Category: Behavior/Psychology Page 23 of 28

Hope for Understanding Ourselves Goes to the Dogs

On April 29, 2013

In Animals, Behavior/Psychology, Biology, Genetics/Genomics, Neuroscience

By Ashley Yeager

Brian Hare and Evan MacLean, co-directors of Duke’s Canine Cognition Center, play with Lilu, a labradoodle. Credit: Ashley Yeager, Duke.

Lilu, a beautiful brown poodle-labradoodle mix, couldn’t sit still. Scents of pizza and peanut butter dog treats and the sights of new people easily distracted her.

The ADD behavior could be one trait that made her fail out of service-dog training.

“Six out of every ten dogs wash out of service training. But it’s hard right now for scientists to understand why,” said Duke evolutionary anthropologist Evan MacLean, co-director of the university’s Canine Cognition Center.

He, along with biological anthropologist Brian Hare and geneticist Misha Angrist spoke about ‘Genes, Brains and Games’ in man’s best friend as part of the Science and Society Journal Club on April 26.

MacLean and Hare explained that dogs have taken on many jobs in human society, acting as everything from pets, to our eyes and ears to being like coal-mine canaries searching for hidden bombs and missing people.

“Dog vocations require different sets of cognitive skills,” MacLean said. He studies military dogs, looking for traits that make them more suited for service tasks than pets like Lilu.

MacLean would ultimately like to identify the genetic components that underlie the characteristics suited for each type of job that a dog might do.

Scientists are interested in correlating dogs’ cognitive traits to their associated genes because the animals are “the most exquisite example of artificial selection,” Angrist said.

In Portuguese water dogs, for example, just six substitutions in individual DNA bases of the dogs explain variations in body size. In humans, nearly every gene could factor into height. It’s the same challenge that makes understanding human cognition and intelligence difficult at the genetic level.

Of course, defining cognition and intelligence at the conceptual level isn’t so clear cut either. “It’s so hard for people, journalists and the general public, to understand multiple intelligences,” Hare said.

He explained that at a basic level, cognition is the ability to make inferences, and that when we think of intelligence we think of IQ and standardized tests. These tests, however, measure only one type of intelligence. They don’t measure the ability to empathize, to verbalize a new idea or to put two completely separate ideas together to form a new one, which are other, important facets of intelligence, or really multiple intelligences.

At the Canine Cognition Center, and through the citizen science website Dognition, Hare and MacLean use standardized tests to study the variation in dogs’ intelligence. The tests, unlike the SAT or ACT, “cast a wide net across skills sets dogs could use for different vocations,” Hare said.

Dogs like Lilu, he added, are “really the hope of the world” for understanding cognition.

The Phishing Market Beyond the Internet

By Ashley Mooney

On April 29, 2013

In Behavior/Psychology, Business/Economics, Lecture, Neuroscience

By Ashley Mooney

Most people have heard of phishing scams on Internet, in which a person is tricked into giving up their money or identity by a clever ruse.

Temptations like this are found throughout all of capitalist society, says George Akerlof, 2001 Nobel Laureate in Economic Sciences. He discussed ideas from his upcoming book, “Phishing for Phools” wth a Duke audience on April 25 to kick off “Decision Making Across the Disciplines,” a two-day symposium sponsored by the Duke Center for Interdisciplinary Decision Sciences.

Akerloff studies connections between individual’s decision biases and larger economic phenomena.

George Akerlof won the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 2001 for his research on economic decision making. (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

“Standard economics assumes that the people are smart, they may not know everything but they can be smart,” he said. “But there may be only one way in which you can be smart, but there are many, many ways in which you can be stupid.”

Akerlof, who is also Koshland Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley, developed his idea of phishing for phools from his paper, “The Market for ‘Lemons,’” which secured his Nobel nod.

“A fool with an f is a stupid or silly person, but it’s perfectly possible to make an error when… making a perfectly intelligent decision,” he said. “Somebody who makes a mistake is a phool with a ph.”

Although markets have the ability to maximize wealth, Akerlof said it is a double-edged sword.

“Free markets open us up to be phools. They open us up to those who seek to influence us to do what they want, but it’s not necessarily good for our sake,” he said. “We live in a world where some 5 billion adults can phish us for being a phool. We’ve intentionally opened ourselves up to such exploitation because of obvious advantages, but then we must also think about the other side.”

Markets, Akerlof noted, aim for three weak spots: emotional weaknesses, cognitive weaknesses and ignorance due to blocked channels of information.

