Researchers found that first-person photos (capturing the scene as it looks from one’s own eyes) best represent the physical experience of an event for people.

But third-person photos like selfies (documenting a moment with themselves in it) better depict the deeper meaning of the event in their lives.

“We found that people have a natural intuition about which perspective to take to capture what they want out of the photo,” said lead author Zachary Niese, a PhD graduate of The Ohio State University, now a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Tübingen in Germany.

The results also provide a counter to the view that people post selfies on sites like Instagram just to promote themselves, said study co-author Lisa Libby, professor of psychology at Ohio State.

“These photos with you in it can document the bigger meaning of a moment,” she said. “It doesn’t have to be vanity.”

The study was published today (April 27, 2023) in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science.

Previous research suggested that capturing the physical experience of an event or its broader meaning may be two important motivations for taking personal photos.

For example, someone at the beach with a friend may take a photo of the ocean to capture the physical experience of the beautiful and relaxing day. Or they could take a photo with themselves in it to capture the bigger meaning of spending time with a friend.

In a series of six studies involving 2,113 participants, the researchers explored the impact of perspective in personal photography.

In one online study, participants read a scenario in which they might want to take a photo, such as spending the day at a beach with a close friend. They were asked to rate how important the experience itself would be for them, and how important the bigger meaning would be. Results showed that the higher participants rated the meaning of the event to them, the more likely they said they would take a photo with themselves in it.

Another study demonstrated the truth of people’s intuitions about whether each perspective better captures the experience or meaning of events. This study asked people to examine photos they posted to their Instagram accounts.

Participants opened their most recent post featuring their own photo and were asked: “What does this photo make you think about more?” with the response options being “The physical experience of the moment” or “The bigger meaning of the moment.”

Results showed that if the photo featured the participant in the shot, they were more likely to say the photo made them think of the bigger meaning of the moment, while photos featuring how the scene looked from their own visual perspective made them think of the physical experience.

But sometimes people may not take the photo that captures their goal — and the result is that they don’t like the photo as much.

In another experiment, the researchers again asked participants to open their most recent Instagram post featuring one of their photos. They were asked whether they were trying to capture the bigger meaning or the physical experience of the moment.

Participants then rated how they felt about the photo on a scale of 1 (not at all positive) to 5 (extremely positive).

“We found that people didn’t like their photo as much if there was a mismatch between the photo perspective and their goal in taking the photo,” Libby said.

For example, if they said their goal was to capture the meaning of the moment, they liked the photo more if it was taken in third person, with themselves in the image.

Overall, the results suggest that people have an intuition about what perspective they should use in photos to fulfill what they want the photo to do, Niese said.

“I hope this study increases people’s knowledge about how photo perspective affects how they react to photos,” he said. “That way they can make sure they consciously choose the perspective that will meet their goal.”

The results also suggest people may be posting photos on Instagram and elsewhere for more than just their audience, Niese said.

“This work suggests people also have very personal motives for taking photos. Even on social media, it appears that people are curating images for themselves to look back on to capture the experience or the meaning of the event,” he said.

“Body size reduction is not the universal response to population increase in marine predators,” says lead author Ana Valenzuela-Toro, a paleoecologist at the University of California Santa Cruz and the Smithsonian Institution. “California sea lions were very resilient over the decades that we sampled and were able to overcome increasing competition thanks to prey availability. They’re like the raccoons of the sea: they can consume almost everything, and they can compensate if something is lacking.”

While many marine mammal species have rebounded to some extent since the Marine Mammal Protection Act was passed in 1972, California sea lions are notable for the size and duration of their population increase: the number of breeding females, who have been most consistently counted, has more than tripled in the US since the 1970’s — from around 50,000 to nearly 170,000 — and their population growth is only now beginning to plateau.

