16 | New Scientist | 20 November 2021
News
NeurosciencePRACTISING a tool-using task helps
people score higher in a complex
language understanding test – and
the benefits go the other way too.
Claudio Brozzoli at the National
Institute of Health and Medical
Research in Lyon, France, and his
colleagues asked volunteers to lie in
a brain scanner while carrying out
tasks involving either tool use or
understanding complex sentences.
The tool-based task involved
placing small pegs into a tray of
holes using pliers. The language test
involved understanding sentences
such as: “The writer that the poet
admires writes the paper.”During both tasks, the fMRI
machine used to scan participants
showed higher activity in the basal
ganglia, structures deep in the brain.
New groups of volunteers were
then asked to carry out two complexlanguage tests, with half of them
doing the pegs and pliers task in
between. Their scores on the second
language task were, on average,
about 30 per cent higher than on
the first language task.The other half of the group did a
simpler physical task between the
language tests – inserting the pegs
with their hands – and their scores
on the language test improved only
by about 15 per cent on average.
What is more, a language task
boosts tool use ability to a similar
extent. This was seen if people did
two rounds of tool use interspersed
with the complex language task
(Science, doi.org/gnfqqf).
Why might this occur? “Abilities
may improve because brain cells
in the basal ganglia start working
more efficiently and become primed
for activity,” says Brozzoli. ❚Using tools can help
you grasp language
better and vice versaClare WilsonIF SOMEONE ends a relationship
by ghosting – abruptly stopping
answering phone calls and
messages – it can be very painful
for their ex-partner, even when the
relationship was short-lived. But
according to Peter Jonason at the
University of Padua in Italy, such
a strategy may seem rational to
people with higher scores for the
so-called dark triad of personality
traits: Machiavellianism, being
manipulative and cynical;
narcissism, being self-centred or
unempathetic; and psychopathy,
being socially callous and
antagonistic.
“This kind of cold and detached
form of break-up – one that
doesn’t take anyone else’s feelings
into consideration – is an easily
reasoned outcome of the way
in which these people’s brains
work,” he says. “They prefer to
just kind of bail.”
Jonason and his colleagues
asked 341 volunteers to completea questionnaire that scored
them on their dark triad traits.
Participants were asked how much
they agreed with statements such
as “many group activities tend to
be dull without me”, “you should
wait for the right time to get back
at people” and “I’ll say anything
to get what I want”. Volunteers
were aged 18 to 72 and were
76 per cent female, 42 per cent
undergraduate students and
72 per cent white, the rest being
primarily African American.
The team then asked the
volunteers to rank how acceptable
ghosting is in different situations
on a 10-point scale, and say if they
had ever ghosted anyone in the
past. Higher dark triad scores
aligned with a greater acceptance
and history of ghosting as a way
to end short-term relationships,
says Jonason (Acta Psychologica,
doi.org/g5mf).
That might be related to the
fact that people with more darktriad traits are “reward-sensitive”
and therefore trying to minimise
the painful aspects of life, he says.
“So they’re going to try to stay
away from the costs of breaking
up – which is the drama and
the argument.”“It is not surprising that scales
that measure low agreeableness
and high antagonism are related
to being rude,” says Donald Lynam
at Purdue University in Indiana,
who wasn’t involved in the study.
“Such a person is not connected
enough to these [partners] to
really care about what they feel
or what they think.” He adds that,
in general, such self-reporting
surveys are reliable.
Long-term relationships are less
common in people with dark triadtraits, Jonason’s earlier work has
shown. But the new study suggests
that when they do occur, their
partners are unlikely to be ghosted.
“It seems they don’t think
it’s acceptable to abandon a
long-term partner with blocking
on WhatsApp or something like
that,” he says. “But [ghosting
could] be a way they have
of extracting themselves
easily from low-investment
relationships, which are already
known to be the preference of
these kinds of people.”
This doesn’t mean people with
higher dark triad scores are evil,
or even pathological, says Jonason.
“These are people who see the
world differently for a variety of
reasons,” he says. “But we all have
these traits in us [to a certain
extent], and good and evil is never
black and white. To pathologise
those people is to essentially
dehumanise them and therefore
misunderstand them.” ❚PsychologyChrista Lesté-LasserreWho sees ‘ghosting’ as OK?
Certain personality types are more comfortable with abruptly cutting ties
WELL
COMECENTRE^HUMAN^ NEU
ROIM
AGING/SPLBrain areas involved in language
comprehension appear as bright
patches in a scan“A detached break-up is an
easily reasoned outcome
of the way these people’s
brains work”