Phishing is common on the internet, but occurs throughout the market. (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

When people are aware of phishing, it has relatively little effect. But when one doesn’t know about a phish, it can have a major impact. He proposed that obesity, product misinformation and the recent economic recession were all caused by phishing for phools.

“In the United States, the goal of almost every businessman is to get you to spend your money,” he said. “Life in capitalist economy is a continual temptation.”

Akerlof said according to economics textbooks, people decide on their demand by budgeting spending and then choosing the things that will maximize their happiness. But most people, he added, are not honest with themselves and as a consequence do not engage in rational budgeting.

“A very significant fraction of consumers are worried about how they’re going to make ends meet,” Akerlof said. “Almost 50 percent of people probably could not come up with $2,000 in a month for unforeseen situations.”

The only way to prevent phishing is to know about it, and to make informed decisions with that knowledge.

“Phishing for phools… creates bad equilibrium, especially if we don’t know about phishing for phools, we think that markets are totally benign,” Akerlof said.

UPDATE – June 28, 2013

The Economics Department has posted a YouTube video of Ackerlof’s entire talk.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U85MKnS8i8U?rel=0]

Everyone Makes Mistakes

By Pranali Dalvi

On April 24, 2013

In Behavior/Psychology, Lecture, Medicine

By Pranali Dalvi

Dr. Brian Goldman, Credit: nsb.com

“Every important thing that I have ever learned since the day I was born has come from a mistake,” said Dr. Brian Goldman on April 17 during the Duke Colloquium.

Goldman is a renowned thinker and leader on issues of medical ethics and medical error. He has had great success in two high-adrenaline fields: broadcasting and medicine.

Not only is he a practicing emergency physician at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto but he also hosts an award-winning radio show White Coat, Black Art where he discusses the Canadian healthcare system. His bold TED Talk ‘Doctors Make Mistakes: Can We Talk about That?’ has over 700,000 hits.

Goldman’s life-altering mistake happened during a 2-month elective in neurology at Johns Hopkins. By medical school, he was a veteran insomniac, often waking up early — except for the one morning he was supposed to deliver grand rounds. That morning, he woke up at 10 AM, the exact moment when he was supposed to be presenting rounds in the neurology conference room at the hospital across the street.

“This mistake was a dramatic enough gesture to make me pay attention. I don’t wish a medical error on anybody, and I don’t wish the misfortune that happens to patients and families that are directly involved. But sometimes it’s a moment like that which redirects you and gets you into thinking about what you need to do with the rest of your life,” Goldman said.

The mistake made him reconsider neurology.

Credit: thestudentceo.com

Too often people have one of two worldviews of failure. The first inspires you to do better – if you fall down seven times, get up eight. The other shows success and failure as completely different paths.

“What we need is for health professionals and the public to realize that mistakes are inevitable with humans,” Goldman said.

What does error look like in medicine?

Radiology mistakes including X-ray and CT misinterpretations, miscalculating medication dosages, and hospital-acquired infections due to poor hand washing practices are human errors in medicine. All potentially catastrophic yet hard to detect.

Why do these errors happen?

The vast majority of health professionals are some of the most caring and compassionate individuals. Why do they mess up? Emphasis on quantity over quality, stress, miscommunication and messy handwriting are just a few of the many reasons.

“I spoke to a pharmacist who said that if you simply add 30 seconds of look-up time to every medicine dispensed at the hospital pharmacy, he’d have to hire 2 more full-time pharmacists. If you don’t have that kind of money, this is the sort of institutional cutting of corners that we have to go through to make ends meet,” Goldman said.

Credit: The Adventures of Pam & Frank Blog

Errors also result from the organization of the system. Residents often don’t go home despite 80-hour week regulations. They fear that no one else knows their patient as well as they do. Patient safety is also compromised as you increase the number of handovers due to duty hour regulations.

Goldman insists on the development of technologies to prevent mistakes, reducing responsibilities to allow increased productivity and fostering a loving and respectful environment for doctors to discuss their errors.

How can we aim for success in a field where failure is so effortless?

The Duke Colloquium, the brainchild of Dr. Andrew Hwang, is a university-wide initiative to pull the humanities into the professions. The event bring forward-thinking visiting scholars to Duke’s campus to inspire students, faculty, and the broader Duke community to become more socially conscious professionals.