To explore how California sea lion ecology has changed as their population has grown, the researchers analyzed museum specimens of adult male and female California sea lions collected in central and northern California between 1962 and 2008. To estimate changes in body size, they compared the overall size of more than 300 sea lion skulls collected over the years. They also measured other skull features, such as the size of muscle attachment points, which allowed them to assess changes in sea lion neck flexibility and biting force.

The team additionally took tiny bone samples from some of the skulls and measured their stable carbon and nitrogen isotope composition, which allowed them to make inferences about where the sea lions were foraging and what they were consuming. “Carbon provides information about habitat use — whether they’re foraging along the coast or offshore — and nitrogen provides insights about the trophic level of their prey, for example if they’re consuming smaller or larger fish,” says Valenzuela-Toro.

Overall, the researchers found that male sea lions have increased in size, while female sea lion size has remained stable. This sex difference is probably due to the fact that size matters for male, but not female, mating success. “One male can breed with many females, and males in the breeding colony fight with each other to establish their territory,” says Valenzuela-Toro. “Bigger males are more competitive during physical fights, and they can go longer without eating, so they can stay and defend their territory for longer.”

Male sea lions also increased their biting force and neck flexibility over this same time period. “The neck muscles are really important because they allow them to move their head and neck more agilely, bite harder, and, eventually, win when they are fighting other males in the breeding colony,” says Valenzuela-Toro.

The isotopic analyses indicated that both male and female sea lions managed to meet their nutritional needs by diversifying their diet and feeding on a broader range of prey. Male sea lions also foraged further afield. “Over time, some male sea lions were foraging further north,” says Valenzuela-Toro. “This is consistent with some anecdotal records that they’ve even been seen in Alaska, where they were not known to go in the past.”

Female sea lions consistently had a more diverse diet compared to male sea lions. The authors suggest that this flexibility in food choice is what allowed females to maintain their average body size without foraging further away.

“They remain in a narrow zone around their breeding colony, but they still show a lot of flexibility in what they eat,” says Valenzuela-Toro. “We believe that skull morphology in the rostrum — which is related to the size and shape of the mouth — probably has something to do with this flexible foraging behavior. We found that the size and shape of the mouth of females is related to the size of the prey that they consume.”

However, this flexibility in diet can only take the sea lions so far, and the authors warn that the sea lions’ future may not be so rosy.

“All these dynamics occurred in an environment that was rich in prey: full of anchovies and sardines, two species that are super important for their diet,” says Valenzuela-Toro. “But over the last few years, the populations of these two fish have collapsed, so California sea lions are diversifying their diet to compensate, and apparently they are not doing so well.”

“As climate change progresses, prey availability of sardines and anchovies will decrease even more, and eventually we will have more permanent El Niño-like warming conditions, reducing the size and causing a poleward shift of these and other pelagic fishes,” she says. “It will be a really hostile environment for California sea lions, and eventually we expect that their population size will stop growing and actually decline.”

Most galaxies harbour a supermassive black hole at their centre. While black holes are known for engulfing matter in their immediate vicinity, they can also launch powerful jets of matter that extend beyond the galaxies that they live in. Understanding how black holes create such enormous jets has been a long standing problem in astronomy. “We know that jets are ejected from the region surrounding black holes,” says Ru-Sen Lu from the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory in China, “but we still do not fully understand how this actually happens. To study this directly we need to observe the origin of the jet as close as possible to the black hole.”

The new image published today shows precisely this for the first time: how the base of a jet connects with the matter swirling around a supermassive black hole. The target is the galaxy M87, located 55 million light-years away in our cosmic neighbourhood, and home to a black hole 6.5 billion times more massive than the Sun. Previous observations had managed to separately image the region close to the black hole and the jet, but this is the first time both features have been observed together. “This new image completes the picture by showing the region around the black hole and the jet at the same time,” adds Jae-Young Kim from the Kyungpook National University in South Korea and the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Germany.

The image was obtained with the GMVA, ALMA and the GLT, forming a network of radio-telescopes around the globe working together as a virtual Earth-sized telescope. Such a large network can discern very small details in the region around M87’s black hole.

