Human Emotions (3)
But bye for now.
Bye.
Hello and welcome to 6 Minute English.
I'm Neil.
And I'm Dan.
Now then, Dan, do you ever feel awkward?
Awkward?
Yes, feeling uncomfortable, embarrassed or self-conscious in a social situation where
something isn't quite right.
Sometimes.
I remember always feeling very awkward watching TV with my parents if there was an explicit
love scene.
You know, people canoodling.
Oh yes, me too!
And that feeling of awkwardness is what we are looking at in today's 6 Minute English,
and how it is all connected to social rules.
Social rules are the unspoken rules which we follow in everyday life - the way we interact
with other people and particularly with strangers.
Yes.
For example, if you're waiting at a bus stop, it's OK to talk about the weather
to a stranger.
But it would be very awkward if you broke that social rule by asking them about, oh
I don't know, how much money they earned.
Oh yes, that would be wrong, wouldn't it?
And we'll find out about another awkward situation on the underground railway later
in the programme.
Before that though, a quiz.
Which city has the oldest underground railway?
Is it:
a) London
b) New York or
c) Tokyo
Aha!
Well, I'm pretty confident about this!
I think it's London.
Well, I'll have the answer later in the programme.
Dr Raj Persuad is a psychologist.
He was a guest on the BBC radio programme Seriously.
He was talking about social rules.
How does he say they affect our lives?
How do we understand what the implicit social rules are that govern our behaviour?
They're so implicit.
They're so almost invisible - yet we all obey them - i.e. they're massively powerful that
the only way to get at them, because you couldn't use an MRI brain scanner or a microscope…
What's the tool you would use to illuminate the social rules that actually govern our
lives?
How do they affect our lives?
He says that they govern our behaviour, they govern our lives – this means that they
'control' our lives.
They 'rule' our lives.
What's interesting is that he says these social rules are implicit.
They are not written down anywhere.
They are unspoken but understood.
If they are unspoken and not written down, how can scientists and sociologists study
them?
How can they find out about them?
They need a way to illuminate the rules.
This means a way of shining a metaphorical light on them to see what they are.
Here's Dr Persaud again.
How do we understand what the implicit social rules are that govern our behaviour?
They're so implicit.
They're so almost invisible - yet we all obey them i.e. they're massively powerful that
the only way to get at them, because you couldn't use an MRI brain scanner or a microscope…
What's the tool you would use to illuminate the social rules that actually govern our
lives?
One way to find out about a rule is to break it.
Another word for 'break' when we're talking about rules is breach and breaching experiments
were used to learn about social rules.
Here's Dr Persaud describing one of those experiments.
You breached the social rule on purpose.
So a classic one – people would go into the Metro, the underground railway – Tube
– and there'd be only one person sitting in a carriage.
You would go and sit next to that person.
And if that led to awkwardness or discomfort, where the person got off the tube stop immediately,
you had discovered a social rule.
So, what was the experiment?
Well, quite simply, find a nearly empty train carriage and then go and sit right next to
someone rather than a distance away.
If that person then feels uncomfortable or awkward, and that's something you can tell
by watching their behaviour – for example, do they change seat, move carriage or get
off the train completely?
If they do, then you know you've discovered a rule.
So you find a rule by breaking it or breaching it.
OK, time to review our vocabulary, but first, let's have the answer to the quiz question.
I asked which city has the oldest underground railway.
Is it:
a) London
b) New York and
c) Tokyo
Dan, you were pretty confident.
I was!
I said London, but now I'm having second thoughts.
I think it might be New York.
Oh…
That's a little bit awkward, isn't it?
Well, it is London, so I don't know if you're right or wrong!
I feel a bit uncomfortable now.
The facts are that London opened in 1863.
New York was 1904 and Tokyo, 1927.
Well done, and extra bonus points if you knew any of those dates.
Now it's time for our vocabulary.
I hope it doesn't make you feel awkward, but you can you start, Dan?
Of course!
And the adjective awkward, and its noun awkwardness, are on our list for today.
They mean 'an uncomfortable feeling in a social situation'.
This is all connected with the idea of social rules – unspoken, but well-known rules which
we follow in daily life to avoid awkward situations.
The rules, as Neil said, are not spoken and they are not written down but we know them
and understand them.
They are implicit.
And these implicit rules govern our lives.
The verb govern means to 'control and rule'.
To see something clearly, either in reality or metaphorically, you need to put some light
on it.
You need to illuminate it.
And that was the next of our words, the verb illuminate.
And finally we had a word which means, when we're talking about rules, the same as break,
to breach.
In experiments, they breached the rules to learn more about them.
Well, we don't want to breach any rules so it's time for us to leave you for today.
