Sensitive Souls

Mimosa pudica, or the sensitivity plant

Friday afternoon, I was walking along West 28th Street between Sixth and Seventh Avenues, where a handful of grubby florists are all that remains of the Flower District.At one little store I stopped to look at what seemed to be a fern, but the store lady said it was a 'sensitivity plant,' then she reached down and touched one of the frond-like leaves. The 'fingers' of the leaf folded upwards and shrank inwards at the light touch, as quickly as it takes one to, say, look down at the keyboard and hit a key. I stared in complete surprise -- I'd never seen or heard of Mimosa pudica before, though I knew the plant sitting next to it immediately, Dionaea muscipula, the Venus Flytrap.

Speaking of sensitivity, there's unusual new research that shows that so-called Pollyannas, people who are naively optimistic, are in fact better at detecting liars than people who exhibit a more routinely skeptical, negative attitude: "trusting people are better able to detect duplicity than untrusting folks."

Researchers at the University of Toronto created an expiriment in which

participants watched videos of eight simulated job interviews: Half of the interviewees were completely truthful; half told a variety of lies to make themselves more attractive job candidates. Contrary to lay wisdom, high trusters were significantly better than low trusters were at detecting lies. This finding extends a growing body of theoretical and empirical work suggesting that high trusters are far from foolish Pollyannas and that low trusters’ defensiveness incurs significant costs.

In other words, the mistrustful people were undermined by their generally dim view of other people, because they assumed that people are generally not to be distrusted.