The new image shows the jet emerging near the black hole, as well as what scientists call the shadow of the black hole. As matter orbits the black hole, it heats up and emits light. The black hole bends and captures some of this light, creating a ring-like structure around the black hole as seen from Earth. The darkness at the centre of the ring is the black hole shadow, which was first imaged by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) in 2017. Both this new image and the EHT one combine data taken with several radio-telescopes worldwide, but the image released today shows radio light emitted at a longer wavelength than the EHT one: 3.5 mm instead of 1.3 mm. “At this wavelength, we can see how the jet emerges from the ring of emission around the central supermassive black hole,” says Thomas Krichbaum of the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy.

The size of the ring observed by the GMVA network is roughly 50% larger in comparison to the Event Horizon Telescope image. “To understand the physical origin of the bigger and thicker ring, we had to use computer simulations to test different scenarios,” explains Keiichi Asada from the Academia Sinica in Taiwan. The results suggest the new image reveals more of the material that is falling towards the black hole than what could be observed with the EHT.

These new observations of M87’s black hole were conducted in 2018 with the GMVA, which consists of 14 radio-telescopes in Europe and North America [1]. In addition, two other facilities were linked to the GMVA: the Greenland Telescope and ALMA, of which ESO is a partner. ALMA consists of 66 antennas in the Chilean Atacama desert, and it played a key role in these observations. The data collected by all these telescopes worldwide are combined using a technique called interferometry, which synchronises the signals taken by each individual facility. But to properly capture the actual shape of an astronomical object it’s important that the telescopes are spread all over the Earth. The GMVA telescopes are mostly aligned East-to-West, so the addition of ALMA in the Southern hemisphere proved essential to capture this image of the jet and shadow of M87’s black hole. “Thanks to ALMA’s location and sensitivity, we could reveal the black hole shadow and see deeper into the emission of the jet at the same time,” explains Lu.

Future observations with this network of telescopes will continue to unravel how supermassive black holes can launch powerful jets. “We plan to observe the region around the black hole at the centre of M87 at different radio wavelengths to further study the emission of the jet,” says Eduardo Ros from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy. Such simultaneous observations would allow the team to disentangle the complicated processes that happen near the supermassive black hole. “The coming years will be exciting, as we will be able to learn more about what happens near one of the most mysterious regions in the Universe,” concludes Ros.

At the core of evolutionary science is a triad: variation, selection and replication, explains Binghamton University Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Biological Sciences David Sloan Wilson, the founder of Binghamton University, State University of New York’s Evolutionary Studies (EvoS) program. You can see this triad at work in culture as well, from economics and business, to engineering and the arts, and the functioning of society at all levels.

Knowing how cultural evolution happens also means we can harness it for the larger good, creating a more just and sustainable world. That’s a topic of “Multilevel cultural evolution: From new theory to practical applications,” a new article by Wilson recently published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences.

Co-authors include Binghamton alumnus Guru Madhavan, MBA ’07, PhD ’09, senior program director at the National Academy of Engineering; Michele J. Gelfand, professor of organizational behavior and psychology at Stanford University; University of Nevada Psychology Professor Steven C. Hayes, who developed Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT); Paul W.B. Atkins, visiting associate professor of psychology with Australian National University’s Crawford School of Public Policy and co-founder of the non-profit ProSocial World with Wilson; and microbiologist Rita R. Colwell, former director of the National Science Foundation.

The wide-ranging article explores the three hallmarks of cultural evolution: prosociality, or behavior oriented toward the welfare of others; social control, which enforces prosocial behavior and penalizes those who behave selfishly; and symbolic thought, which relies on a flexible inventory of symbols with shared meaning.

Humans have evolved to live in small, cooperative groups, not as disconnected individuals. To be effective, however, society also requires structure.