But don't worry we will be back.
In the meantime, you can find us in all the usual places online and on social media, just
look for BBC Learning English.
Bye for now.
Bye-bye!
Hello and welcome to 6 Minute English.
I'm Neil.
And I'm Rob.
Now, Rob, would you say that you are an introvert or an extrovert?
What a good question!
Well, extroverts are confident in their personality.
They're outgoing and comfortable in social situations.
So, I would have to say that, if anything, I'm the opposite.
I'm more of an introvert.
I'm really quite shy.
I feel uncomfortable in social situations.
For example, if I go to a party, where I don't know anyone I usually feel very embarrassed
and I find it impossible to start conversations with strangers.
But you do all of this on the radio and videos for Learning English, don't you?
Some would say you have to be an extrovert to do what we do.
Ah!
Well, maybe I'm pretending to be an extrovert to hide the fact that I'm an introvert.
It's quite a common thing, you know.
Well, it might not be so easy to hide in the future because researchers have developed
a computer program that can tell your personality from looking at where you look, by tracking
your eye movements.
Wow!
That sounds pretty hi-tech, and scary.
Well, we'll learn more shortly, but first a question on the topic of clever computers.
The letters 'AI' stand for Artificial Intelligence but what are the letters 'AI'?
Are they
A) an abbreviation
B) an acronym, or
C) an initialism?
OK, I thought that was going to be easy, but I think it's an abbreviation, isn't it?
Well, you'll have to wait to the end of the programme to find out!
Sabrina Hoppe is a researcher at the University of Stuttgart.
She was interviewed on the BBC Radio programme All In The Mind.
She spoke about an experiment in which they tracked the eye movements of people in real
situations.
This is what she said about the research.
Was she confident the experiment would work in the real world?
The main finding in our study is that it is possible at all to just look at eye movements
and then predict something about their personality.
And before our study, it was not clear at all if this would be possible from eye movements
in such an unconstrained real world setting.
So, was she confident this would work?
No, not really.
She said that before the study it wasn't clear if it would be possible in an unconstrained
real-world setting.
Unconstrained here means that there wasn't strict control over the conditions of the
experiment.
It took place in the ‘real-world' – so not in a laboratory.
The result of the experiment - or the finding, as she called it - was that by following eye
movements, a computer programme was able to work out the personality of the subjects.
Let's listen again.
The main finding in our study is that it is possible at all to just look at eye movements
and then predict something about their personality.
And before our study, it was not clear at all if this would be possible from eye movements
in such an unconstrained real world setting.
So how does the software work, for example, what are the differences in the eye movements
of extroverts compared to introverts?
We still don't really know in detail what makes the difference.
We can only tell that there are differences and that we know computer programs that can
pick up those differences.
Maybe extrovert people look up a lot because they want to look at people's faces, whereas
some super introvert person maybe just stares at their own shoes, if you want to take the
extreme examples.
So, probably it somehow changes gaze.
But we only know that this information is there and somehow our program figured out
how to extract it.
So how does it work?
Well, that's the strange thing.
She said that she didn't really know, at least not in detail.
She did say that our personality somehow changes gaze.
Gaze is another word for looking at something.
So maybe we gaze in different ways depending on our personality.
Extroverts may look up more and introverts, like me, may look down more.
Yes, it was interesting that she said that she didn't know how it did it, but the program
somehow managed to figure it out.
The phrasal verb to figure something out means 'to understand or realise something'.
Time to review today's vocabulary, but first, let's have the answer to the quiz question.
I asked what are the letters AI?
Are they
A) an abbreviation
B) an acronym
C) an initialism
Rob, what did you say?
I said A) an abbreviation.
Well sorry, no, AI is C), so to speak.
It's an initialism.
It's the first letters of the words 'artificial intelligence', but it's not pronounced like
a new word, just the initial letters.
Right, time now to review today's vocabulary.
Yes.
We had the word extrovert.
This describes someone who has a very outgoing personality.
An extrovert is confident and socially comfortable.
By contrast, an introvert is someone who is shy and not comfortable in social situations
and doesn't like being the centre of attention.
Our report today talked about the findings of some new research.
A finding is something that has been learnt, discovered or indeed, found out.
It is the conclusion that is reached.
Then we had unconstrained to describe the experiment which was not carried out in a
controlled environment.
So unconstrained means 'not limited or restricted'.
Our next word was gaze.
This is a word that means 'our way of looking at something'.
Yes, the findings of the research suggest that our personality can affect our gaze.
And this was something the computer was able to figure out.
To figure out means 'to study something and reach an answer to a particular question or
problem'.
Right!
Well, you know what I've just figured out?
Do tell!
It's time to bring this edition of 6 Minute English to an end.