Student Profile: Arnab Chatterjee

By sa160@duke.edu

On March 28, 2013

In Behavior/Psychology, Global Health, Medicine, Students

By Nonie Arora

Arnab Chatterjee, Duke Student. Credit: Chrislyn Choo

Freshman Arnab Chatterjee, Credit: Chrislyn Choo

Freshman Arnab Chatterjee spent three days in Abu Dhabi developing solutions to health care problems plaguing the Middle East. He travelled to the Global Issues Network conference, hosted by New York University in Abu Dhabi.

The conference pushes undergraduates to develop sustainable action plans to solve global problems on a regional level in just three days. It has a broad reach, from energy, to health, to waste management. The plans are intended as stepping-stones to bringing positive change to the region.

Chatterjee’s small group focused on mental health, which is often disregarded as a legitimate health concern in the Middle East.

“The ruling bodies of the UAE don’t acknowledge that mental health issues are a real problem, so it often gets swept under the rug,” Chatterjee said.

The group initially attempted to avoid a direct discussion of mental health by asking patients about irregularities in their sleeping and eating patterns, which can be early indicators of mental health issues.

Chatterjee’s team discovered that diabetes was one of the top contributors to the UAE’s mortality rate, and an issue that the government was very much invested in addressing. Multiple studies have suggested a correlation between an increase in the rate of depression among diabetes patients, and vice versa. Other work has shown that the mortality rates among patients with diabetes and depression are significantly higher than those with just diabetes, Chatterjee said. But in this region, seeking help for a mental illness is highly stigmatized. Addressing depression by targeting diabetic populations and their families alleviated this stigma somewhat.

Near the end of the conference, his team suggested that a clinical research study be conducted by New York University’s public health institute in the region to address whether patient-family support specialists could be helpful in improving patient outcomes. They planned to screen for depression, but without describing the behavior by name. “People can be offended even by doctors asking questions that imply a patient has depression. It’s a delicate balance between being tactful but remaining effective,” Chatterjee said.

Chatterjee and his team presented their plan to health care providers from Cleveland Clinic’s medical center in Abu Dhabi, government officials, and the press in Abu Dhabi. He said it was well received by most, but that the government officials remarked that they would have preferred even less emphasis on mental health issues.

Beyond this specific project, Chatterjee said that attending the conference gave him a great opportunity to build a global network with other undergraduates with diverse interests. He is interested in medicine and research, works as a research assistant in the Nicolelis Primate Laboratory, and will be working as a Howard Hughes Research fellow this summer.

Activist targets inner child not 'target audience'

By Ashley Yeager

On March 4, 2013

In Animals, Behavior/Psychology, Business/Economics, Climate/Global Change, Environment/Sustainability, Faculty, Lemurs, Science Communication & Education, Visualization

By Ashley Yeager

A baby albatross carcass full of plastic “food.” Credit: Chris Jordan.

When artist Chris Jordan works on a photograph or film, he doesn’t think about his audience. He said he thinks the phrase “target audience” is a disrespectful, manipulative business concept.

“I want to be as authentic as possible with my work,” Jordan said, explaining that each of his pieces instead taps into that “universality in us that we all carry, a deep appreciation for the abiding beauty of our world and the miracle of our own lives.”

An environmental activist as well as an artist, Jordan is challenging others to target that universality too as they convey messages about the issues that affect the planet.

Jordan spoke March 1 as part of a working group to discuss questions about how environmentalists, neuroscientists and artists can work together to better communicate about issues affecting the planet. The Nicholas School of the Environment and the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences sponsored the discussion.

Duke ecologist Nicole Heller moderated the discussion, opening it with the idea that scientists are frustrated with their inability to communicate with politicians and the public about the environment.

“In the ’70s, yucky or scary images might have worked, but now they don’t. That’s no longer appealing. We need different kinds of imagery to reach across people’s biases,” Heller said. She invited Jordan to speak because of his reputation for being able to move audiences from diverse backgrounds and education levels.

“Second graders are some of the most passionate and responsive to these issues,” Jordan said, adding that perhaps the best thing we can do is to appeal to an individual’s inner child – that curious spirit we have to understand how the world works.

One example of this approach is the film Jordan is working on to explore the mating dance of albatrosses on Midway Atoll in the Pacific Ocean. He’s photographed dead baby albatrosses, whose stomachs are full of plastic trash their parents fed to them because they mistake the plastic for food. The work was to make people aware of the plastic vortex, or Great Pacific Garbage Patch, swirling beyond the horizon and therefore beyond our conscious concern.

