Zachary Pincus-Roth.com

Is location-based social networking practical in spread-out Los Angeles?

Published in the Los Angeles Times

This article was the lead story on the front page of the Los Angeles Times website:

In early May, Mark Ghuneim was sitting in his hotel room at the Four Seasons near Beverly Hills. He discovered, via his iPhone's Foursquare app, that a friend was at the Echo, a concert venue in Echo Park about eight miles away, about to watch a concert. "I'm realizing that even if I got in my car and drove there right now, I'd miss the set," he said.

At that moment, Ghuneim did not find Foursquare as useful as some of its 1 million users do. Location-based services are the hot new form of social networking, allowing users to tell their friends where they are and what they think of that place. Loopt has more than 3 million users and MyTown has more than 2 million, while Twitter and Google also have location-based features.

But as Ghuneim discovered, these services might not be an ideal fit for Los Angeles, a city that has always had anxiety when it comes to locations. Angelenos tend to spend too much time in a location we don't want to be, driving to a location we're trying to reach, along with a bunch of other people fighting to do the same. The city's spread-out geography and car dependence might make it particularly inhospitable to the spontaneity that these services thrive on.

Robin Hood Psychology

Published in Slate

Most summer movie heroes have an uncontroversial moral mandate: Beat the bad guys; save the city; "With great power comes great responsibility." Robin Hood's crusade is more divisive: He steals from the rich and gives to the poor, redistributing wealth in favor of a more equitable society.

On opening weekend of Ridley Scott's film adaptation (starring Russell Crowe and Cate Blanchett), the climate for Robin Hood's moral brand seems bleak—"socialism" has become a dirty word in America. But while Robin Hood's ideals are politically controversial, researchers in psychology and related fields are finding that humans seem inclined to engage in Robin Hood-like thinking, which they often call "egalitarian motives," "inequity aversion," or "variance reduction." In fact, there's a growing body of evidence that, despite appearances, we're Robin Hoods at heart.

To measure our attitudes toward inequality, researchers conduct "ultimatum games," a form of experimental economics frequently cited by journalists and pop psychologists to debunk the idea that we always act rationally. In an ultimatum game, the first test subject is given money that he must divide between himself and a second subject. The second subject then gets the opportunity to take the deal or to reject it—leaving both subjects with nothing. It turns out that people are inclined to reject the deal when the split is very unequal, even though they'd be better off taking what they can. The conclusion: People are willing to sacrifice their own income to punish those who don't distribute incomes equally.

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