Trawling The Net

Never mind that Chicago power pop group OK Go pleaded for weeks to get their greedy record company EMI to allow this unique video to be embeddable — it is now, and just look! The group's Rube Goldberg masterpiece is here for all to see. "This Too Shall Pass" might be the most elaborate setup ever, and beyond that, it's got to be the most tasteful and colorful. That's what you get when you assemble a brilliant team consisting of wizards from Syyn Labs, Caltech, and MIT Medialab. They created this magnificent machine inside a 10,000-square-foot abandoned warehouse, and Flying Box Productions shot it all with brilliant skill and artistry. Why were all those people clapping at the end? Was the video successfully shot in one take? That huge warehouse full of paraphernalia couldn't have been easy to set up. Want to see how this was done? Four videos with a few hints:

"Police are looking for a.... Umm... Me tonight."

"People tend to conform their factual beliefs to ones that are consistent with their cultural outlook, their world view," Braman says. The Cultural Cognition Project has conducted several experiments to back that up. Participants in these experiments are asked to describe their cultural beliefs. Some embrace new technology, authority and free enterprise. They are labeled the "individualistic" group. Others are suspicious of authority or of commerce and industry. Braman calls them "communitarians." In one experiment, Braman queried these subjects about something unfamiliar to them: nanotechnology — new research into tiny, molecule-sized objects that could lead to novel products. "These two groups start to polarize as soon as you start to describe some of the potential benefits and harms," Braman says. The individualists tended to like nanotechnology. The communitarians generally viewed it as dangerous. Both groups made their decisions based on the same information. "It doesn't matter whether you show them negative or positive information, they reject the information that is contrary to what they would like to believe, and they glom onto the positive information," Braman says.

"Basically the reason that people react in a close-minded way to information is that the implications of it threaten their values," says Dan Kahan, a law professor at Yale University and a member of The Cultural Cognition Project. Kahan says people test new information against their preexisting view of how the world should work. "If the implication, the outcome, can affirm your values, you think about it in a much more open-minded way," he says. And if the information doesn't, you tend to reject it. In another experiment, people read a United Nations study about the dangers of global warming. Then the researchers told the participants that the solution to global warming is to regulate industrial pollution. Many in the individualistic group then rejected the climate science. But when more nuclear power was offered as the solution, says Braman, "they said, you know, it turns out global warming is a serious problem."And for the communitarians, climate danger seemed less serious if the only solution was more nuclear power.