Otherwise, strategies that are beneficial on the individual or small-group level become maladaptive: Self-preservation becomes self-dealing, helping friends and family becomes nepotism and cronyism, and patriotism fuels international conflict, for example.

“We have to have the global good in mind and everything that we do in some sense has to be coordinated with the good of the whole,” Wilson said.

A roadmap for evolution

Evolutionary concepts have been misused, however. Take social Darwinism, for example, which is often used to justify competition and harsh social inequities as “survival of the fittest,” a misunderstanding and misapplication of Darwinian theory. “Social engineering” also has insidious implications, Wilson noted.

“We need to ask: Is there anything about evolutionary theory that is especially dangerous in that regard? Or is it the case that anything that can be used as a tool can also be used as a weapon?” Wilson asked. “I think it’s the latter.”

These concepts become weapons when they are used as means of control, with little to no input from the people they impact, he explained. When people decide to use evolutionary principles to shape their own actions and goals, however, these principles are largely benign.

Checks and balances are at the core of multilevel cultural evolution to avoid power imbalances, making it the opposite of social Darwinism, which portrayed social inequities as necessary and inevitable. Social Darwinism actually has little to do with Darwin or his theories, Wilson points out; it’s a stigmatizing term associated with the moral justification for ruthless competition, and probably closer to the principles behind neoclassical economics.

But fields such as economics and business needn’t define themselves with the neoclassical “greed is good” ethos of Milton Freidman. Wilson points to the work of Nobel Prize-winning economist Elinor Ostrom, who proved that groups can self-manage common-pool resources — avoiding the proverbial “tragedy of the commons” if they implement eight “core design principles.”

Wilson collaborated with Ostrom to show that the core design principles can be generalized, providing a key to successful governance for nearly all forms of cooperative activity.

“To begin, you need to have a good, strong sense of identity and purpose; that’s the first core design principle,” Wilson said.

Other principles involve the equitable distribution of benefits and resources, inclusive decision-making, transparent behavior, and levels of response to helpful and unhelpful behavior, as well as fast and fair conflict resolution, local autonomy and authority, and relationships with other groups.

These principles not only build better workplaces, neighborhoods and nations, they can also heal the mind. As social mammals, our minds interpret social isolation as an emergency situation, the authors note, and social support is key for the treatment of such conditions as anxiety and depression.

The tools used in therapy — particularly mindfulness — are also applicable on a societal level, encouraging adaptability and cognitive flexibility, which helps individuals recover from adverse life events. That’s true of groups as well, Wilson said.

Planting the seed

Creating a more prosocial world grounded in equity and cooperation isn’t some unreachable pipe dream.

“There are practical applications,” said Wilson, who established the nonprofit ProSocial World to plant these ideas outside of academia. “Right now, not in some far, distant future, we could be using these ideas to accomplish positive change.”

It’s important to avoid what Wilson calls the archipelago of knowledge and practice, consisting of “many islands with little communication.” Otherwise, ideas and solutions may become trapped in separate silos.

In essence, the EvoS’ speaker series functions that way for students, mingling lectures on bacteria with Neanderthals, morality, the arts and more. Students are exposed to ideas they may not have otherwise encountered, which introduces new paths and possibilities. The same can happen in the larger society, too.

While technological changes can spread from one culture to another over decades or centuries, Wilson hopes to spark societal change more quickly. He draws upon the concept of catalysis in chemistry: Added in small amounts, a catalytic molecule hastens the rate of change, he explains.

As catalytic agents, individuals may inspire changes that would otherwise take decades or not happen at all. And this catalysis can happen in ordinary ways, by leaning into the small-group community mindset that fuels our humanity.

Consider a community garden, for example: Reaching out to different community gardens and sharing knowledge can only benefit everyone involved, Wilson said. And those connections don’t need to consist of dull meetings; they can involve social interactions such as parties and potlucks, which bring people together and encourage them to make connections.

“Imagine repeating that in every walk of life, in our schools or businesses, on every scale from small groups to cities,” he explained.