Mind Hacks: Reasoning Archives

March 03, 2010

Tipsy thinking:

Seed Magazine has a great short article on misperceptions and counter-intuitive findings concerning alcohol and drinking.

The piece covers whether alcohol break-down product acetaldehyde plays as much a part in drunkenness as alcohol itself, misperceptions about the chances of women having their drink spiked to facilitate sexual assault, and mothers' perceptions about their kids future drinking patterns.

Alcohol is so embedded in most cultures that perceptions and reality intermix in surprising ways. Last week psychologist Polly Palumbo discussed a 2008 study about mothers’ beliefs about their own kids’ drinking. You might think that if mothers were concerned about their young children becoming drinkers in high school, they might be more successful in preventing some of the kids from actually engaging in underage drinking. In fact, the study, led by Stephanie Madon and published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, found the opposite. Mothers who worried their children might become drinkers had kids that were significantly more likely to drink.

The researchers are careful to point out that the study is just a correlation; we can’t say that the mothers’ belief about drinking is what caused their kids to drink. But because the study was administered over several years, it’s better than many correlational studies: We know the belief preceded the drinking, so it’s pretty much impossible that the kids’ drinking behavior itself led to the belief.

Link to Seed article 'A Sober Assessment'.

—Vaughan.

February 18, 2010

Teenagers: hyper-mortals :

A common belief about teenagers is that they implicitly assume that they are invincible or immortal and think little about their own deaths. A new study just published in the Journal of Adolescent Health shows this to be a myth, however, as they vastly over-estimate their chances of dying within the next year.

By the mid-teens, our ability to judge the likelihood of uncertain events is usually equal to that of adults, so we might expect that adolescents can judge the chance of death as accurately as grown-ups.

This study, led by psychologist Baruch Fischhoff, surveyed 3,436 14–18-year-old adolescents and a local group of 124 seventh graders and 132 ninth graders asking them to estimate their chance of dying in the next year, enquiring about what sort of neighbourhood they lived in, whether they'd experienced or witnessed any violent events and whether they'd had any serious health problems.

Although the statistical death rate is 0.08%, the most common estimates where that they had a 5% of 10% chance of dying within the next year. Interesting, there was a larger than expected number of teens who judge their chance of dying within the next year as 50%, although this likely suggests that they were indicating a sort of 50/50 answer as a way of expressing "I don't know".

Adolescents assumptions about how likely they were to die were strongly related to their reports of how much crime they expected to experience and not or only very weakly related to if they'd experienced violent events or had health problems.

In other words, teenagers seem to be personally pessimistic and live in a world where they perceive themselves to have a high chance of dying despite the relatively small actual risk.

Link to PubMed entry for study.

—Vaughan.

February 17, 2010

Tell me lies, tell me sweet little lies:

Flattery can work it's magic, even when we know it's insincere. The Boston Globe covers a new study that found that even when we realise the compliments we're hearing are an attempt to butter us up, they can still have a persuasive effect.

Insincere flattery gets a bad rap. Sure, it sounds cheesy or even awkward. But new research suggests that one’s initial conscious reaction - discounting the flattery as a self-serving ploy - may mask a more durable implicit positive emotional association with the flatterer. People who were given a printed advertisement from a department store that paid compliments to their sense of fashion had higher opinions of the store, but only when they weren’t given much time to think about it, or when they were asked several days later. This effect was boosted after people engaged in self-criticism but was nullified after people engaged in self-affirmation, suggesting that flattery - even the patently insincere type - will be especially effective on folks who are down on their luck.

Sadly, the study itself is locked behind a paywall, but there's a longer summary of the experiment at the journal website which has a few more details.

By the way, could I just say what a lovely gas mask you're wearing? Mind Hacks, getting the readers we deserve since 2004.

Link to brief Boston Globe write-up.
Link to study abstract.
Link to longer summary of study (via Neuromarketing).

—Vaughan.

February 11, 2010

The burglar with the lemon juice disguise:

I've just re-read the classic study "Unskilled and unaware of it" which established that when we're incompetent at something we're often so incompetent that we don't realise that we're incompetent. I had forgotten that it starts with a wonderful story about an inept bank robber.

In 1995, McArthur Wheeler walked into two Pittsburgh banks and robbed them in broad daylight, with no visible attempt at disguise. He was arrested later that night, less than an hour after videotapes of him taken from surveillance cameras were broadcast on the 11 o'clock news. When police later showed him the surveillance tapes, Mr. Wheeler stared in incredulity. “But I wore the juice,” he mumbled. Apparently, Mr. Wheeler was under the impression that rubbing one's face with lemon juice rendered it invisible to videotape cameras (Fuocco, 1996).

We bring up the unfortunate affairs of Mr. Wheeler to make three points. The first two are noncontroversial. First, in many domains in life, success and satisfaction depend on knowledge, wisdom, or savvy in knowing which rules to follow and which strategies to pursue. This is true not only for committing crimes, but also for many tasks in the social and intellectual domains, such as promoting effective leadership, raising children, constructing a solid logical argument, or designing a rigorous psychological study. Second, people differ widely in the knowledge and strategies they apply in these domains (Dunning, Meyerowitz, & Holzberg, 1989; Dunning, Perie, & Story, 1991; Story & Dunning, 1998), with varying levels of success. Some of the knowledge and theories that people apply to their actions are sound and meet with favorable results. Others, like the lemon juice hypothesis of McArthur Wheeler, are imperfect at best and wrong-headed, incompetent, or dysfunctional at worst.

Perhaps more controversial is the third point, the one that is the focus of this article. We argue that when people are incompetent in the strategies they adopt to achieve success and satisfaction, they suffer a dual burden: Not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it. Instead, like Mr. Wheeler, they are left with the mistaken impression that they are doing just fine. As Miller (1993) perceptively observed in the quote that opens this article, and as Charles Darwin (1871) sagely noted over a century ago, “ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge” (p. 3).

This effect has since been named the Dunning–Kruger effect after the authors of the study.

Link to PubMed entry for study.

—Vaughan.

February 06, 2010

Bonuses generate more heat than light:

The engaging behavioural economist Dan Ariely has just become a columnist for Wired UK and in his first article he describes how the promise of performance-related pay often backfires leading people to do more but perform worse.

To see the effect of bonuses on performance, Nina Mazar (assistant professor of marketing, Toronto University), Uri Gneezy (professor of economics and strategy, University of California, San Diego), George Loewenstein (professor of economics, Carnegie Mellon, Pennsylvania) and I conducted three experiments. In one we gave subjects tasks that demanded attention, memory, concentration and creativity. We asked them, for example, to assemble puzzles and to play memory games while throwing tennis balls at a target. We promised about a third of them one day's pay if they performed well. Another third were promised two weeks' pay. The last third could earn a full five months' pay. (Before you ask where you can participate in our experiments, I should tell you that we ran this study in India, where the cost of living is relatively low.)

What happened? The low-and medium-bonus groups performed the same. The big-bonus group performed worst of all.

Link to 'Bonuses boost activity, not quality' in Wired UK.

Full disclosure: I'm a contributing editor to Wired UK. I have never received a bonus in my life, but if I do, I hope to spend it beautiful on women and fast cars, although, in reality, I will probably buy a laptop.

—Vaughan.

January 28, 2010

We go with the flow:

The Psychologist has a completely fascinating article on how we perceive things to be more appealing, easier to handle and more efficient based on how simple they are to understand - even when this is based on irrelevant or superficial properties - like its name or the font it is described in.

The core idea is that we partly judge things on 'processing fluency', that is, how easy it is to immediately grasp something. This seems intuitive, as we tend to prefer things that make sense to us, but it turns out that this preference is also heavily influenced by surface features.

For example, the article discusses the surprising amount of work on how simply changing the font can change our opinion of what the text is describing.

When they were presented [with physical exercise instructions] in an easy-to-read print font (Arial), readers assumed that the exercise would take 8.2 minutes to complete; but when they were presented in a difficult-to-read print font, readers assumed it would take nearly twice as long, a full 15.1 minutes (Song & Schwarz, 2008b). They also thought that the exercise would flow quite naturally when the font was easy to read, but feared that it would drag on when it was difficult to read. Given these impressions, they were more willing to incorporate the exercise into their daily routine when it was presented in an easy-to-read font. Quite clearly, people misread the difficulty of reading the exercise instructions as indicative of the difficulty involved in doing the exercise...

Novemsky and colleagues (2007) presented the same information about two cordless phones in easy- or difficult-to-read fonts. They observed that 17 per cent of their participants postponed choice when the font was easy to read, whereas 41 per cent did so when the font was difficult to read. Apparently, participants misread the difficulty arising from the print font as reflecting the difficulty of making a choice.

The article contains numerous examples of how changing surface features, such as giving something an easy or difficult to pronounce name, alters what we think about it.

However, the piece also mentions that giving something difficult-to-process or unfamiliar features also means we scrutinise it more closely, which means we often pick up errors more easily.

This is is a wonderfully elegant example:

As an example, consider the question ‘How many animals of each kind did Moses take on the Ark?’ Most people answer ‘two’ despite knowing that the biblical actor was Noah, not Moses. Even when warned that some of the statements may be distorted, most people fail to notice the error because both actors are similar in the context of biblical stories. However, a change in print fonts is sufficient to attenuate this Moses illusion. When the question was presented in an easy-to-read font, only 7 per cent of the readers noticed the error, whereas 40 per cent did so when it was presented in a difficult-to-read font...

Link to Psychologist article on processing fluency.

Full disclosure: I am an unpaid associate editor and columnist for The Psychologist and I have an unfamiliar first name - draw your own conclusions.

—Vaughan.

January 26, 2010

Information channelling:

The Frontal Cortex has a fantastic piece discussing a new study finding that people choose TV news based on which channels are more likely to agree with their pre-existing opinions and how we have a tendency to filter for information that confirms, rather than challenges, what we believe.

Lehrer discusses various ways in which we selectively attend to information we agree with but the best bit is where he goes on to discuss a wonderful study from 1967 where people demonstrated in the starkest way that they'd rather block out information that doesn't agree with their pre-existing beliefs.

Brock and Balloun played a group of people a tape-recorded message attacking Christianity. Half of the subjects were regular churchgoers while the other half were committed atheists. To make the experiment more interesting, Brock and Balloun added an annoying amount of static - a crackle of white noise - to the recording. However, they allowed listeners to reduce the static by pressing a button, so that the message suddenly became easier to understand. Their results were utterly predicable and rather depressing: the non-believers always tried to remove the static, while the religious subjects actually preferred the message that was harder to hear. Later experiments by Brock and Balloun demonstrated a similar effect with smokers listening to a speech on the link between smoking and cancer. We silence the cognitive dissonance through self-imposed ignorance.

Link to Frontal Cortex piece 'Cable news'.
Link to summary of 1967 static study.
Link to PubMed entry for same.

—Vaughan.

January 14, 2010

The ominous power of confession:

I've just read a remarkable article [pdf] on 125 proven cases of wrongful conviction in the US justice system where the accused made a false confession.

While we tend to think that no-one would confess to a crime they've never committed the phenomenon is a lot more common than we assume. The article cites studies where convicted people have been subsequently proved innocent, largely through DNA evidence, and 14-25% had made a false confession.

Research has now established that certain police interrogation techniques can lead to false confessions, and it is not only through intimidated suspects confessing even though they know they're innocent. In some cases, categorised as 'coerced-internalized' false confessions, the person starts to doubt their own memory and actually comes to believe that they did commit the crime.

Interestingly, there is evidence that this is most likely to occur in the most serious crimes, possibly because the police themselves are under pressure to solve the cases. In this study, 81% of false confessions were for murders, 9% for rapes and 3% for arsons.

The article also outlines the impact of a confession on the justice system. We discussed an experimental study on the persuasive effect of confessions previously, but below is a remarkable run down of evidence from the 'real world'.

I've taken out the numerical references for ease of reading, but if you want to check out the sources for the following section, it's taken from p920:

...a suspect’s confession sets in motion a virtually irrefutable presumption of guilt among criminal justice officials, the media, the public and lay jurors. A suspect who confesses—whether truthfully or falsely—will be treated more harshly at every stage of the criminal justice process. Once police obtain a confession, they typically close the investigation, clear the case as solved, and make no effort to pursue other possible leads—even if the confession is internally inconsistent, contradicted by external evidence or the result of coercive interrogation.

Like police, prosecutors rarely consider the possibility that an entirely innocent suspect has been made to confess falsely through the use of psychologically coercive and/or improper interrogation methods. When there is a confession, prosecutors tend to charge the defendant with the highest number and types of offenses and are far less likely to initiate or accept a plea bargain to a reduced charge. Suspects who confess will experience greater difficulty making bail (especially in serious cases), a disadvantage that significantly reduces a criminal defendant’s likelihood of acquittal.

Defense attorneys are more likely to pressure their clients who have confessed to waive their constitutional right to a trial and accept a guilty plea to a lesser charge. Judges are conditioned to disbelieve claims of innocence and almost never suppress confessions, even highly questionable ones. If the defendant’s case goes to trial, the jury will treat the confession as more probative of the defendant’s guilt than virtually any other type of evidence, especially if—as in virtually all high profile cases—the confession receives negative pre-trial publicity.

Confession evidence (regardless of how it was obtained) is so biasing that juries will convict on the basis of confession alone, even when no significant or credible evidence confirms the disputed confession and considerable significant and credible evidence disconfirms it. Sadly, if a false confessor is convicted, he will almost certainly be sentenced more harshly

The article, 'The Problem of False Confessions in the Post-DNA World', originally published in the North Carolina Law Review is quite long but a gripping read.

pdf of article.
Link to citation and summary of article.

—Vaughan.

January 09, 2010

Motivated reality:

Neurophilosophy has a great piece on a new study finding that the perception of distance to an object was altered by how much someone wanted it, with a greater desire leading the people in the study to perceive the object as closer. This a summary of one of the several experiments that demonstrated the effect:

Participants were asked to throw a small rubber bean bag towards a gift voucher placed on the floor in front of them, and told that the person whose toss landed closest to the voucher would win it. One group was told that the voucher had a value of $25, thus making it desirable to them, while the other was led to believe that it was worthless. This experiment confirmed the earlier ones - those participants who believed the voucher was worth something perceived it to be nearer, and consequently underthrew the bean bag so that it fell short of the target.

As Mo notes, these experiments are related to what is known as the 'New Look' movement in psychology which arose in the 1940s as a direct challenge to the behaviourists who said that all mental states, such as beliefs and desire, were illusions and had no scientific basis.

The New Look theories argued that our perception of reality could be directly influenced by our desires and set about proving behaviourists wrong by using their own tools, physical measurements of perception, to prove them wrong.

The movement was sparked by a 1947 study by psychologists Jerome Bruner and Cecile Goodman that has become a classic in the field and is still fascinating today.

They asked children to estimate the size of coins using an adjustable 'collar' and found the kids consistently judged the coins to be bigger than identically sized cardboard circles, suggesting the monetary value of the coins was influencing how big they perceived the dimensions to be.

But the clincher for the idea that value and desire altered perception was that the children from poorer backgrounds perceived the coins to be bigger than children from richer backgrounds.

The study caused huge interest and many studies followed in the subsequent years, partly as the field allowed the combination of both experimental psychology and Freudian-inspired ideas about the power of unconscious motivations.

These latest studies, covered expertly by Neurophilosophy, follow in the same tradition.

Link to Neurophilosophy on how 'Desire influences visual perception'.
Link to full text of Bruner and Goodman's classic study.

—Vaughan.

