’d have to figure out how to hack that, to give the impression of agreeing. This would provide an incredibly strong incentive to actually agree over time.
Pingback: Links for 2011-07-11 « Den's Random Ramblings of Rude Reality