Jordan decided to capture the wonder of the albatrosses as they mate, rather than just their rotting carcasses, hoping to feed his audiences — no matter their background — with life, rather than depress them with death.

“Like the albatross, we first-world humans find ourselves lacking the ability to discern anymore what is nourishing from what is toxic to our lives and our spirits. Choked to death on our waste, the mythical albatross calls upon us to recognize that our greatest challenge lies not out there, but in here,” Jordan writes on his Web site.

What makes humans so unique?

By Pranali Dalvi

On January 18, 2013

In Animals, Behavior/Psychology, Biology, Genetics/Genomics, Lecture

By Pranali Dalvi
Human and chimpanzees are very similar genetically despite the stark differences in their outward appearances. So it must be just a very small portion of human genes that are responsible for everything from our upright posture to our ability to sing. What makes humans so unique?

On Jan. 14, Duke Professor of Biology Greg Wray spoke about his group’s work on the genetic and molecular processes that contribute to our uniquely human physiology and brains as a part of the Computational Biology and Bioinformatics Seminar Series.

“Humans are not the best model organisms since there is a limit to what you can do genetically and mentally. You can’t really make a human knockout (but sometimes, nature makes it for you),” Wray said.

Still, humans are immensely important to study for practical reasons. We have uniquely human courses of disease in part due to our physiological, cognitive, and mechanical properties. Also, we’re just intrinsically curious about our own bodies.

According to Wray, the answer to human uniqueness is our regulome, the genes, mRNAs, proteins, and metabolites that regulate which genes are turned on when.

This graph shows the two major shifts in diet (meat-rich diet and grain-based diet) that likely contributed to our divergence from chimpanzees and thus differential gene expression. Source: Greg Wray

One prevailing hypothesis is that human forerunners likely began diverging from chimps about 2 million years ago when we took on a meat-rich diet in the savannah. The ancestors of chimpanzees retreated to the rainforest to eat a diet consisting mostly of fruits. Our meat-rich diet seems to coincide with an increase in brain size. And today we metabolize fats much differently than chimpanzees.

Wray’s lab studied the effects of dietary changes on five tissue samples – the cerebral cortex and cerebellum of the brain, liver, fat, and skeletal muscle. What seems to have changed in chimps versus humans are genes related to neural functioning, development, and metabolism. For instance, 31 of 61 genes involved in insulin signaling are operated differently in chimps and humans. These differences in gene expression may also explain why humans are uniquely susceptible to diet-related illnesses like type II diabetes.

On the other hand, genes involved in the transcription, translation and replication of DNA, RNA processing and protein localization haven’t changed in chimps versus humans.

Fat cells also behave differently in humans versus chimps. Wray’s lab took adult stem cells from adipose tissue in both chimps and humans and challenged them with either more oleic acid (the main fatty acid in a meat-heavy diet) or more linoleic acid (the dominant fatty acid in a grain-based diet). The enzymes involved in fatty acid synthesis were more common in human adipose tissues. Wray believes that the increased fatty acid synthesis is probably responsible for building and fueling a larger human brain.

Another major shift in diet occurred during the agricultural revolution, which introduced omega-6 fatty acids into our diet along with pro-inflammatory compounds. Wray explains that the increase in grains from the shift in diet likely contributes to chronic pro-inflammatory diseases in humans, such as atherosclerosis.

“Understanding our metabolic history from an evolutionary context can potentially give us insight into some pretty prominent health concerns,” says Wray.

Grad Student Sees Yawning Gap in Animal Welfare

By Ashley Mooney

On January 18, 2013

In Animals, Behavior/Psychology, Biology, Field Research, Students

by Ashley Mooney

Sometimes a middle-school nickname becomes a career.

Graduate student Jingzhi Tan, yawned loudly during a quiet class in middle school in China, garnering the nickname Hippo. So now he’s at Duke, studying yawning behaviors in bonobos.

Jingzhi “Hippo” Tan is a graduate student working on bonobos’ love of strangers.

So-called ‘contagious yawning’ has been found in many species besides humans and other great apes, including baboons, monkeys and dogs. Tan found that bonobos are more likely to yawn along with strangers than they are to yawn with animals they already know. (They also prefer to share food with strangers first.) In the future, he hopes to do a similar study with chimpanzees, but must first modify the structure of the experiment.

“The bonobo study that we just did is technically unethical to do with chimps—you can’t put two strange chimps together because they’re going to kill each other,” Tan said. “Later we’re trying to develop a task that is chimp-friendly and we’re going to use it for comparison between a variety of species.”