December 23, 2009

Dealing with data of the damned:

There's an interesting article in Wired about how scientists deal with data that conflicts with their expectations and whether biases in how the brain deals with contradictory information might influence scientific reasoning.

The piece is based on the work of Kevin Dunbar who combines the sociology of science with the cognitive neuroscience of scientific reasoning.

In other words, he's trying to understand what scientists actually do to make their discoveries (rather than what they say they do, or what they say they should do) and whether there are specific features of the way the brain handles reasoning that might encourage these practices.

One of his main findings is that when experimental results appear that can't be explained, they're often discounted as being useless. The researchers might say that the experiment was designed badly, the equipment faulty, and so on.

It may indeed be the case the faults occurred, but it could also be the case when consistent information emerges, but these possibilities are rarely investigated when the data agrees with pre-existing assumptions, leading to possible biases in how data is interpreted.

Dunbar is not the first to tackle this issue. In fact, the first to do so is probably one of the most important but unrecognised philosophers of science, Charles Fort, who is typically associated with 'Fortean' or anomalous phenomena - such as fish falling from the sky.

Fort did indeed collect reports of all types of anomalous phenomena (interestingly, almost all from scientific journals) and used them as a critique of the scientific method - noting that while scientists say they reason from the data to theories about the world, what they actually do is filter the data in light of their theories and frequently ignore information that contradicts existing assumptions - hence, 'damning' some data as unacceptable.

This was later echoed when philosophers and sociologists started studying the scientific community in the 20th century, noting that the scientific method was not a clear practice but more of a tool in a wider consensus-forming toolbox.

Probably the most important thinker in this regard, not mentioned in the Wired article, was the philosopher Paul Feyerabend who noted that researchers regularly violate the 'rules' of science and this actually promotes progress rather than impedes it.

The article goes on to discuss research suggesting that part of this bias for information consistent with our assumptions may be due to differences in the way the brain handles this information.

Curiously, the piece mentions a 2003 study, where students were apparently asked to select the more accurate representation of gravity in an fMRI scanner, but unfortunately, I can find no trace of it.

However, a 2005 study by the same team, where participants where asked to match theories supported to different degrees by the data they'd seen (to do with how drugs relieve depression), came to similar conclusions. Namely, that brain activity is markedly different when we receive information that confirms our theories compared to when we receive information that challenges them.

In particular, contradictory information seems to activate an area deep in the frontal lobe (the ACC) often associated with 'conflict monitoring', along with an outer area of the frontal lobe (the DLPFC) associated with sorting out conflicting information, likely by filtering out some of the incompatible data so it is less likely to be registered or remembered.

There is clearly much more to scientific reasoning than this, as it is vast and complex both within individual researchers and between groups of people. I was particularly interested to read that breakthroughs were most likely to come from group discussions:

While the scientific process is typically seen as a lonely pursuit — researchers solve problems by themselves — Dunbar found that most new scientific ideas emerged from lab meetings, those weekly sessions in which people publicly present their data. Interestingly, the most important element of the lab meeting wasn’t the presentation — it was the debate that followed. Dunbar observed that the skeptical (and sometimes heated) questions asked during a group session frequently triggered breakthroughs, as the scientists were forced to reconsider data they’d previously ignored. The new theory was a product of spontaneous conversation, not solitude; a single bracing query was enough to turn scientists into temporary outsiders, able to look anew at their own work.

Although it turns out that discussion with people from a diverse range of people is most important - having a room full of people who share assumptions and expertise tends not to lead to creative scientific insights.

Link to Wired article on scientific reasoning.

—Vaughan.

December 19, 2009

The psychological effects of brain theories:

The Frontal Cortex has an interesting piece on how giving people information suggesting that neuroscience undermines our everyday concept of free will can alter our ethical behaviour.

The post discusses two experiments where participants had been given information suggesting that free will was an illusion - one passage taken from Francis Crick's book The Astonishing Hypothesis that argues against the everyday concept of free will on the basis of neurobiology.

It seems even these relatively brief encounters with information arguing against free-will had a noticeable effect on behaviour:

It turned out that students who had read the anti-free will quote were significantly more likely to cheat on the mental arithmetic test; their exposure to some basic scientific spin - your soul is a piece of meat - led to an increase in amorality. Of course, this is a relatively mild ethical lapse - as Schooler notes, "None of the participants exposed to the anti-free will message assaulted the experimenter or ran off with the payment kitty" - but it still demonstrates that even seemingly banal materialist concepts can alter our ethical behavior.

In another study, information on a "disbelief in free will" reduced people's willingness to help others and increased the amount of unhelpful behaviour toward others.

The issue of free will in neuroscience is complex, but it is interesting that the information provided doesn't bear directly on the issue of whether it is best to help other people or not.

Clearly though, biological explanations have an association with the idea that people are less in control of their actions, as we also know from other studies.

Science tends to assume that theories are not neutral in that they affect how we look at the world as researchers, but it is interesting to find out that this also happens on a personal psychological level as well.

Link to Frontal Cortex on 'Free Will and Ethics'.

—Vaughan.

December 09, 2009

The persuasive power of false confessions:

The APS Observer magazine has a fantastic article on the power of false confessions to warp our perception of other evidence in a criminal case to the point where expert witnesses will change their judgements of unrelated evidence to make it fit the false admission of guilt.

We tend to think that no-one would confess to a crime that they didn't commit but there are numerous high profile cases where this has happened and the article notes that "because of advances in DNA evidence, the Innocence Project has been able to exonerate more than 200 people who had been wrongly convicted, 49 of whom had confessed to the crime we now know they didn’t commit."

As a result of some of the early discoveries of false confessions, there is now a growing amount of research on what personal and situational factors trigger false confessions.

The classic book on the topic is forensic psychologist Gisli Gudjonsson's The Psychology Of Interrogations And Confessions. It reviews the scientific evidence but also covers numerous legal cases where false confessions have played a part.

It turns out, people falsely confess to crimes for a wide array of reasons. Some are voluntary confessions where the person might want to gain notoriety, annoy the police or might genuinely believe they've committed the crime due to a delusion in the context of a psychotic mental illness like schizophrenia.

In other cases, a false confession can be triggered by pressure from the police or investigators. Sometimes this happens even when the person doesn't genuinely believe their confession, because they just want to escape the high-pressure situation. In other cases, the psychological pressure leads the person to start doubting their own memories and they come to believe they have committed the crime.

There is now a great deal of research showing that highly suggestible people and people with learning disabilities or mental illnes are much more likely to make a false confession under pressure and police interview guidelines are being changed as a result.

However, the APS article takes a different tack. It looks at the psychology of how other people involved in deciding whether the person is guilty or not are influenced by confessions.

Imagine if an accused but innocent person falsely confesses and the other evidence doesn't suggest that they have committed the crime. In this situation, it turns out that both lay people and experts tend to change their evaluation of the other evidence and perceive it as being stronger evidence against the accused.

Some of the studies cited in the article just blew me away:

In a 1997 study, Kassin and colleague Katherine Neumann gave subjects case files with weak circumstantial evidence plus either a confession, an eyewitness account, a character witness, or no other evidence. Across the board, prospective jurors were more likely to vote guilty if a confession was included in the trial, even when they were told that the defendant was incoherent at the time of the confession and immediately recanted what he said... Other studies have shown that conviction rates rise even when jurors see confessions as coerced and even when they say that the confession played no role in their judgment...

Kassin recently teamed up with psychologist Lisa Hasel to test the effect of confessions on eyewitnesses. They brought subjects in for what was supposed to be a study about persuasion techniques. The experimenter briefly left the room and, during that time, someone came in and stole a laptop off the desk. The subjects were then shown a lineup of six suspects, none of whom was the actual criminal, and they were asked to pick out which member of the lineup, if any, committed the crime. Two days later, the witnesses were brought back for more questioning... Of the people who had identified a subject from the original lineup, 60 percent changed their identification when told that someone else had confessed. Plus, 44 percent of the people who originally determined that none of the suspects in the lineup committed the crime changed their mind when told that someone had confessed (and 50 percent changed when told that a specific person had confessed). When asked about their decision, “about half of the people seemed to say, ‘Well, the investigator told me there was a confession, so that must be true.’...

In 2006, University College London psychologist Itiel Dror took a group of six fingerprint experts and showed them samples that they themselves had, years before, determined either to be matches or non-matches (though they weren’t told they had already seen these fingerprints). The experts were now given some context: either that the fingerprints came from a suspect who confessed or that they came from a suspect who was known to be in police custody at the time the crime was committed. In 17 percent of the non-control tests, experimenters changed assessments that they had previously made correctly.

The APS Observer has plenty more examples and demonstrates that false confessions are psychological sink holes that pull in both the accused and the legal process.

Link to 'The Psychology and Power of False Confessions'.

—Vaughan.

December 08, 2009

Optimal starting prices for negotiations and auctions:

An article in the latest edition of Current Directions in Psychological Science reviews studies on the best starting points to increase the final price in either negotiations or auctions. In general, start high in negotiations, start low in auctions.

It turns out that negotiations, where several parties are invited to discuss a price, and auctions, where people can include themselves by jumping in when they want, are quite different psychologically.

The article, by business psychologist Adam Gilinsky and colleagues, notes that starting prices are a form of 'anchor' - a piece of information which is known to affect subsequent decisions. As the authors note, anchoring has a powerful influence on our reasoning:

An anchor is a numeric value that influences subsequent numeric estimates and outcomes. When people make judgments, their final estimates are often assimilated to—that is, become more similar to—the initial anchor value (Tversky & Kahneman, 1974).

For example, in one of the best-known anchoring studies (Tversky & Kahneman, 1974), participants were exposed to an arbitrary number between 0 and 100 from the spin of a roulette wheel and then asked to estimate the percentage of African nations in the United Nations: Participants whose roulette wheel landed on a relatively high number gave higher absolute estimates than did participants whose wheel landed on a lower number.

Even outside of trivia questions, few psychological phenomena are as robust as the anchoring effect; it influences public policy assessments, judicial verdicts, economic transactions, and a variety of psychological phenomena.

The evidence suggests that in negotiations, a high starting price most often leads to a high final price, as the anchoring effect seems to work in a relatively undiluted way (with the caveat that completely ridiculous starting prices could prevent any deal being reached).

There's an interesting aside in the article, mentioning that you can protect yourself from high anchor points from other people by focusing on your own ideal price or your opponents weaknesses, as found by a 2001 study, or by considering why the suggested price might be inaccurate, as found by another study published in the same year.

It also turns out that, contrary to conventional wisdom, making the first offer is also a good strategy:

Many negotiation books recommend waiting for the other side to offer first. However, existing empirical research contradicts this conventional wisdom: The final outcome in single and multi-issue negotiations, both in the United States and Thailand, often depends on whether the buyer or the seller makes the first offer. Indeed, the final price tends to be higher when a seller (who wants a higher price and thus sets a high first offer) makes the first offer than when the buyer (who offers a low first offer to achieve a low final price) goes first.

In contrast, for auctions, starting with a low price is generally more likely to lead to a higher final price. The researchers note this is likely due to three factors: price rise in auctions seems to be driven by social competition and so starting with a low entry point encourages more people to join in; once someone has bid, they have made a commitment which is likely to encourage them to continue; and finally, more bids leads us to infer that the item has a higher value.

It's not a huge article so is worth reading in full if you're interested in economic reasoning. Luckily, the full text is available as a pdf pre-print if you don't have access to the journal.

Link to DOI entry for study.
pdf of full text.

—Vaughan.

November 26, 2009

The consequences of faking it:

I've just caught a short video by the brilliant behavioural economist Dan Ariely who explains the surprising effect of wearing fake goods on the likelihood of us cheating and for on much we suspect that others are being dishonest.

Ariely is riffing on one of his recent studies that was led by psychologist Francesca Gino. It'll shortly appear in Psychological Science but can read the full text online as a pdf.

The study involved asking people to wear real or fake designer sunglasses, when in reality they were all the genuine article. Interestingly, those wearing the supposedly fake shades behaved less honestly in subsequent tests and were more likely to suspect others of behaving unethically.

Ariely gives a brilliant account of the study but there's an interesting aspect in the full paper which he doesn't touch on so much. In the final experiment of the study, the researchers found that it was a change in attitude that seemed to drive the change in honesty.

Wearing the 'fake' sunglasses seemed to increase personal feelings of being inauthentic and these feeling of the 'counterfeit self' were most associated with changes in behaviour.

Participants who believed they were wearing imitation goods were more likely to agree with the sentiments "Right now, I don't know how I really feel inside" and "Right now, I feel alienated from myself" and were more like to say that they felt "out of touch with the ‘real me’" and felt as if "I don’t know myself very well".

The study suggests that fake goods change how we perceive ourselves and this relaxes our boundaries of acceptable behaviour.

The video is short and brilliantly explained and the study is fascinating.

Link to Dan Ariely video on the effect of faking it.
pdf of full text of scientific paper.

—Vaughan.

November 16, 2009

You are kind, strong willed, but can be self-critical:

I've just found a classic study online where psychologist Bertram Forer gave a personality test to his students and then asked each person to rate how the accuracy of their 'individual personality profile'. In reality, all the 'individual profiles' were identical but students tended to rate the descriptions as highly accurate.

In fact, on a scale of 1-5, students rated the accuracy of their profile, on average, as 4.2. This is the profile Forer used:

You have a great need for other people to like and admire you. You have a tendency to be critical of yourself. You have a great deal of unused capacity which you have not turned to your advantage. While you have some personality weaknesses, you are generally able to compensate for them. Your sexual adjustment has presented problems for you. Disciplined and self-controlled outside, you tend to be worrisome and insecure inside. At times you have serious doubts as to whether you have made the right decision or done the right thing. You prefer a certain amount of change and variety and become dissatisfied when hemmed in by restrictions and limitations. You pride yourself as an independent thinker and do not accept others' statements without satisfactory proof. You have found it unwise to be too frank in revealing yourself to others. At times you are extroverted, affable, sociable, while at other times you are introverted, wary, reserved. Some of your aspirations tend to be pretty unrealistic. Security is one of your major goals in life.

The tendency to see ourselves in vague or general statements has since been called the Forer effect or, alternatively, the Barnum effect, after the famous catchphrase attributed to the travelling circus impresario P.T. Barnum: "There's a sucker born every minute!"

It has been cited as the basis for palm reading, fortune telling and the like, and in the original article, Forer notes that he was inspired to conduct the study because he was "accosted by a night-club graphologist who wished to 'read' his handwriting".

Forer asked the graphologist what evidence he had for the accuracy of his readings and he replied that his clients usually confirmed that he was correct.

Forer felt this was rather poor evidence but decided on an interesting tack: rather than attempt to validate the test, he decided to study the psychology of agreeing with vague personality profiles.

Link to full text of Forer study (via Las penas del Agente Smith)

—Vaughan.

November 04, 2009

I only read it for the articles:

The Economist has a delightful article on how we self-justify our dubious behaviour after the event using spurious reasons. It turns out we often deceive ourselves into believing that our hastily constructed justifications are genuinely what motivated us.

The article riffs on a recent study by marketing researchers Zoë Chance and Michael Norton, who asked male students to choose between two specially created sports magazines.

One had more articles, but the other featured more sports. When a participant was asked to rate a magazine, one of two magazines happened to be a special swimsuit issue, featuring beautiful women in bikinis.

When the swimsuit issue was the magazine with more articles, the guys said they valued having more articles to read and chose that one. When the bikini babes appeared in the publication with more sports, they said wider coverage was more important and chose that issue.

This, as it turns out, is a common pattern in studies of this kind, and crucially, participants are usually completely unaware that they are post-justifying their choices.

This may not seem surprising: the joke about reading Playboy for the articles is so old Ms Chance and Mr Norton borrowed it for the title of their working paper. But it is the latest in a series of experiments exploring how people behave in ways they think might be frowned upon, and then explain how their motives are actually squeaky clean. Managers, for example, have been found to favour male applicants at hypothetical job interviews by claiming that they were searching for a candidate with either greater education or greater experience, depending on the attribute with which the man could trump the woman. In another experiment, people chose to watch a movie in a room already occupied by a person in a wheelchair when an adjoining room was showing the same film, but decamped when the movie in the next room was different (thus being able to claim that they were not avoiding the disabled person but just choosing a different film to watch). As Ms Chance puts it: “People will do what they want to do, and then find reasons to support it.”

Further compounding the problem, Ms Chance and Mr Norton’s subjects, like the subjects of the similar experiments, showed little sign of being aware that they were merely using a socially acceptable justification to look at women in swimsuits. Mr Norton reports that when he informs participants that they were acting for different reasons than they claimed, they often react with disbelief.

I recommend reading the original study. It's very accessibly written, and if you read nothing else, skip to page 9 (page 10 of the pdf file) and read the section entitled 'Are People Aware That They are Justifying?'.

One of the key insights from psychology and one of the most practically applicable findings (particularly in clinical work) is that people's explanations for why they do something are not necessarily a reliable guide to what influences their behaviour.

This also goes for ourselves and there are probably many areas in our life where we justify our actions, good or bad, with comfortable, plausible, fantasies.

Link to Economist piece 'The conceit of deceit'.
Link to study text.

—Vaughan.

August 20, 2009

Empty glass, empty promise:

There's a neat study in the August edition of the Journal of Abnormal Psychology on how alcohol can make us feel fully committed to goals we know we have no chance of achieving.

Alcohol breeds empty goal commitments

J Abnorm Psychol. 2009 Aug;118(3):623-33.

Sevincer AT, Oettingen G.

According to alcohol-myopia theory (C. M. Steele & R. A. Josephs, 1990), alcohol leads individuals to disproportionally focus on the most salient aspects of a situation and to ignore peripheral information. The authors hypothesized that alcohol leads individuals to strongly commit to their goals without considering information about the probability of goal attainment. In Study 1, participants named their most important interpersonal goal, indicated their expectations of successfully attaining it, and then consumed either alcohol or a placebo. In contrast to participants who consumed a placebo, intoxicated participants felt strongly committed to their goals despite low expectations of attaining them. In Study 2, goal-directed actions were measured over time. Once sober again, intoxicated participants with low expectations did not follow up on their strong commitments. Apparently, when prospects are bleak, alcohol produces empty goal commitments, as commitments are not based on individuals' expectations of attaining their goals and do not foster goal striving over time.

Link to PubMed entry for study.

—Vaughan.

August 05, 2009

Through gritted teeth:

There's an excellent article in the Boston Globe about 'grit' - the ability to stick with a task and persevere over a long period even when the going gets tough.

The article riffs on the work of psychologist Angela Duckworth who became interested in what attributes outside of intelligence contribute to success.

“I’d bet that there isn’t a single highly successful person who hasn’t depended on grit,” says Angela Duckworth, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania who helped pioneer the study of grit. “Nobody is talented enough to not have to work hard, and that’s what grit allows you to do.”...

After developing a survey to measure this narrowly defined trait - you can take the survey at www.gritstudy.com - Duckworth set out to test the relevance of grit. The initial evidence suggests that measurements of grit can often be just as predictive of success, if not more, than measurements of intelligence. For instance, in a 2007 study of 175 finalists in the Scripps National Spelling Bee, Duckworth found that her simple grit survey was better at predicting whether or not a child would make the final round than an IQ score.

As the article notes, this concept of grit is not just perseverance, it's also about keeping relevant long-term goals in mind.

When psychologists have researched 'goal-directed action' in the past, they've almost always been thinking about the here and now. Reaching, immediate problem solving and short-term achievement.

This is slowly starting to change and some cognitive scientists are now attempting to understand the psychology and neuroscience of what we might call 'life goals'.

There's an interesting neuroimaging study in the latest issue of the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience that looked which brain areas are active when we're thinking about future events that are not personally relevant, compared to those that the individual holds as a personal goal.

The study extends previous work that indicates that our ability to imagine the future uses similar brain networks as our ability to remember the past, to the point where patients with dense amnesia have drastic impairments in picturing future events.

In the case of personal goals, it seems a similar network is involved, with the addition of the ventromedial and posterior cingulate areas, both frontal lobe regions previously linked to coding the emotional weight or value of an experience.

I've long suspected that 90% of real-world intelligence is motivation and a similar message seems to be emerging from the research.

Link to Boston Globe article 'The truth about grit'.

—Vaughan.

July 14, 2009

Unique like everyone else:

You've probably heard of the many cognitive bias studies where the vast majority of people rate themselves as among the best. Like the fact that 88% of college students rate themselves in the top 50% of drivers, 95% of college professors think they do above average work, and so on.

In light of this, I've just found a wonderfully ironic study that found that the majority of people rate themselves as less susceptible to cognitive biases than the average person.

It's work from psychologist Emily Pronin who studies insight into our own judgements and how it affects our social understanding and perception of others.

In this study, the participants (psychology students no less), were given a booklet explaining how cognitive biases work that described eight of the most common ones. They were then asked to rate how susceptible they were to each of the biases and then how susceptible the 'average American' was.

Each rated themselves as less affected by biases than other people, instantly causing an irony loop in the fabric of space and time.

The study also had a fantastic follow-up that demonstrated just how strongly these cognitive biases affect our thinking. Even when they're pointed out, we can't escape them:

Participants in one follow-up study who showed the better than-average bias insisted that their self-assessments were accurate and objective even after reading a description of how they could have been affected by the relevant bias.

Participants in a final study reported their peer's self-serving attributions regarding test performance to be biased but their own similarly self-serving attributions to be free of bias.

Pronin calls this the 'bias blind spot' and you can read the full study online as a pdf file. Pronin also wrote an excellent 2008 review, also available as a pdf, on how these biases mean we see ourselves differently from how we see others, because we have direct access to our own minds but only observations of other people.

pdf of 'bias blind spot' study.
Link to DOI entry for same.

—Vaughan.

June 19, 2009

Out of control decision-making:

I've just noticed that TED has recently put another talk online by the entertaining and thought-provoking behavioural economist Dan Ariely where he discusses why our feeling of being in total control of our decision-making may be false.

We mentioned an earlier and similarly interesting TED talk on the psychology of cheating previously, but this one is more concerned with what we might call decision-making inertia, where the 'default' options or red herrings have a huge sway over our reasoning

This is despite the fact that most people are completely unaware of how irrelevant information has such a profound impact on our choices.

Link to Dan Ariely TED talk on whether we're in control of our choices.

—Vaughan.

May 17, 2009

The psychology of being scammed:

I'm just reading a fascinating report on the psychology of why people fall for scams, commissioned by the UK government's Office of Fair Trading and created by Exeter University's psychology department.

It's a 260 page monster, so is not exactly bed time reading, but was drawn from in-depth interviews from scam victims, examination of scam material, two questionnaire studies and a behavioural experiment.

Here's some of the punchlines grabbed from the executive summary. The report concluded that the most successful scams involve:

Appeals to trust and authority: people tend to obey authorities so scammers use, and victims fall for, cues that make the offer look like a legitimate one being made by a reliable official institution or established reputable business.

Visceral triggers: scams exploit basic human desires and needs – such as greed, fear, avoidance of physical pain, or the desire to be liked – in order to provoke intuitive reactions and reduce the motivation of people to process the content of the scam message deeply.

Scarcity cues. Scams are often personalised to create the impression that the offer is unique to the recipient.

Induction of behavioural commitment. Scammers ask their potential victims to make small steps of compliance to draw them in, and thereby cause victims to feel committed to continue sending money.

The disproportionate relation between the size of the alleged reward and the cost of trying to obtain it. Scam victims are led to focus on the alleged big prize or reward in comparison to the relatively small amount of money they have to send in order to obtain their windfall.

Lack of emotional control. Compared to non-victims, scam victims report being less able to regulate and resist emotions associated with scam offers. They seem to be unduly open to persuasion, or perhaps unduly undiscriminating about who they allow to persuade them.

And here's a couple of counter-intuitive kickers:

Scam victims often have better than average background knowledge in the area of the scam content. For example, it seems that people with experience of playing legitimate prize draws and lotteries are more likely to fall for a scam in this area than people with less knowledge and experience in this field. This also applies to those with some knowledge of investments. Such knowledge can increase rather than decrease the risk of becoming a victim.

Scam victims report that they put more cognitive effort into analysing scam content than non-victims. This contradicts the intuitive suggestion that people fall victim to scams because they invest too little cognitive energy in investigating their content, and thus overlook potential information that might betray the scam.

Interesting, people who fall for scams often have a feeling that it's dodgy. The report suggests we trust our gut instincts. If it seems too good to be true, it probably is.

We like to think that only other people fall for scams, but as I'm working my way through the report it's becoming clear that those things that we think make us resistant to scams (a keen analytical mind) are not what help us avoid being a victim.

A really fascinating read and a great example of applied psychology.

Link to Office of Fair Trading report page and download.

—Vaughan.

Link to this post | Comments (7)

May 12, 2009

Delayed gratification and the science of self-control:

The New Yorker has a fantastic article on the psychology of delayed gratification and how tempting kids with marshmallows allowed us to understand the life-time impact of self-control.

The piece focuses on the work of psychologist Walter Mischel who invented a test for children where they'd be presented with a marshmallow but told they could have two, later on, if they just waited.

It was an early demonstration of the power of temporal discounting - some kids ate the marshmallow, about a third waited and cashed in their patience for bigger rewards - but this wasn't, in itself, particularly earth-shattering news.

What was most surprising was that years later, when Mischel followed up the kids in his experiment, the ones who waited, who could delay their gratification, turned out to be more successful in life - better jobs, better exam results, less drug addiction and so on.

This and subsequent research has led us to believe that the ability to delay gratification for better rewards in the future is a fundamental skill in success, probably because it looks at how emotions and motivations interact with a more rational appproach to reasoning. We know what's best, but can we keep temptation at bay to reach it?

The article is a compelling exploration of this key ability and the subsequent research that has sprung up around it to help explain how we manage to keep those cheap instant hits at bay.

There's also a great observation in the piece where the author, science writer Jonah Lehrer, describes Mischel as someone who "talks with a Brooklyn bluster and he tends to act out his sentences".

Link to New Yorker article 'Don’t! The secret of self-control'.

—Vaughan.

April 20, 2009

Choice blindness:

New Scientist has a fascinating article on some 'I wish I'd thought of that' research that looks at how we justify our choices, even when the thing we've chosen has been unknowingly swapped. It turns out, most of the time we don't notice the change and precede to give reasons for why the thing we didn't choose was the best choice.

It's a fantastic use of stage magician's sleight of hand to make a change outside conscious awareness.

We have been trying to answer this question using techniques from magic performances. Rather than playing tricks with alternatives presented to participants, we surreptitiously altered the outcomes of their choices, and recorded how they react. For example, in an early study we showed our volunteers pairs of pictures of faces and asked them to choose the most attractive. In some trials, immediately after they made their choice, we asked people to explain the reasons behind their choices.

Unknown to them, we sometimes used a double-card magic trick to covertly exchange one face for the other so they ended up with the face they did not choose. Common sense dictates that all of us would notice such a big change in the outcome of a choice. But the result showed that in 75 per cent of the trials our participants were blind to the mismatch, even offering "reasons" for their "choice".

The idea riffs on the well-known psychological phenomenon of change blindness but this is also a lovely example of what Daniel Dennett called "narratization", the ability of the mind to make a coherent story out what's happening, with you as the main character, even when it's clear that the outcome was determined externally. In a well-known article, Dennett cites this process as the key to our understanding of the 'self'.

This was vividly demonstrated in split-brain patients who can be shown images to each independent hemisphere.

Each hand picks out a different picture, because the information is only accessible to the side that controls action for one side of the body, but when asked why they chose the two, they give a story of why the two pictures are related, even though they're not conscious of initially seeing both pictures.

There's a great summary in this New York Times piece from 2005, that comes highly recommended.

The New Scientist article covers this new technique for investigating this process with a nifty video of the slight-of-hand in action.

Link to NewSci on 'Choice blindness: You don't know what you want'.

—Vaughan.

Link to this post | Comments (4)

April 06, 2009

Bias we can believe in:

Time magazine has a recent article on how the Obama team are making behavioural economics the centre of their financial policies in the hope of altering the behaviour of US citizens. But where are the sceptical voices?

Behavioural economics is primarily an academic discipline where researchers investigate how our cognitive biases divert us from strictly rational reasoning and affect our financial decision-making.

More recently, however, researchers have started touting these findings as a basis for making financial policy. This was most conspicuously done in Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein's book Nudge, which the article notes was an inspiration for the Obama campaign.

In fact, the article reveals that several well-known behavioural economists were advisors for the Obama campaign team:

The existence of this behavioral dream team — which also included best-selling authors Dan Ariely of MIT (Predictably Irrational) and Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein of the University of Chicago (Nudge) as well as Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman of Princeton — has never been publicly disclosed, even though its members gave Obama white papers on messaging, fundraising and rumor control as well as voter mobilization. All their proposals — among them the famous online fundraising lotteries that gave small donors a chance to win face time with Obama — came with footnotes to peer-reviewed academic research. "It was amazing to have these bullet points telling us what to do and the science behind it," Moffo tells TIME. "These guys really know what makes people tick."

President Obama is still relying on behavioral science. But now his Administration is using it to try to transform the country. Because when you know what makes people tick, it's a lot easier to help them change.

And the fact that Obama has picked behavioural economist and Nudge co-author Cass Sunstein to head up the policy tweaking 'Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs' office is evidence that behavioural science is being taken seriously in the new administration.

What's remarkable, however, is how so few of the high profile stories on this new influence in the Obama team has asked any difficult questions - they're all almost relentlessly enthusiastic.

For example, one major problem is knowing how well largely lab-based studies will scale up to whole-population economic systems.

It's perhaps no accident that almost all the articles cite a 2001 study that found that simply making the US's 401(k) retirement savings scheme opt-out instead of opt-in vastly increased participation simply because it's a hassle to change and employees perceive the 'default' as investment advice.

But it's probably true to say that this example has been so widely repeated but it's one of the minority of behavioural economics studies that have looked at the relation between the existence of a cognitive bias and real-world economic data from the population.

And it's notable that behavioural economists who specialise in making this link, a field they call behavioural macroeconomics, seem absent from the Obama inner circle.

In fact, the two most prominent, George Akerlof and Bob Shiller, are certainly guys worth listening to.

Akerlof won the Nobel prize in economics for his work on behavioural macroeconomics and Shiller has predicted the tech crash in his 2000 book Irrational Exuberance, and then the housing crash in the second edition.

It is essential to check lab findings against real-world economic data because the responses of small groups of undergraduates should not be the basis of economic policy.

Link to Time article 'How Obama is Using the Science of Change'.
Link to Economist on behavioural macroeconomics book by Akerlof and Shiller.
Link to Atlantic interview with Akerlof on behaviour and economic policy.
Link to Atlantic interview with Shiller on the same.

—Vaughan.

March 18, 2009

Dan Ariely on the psychology of cheating:

Behavioural economist Dan Ariely gives a fantastic 15 minute TED lecture on the psychology of cheating that explores numerous fascinating and counter-intuitive influences on how we bend the truth for personal benefit.