His studies on great apes, he said, will hopefully reveal more about the human mind and aid wildlife conservation efforts.

Tan noted that there is no better way of understanding the human mind than studying its evolution. Through his studies, Tan hopes to uncover the constraints of human problem-solving abilities, which will help solve problems relating to conservation.

“There is a gap between people who want to conserve nature versus people who are making decisions and policies. Usually what they do is alienate each other,” Tan said. “You can’t actually do something unless you really understand the mind of people.”

Likasi, a resident of the Lola ya Bonobo sanctuary in Kinshasa, where Hippo does his work. (Jingzhi Tan)

As an undergraduate at Peking University, Tan studied under the only cognitive evolution professor in all of China. He is now the first Chinese person to study great apes in Africa.

Tan said he is concerned that chimps are apparently being illegally exported to China, where they end up in the entertainment industry. Tan said there is one reality show that features three chimps—dressed in human clothes—choosing fruit at a supermarket. Another pair of infant chimps were forced into a fake wedding, complete with a wedding dress, and received national media attention.

China needs stronger animal welfare laws, Tan said. “Going back to the big picture, in the next decade, if you want to help bonobos in Africa or any other animals in Africa, we have to get China involved. Right now it’s just completely empty and blank.”

Not Swimming with Spinners

By Ashley Yeager

On December 17, 2012

In Animals, Behavior/Psychology, Biology, Environment/Sustainability

By Ashley Yeager

Spinner dolphins swimming just off the bow of a boat. Image courtesy of Dave Johnston, Duke.

Waianae, HI – Pet a dolphin for me, my sister texted as I stepped onto a catamaran in West Oahu. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that is exactly what I would NOT be doing, under any circumstances.

I have to admit that a little later, as a pod of wild spinner dolphins undulated just ahead of the bow of our boat, it was really hard not to reach out and try to touch one of them.

It was almost as if getting closer to the creatures as they slid through the water would free us, if only for a moment, from our artificial world of buildings, cars, computers and cell phones. But, in reality, interacting with spinners can’t take us away from our hyper-connected world, and chasing and touching the dolphins is not good for them either.

“If you try to play with spinners during the day, it’s like a stranger coming into your bedroom in the middle of the night and trying to wake you up,” says Nicholas School marine biologist Dave Johnston. He comes to Hawaii a few times each year to take photographs and other data on the islands’ spinner dolphins to learn more about their behaviors, population size and the bays they are swimming in during the day.

Spinner dolphins — Stenella longirostris – swim into shallow bays off Hawaii’s coast during the day to rest, turning off half of their brain at a time as they sleep. With one half on and one half off, they can still swim to the surface to breathe and ultimately recharge for the next night’s hunt.

But lots of vacationing people swimming and sailing in the bays aren’t thinking of the dolphins’ schedule and rest, they are only wanting to get closer to the wild animals. And the dolphins, much like humans, are curious. They’re going to check you out if you’re in their space, just like you would if you hear a strange noise in your room while your trying to sleep, our guides from Hawaii Nautical tell us as we cruise out of Waianae Harbor on West Oahu.

We sail for a bit and then come upon a pod of spinner dolphins resting off our port side. Everybody bunches to the front of the boat to get as close as they can to the animals. Our guides remind us of the dolphins’ sleep cycle and explain that the tour company follows the NOAA-sponsored Dolphin SMART program.

SMART stands for: Staying back from the dolphins; Moving away if they seem disturbed; Always keep a boat engine in neutral if you are near a pod; Refraining from feeding or touching them; and Teaching others to be dolphin SMART. Needless to say, we didn’t swim with or touch the dolphins. Sorry sis. Instead, we sailed a bit more, snorkeled with some sea turtles, not touching them of course, and then sailed back toward the harbor.

On the way back, we spotted another pod of spinners, and even more inspiring, we simply watched the animals. They were enjoying their rest, undisturbed in their home — something we all crave and appreciate when we can get it.

Deeper voice still wins, even in "feminine" leadership roles

By Ashley Yeager

On December 14, 2012

In Behavior/Psychology, Biology, Field Research

By Ashley Yeager

Deeper voices get votes even in PTA and school board elections. Credit: Barton Stabler, gettyimages.com

A lower pitched voice gets more votes — even in elections for stereotypically feminine roles, such as for president of the Parent-Teacher Association or member of the School Board, a new Duke study shows.