Ariely discusses some curious social influences, including the fact that seeing someone else cheat may actually decrease the general cheating of the group, but only if they perceive they are part of a different or rival group. Seeing someone cheat who is part of your 'in-group' seems to reliably increase dishonesty.

He also notes various effects of changing the form of the benefit. Simply making the reward tokens that can be exchanged for money, rather than just directly paying, greatly increases cheating, even though the value is identical in both cases.

Ariel does some fascinating research and is the author of Predictably Irrational, an excellent book which I thoroughly recommend.

The talk is similarly enjoyable and Ariely makes links between his own studies on cheating and the current financial meltdown.

Link to Dan Ariely's TED talk.

—Vaughan.

March 02, 2009

Where is my mind?:

Fora.TV has a great video discussion with science writer Jonah Lehrer where he gives a wonderfully engaging talk on the on decision making, meta-cognition and the paradox of choice.

The discussion is an hour long and well worth the time, although for those with pathological impatience or only five minutes to spare, the section on metacognition is a particular highlight.

I also notice from his blog that he's also just reviewed a recent book on consciousness and embodied cognition called 'Out of Our Heads' by philosopher Alva Noë for the San Francisco Chronicle which is also worth checking out.

Link to Fora.TV interview with Lehrer (thanks Rich!)

—Vaughan.

February 21, 2009

Experimental philosophy of others' intentions:

Today's ABC Radio National All in the Mind has a fascinating discussion on how we attribute intentions to other people which covers some surprising and counter-intuitive examples of how our understanding of other people's desires are biased by the situation.

There's a great example depicted in this YouTube video which I highly recommend, but essentially the example is this:

A vice president of a large company goes to the CEO and says "We have a new business plan. It will make huge amounts of money for the company, but it will also harm the environment".

The CEO says "I know the plan will harm the environment, but I don't care about that, I'm just interested in making as much money as we possibly can. So let's put the plan into action".

The company starts the plan, and the environment is harmed.

The question is, did the CEO harm the environment intentionally? As it turns out, most people say yes to this question.

Now have a think about this similar scenario.

A vice president of a large company goes to the CEO and says "We have a new business plan. It will make huge amounts of money for the company, but it will also help the environment".

The CEO says "I know the plan will help the environment, but I don't care about that, I'm just interested in making as much money as we possibly can. So let's put the plan into action".

The company starts the plan, and the environment is helped.

The question is the same - did the CEO intentionally help the environment in this case.

Curiously, most people say no. Despite the CEO making the same decision in both cases.

The programme is full of many more fascinating examples of how our judgement of intention is affected by the outcome rather than the decision the person makes.

However, I wonder whether our judgements are clouded by the notion of responsibility rather than purely intention, where we place much greater social weight on responsibility for damaging actions, than beneficial ones.

This area is largely being explored by the new area of 'experimental philosophy' that aims to empirically test our assumptions about traditionally philosophical issues.

Link to AITM on 'The philosophy of good intentions'.

—Vaughan.

February 06, 2009

If It's Difficult to Pronounce, It Must Be Risky:

I've just found a short-but-sweet study recently published in Psychological Science that shows that we tend to rate things with difficult to pronounce names as more risky than those with names that we can say more fluently.

Psychologists Hyunjin Song and Norbert Schwarz created names of notional food additives and asked the participants to rate how hazardous they seemed.

Easy to pronounce 'additives' with names like Magnalroxate were consistently rated as less risky than names such as Hnegripitrom.

Wanting to see whether the same effect held for risks that could be seen as exciting, they ran a similar experiment but where participants were asked to rate amusement park rides.

Rides with names like Ohanzee were rated as less likely to make you sick than difficult-to-pronounce rides with names like Tsiischili, but were also rated as less adventurous.

The researchers note that their study is in line with previous research on cognitive biases, which has found that we tend to underestimate the risk of familiar things and over-estimate the risk of things we don't know so well.

Link to PubMed entry for study.

—Vaughan.

February 05, 2009

Never mind the quality, look at the width:

The New York Times has a fascinating snippet on how cooperation with others to get a monetary reward is not influenced by the value of the reward, but by the numbers that describe it.

In the study, when the reward was described as rising from 3 cents to 300 cents cooperation increased - but when it was described as rising from 3 cents to 3 dollars, it had no effect.

The experiment was carried by psychologists Ellen Furlong and John Opfer who were interested in comparing how our reasoning is affected by the representation of value.

The researchers asked volunteers to take part in a behavioral test known as the prisoner’s dilemma, in which two partners are offered various rewards to either work together or defect.

The idea is that in the long term, the participants earn the most money by cooperating. But in any given round of play, they make the most if they decide to turn against their partner while he stays loyal. (The reward is lowest when both partners defect.)

When the reward for cooperation was increased to 300 cents from 3 cents, the researchers found, the level of cooperation went up. But when the reward went from 3 cents to $3, it did not.

We covered a study late last year that also found a similar effect: people were swayed more by higher numbers in adverts even when the alternative described exactly the same thing but using smaller units.

Link to short NYT piece '$1? No Thanks. 100 Cents? You Bet'.
Link to academic article on study.
Link to DOI entry for same.

—Vaughan.

January 25, 2009

Irrational reading:

Science writer Jonah Lehrer has a short but useful piece in the Wall Street Journal where he recommends five must-read books on irrational decision-making.

Lehrer is well placed to be making recommendations as he's recently been completely immersed in the science of decision-making to write his newly released book How We Decide.

The five books he recommends are:

Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds by Charles Mackay.

Judgment Under Uncertainty by Daniel Kahneman, Paul Slovic and Amos Tversky

How We Know What Isn't So by Thomas Gilovich

The Winner's Curse by Richard H. Thaler

Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely

All of which I can also heartily recommend, except The Winner's Curse, but simply because I'm not familiar with it.

By the way, the first book that Lehrer recommends was published in 1841 and is freely available online.

Link to 'Books on Irrational Decision-Making' from the WSJ (via FC).

—Vaughan.

January 14, 2009

How psychiatrists think:

An article just published in Advances in Psychiatric Treatment called 'How Psychiatrists Think' discusses how mental health physicians are susceptible to cognitive biases and how it's possible to reduce the chance of error.

The article was inspired by a Jerome Groopman book we discussed in 2007 called How Doctors Think in which he tackles cognitive errors in medicine but omitted psychiatrists because he felt their thinking process were too complex.

Two psychiatrists, Niall Crumlish and Brendan D. Kelly, decided to take this as a challenge and wrote an article that applied the cognitive science of 'heuristics' to psychiatric reasoning.

Heuristics are mental short-cuts we make to deal with everyday reasoning, and work made famous by Nobel-prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman has shown that these short cuts often lead us astray.

For example, the availability heuristic is where we judge likelihood on how easily something comes to mind - perhaps nudging psychiatrists towards incorrectly diagnosing a rare disorder if they've just been to a recent discussion on it.

The authors make the point that although they discuss how general reasoning biases applies equally to psychiatric decision-making, almost no experimental work has been done specifically on psychiatrists, meaning we're still not exactly sure whether there are any speciality-specific mental errors that might regularly crop up.

However, they do note that there's good evidence that being aware of these biases helps people overcome them.

Their article is a brief guide to some of the most common cognitive biases in us all, with an interesting insight into psychiatric thinking.

Link to 'How psychiatrists think'.
Link to DOI entry for same.

—Vaughan.

January 11, 2009

Predictably Irrational and relative value:

ABC Radio National's All in the Mind just broadcast an interesting interview with behavioural economist Dan Ariely, where he discusses some of his fascinating work on our cognitive biases and why we find it so difficult to judge what will benefit us most.

I'm pretty sure it's a repeat, but I mention it as I've almost finished the unabridged audiobook of his recent bestseller Predictably Irrational which is thoroughly excellent.

The first thing that strikes me is 'wow, you've done so much interesting research', as the book is largely about studies he has personally been involved with.

The second thing is 'damn, I wish I'd thought of that' as the studies are often cleverly conceived and tackle real-world corners of our reasoning and judgement.

The chapters on anchoring and on decoy options are particularly fascinating and he gives a vivid example of how decoy options work.

He notes that the UK magazine The Economist was offering a web only subscription for $59, a print subscription for $125 dollars, and a print-and-internet subscription also for $125.

It seems no-one would choose the print-only subscription - it seems obsolete - but its mere presence affects our reasoning and boosts the sales the more expensive option.

In a study to test this, Ariely gave participants the choice between these three subscription options, and to another group of participants, the choice only between web-only and print-and-internet subscriptions.

in the three option condition 16 people chose the internet-only subscription, none the print-only subscription and the other 84 chose the print-and-internet option.

As the print-only is obselete, it should make no difference whether it is part of the choice or not, when it isn't there, in the two choice condition, the reverse pattern emerged. The majority, 68 people, chose the cheaper online option, while only 32 took the print-and-internet option.

In other words, the print-only is a decoy and it makes us think that the print-and-internet option is a better deal because it has something 'free', when in reality, this impression is just created because we've just been presented with a decoy worse deal

This relates to one of Ariely's main points that he returns to throughout the book, that we tend to make relative judgements, and manipulating the context can skew our perceptions of value.

It struck me that this is how most people experience pitch and musical notes. A few people have 'perfect pitch' and can label tones without reference to other tones. I wonder if some people have 'perfect pitch' with regard to this sort of value judgements.

The Predictably Irrational website is also very good, where Ariely has a regularly updated blog and has created free video summaries of each of the chapters.

All come highly recommended.

Link to AITM interview with Dan Ariely.
Link to Predictably Irrational website.

—Vaughan.

January 06, 2009

Self-destruction lite:

The New York Times has a thought-provoking article about self-handicapping - the attempt to actually make yourself worse at something. The idea is that if a bad performance is expected, some people actively try and handicap themselves before hand, for example by not practising or by getting drunk, so they have an excuse already lined up and can preserve their self-esteem when they don't do very well.

I'm sure we've all heard about this sort of behaviour discussed anecdotally, but I didn't realise it's actually been quite well researched by psychologists since the late 1970s.

Some snippets from the article:

Psychologists have studied this sort of behavior since at least 1978, when Steven Berglas and Edward E. Jones used the phrase “self-handicapping” to describe students in a study who chose to take a drug that they were told would inhibit their performance on an exam (the drug was actually inert)...

Yet given the opportunity, and a good reason, most people will claim some handicap. In a paper [pdf] published last summer, Sean McCrea, a psychologist at the University of Konstanz in Germany, described experiments in which he manipulated participants’ scores on a variety of intelligence tests. In some, the subjects could choose to prepare before taking the test or could join the “no practice” group.

Sure enough, Dr. McCrea found that those told they got bad scores blamed a lack of practice, if they could, and that citing this handicap cushioned the blow to their self-confidence...

As a short-term strategy, self-handicapping is often no more than an exercise in self-delusion. Studies of college students have found that habitual handicappers — who skip a lot of classes; who miss deadlines; who don’t buy the textbook — tend to rate themselves in the top 10 percent of the class, though their grades slouch between C and D.

I wonder how this interacts with the effects of different types of praise and beliefs about intelligence, studied by psychologist Carol Dweck.

She has found that praising a child's effort on a task ("you've worked really hard!") has a motivating effect, whereas praising the child by attributing their success to a character trait ("you're really clever") caused them to become to be more distressed when they encounter failure and lead them to chose easier tasks afterwards.

Her work suggests this is because a belief that intelligence is flexible and effort-related, rather than a fixed character trait, actually makes us more motivated and helps us perform better as we don't feel we are less intelligent if we fail.

It reflects a likely interaction between performance and self-esteem, mediated by beliefs about competence and I wonder whether self-handicapping is way some people develop to manage this interaction.

Anyway, enough speculation, but I recommend reading the article as it highlights an area that I wasn't aware of and has many intriguing possibilities.

Link to NYT article on self-handicapping.

—Vaughan.

Link to this post | Comments (4)

December 31, 2008

Understanding numbers: let me count the ways :

The latest edition of The Economist has an interesting article about whether our ability to count and estimate quantity is an innate ability that we have from birth.

The article covers studies on babies, people who speak languages that only have number words for "one", "two", "few" and "many", people who have never developed certain maths skills and others who have lost specific number abilities after brain injury:

Lisa Cipolotti, a neuropsychologist, studied a Signora Gaddi, who used to run a hotel and keep its accounts. After a stroke she could find the number of things in a small group only by counting—when asked how many arms a crucifix had, she got Dr Cipolotti to hold out her arms so she could count them. Signora Gaddi’s problems seemed to affect only numbers. She could still read, speak and reason, remember historical and geographical facts, and order objects by their physical size.

In fact, Signora Gaddi’s difficulties went even deeper than Charles’s. The stroke which damaged her innate understanding of small numbers also robbed her of the entire numerical edifice built on that foundation. For her, numbers stopped at four. When asked to count up from one, she got to four and no further. If there were more than four dots on a page she could not count them. She could not say how old she was or how many days were in a week, or even tell the time.

Link to Economist article 'Easy as 1, 2, 3'.

—Vaughan.

December 11, 2008

Medical jargon alters our understanding of disease:

A new study just published in PLoS One reports that simply using technical-sounding labels for newly popularised medical conditions changes our understanding of the condition itself, leading us to think it is more serious and ~~more~~ less common.

The study is interesting as it speaks to the debate about disease mongering - the over-medicalising of problems that were previously considered unfortunate but normal parts of life.

The research team, led by psychologist Meredith Young, gave 16 descriptions of medical conditions to two groups of participants.

Eight were conditions that were previously not considered medical disorders but have been 'medicalised' in the last 10 years with new technical sounding names common in press reports. For example, impotence is now commonly described 'erectile dysfunction' while baldness has been labelled 'androgenic alopecia'.

The other eight conditions were established medical disorders that have medical and everyday names that are both widely used in the popular press, such as stroke (cerebrovascular accident) and heart attack (myocardial infarction).

One group of participants was given descriptions of the conditions with the common names, and the other group was given the technical names, and each were asked to rate how serious it was, how prevalent it was and whether they thought it was a real disease or not.

For the recently medicalised conditions, the technical label led people to rate it as more serious, ~~more~~ less common and more likely to be a real disease.

For the established conditions, the technical name didn't effect how the condition was perceived.

Simply giving a condition a technical label seems to change our understanding of the condition itself, making it seem more of a risk and more medically significant.

These findings follow-on from another interesting study from Young, where she found that diseases are thought to be more common and serious the more they're mentioned in the media.

Participants considered diseases that occur frequently in the media to be more serious, and have higher disease status than those that infrequently occur in the media, even when the low media frequency conditions were considered objectively ‘worse’ by a separate group of participants.

We now know that our beliefs about disease and understanding of illness has a significant effect, not only how we cope with the experience, but how the disease takes its course.

Pharmaceutical companies often promote the benefits of their product, but they also regularly attempt to change our understanding of the problem itself, so the use of their medication seems the most sensible option.

However, there are many other players in the public discussion of illness and certain ideas about causes, symptoms and treatments are often pushed by people because it fits in with other agendas they have.

This is particularly relevant for scientific theories and it is no accident that many of the most significant public medical debates in recent years have been over the acceptance of certain explanations - such as the role of the MMR vaccine in autism, the role of neurotransmitters in mental illness, the role of genetics in obesity.

There is no explanation of illness independent of culture and an understanding of how popular ideas influence our personal medical beliefs is an essential part of understanding medicine itself.

Link to study on medical language and perception of illness.
Link to study on press reporting and perception of illness.

Full disclosure: I'm an unpaid member of the PLoS One editorial board.

—Vaughan.

October 23, 2008

False advertising statistics effective, say 9 out of 10 cats:

Ars Technica has a fantastic article on a recent study that found that numerical specifications in adverts have a huge effect on our choices, even when they're meaningless.

The numbers can be ratings, technical details, supposed representations of quality - it doesn't seem to matter. In general, bigger is better and the study found that we tend to be swayed by the numbers even when it directly contradicts our experience.

The first test involved megapixels. The authors took a single image, and used Photoshop to create a sharper version, and one with more vivid colors; they told the students that the two versions came from different cameras. When told nothing about the cameras, about 25 percent of the students chose the one that had made the sharper image. But providing a specification reversed that. When told that the other model captured more pixels using a figure based on the diagonal of the sensor, more than half now picked it. When it comes to specs, bigger is better, too, even if the underlying property is the same. Given the value in terms of the total number of pixels captured, the preference for the supposedly high-resolution camera shot up to 75 percent.

The researchers thought this might be a problem with the fact that not everyone is technically minded, so they tried various other experiments with everything from scented oil to ice-cream - all with the same effect.

To quote the researchers "even when consumers can directly experience the relevant products and the specifications carry little or no new information, their preference is still influenced by specifications, including specifications that are self-generated and by definition spurious and specifications that the respondents themselves deem uninformative."

Link to Ars Technica write-up of study.
Link to study paper.
Link to DOI.

—Vaughan.

October 07, 2008

I have a hunch, but I'm just working out when to use it:

The Boston Globe has an interesting piece on differing decision-making styles and how cognitive science is increasingly recognising the role of emotion in making choices.

It's shoehorned into a slightly dubious Obama vs McCain premise, but it covers the important relationship between more conscious reflective forms of problem analysis, and more intuitive forms of approach.

Some of the most interesting research in this area has looked at how these systems interfere with each other.

One of my favourite studies used the Iowa Gambling Task, a card game where participants pick from four decks of cards that can either give them wins and losses. There are various version but a common variant is where two decks give a slight overall gain, while the other two give a slight overall loss.

It's really hard to work out rationally, because there are just too many numbers to keep in your head, but after a while people tend to get an intuitive grasp of which are the best decks to stick with.

One particular study [full text], led by psychologist Cathryn Evans, found that people with a university education actually did worse on this task than people without one, presumably because they tended to over-apply futile rationalist strategies.

In terms of discussing the problem and ways of tackling it, a classic study by Jonathan Schooler found that getting people to talking about their problem-solving strategy actually made people worse at solving problems, particularly for 'insight problems' where the solution lies in your ability to reframe the whole scenario - often in a counter-intuitive way.

Of course, some problems need a measured, thoughtful, analytical approach, whereas in some situations this interferes with the outcome. However, these are largely findings from lab tasks designed to isolate these types of problems whereas in the real world, problems come as a chaotic mix of both elements.

Knowing which strategy to apply is key, but then again, solving this problem is often equally as complex as solving the problem itself.

Link to Boston Globe article 'The next decider'.

—Vaughan.

September 09, 2008

Intuitive number sense part of formal maths skills:

The ability to intuitively estimate the number objects you can see is known as automatic number sense and has been widely studied in the scientific literature, but is usually thought to be separate from the formal and precise maths abilities we learn at school.

A new study just published online in Nature suggests that these abilities are more intertwined than we might think, as the better the number sense of 14 year-olds, the better their formal maths ability.

The researchers, led by psychologist Justin Halberda, flashed up a series of dot patterns to a group of 14 year-old students. Just like the one in the picture.

The kids were asked to indicate the ratio of blue and yellow dots but because the patterns flashed up so quickly, for only one fifth of a second, the kids didn't have time to count them. They had to rely on a guestimate - their number sense - to give their answer.

After a whole set of these, the researchers calculated each kid's accuracy, to give a measure of their overall number sense ability.

This in itself isn't particularly interesting, as number sense has been widely tested and researched in the scientific literature. However, in the past, it's often been considered a fuzzy, perhaps more 'primitive', ability unrelated to formal maths skills.

Owing to the fact that the researchers had access to the children's maths achievement test scores, all the way back to kindergarten, they tested whether number sense and maths skills were related.

It turns out they were, and automatic number sense accounted for almost a third of the scores on formal maths tests.

This was even after controlling for the fact that some children were generally brighter or quicker than others.

What is not clear is whether just being better at maths means you develop a better number sense, or whether a better number sense encourages better maths skills.

The fact that they are related at all is interesting, however, as it suggest that intuition plays a part in the practice of mathematics - the most logical of pursuits.

Link to scientific paper.
Link to PubMed entry.
Link to write-up from ScienceNow.

—Vaughan.

August 20, 2008

Francis Crick inadvertently raises criminal robot army:

Scientific American's Mind Matters blog covers an interesting study that found that altering people's belief in free will also altered the likelihood of participants being dishonest in a test of mental ability.

To achieve this, the study used part of Francis Crick's book The Astonishing Hypothesis that argues against the everyday concept of free will on the basis of neurobiology.

Half of the participants got a passage saying that there is no such thing as free will. The passage begins as follows: “‘You,’ your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. Who you are is nothing but a pack of neurons.”

The passage then goes on to talk about the neural basis of decisions and claims that “...although we appear to have free will, in fact, our choices have already been predetermined for us and we cannot change that.” The other participants got a passage that was similarly scientific-sounding, but it was about the importance of studying consciousness, with no mention of free will.

After reading the passages, all participants completed a survey on their belief in free will. Then comes the inspired part of the experiment. Participants were told to complete 20 arithmetic problems that would appear on the computer screen. But they were also told that when the question appeared, they needed to press the space bar, otherwise a computer glitch would make the answer appear on the screen, too. The participants were told that no one would know whether they pushed the space bar, but they were asked not to cheat.

The results were clear: those who read the anti-free will text cheated more often! (That is, they pressed the space bar less often than the other participants.) Moreover, the researchers found that the amount a participant cheated correlated with the extent to which they rejected free will in their survey responses.

I wonder how specific this is to a general belief in us lacking free will, or whether it's more specifically to do with a similar belief but which is particularly tied up with the mechanistic concept that Crick discusses - i.e. we're all just the function of lots of little parts.

The reason I'm wondering this is because the twelve-step approach to addiction recovery has two free-will reducing principles at its core - namely an admission that you are not in control of your addiction and the belief that you have to give yourself up to a 'higher power'.

The Mind Matters article goes on to discuss the various interpretations of the study and how it fits with our understanding of the philosophy of free will.

Link to Mind Matters on 'Free Will vs. the Programmed Brain' (via fc).
pdf of full text of study.

—Vaughan.

Link to this post | Comments (4)

August 19, 2008

The best jobs in life are free:

The BPS Research Digest covers a recent study finding that volunteers are actually more committed than paid staff in an organisation, in line with studies showing that payment tends to reduce people's productivity and enjoyment for the same work compared to when it's done for free.

A recent study published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics tested this by asking students to complete 'IQ test' style questions for varying amounts of money, or by 'incentivising' some students on a charity collection day while others collected for free.

In this paper we have provided quantitatively precise evidence, in a controlled environment, of the effect of the introduction of monetary compensation on performance, which includes a precise comparison of the cases in which the reward was given in different quantities or not given at all. The result has been that the usual prediction of higher performance with higher compensation, when one is offered, has been confirmed: but the performance may be lower because of the introduction of the compensation.

In other words, those who were paid more worked harder than those who were paid less, but the hardest work was done by those not paid anything at all.

Link to BPSRD on the commitment of volunteers.
Link to summary of payment and productivity paper.
pdf of full-text.

—Vaughan.

July 25, 2008

Strippers for taxation reform:

Frontal Cortex has an excellent post on the near futility of election coverage and why people tend to vote with what they feel, rather than what they know.

The piece reviews a whole range of studies that have highlighted possible non-issue influences on people's voting preferences, from the weather to the facial expressions of news presenters.

One other line of research has found that facial structure can predict leadership, allowing people to reliably pick out business leaders or political winners just from a photo of their face.

Advertisers have long known that marketing products on the basis of facts is a lot less effective than marketing on the basis of appeals to emotion, desire and self-image.

While this is often labelled 'sex sells', 'you-can-be-sexy sells' is just as widely used.

Traditionally, this avenue has not been open to political candidates since it leaves the candidate open to the emotional counter-attack of accusations of impropriety.

After seeing the popularity of the 'Obama Girl' video, it struck me that the internet opens up this avenue, as supporters not officially associated with a candidate can now make their own wide-coverage sex sells promotions without 'sullying' the name of the official party machine.

As Frontal Cortex notes:

The problem, as political scientist Larry Bartels notes, is that people aren't rational: we're rationalizers. Our brain prefers a certain candidate or party for a really complicated set of subterranean reasons and then, after the preference has been unconsciously established, we invent rational sounding reasons to justify our preferences.

Link to Frontal Cortex on 'Rational Voters?'.

—Vaughan.

Is banking on neuroscience a false economy?:

The Economist has a great article taking a wide-angle view of neuroeconomics, asking whether it actually contributes anything useful to our understanding of economic systems or whether its just a personal psychology of gains and losses that won't actually scale.

The fiercest attack on neuroeconomics, and indeed behavioural economics, has come from two economists at Princeton University, Faruk Gul and Wolfgang Pesendorfer. In an article in 2005, “The Case for Mindless Economics” [pdf], they argued that neuroscience could not transform economics because what goes on inside the brain is irrelevant to the discipline. What matters are the decisions people take—in the jargon, their “revealed preferences”—not the process by which they reach them. For the purposes of understanding how society copes with the consequences of those decisions, the assumption of rational utility-maximisation works just fine.

But today’s neuroeconomists are not the first dismal scientists to dream of peering inside the human brain. In 1881, a few years after William Jevons argued that the functioning of the brain’s black box would not be known, Francis Edgeworth proposed the creation of a “hedonimeter”, which would measure the utility that each individual gained from his decisions. “From moment to moment the hedonimeter varies; the delicate index now flickering with the flutter of the passions, now steadied by intellectual activity, low sunk whole hours in the neighbourhood of zero, or momentarily springing up towards infinity,” he wrote, poetically for an economist.

Part of the scepticism seems to originate from more general reservations about the results of brain scanning studies being over-interpreted, echoing wider concerns in cognitive neuroscience.

What's interesting though is that the article mentions that neuroeconomics researchers are turning to transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) - a technique that alters brain function for a few hundred milliseconds while people are actively completing tasks.

Because TMS alters brain function, it's not just showing you a correlation like brain scans do. If task performance changes when you've altered that brain area you can infer that the particularly part of the cortex you've targeted is causally involved in the psychology of the task.

Along these lines, one recent high-profile study [pdf] managed to alter participants' fairness behaviour in the Ultimatum Game (a common experimental task) when the function of the upper outside surface of the right frontal lobe was disrupted.

Link to The Economist article 'Do economists need brains?'.
pdf of 'The Case for Mindless Economics'.
pdf of TMS study on fairness in the Ultimatum Game.

—Vaughan.

July 16, 2008

The future is nonlinear:

There have been some excellent articles recently on the psychology of time but one of the most fascinating is from Developing Intelligence who look at a new study that suggests our concept of time becomes nonlinear as we look into the future - in other words, not all futures are equal.

The research, led by psychologist Gal Zauberman, riffs on an effect called 'hyperbolic discounting', where immediate rewards seem more valuable than rewards in the future.

Studies have offered people, for example, £5 now, or more money in the future. Despite the fact that in economic terms they're better off waiting even for a small amount more, people tend to want considerably more money in the future to make the wait 'worth it'.

As the DevIntell article notes, this has largely been explained by impulsivity in the past, but a new study considers a radical alternative.

What if the effect is not because we're impulsive, but because our concept of time is non-linear? In other words, we are reasoning rationally but not on the basis of how much additional time there actually is, but how much longer the wait seems.

These are quite different concepts - for example, we know logically that waiting four weeks is exactly four times as long as waiting a week, but it might not feel exactly four times as bad.

The study asked participants how much extra they'd have to be paid to receive a $75 gift voucher, either in 3 months, 1 year or 3 years. They also had to mark a line to indicate how long each wait seemed, from 'Very Short' at one end to 'Very Long' at the other.

When compared against the actual time, participants seemed to show hyperbolic discounting, but when compared against the subjective judgement the discounting effect disappeared.

The study goes on to test the effect in different ways, but also added another intriguing angle - when participants were asked to estimate the duration of how long various activities would take, essentially better calibrating their subjective time with actual time, the discounting effect was reduced.

I also really recommend another recent DevIntell post on time perception, discussing how cognitive science theories are attempting to explain how we can perceive something that doesn't have any 'sensation' attached to it.

Any if you're still hungry for more time, science writer Carl Zimmer has an article in Discover Magazine about how the brain keeps track of time.

Link to DevIntell on distortions in future time perception.
pdf of full-text of study.
Link to DevIntell on time perception and time 'sensation'.
Link to Carl Zimmer's article on neuroscience of time.

—Vaughan.

June 29, 2008

Average guesses to hit the mark:

The Economist has a short but sweet article on a new study that has found that asking the same person to make two guesses and averaging the answer is more accurate than any one guess alone, with more time between guesses improving accuracy.

The study is apparently by psychologists Hal Pashler and Ed Vul and has just been published in Psychological Science, but unfortunately the journal website is down at the moment, but I shall link to the original study when it reappears.

According to The Economist though, here's the punchline:

The two researchers asked 428 people eight questions drawn from the “CIA World Factbook”: for example, “What percentage of the world’s airports are in the USA?” Half the participants were unexpectedly asked to make a second, different guess immediately after they completed the initial questionnaire. The other half were asked to make a second guess three weeks later.

Dr Vul and Dr Pashler found that in both circumstances the average of the two guesses was better than either guess on its own. They also noticed that the interval between the first and second guesses determined how accurate that average was. Second guesses made immediately improved accuracy by an average of 6.5%; those made after three weeks improved the accuracy by 16%.

Link to Economist article 'The crowd within'.

—Vaughan.

June 18, 2008

Counting in the language without numbers:

The Pirahã are a tribe in the Brazilian Amazon who apparently don't have words for specific numbers. A recent study reported by Science News suggests that despite this, the Pirahã people can do numerical tasks, challenging the idea that we need number words to think about and recognize exact quantities.

The study was led by psycholinguist Michael Franks who was interested in previous reports that the Pirahã only have words for 'one', 'two' and 'many'.

Previous researchers had put a single object on a table, asked a Pirahã participant "How much is this?", added another, asked again and so on, while responses were recorded when different words were used for different quantities.

Frank did the same, but also counted down, starting with a large number of objects and taking one away each time.

He got different answers for the same number of objects and it transpired that the words didn't mean 'one', 'two' and 'many', as previously thought, but 'few', 'some' and 'more'.

In fact, the researchers noted that the Pirahã have no linguistic method whatsoever for expressing exact quantity, not even 'one'.

In a subsequent part, the researchers asked the Pirahã participants to do several matching tasks. Some just involved the researchers lining up several objects and asking the participants to match the quantity with a different type of object, with some variation for position and grouping.

Other tasks involved the researchers counting out objects and then hiding them, or counting them into a can.

The Pirahã were easily able to do the more straightforward matching tasks, but as soon as they needed to transform the number of items across position or after a delay, they started making errors.

The researchers argue that this suggests we don't need number words to think about quantity, but they are useful tools to augment our memory.

In other words, numbers are a culturally developed cognitive technology allowing us to remember and compare information about quantity over time and across situations.