“These findings are somewhat surprising,” said University of Miami political scientist Casey Klofstad, co-author on the study. He explained that since women typically hold these kinds of leadership positions, people might assume that voters would prefer leaders with more feminine voices.

“We found the opposite, that the preference for leaders with more masculine voices generally still holds,” he said. The results, which appear Dec. 12 in PLoS ONE, however, suggest that women may want men with more feminine qualities to take feminine leadership positions.

“The selection of leaders is arguably one of the most important decisions we make,” said Duke biologist Rindy Anderson, lead author on the study. “It is worth considering that voice pitch, a physically-determined trait that may or may not be related to leadership capacity, influences how we select our leaders,” she said.

In the experiment, she and Klofstad recorded people saying, “I urge you to vote for me this November,” and then altered the recordings to create high and low-pitched versions of each voice. The scientists then held hypothetical elections by asking people to choose, based solely on voice pitch, which candidate they would prefer when voting for president of the PTA or for a position on the School Board.

The results show that women did not distinguish between men with higher-or lower-pitched voices for the two feminine leadership roles. This finding contradicts the team’s previous study, which identified women’s strong preference for men with more masculine voices when voting for candidates who were “running against each other in an election,” rather than for a specific leadership position. The new finding suggests that the strong preference women had in the previous experiment is more relaxed within the more specific context of feminine leadership roles.

“Another possibility is that women are less sensitive to this vocal cue within the context of this specific domain of leadership. It is also possible that some women might actually prefer male leaders with more feminine voices for feminine leadership roles,” Klofstad said.

The scientists need to do more work to understand what is happening to women’s preferences in this situation, he said, adding that he and Anderson also want to know whether people with lower voices are truly more competent leaders.

“We need to test whether voice pitch actually signals anything about leadership capacity,” Klofstad said. He and Anderson are now designing those experiments.

Citation: “Preference for Leaders with Masculine Voices Holds in the Case of Feminine Leadership Roles.” Anderson, R. and Klofstad, C. 2012. PLOS ONE. 7(12): e51216. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0051216.

The new blood diamond is your cell phone

By Ashley Mooney

On December 13, 2012

In Animals, Behavior/Psychology, Environment/Sustainability, Global Health, Lecture

by Ashley Mooney

There is an African proverb that says “when the elephants fight, the grass suffers.”

In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the elephants are militias and the grass is the women, said John Prendergast, co-founder of Enough Project, an organization that fights to end genocide.

Congolese rape victims assemble outside of a peace hut. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Prendergast, who spoke at Duke Nov. 29, said the DRC is now the home of the deadliest war since World War II. The conflict has been created in part by large corporations seeking a variety of natural resources within the region throughout the past 150 years. Currently, the Congo is the main source of gold, tantalum, tin and tungsten, which are used to power electronics such as cell phones, laptops and digital cameras.

“Congo is now the most dangerous war because powerful corporations have come to [the country] for the last few centuries to take whatever they want, and structured the state to facilitate that,” he said. His talk was part of the Ferguson Family Distinguished Lectureship series on the Environment and Society.

The nation is currently riddled by struggles between the Congolese armies, militias and other groups from bordering nations Rwanda and Uganda. Many of the groups utilize brutal tactics throughout mineral-smuggling networks, and, Prendergast said, use sexual violence at the center of their methodology.

“[There has been] no other war in the world where the link between our consumer appetites and sexual violence is so direct,” he said. “All of these groups use rape as a means of social control… They target women to humiliate and destroy the will of the community.”

Prendergast has dedicated himself to the pursuit of peace in the region for over 30 years and has lobbied several companies – including Apple – to use free-trade models of mineral trade.

“Unless international capital or profit-seeking capital is regulated in some way, it will trample all over human rights,” he said.

Prendergast credited Duke’s student body for leading the nation in the Conflict-Free Campus Initiative, which 115 schools are involved in.

The way to create peace, he said, is to pressure the United States government to encourage the United Nations and other countries to support “an African-led peace process in Congo,” which deals with the root causes of the issue.

“We aren’t going to solve all of the Congo’s problems sitting here – we aren’t going to solve them in the United States or Europe,” he said. “But we can play a major role in supporting the Congolese to find those solutions.”

He added that until everyone is more aware of the root cause – the demand for phones, laptops and other electronics – the conflict will not end.

“When you log onto your laptops tonight, remember they wouldn’t be so cheap without minerals from the Congo,” he said. “When you answer your cell phone or make a call, remember… all of the women of the Congo who have survived sexual attacks.