Link to abstract of scientific study.
Link to Science News article 'Numbers beyond words'.

—Vaughan.

June 16, 2008

You get what you pay for:

This week's Bad Science rounds-up several intriguing studies that have found that money does more than make the world go round, it changes how we think, feel and perceive.

The piece looks at several studies where participants paid more, or thought they were getting something of a 'higher value', even though there was no actual difference in what they received.

In each case, the 'higher value' items things had more of an impact. One study is particularly impressive:

A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in March subjected 82 healthy subjects to painful electric shocks, offering them pain relief in the form of a pill which was described as being similar to the opiate codeine, but with a faster onset, in a lengthy and authoritative leaflet. In fact it was just a placebo, a pill with no medicine, a sugar pill, like a homeopathy pill. The pain relief was significantly stronger when subjects were told the tablet cost $2.50 than when they were told it cost 10c.

Link to Badscience on money and psychology.

—Vaughan.

May 16, 2008

Expensive advice more likely to be followed:

Hot on the heels of a study that found that simply describing a wine as more expensive made it taste better comes the discovery that the same advice is more likely to be followed if it costs more.

The study was led by organisational psychologist Francesca Gino and is covered by the BPS Research Digest:

Dozens of students were asked questions about American history and received small cash prizes for correct answers. The students were either given the option of receiving advice on the correct answers, or advice was imposed on them. Sometimes this advice was free; other times it was paid for out of the students' winnings.

Crucially, the advice always came from the same source - in the form of the answer that a student from a pilot session had given to the same question - so the quality of advice was held constant regardless of whether it was free or paid for.

Throughout the study, the participants took more account of advice they had paid for than advice they were given free, even though it was made clear to them that the advice was of the same quality. A final study showed the students took even more account of advice if it was made more expensive.

The full text of the study is freely available online as a pdf, although if you're not convinced of the findings I'm sure Dr Gino would be happy to supply an additional copy for a small fee.

Link to BPSRD on the behavioural value of expensive advice.

—Vaughan.

May 06, 2008

CIA guide to optimised thinking:

The CIA have released the full text of a book on the psychology of analysing surveillance data. While aimed at the CIA's analysts, it's also a great general guide on how to understand complex situations and avoid our natural cognitive biases in reasoning.

I've not read it all, but it aims not only to give the reader an understanding of the limitations of our reasoning, but also how to overcome them when trying to think about tricky problems.

A central focus of this book is to illuminate the role of the observer in determining what is observed and how it is interpreted. People construct their own version of "reality" on the basis of information provided by the senses, but this sensory input is mediated by complex mental processes that determine which information is attended to, how it is organized, and the meaning attributed to it. What people perceive, how readily they perceive it, and how they process this information after receiving it are all strongly influenced by past experience, education, cultural values, role requirements, and organizational norms, as well as by the specifics of the information received.

The chapters on cognitive biases seem particularly good, and the book consistently grounds the abstract concepts in accessible examples.

It's interesting that patients who undertake cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) to help with emotional or psychiatric difficulties will learn how to identify and avoid many of these exact same biases.

However, in the clinical situation the idea is that mood or emotion is in a pathological feedback loop which makes biases more likely (e.g. anxious people will tend to focus on threatening things), which in turn reinforces the emotional state.

The CIA book doesn't seem to mention emotion or mood at all, despite the fact that the same effects are known to occur in all of us, even if they don't get to the level of illness or impairment.

Secret service analysts must surely work in high-emotion environments (and the fact that the UK's secret services regularly advertise for clinical psychologists seems to bear this out), so this would seem to be a crucial aspect not covered by this otherwise very comprehensive guide.

Link to full text of CIA book 'Psychology of Intelligence Analysis'.

—Vaughan.

April 16, 2008

Cognitive biases as public policy:

The LA Times has an interesting article on whether the sorts of decision-making biases identified by behavioural economists should be used to promote public policy objectives.

The idea is based on the fact that we are more likely to choose certain options depending on how they're presented. In fact, supermarkets take advantage of this in how they lay out their products to maximise the chances of us buying the premium brands.

The LA Times piece argues that this could be used for government objectives, such as increasing the number of people who take out pensions, while still maintaining the freedom to choose and without using explicit incentives.

The libertarian aspect of the approach lies in the straightforward insistence that, in general, people should be free to do what they like. They should be permitted to opt out of arrangements they dislike, and even make a mess of their lives if they want to. The paternalistic aspect acknowledges that it is legitimate for choice architects to try to influence people's behavior in order to make their lives longer, healthier and better.

Private and public institutions have many opportunities to provide free choice while also taking real steps to improve people's lives.

* If we want to increase savings by workers, we could ask employers to adopt this simple strategy: Instead of asking workers to elect to participate in a 401(k) plan, assume they want to participate and enroll them automatically unless they specifically choose otherwise.

The article gives several more examples and defends its use of the term 'libertarian paternalism' for the idea.

I'm left wondering whether governments shouldn't be adopting exactly what the commercial sector have been doing for years, or whether we're naive to think political choice engineering isn't being used already.

Link to LA Times article 'Designing better choices'.

—Vaughan.

April 12, 2008

The psychology of magical thoughts:

Psychology Today has a great article that covers the length and breadth of magical thinking - the tendency to see patterns and causality where none exists.

Magical thinking is described in a number of ways. Superstition is the most common, where we assume rituals will somehow affect the future despite having no causal connection to what we want to change.

Apophenia or pareidolia describe the effect where we see meaningful information where none was intended. The Fortean Times has a wonderful collection of photographs that depict 'faces' or other forms in clouds, trees, rock formations or even food.

Superstition and apophenia are an interesting contrast, because superstition can be more easily rejected than apophenia. Our perceptual systems are just set up to detect patterns, and so the perception of 'faces' is unavoidable.

Often we don't even register our wacky beliefs. Seeing causality in coincidence can happen even before we have a chance to think about it; the misfiring is sometimes perceptual rather than rational. "Consider what happens when you honk your horn, and just at that moment a streetlight goes out," observes Brian Scholl, director of Yale's Perception and Cognition Laboratory. "You may never for a moment believe that your honk caused the light to go out, but you will irresistibly perceive that causal relation. The fact remains that our visual systems refuse to believe in coincidences." Our overeager eyes, in effect, lay the groundwork for more detailed superstitious ideation. And it turns out that no matter how rational people consider themselves, if they place a high value on hunches they are hard-pressed to hit a baby's photo on a dartboard. On some level they're equating image with reality. Even our aim falls prey to intuition.

The article looks at seven types of magical thinking, and discusses some of the key psychology experiments that have shown us how magical thinking is influenced.

One of my favourites is an experiment by psychologist Emily Pronin who found that people would readily attribute another person's headaches to sticking pins in a 'voodoo doll'.

Interestingly, the effect was much stronger when the other person (actually a stooge) was deliberately annoying. The irritating actor increased the likelihood of participants' wishing them harm, and so increased the perceived connection between their 'voodoo doll' pin-sticking and the actor's feigned headache.

Link to Psychology Today article on magical thinking.

—Vaughan.

March 31, 2008

Predictably irrational, variably dishonest:

Behavioural economist Dan Ariely was the guest on the latest edition of ABC Radio National's All in the Mind where he discusses why we're so bad at predicting what's best for us, and why honesty is a shifty behaviour.

As well as being a researcher, Ariely is also author of a psychology book called Predictably Irrational which is currently riding high in the book charts.

It's worth catching the mp3 version of the programme, as it's slightly extended, and I found the last part, where Ariely talks about honesty, the most interesting.

Using various experimental conditions where participants are given varying degrees of room for dishonesty, Ariely notes that people tend to be dishonest enough to give themselves an advantage, but suggests we're not so dishonest to feel bad about ourselves.

In other words, he's suggesting that honesty is a cognitive dissonance style reasoning process, balancing our desire for personal gain against our willingness to believe in ourselves as a 'good person' - an idea explored further in a forthcoming paper [pdf] by Nina Mazar and Dan Ariely.

If you're interested in a good overview of the psychology of honesty and deception, I've just read a fantastic paper [pdf] by the same pair, which is fascinating as much for its insights into what influences our level of honesty for its recommendations about applying the research to encourage people to be more honest.

It notes that getting people to focus on themselves increases honesty, as does getting them to focus on moral ideas, such as the Ten Commandments.

In their experiment, participants were told to write down either as many of the Ten Commandments as they could remember (increased self-awareness of honesty) or the names of ten books that they read in high school (control). They had two minutes for this task before they moved on to an ostensibly separate task: the math test. The task in the math test was to search for number combinations that added up to exactly ten. There were 20 questions, and the duration of the experiment was restricted to five minutes. After the time was up, students were asked to recycle the test form they worked on and indicate on a separate collection slip how many questions they solved correctly. For each correctly solved question, they were paid $.50.

The results showed that students who were made to think about the Ten Commandments claimed to have solved fewer questions than those in the control. Moreover, the reduction of dishonesty in this condition was such that the declared performance was indistinguishable from another group whose responses were checked by an external examiner. This suggests that the higher self-awareness in this case was powerful enough to diminish dishonesty completely.

However, I wonder whether the effect of focusing on the Ten Commandments was due to their moral or supernatural associations.

I am reminded of Eric Schwitzgebel's ongoing project on why ethics professors, who think about moral issues a lot, are no more moral (and perhaps less!) than other people, and a study [pdf] by psychologist Jesse Bering that found that simply telling participants that the lab was haunted increased honesty in a computer task.

Link to Dan Ariely on All in the Mind.
pdf of Mazar and Ariely's paper on the psychology of dishonesty.

—Vaughan.

March 17, 2008

Beyond belief:

Salon has a provocative article by neurologist Robert Burton who discusses what the neuroscience of belief means for how we understand the world, drawn from his new book, On Being Certain.

We're going to be posting an interview with Burton on Mind Hacks in the near future, but the Salon article should give you a flavour of some of his thoughts the brain and belief.

What's most curious about work on the neuropsychology of belief is that it barely touches upon the memory research where they've had many of these things under the microscope for years.

I'm a huge fan of the work of Israeli psychologist Asher Koriat who has done some absolutely stunning work on the control of memory.

This may seem a relatively dry topic, but think for a minute about how you use your memory.

For example, you've almost certainly had the experience where you know that you know something but can't remember the details, or that you know you recognise something, but can't remember the occasion when you encountered it before.

Also, we seem able to judge when we've remembered something to our satisfaction, but this is quite a remarkable feat in itself. Think about how we could possibly do this.

You could say we know because the memory matches other memories we have in mind, but then these are subject to the same problem - how do we know that we've remembered them correctly?

In other words, there must be another system at work, and one of the primary components of this is what psychologists call the 'feeling of knowing' that communicates between our unconscious pool of stored information and our conscious sense of how successfully our memory is operating.

Koriat discussed these processes in a 2000 paper [pdf] that was a revelation for me when I read it. It convinced me of the importance of these wormhole-like processes that connect the conscious and unconscious mind.

In his article, Burton suggests what social implications arise from the science of belief, suggesting we should be a little more humble when we state what we 'know'.

Link to Salon article 'The certainty epidemic'.
pdf of Koriat's 2001 paper on the 'feeling of knowing'.

—Vaughan.

February 27, 2008

Behavioural Obamanomics:

Theories are made great by those whom they inspire. Perhaps then, it is not surprising that the fresh new face of the US presidential race has been inspired by behavioural economics, one of the fresh new faces of cognitive science.

The New Republic magazine has an article on how the Obama campaign have adopted behavioural economics - the science of how people actually reason about money, as opposed to how they should - as their mainstay of economic policy.

Unsurprisingly, The New Republic, generally a centre-left publication, hold out great hope for the partnership of this new science and an Obama government.

You can find subtle evidence of this influence across numerous Obama proposals. For example, one key behavioral finding is that people often fail to set aside money for retirement even when their employers offer generous 401(k) plans. If, on the other hand, you automatically enroll workers in 401(k)s but allow them to opt out, most stick with it. Obama's savings plan exploits this so-called "status quo" bias.

What is more interesting though is that cognitive science is starting to make inroads into policy development outside the traditional area of defence (where psychology, and more recently neuroscience, have traditionally been key in driving defence spending).

Link to The New Republic article 'The Audacity of Data'.
Link to intro to behavioural economics (both via MeFi).

—Vaughan.

January 01, 2008

Sampling risk and judging personal danger:

We live in a dangerous world and we've learnt to judge risk as a way of avoiding loss or injury. How we make this appraisal is crucial to our survival and an innovative study published in December's Risk and Analysis investigated what influences risk perception in everyday life and has shown that our retrospective estimations of risk are quite different from how we judge them at the time.

Many studies on the psychology of risk ask people to look back on past situations or judge risk for hypothetical or lab-based situations.

The trouble is, imaginary or lab-based situations may not be a good match to real-life (after all, what's really the danger?) and our perceptions when looking back might be influenced by the outcome - perhaps we judge things as less risky if they turned out OK in the end.

One way of trying to get a handle on how people feel during the flow of everyday life is to use a method call 'experience sampling'.

This usually involves giving participants a pager, an electronic diary or just sending them texts to their mobile phone.

Participants are alerted at random times during the day by whatever method is chosen and they're asked to rate how they feel there and then, or as soon as safely possible (I discussed how this has been applied to psychotic experiences in a BPSRD article in 2006).

In this study, participants were asked to rate their mood, what activity they were doing, what is the worst consequence that could occur, how severe that consequence could be, how likely it is to happen and what would the risk be to their well-being.

Generally, risks were perceived to be short term in nature and involved "loss of time or materials" related to work and "physical damage".

Interestingly, everyone rated the severity of risk as about the same, but women were more likely to think that the worst consequence was likely to occur.

Furthermore, the better the mood of the participants (both male and female), the less risky they thought their activity was.

As an additional part of the study, participants were asked to look back and re-assess some of the situations they rated on the spot. These ratings tended to be much lower, showing that people tend to judge things to be more risky 'in the heat of the moment'.

Both of these findings demonstrate the importance of emotion in risk judgements, suggesting that it forms another source of information, along with more calculated rational estimates.

In fact, this is one of the key ideas behind understanding anxiety disorders.

Anxiety acts as an emotional risk warning, but it can get massively 'out of synch' with our rational judgements, so even when we 'know' that (for example) the risk of air travel is smaller than the risk of driving a car, 'in the heat of the moment', the information from our emotions overrides this in our judgement of risk in the form of anxiety.

Of course, risk perception in itself is an important topic to understand, particularly as risk judgements are the basis of safety decisions in many professions.

Link to PubMed abstract of paper.
pdf of full-text of paper.

—Vaughan.

December 27, 2007

Beliefs about intelligence affect mental performance:

I've just found a fascinating five minute NPR radio report on work by psychologist Carol Dweck that has found that if a child thinks that intelligence is something that can change throughout life, they do better in school.

Dweck has been doing some fascinating work on what affects children's academic performance.

We've reported on some of her earlier work, including the fact that praising children for their intelligence actually makes them perform worse in certain situations, whereas praising them for their hard work encourages them to tackle adversity when it occurs.

This NPR radio slot covers some work she published with colleagues in a freely available paper looking at the fact that children who believe that intelligence is flexible seem to do better as they "tend to emphasize ‘learning goals’ and rebound better from occasional failures".

Dweck and her colleagues then tested the idea that if they taught children that intelligence could grow, their performance would improve. As predicted, it did.

It's a really great example of carefully targeted cognitive science research. It's a counter-intuitive finding that has direct practical application to improving children's academic performance in both the long- and short-term.

It's also a lovely example of a self-confirming belief. Children who believe intelligence is fixed are more likely to have fixed performance, whereas children who believe intelligence can grow are more likely to show performance growth.

The implications for the psychology of teachers are also interesting, because it would seem to be self-confirming for them as well. Teachers who believe that poorly performing children may have hidden potential might see them improve when they pass this on to the child.

Teachers who believe that poorly performing children are unlikely to change may actually limit a child's performance if the child picks up on this and begins to believe the same.

So it might be worth testing whether teachers' beliefs about intelligence affect their students' performance as well.

Link to NPR on 'Students' View of Intelligence Can Help Grades'.
Link to paper 'Why do beliefs about intelligence influence learning success?'.

—Vaughan.

December 25, 2007

Kids' letters to Santa as advertising psychology study:

A completely charming study looking at how television advertising influences children by examining the toys they request in their letters to Santa Claus.

The study was led by Prof Karen Pine and has just been published in the Journal of Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics.

The Relationship Between Television Advertising, Children's Viewing and Their Requests to Father Christmas.

J Dev Behav Pediatr. 2007 Dec;28(6):456-61.

OBJECTIVE:: Children's letters to Father Christmas provide an opportunity to use naturalistic methods to investigate the influence of television advertising.

METHODS:: This study investigates the number of toy requests in the letters of children aged between 6 and 8 (n = 98) in relation to their television viewing and the frequency of product advertisements prior to Christmas. Seventy-six hours of children's television were sampled, containing over 2,500 advertisements for toys.

RESULTS:: Children's viewing frequency, and a preference for viewing commercial channels, were both related to their requests for advertised goods. Gender effects were also found, with girls requesting more advertised products than boys.

CONCLUSION:: Exploring the children's explicit understanding of advertising showed that children in this age group are not wholly aware of the advertisers' intent and that, together with their good recall of advertising, this may account for their vulnerability to its persuasive messages.

Link to abstract on PubMed.

—Vaughan.

November 02, 2007

Black humour perks up the inevitable:

Time magazine has a short article on an interesting finding: after thinking about their own death, participants in a psychology study were more likely to respond unconsciously in ways that suggested a boost in mood.

The study was led by psychologist Nathan DeWall and asked one group of students to think about a painful dental procedure, and another about their own death.

The participants were then asked to complete questionnaires that rated their mood. In terms of their conscious reporting, there was no difference between the groups.

However, when asked to do some simple tasks that are known to be affected by unconscious emotional biases, the group who had thought about death showed a consistently positive effect:

Students in the death-and-dying group, it turns out, had all gone to their happy place — at least in their unconscious. There was no difference in scores between the groups on the explicit tests of emotion and affect. But in the implicit tests of nonconscious emotion — the wordplay — researchers found that the students who were preoccupied with death tended to generate significantly more positive-emotion words and word matches than the dental-pain group. DeWall thinks this mental coping response kicks in immediately when confronted with a serious psychological threat. In subsequent research, he has analyzed the content of the volunteers' death essays and found that they're sprinkled with positive words. "When you ask people, 'Describe the emotions that the thought of your own death arouses in you,'" says DeWall, "people will report fear and contempt, but also happiness that 'I'm going to see my grandmother' and joy that 'I'm going to be with God.'"

I would like to think that this will come as welcome news to the people who protested against a funeral parlour being built near their homes because of concerns about a 'negative psychological impact', although, I suspect it will be of little comfort.

Experimental evidence is remarkably unconvincing to some.

It reminds me of when Tom Gilovich did an analysis of the 'hot hand' in professional basketball (where players who have scored several points are supposedly 'on a run'). His study [pdf], published in the journal Cognitive Psychology, found that the effect was just the misperception of random variation.

When asked about the research, Red Auerbach, coach of the Boston Celtics, reportedly responded "Who is this guy? So he makes a study. I couldn't care less".

Another example of the fly of empirical evidence being crushed against the windscreen of self-confidence. Well, at least Stephen Colbert would be proud.

Link to Time article 'Are We Happier Facing Death?'.

—Vaughan.

October 29, 2007

Decision-making special issue in Science:

This week's Science has a special selection of papers on the psychology and neuroscience of decision making. While most of the articles are closed-access, one on how game theory and neuroscience are helping us understand social decision-making is freely available.

It is a great introduction to 'neuroeconomics', a field that attempts to work out how the brain supports cost-benefit type decisions.

This can be directly applied to financial decision-making, but also to other types of situations where weighing possible gains and losses is important, whether the gains and losses are in the form of money, time, social advantage or status - to name just a few.

One of the crucial discoveries of recent years is that people do not act as rational maximisers - making individual decisions on how to get the most benefit out of each choice. In fact, social influences can be huge and often lead people to reject no-risk economic gains when then feel it is socially unjustified.

This had led the field into interesting territory, both informing models of the economy, and illuminating how we make social decisions.

As part of the neuroeconomic approach, researchers have begun to investigate the psychological and neural correlates of social decisions using tasks derived from a branch of experimental economics known as Game Theory. These tasks, though beguilingly simple, require sophisticated reasoning about the motivations of other players. Recent research has combined these paradigms with a variety of neuroscientific methods in an effort to gain a more detailed picture of social decision-making. The benefits of this approach are twofold. First, neuroscience can describe important biological constraints on the processes involved, and indeed, research is revealing that many of the processes underlying complex decision-making may overlap with more fundamental brain mechanisms. Second, actual decision behavior in these tasks often does not conform to the predictions of Game Theory, and therefore, more precise characterizations of behavior will be important in adapting these models to better fit how decisions are actually made.

Link to Science special issue on decision making.
Link to article 'Social Decision-Making: Insights from Game Theory and Neuroscience'.
Link to previous Mind Hacks post on game theory and (ir)rationality.

—Vaughan.

September 05, 2007

Infowar: strike early, strike often:

The Washington Post has a timely article about the psychology of believing news reports, even when they've been retracted - suggesting that if false information is presented early, it is more likely to be believed, while subsequent attempts to correct the information may, in fact, strengthen the false impression.

The article starts with results from a study [pdf] by psychologist Norbert Schwarz who looked at the effect of a government flier that attempted to correct myths about the flu vaccine by marking them 'true' or 'false'.

Unfortunately, the flier actually boosted people's belief in the false information, probably because we tend to think information is more likely to be true the more we hear it.

Negating a statement seems just to emphasise the initial point. The additional correction seems to get lost amid the noise.

One particularly pertinent study [pdf] not mentioned in the article, looked at the effect of retractions of false news reports made during the 2003 Iraq War on American, German and Australian participants.

For example, claims that Iraqi forces executed coalition prisoners of war after they surrendered were retracted the day after the claims were made.

The study found that the American participants' belief in the truth of an initial news report was not affected by knowledge of its subsequent retraction.

In contrast, knowing about a retraction was likely to significantly reduce belief in the initial report for Germans and Australians.

The researchers note that people are more likely to discount information if they are suspicious of the motives behind its dissemination.

The Americans rated themselves as more likely to agree with the official line that the war was to 'destroy weapons of mass destruction', whereas the Australian and German participants rated this as far less convincing.

This suggests that there may have been an element of 'motivated reasoning' in evaluating news reports.

Research has shown that this only occurs when there's sufficient information available to create a justification for the decision, even when the information is irrelevant to the main issue.

There's a wonderful example of this explained here, in relation to men's judgements about the safety of sex with HIV+ women of varying degrees of attractiveness.

So, if you want your propaganda to be effective get it in early, repeat it, give people reasons to be believe it (however irrelevant), and make yourself seem trustworthy.

As I'm sure these principles are already widely known among government and commercial PR departments, bear them in mind when evaluating public information.

Link to Washington Post article on the persistence of myths.
pdf of study 'Memory for Fact, Fiction, and Misinformation' in the Iraq war.
Link to info on motivated reasoning and example.

—Vaughan.

August 27, 2007

Sufficiently advanced madness:

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from madness."

Ashley Pomeroy, riffing on Arthur C. Clarke's third law.

—Vaughan.

August 04, 2007

The obvious and not-so-obvious in psychology:

Tom has written an excellent article for The Psychologist on the not-so-obvious findings in psychology which has just been made freely available.

There are certain predictable responses you get if you introduce yourself as a psychologist.

The most common is "are you analyzing me?", followed by "can you read my mind?". The best answer to both, of course, is 'sometimes'.

Occasionally, a bright spark will tell you "psychology, well, it's just obvious isn't it?", which, to be frank, I wish it was. But sadly, it's fiendishly complicated.

Tom's article gathers a whole bunch of counter-intuitive research findings for exactly such situations:

I used to keep a stock of ‘unobvious’ findings ready to hand for occasions like this. Is it really obvious that people can be made to enjoy a task more by being more poorly paid to recruit for it (cognitive dissonance: Festinger & Carlsmith, 1959)? That a saline solution can be as effective as morphine in killing pain (the placebo effect: Hrobjartsson, 2001)? That students warned that excessive drinking is putting many of their peers at risk may actually drink more, whereas advertising the fact that most students don’t drink, or drink in moderation, is the thing that actually reduces binge drinking (Perkins et al., 2005)? That over a third of normal people report having had hallucinations, something we normally experience solely with mental illness or substance abuse (Ohayon, 2000)? Or that the majority of ordinary Americans could be persuaded to electrocute someone to death merely by being asked to by a scientist in a white coat (Milgram, 1974)?

There's many more great examples, including touching on the cognitive bias that leads people to think they understand more than they do when they have little knowledge.

Priceless stuff.

Link to article in The Psychologist on the 'obvious'.

—Vaughan.

August 01, 2007

The modern science of subliminal influence:

The New York Times has a great article on how our actions and decisions can be subconsciously 'primed' by the world around us.

Priming is a well-established effect in psychology. It describes the effect whereby encountering one thing activates related mental concepts in the mind.

Because they've been activated, they influence other mental processes that happen to be occurring at the same time, influencing decision making and desire, even if we're not aware of it.

New studies have found that people tidy up more thoroughly when there's a faint tang of cleaning liquid in the air; they become more competitive if there’s a briefcase in sight, or more cooperative if they glimpse words like "dependable" and "support" — all without being aware of the change, or what prompted it.

Psychologists say that "priming" people in this way is not some form of hypnotism, or even subliminal seduction; rather, it's a demonstration of how everyday sights, smells and sounds can selectively activate goals or motives that people already have.

More fundamentally, the new studies reveal a subconscious brain that is far more active, purposeful and independent than previously known. Goals, whether to eat, mate or devour an iced latte, are like neural software programs that can only be run one at a time, and the unconscious is perfectly capable of running the program it chooses.

It's great to see this article is largely based on published experiments.

Often, experiments tell their own stories and very little is needed to make them 'accessible' to the public. Just a bit of light and attention.

Link to NYT article 'Who’s Minding the Mind?'.

—Vaughan.

June 26, 2007

Why don't ethics professors behave better?:

If you spent your whole life trying to work out how to be ethical, you would think you'd be more moral in everyday life. Philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel has found that this isn't the case, and asks the question "Why don't ethics professors behave better than they do?".

Initially, this was based on a hunch, but Schwitzgebel, with colleague Joshua Rust, has begun to do research into the question. They've found some surprising results.

At a recent philosophy conference, he offered chocolate to anyone who filled in a questionnaire asking whether ethicists behaved better than other philosophers.

It wasn't long before an ethics professor stole a chocolate without filling in a questionnaire. (This reminds me of a famous psychology study that found that trainee priests on their way to give a talk on 'The Good Samaritan' mostly ignored someone in need if they were in a hurry!).

When the results came in, ethicists rated other ethicists as behaving better, but other philosophers rated them as no more moral than everyone else.

In another study, Schwitzgebel investigated whether people interested in moral issues are more likely to steal books. By looking at library records, he's found that books on ethics are more likely to be stolen than other philosophy books.

So why aren't ethics professors more ethical than the rest of us? Schwitzgebel wonders whether it is because there is a difference between emotional engagement with moral issues and a more detached reasoning style that is necessary for careful analysis, but which may not make someone feel compelled to act more ethically.

Ominously, he notes that "More and more, I'm finding myself inclined to think that philosophical reflection about ethical issues is, on average, morally useless".

It is interesting that there are similar problems in other professions. For example, doctors don't follow health advice adequately and are much more likely to suffer from mental illness.

As an aside, Schwitzgebel has made all his papers and publications available online and has a fantastic blog that is well worth keeping tabs on.

Link to Schwitzgebel's articles on 'The problem with ethics professors'.
Link to Schwitzgebel's homepage with publications and blog links.

—Vaughan.

June 20, 2007

What aliens taught us about self-justification:

Newsweek has a brief but interesting article on the new generation of research focused on cognitive dissonance - our desire to reconcile ill-fitting beliefs and actions which can lead us to self-justify in the most curious ways.

The theory is one of the most important in psychology but has a rather unusual origin.

It originated with psychologist Leon Festinger who came up with the idea after studying a UFO cult.

The cult believed in a prophecy that aliens would land at a certain date and destroy the earth. The date came and went and no aliens appeared, but a curious thing happened.

While some believers became disillusioned and left, others strengthened their beliefs. Festinger asked 'why would your belief strengthen if there's evidence against it?'.

He thought that it might result from a process of trying to make sense of two conflicting things - in this case, acting as a cult member, but having your belief in a prophecy disproved.

Perhaps to reconcile these positions and make yourself feel more at ease, you could either change your actions (leave the cult), or, change your other beliefs to fit (maybe the prophecy was a test of faith?).

Festinger set decided to test this idea in the lab with a now classic experiment.

He asked groups of students to volunteer for an experiment. In the study the students were asked to complete a dull and repetitive task.

Afterwards they were asked to persuade another student to volunteer. For this, half the students were paid one dollar, half twenty dollars.

The students were put in the position that their actions (persuasion) conflicted with their belief that the task was boring.

The students who were paid only one dollar rated the task as more enjoyable than the twenty dollar students.

While the paid students could justify their persuasion by telling themselves they were doing it for the money, the unpaid students justified it to themselves by changing their opinion of the task - "Actually, it wasn't that boring after all".

Many more studies have born out the theory, suggesting that we are motivated to reduce conflicts in our actions and beliefs, partly because we feel discomfort when they do not adequately match.

The Newsweek article looks at some of the more recent research in this area, and touches on some of the neuroscience studies which are trying to work out how the brain is involved in this process.

Incidentally, the author of the piece, Wray Herbert, also has a blog that is full of other great articles.

Link to Newsweek article 'Toothless is Beautiful'.

—Vaughan.

May 29, 2007

The paradoxes of mental accounting:

The Washington Post has a fascinating article on the psychology of mental accounting - a seemingly simple process but one which seems to have curious effects on how we decide to spend our money.

The article suggests we mentally divide our money for different purposes, and tend to be reluctant to change our thinking, even when it is against our interests.

There's a nice example of turning up to the cinema and discovering you've lost your $20 ticket. How would you feel about shelling out for another one?

Compare this situation to one in which you turn up to the cinema to buy a ticket, but find you've lost a $20 bill. How would you feel about buying a cinema ticket in this situation?

Intuitively, it seems as if the first situation is worse, because you're buying another ticket, when, in fact, the loss is exactly the same in both situations.

It also seems that we assign different sources of money to different purposes, despite the fact that money is completely interchangeable:

Arkes and his colleagues once cited an anecdote in a study: Employees of a publishing firm who were in the Bahamas for an annual meeting were each given a cash bonus for getting a big contract. Almost to a person, the bonus recipients took the money to a local casino and blew it. What is interesting is that most of these people did not lose more than the $50 -- they slowed down or stopped when they felt they were playing with their "own" money rather than with the $50 of "free" money. The irony, of course, is that the $50 these people lost was their own money, too.

The article has got some more great examples of how we make spending decisions based on our own idosyncratic internal accounting schemes.

UPDATE: An interesting note from jswolf19, grabbed from the comments:

In my mind, the loss of the ticket and the loss of $20 are not the same. It's possible that I might find either the ticket or the $20 later (that it's misplaced instead of lost). However, the ticket will have become useless to me whereas the $20 will not have.

Link to Washington Post article 'mental accounting' (thanks Enchilada!)

—Vaughan.

May 23, 2007

The irrational guide to gaming the system:

The latest edition of Scientific American has a freely available feature article on how our decisions are often irrational in game theory terms, but can still be more beneficial than the supposed rational choice.

Game theory tries to understand choices when individuals are working independently and each choice affects the other person's gains or losses.

In other words, it asks the question 'considering I don't know what choice the other person is going to make, what is the best option to maximise my own outcome?'.

This was famously the basis of the American Cold War policy of stockpiling huge amounts of nuclear missiles.

Obviously it would be better if there were fewer nuclear weapons in the world, but if the USA decided to reduce the number of missiles, how could it trust the Soviets to do the same?

Game theory suggested that the best option was to have so many weapons that they could destroy the other country. This way, if the other country reduced their stockpile, they were safe, and if they didn't, both countries were equally armed.

If this were the case, the potential outcome for starting a nuclear war would be the destruction of both countries. As each wanted to avoid this fate, the idea was that it resulted in a stable but uneasy standoff.

Without a hint of irony, the policy was called MAD, short for Mutual Assured Destruction.

While this is perhaps an extreme example of game theory in action, it can be applied to many situations in which gains and losses are dependent on another person's choices.

In essence, it's a mathematical take on a psychological guessing game.

The SciAm article looks at how there are many situations where game theory predicts the most rational outcome, but which may actually lead to much less gains for everyone than if people make an irrational response.

One version of the most rational outcome is the Nash equilibrium, named after Nobel-prize winning mathematician John Nash, who was also the subject of the film A Beautiful Mind.

This is where everyone has settled on a choice where no one has anything to gain by choosing something else.

As the article discusses, this rarely happens in practice, however, and in many cases people just take the risk that they may get screwed over and maximise their benefits as a result.

This suggests that game theory can be a narrow view of human interaction (for example, it doesn't account for the role of dialogue in the arms race).

This was also a criticism made by Adam Curtis, producer of documentary series The Trap, who argued that game theory had given a cynical and oversimplified view of human psychology that has been disastrously applied to politics.

Whether you buy Curtis' political view or not, it's a fascinating example of how trying to model psychological decision making can have a huge influence on world politics.

Curtis' documentary is variously available online, but unfortunately, video streaming sites are blocked from work, but it seems to turn up quite frequently on a Google search.

And if you want more on economics and rationality, ABC Radio National's The Philosopher's Zone just had a programme on the ethics of economic rationalism.

UPDATE: The Trap episode 1, episode 2 and episode 3 are available on Google video. From some reason episode 3 is in three 20 minutes chunks, but the next chunk is linked from each page.

Link to SciAm article 'The Traveler's Dilemma'.
Link to The Philosopher's Zone on economic rationalism.

—Vaughan.

March 18, 2007

On not drowning in a teaspoon of water:

The Stanford Magazine has an article an the work of psychologist Prof Carole Dweck who argues that the key to success lies in how you deal with failure.

Dweck's research was recently the subject of a great deal of interest after it was discussed in a widely read New York Magazine article on the sometimes paradoxical effects of praising children in certain ways.

In the Stanford Magazine article, Dweck discusses how her findings have been applied to achievement in general, and how we attribute or give credit for success has a significant impact on our future successes.

A 60-year-old academic psychologist might seem an unlikely sports motivation guru. But Dweck's expertise — and her recent book, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success — bear directly on the sort of problem facing the Rovers. Through more than three decades of systematic research, she has been figuring out answers to why some people achieve their potential while equally talented others don't — why some become Muhammad Ali and others Mike Tyson. The key, she found, isn't ability; it's whether you look at ability as something inherent that needs to be demonstrated or as something that can be developed.

Link to Stanford Magazine article 'The Effort Effect'.
Link to details on Dweck's book Mindset.

—Vaughan.

February 08, 2007

The psychology of risk and security:

Security expert Bruce Schneier has written a remarkably insightful article on the psychology of security trade-offs and risk assessment.

He's not a psychologist by trade, although has obviously spent a lot of time researching the various studies that are relevant to the sort of decision making we engage in when trying to estimate how risky something might be.

Errors or cognitive distortions are also discussed in detail, particularly with regard to how these might bias our reasoning to make certain things seem more or less risky, even if there's no change in actual risk.

One crucial concept that Schneier talks about is that security is a feeling, generated by a complex interplay of innate and calculated responses.

Something similar has been discussed in the clinical literature, particularly in a theory of obsessive-compulsive disorder put forward by Henry Szechtman and Erik Woody [pdf].

Obsessive-compulsive disorder or OCD is a disorder where people can feel they have to repetitively do certain actions - often some sort of checking or washing

Szechtman and Woody argue that most drives, such as hunger or sex, have a specific end point behaviour that leads to a feeling of goal satisfaction.

In contrast, the drive for safety has no specific action associated with it that 'completes' the desire (because you can always try and be more safe), and so they argue we've developed a feedback system (a 'security feeling') that signifies when we've done enough to be reasonably secure.

In OCD, this might go wrong. So even when the door is locked or you've washed your hands, the security feeling doesn't kick in and you still have the strong desire to do it again.

Anxiety can make the feeling needed all the more, so when we're anxious, we might need to check the door more, even though we specifically remember locking it.

It's no surprise that OCD is an anxiety disorder and this may fuel the cycle.

Schneier isn't discussing mental illness, but it's interesting that this sort of approach can be widely applied as so much of our behaviour involves risk judgements.

Link to Bruce Schneier article 'The Psychology of Security'.
pdf of paper 'Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder as a Disturbance of Security Motivation'.

—Vaughan.

February 02, 2007

All shopped out?:

Science and Consciousness Review has a short but interesting piece by neuroscientist Bernard Baars on recent findings on the neuroscience of buying.

An fMRI brain-scanning study published earlier this year in science journal Neuron [pdf] reported that when someone was making a decision to buy something or not, the brain activity could be reliably tracked through the buying process.

Crucially, when the product was first presented, activity in the nucleus accumbens was strongest. This area is often typecast as the 'pleasure centre' of the brain.

Later, other areas in the brain seemed to inhibit the nucleus accumbens when other factors, such as price, were considered to override the desire to buy.

However, Baars notes that there are other interpretations of the data as the method for brain scanning, fMRI, only gives an indirect measure of brain activity.

For example, the brain activity could be equally related to attention or anxiety.

This is a typical problem with new findings in cognitive neuroscience. With potentially important findings, much later work will try and determine to what extent these other factors are involved.

Link to SciCon Review article 'Shopping Centers in the Brain'.
Link to SciAm write-up of original study.
pdf of full-text of scientific paper.

—Vaughan.

January 29, 2007

Working in the future imperfect:

The aesthetically and intellectually compelling PsyBlog has a great article arguing that long-term career planning is often a waste of time as research has shown that we are unlikely to be able to predict what will make us happy in the future.

The research was a paper from Daniel Gilbert's lab, that specifically studies happiness, how we understand it, and how it is affected by life events and our choices.

Gilbert has written a book about his research called Stumbling on Happiness that discusses the fact that although we think we know what will make us happy, it rarely does.

PsyBlog notes one particular experiment that highlights this effect:

My favourite is a simple experiment in which two groups of participants get free sandwiches if they participate in the experiment - a doozie for any undergraduate.

One group has to choose which sandwiches they want for an entire week in advance. The other group gets to choose which they want each day. A fascinating thing happens. People who choose their favourite sandwich each day at lunchtime also often choose the same sandwich. This group turns out to be reasonably happy with its choice.

Amazingly, though, people choosing in advance assume that what they'll want for lunch next week is a variety. And so they choose a turkey sandwich Monday, tuna on Tuesday, egg on Wednesday and so on. It turn out that when next week rolls around they generally don't like the variety they thought they would. In fact they are significantly less happy with their choices than the group who chose their sandwiches on the day.

The PsyBlog post draws these findings out and applies them to making career choices.

How will we know what make us happy in even 5 years away if we can't even predict what sandwiches we'd be most happy with during the following week?

Link to PsyBlog post 'Why Career Planning Is Time Wasted'.

—Vaughan.

January 23, 2007

Magic in mind:

The New York Times has an article on magical thinking - the mental process of making connections between unrelated or loosely-related things.

Magical thinking is thought to exist on a spectrum, from hunches, creative leaps and superstitions at one end, to frank psychosis at the other - where the connections become so odd as to lead to delusions.

As children we, perhaps, experience magical thinking at its strongest. Children live in magical worlds where moving trees cause the wind to blow and toys come to life after dark.

The link between magical thinking in children in adults is rarely discussed, but it was the subject of an 2004 article published in The Psychologist.

The NYT article looks at magical thinking in all its guises, and discusses its possible roles in religion and spirituality, and how it is affected by stress and coincidence.

Link to NYT article 'Do You Believe in Magic?'.
Link to 'Magical thinking - Reality or illusion?' from The Psychologist.

—Vaughan.

January 09, 2007

Ironically, pessimists are more likely to die early:

According to a brief article in the New York Times, research has shown that pessimists are, ironically, more likely to die earlier than optimists.

The article discusses some research on dispositional optimism and pessimism and how it relates to health and risk for mortality.

The study, led by Dr. Erik J. Giltay of the Psychiatric Center GGZ Delfland and published in The Archives of General Psychiatry, followed 941 Dutch subjects, ages 65 to 85, from 1991 to 2001. Subjects were ranked in quartiles as pessimistic or optimistic on the basis of their reactions to statements like, "I still have positive expectations concerning my future" and, "I often feel that life is full of promises."

Dr. Giltay and his colleagues found that subjects with the highest level of optimism were 45 percent less likely than those with the highest level of pessimism to die of all causes during the study. For those in the quartile with the highest optimism score, the death rate was 30.4 percent; those in the most pessimistic quartile had a death rate of 56.5 percent. There were 397 deaths in the study, and prevention of cardiovascular mortality accounted for nearly half of the protective effects of optimism.

In fact, Giltay has published a few studies which have shown similar findings.

However, one of the difficulties with these sorts of studies is determining causality.

Does being pessimistic make you more likely to have poor health, or does having poor health make you more likely to be pessimistic, or might it be a combination of both, perhaps working as a self-reinforcing cycle?

These sort of self-sustaining negative cycles are exactly the sort of things that clinical psychologists tend to target when they are treating patients, often with substantial benefits for physical and mental health.

Link to NYT article 'Yet Another Worry for Those Who Believe the Glass Is Half-Empty'.

—Vaughan.

December 11, 2006

Work, play and the vagaries of regret:

The New York Times has a piece on thought-provoking research suggesting that while we are glad we resisted the temptation to party in the short-term, in the long-term we regret the missed opportunity for enjoyment.

They say that no-one on their death bed says "I wish I'd spent more time in the office". A study by Ran Kivetz and Anat Keinan seems to suggest that this attitude holds, even over shorter periods of time.

Kivetz interviewed 63 subjects and asked half of them to recall a time in the previous week when they had to choose between work or pleasure — and then to rank how they felt about their decision on a scale from "no regret at all" to "a lot of regret." Then Kivetz asked the other half to do the same for a similar decision five years in the past. When the moment in question was a week before, those who worked industriously reported that they were glad they had. Those who partied said they regretted it. But when the subjects considered the decision from five years in the past, the propositions reversed: those who toiled regretted it; those who relaxed were happy with their choice.

They suggest that this occurs because time dulls what they call 'indulgence guilt', but accentuates the feeling of 'missing out'.

Guilt, it seems, is more of an emotional reaction that is tempered in hindsight, whereas the feeling of 'missing out' is a more reflective reaction based on a longer-view of the preceding years.

The moral of the story is, er... party now, or, alternatively try and get a job you enjoy.

The researchers' paper, published in the Journal of Consumer Research, is available online as a pdf file.

Link to NYT article.
pdf of paper 'Repenting Hyperopia: An Analysis of Self-Control Regrets'.

—Vaughan.

August 01, 2006

SciAm on the expert mind:

This month's Scientific American has a fantastic article on the psychology of expert skills which they've made freely available online.

It discusses how research into the cognitive processes and neuropsychology of chess masters is informing wider questions of how experts differ from novices and what mental skills underlie the mastering of a subject.

...much of the chess master's advantage over the novice derives from the first few seconds of thought. This rapid, knowledge-guided perception, sometimes called apperception, can be seen in experts in other fields as well. Just as a master can recall all the moves in a game he has played, so can an accomplished musician often reconstruct the score to a sonata heard just once. And just as the chess master often finds the best move in a flash, an expert physician can sometimes make an accurate diagnosis within moments of laying eyes on a patient.

But how do the experts in these various subjects acquire their extraordinary skills? How much can be credited to innate talent and how much to intensive training? Psychologists have sought answers in studies of chess masters. The collected results of a century of such research have led to new theories explaining how the mind organizes and retrieves information.

Link to SciAm article 'The Expert Mind'.

—Vaughan.

June 08, 2006

Caffeine makes people more open to persuasion:

Dosing someone with coffee or another strongly caffeinated drink may make them more susceptible to persuasion, according to a recent study, reported in New Scientist.

Previous studies have show that consuming caffeine can improve one's attention and enhance cognitive performance, with 200 milligrams (equivalent to two cups of coffee) being the optimal dose.

Moderate doses of caffeine can also make you more easily convinced by arguments that go against your beliefs, say Pearl Martin of the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, and her colleagues.

In 2005, her team published a paper suggesting that the compound primes people to agree with statements that go against their typical views because it improves their ability to understand the reasoning behind the statements.

After a bit of a search, it seems the full paper is freely available online.

Link to news story from New Scientist.
Link to page with full-text paper.

—Vaughan.

April 24, 2006

Uncovering hidden biases:

Science News has got an excellent article on one of psychology's most recent developments - the Implicit Association Test - a computerised task that claims to measure hidden or unadmitted biases.

The test involves reacting to (usually) words as they appear on-screen by classifying them into categories. The categories are altered to draw out differences in reaction time, which supposedly relate to the difficulty of associating certain concepts with each other.

The idea is that the measure of reaction time makes it particularly difficult to fake, and the association should be detectable even if it is usually over-ridden by the conscious mind.

The IAT has been used for everything from detecting hidden racial prejudices to examining violent associations in psychopaths.

It is still controversial, however, because it is not clear exactly what is being measured, other than some general concept of an 'association'.

Whether this is predictive of explicit beliefs or attitudes, or future action and risk (such as violence - particularly importantly in forensic psychology) is still an open question.

If you want to try the test yourself, there's an online version at Project Implicit.

Link to 'The Bias Finders' from Science News.
Link to Project Implicit.

—Vaughan.

April 20, 2006

Lingerie sharpens the financial mind:

According to recent news reports, the sight of lingerie or a sexy woman significantly impairs male decision making. Unfortunately, the details have got a little blurred in the re-telling from the original research paper - to the point where most reports flatly contradict the study's conclusions.

The study involved a well-researched financial task known as the ultimatum game where one participant is given a sum of money (10 euros in this study) and has to decide how to split it with another. If the other participant accepts the split, both get to keep the money. If they don't, no one gets anything.

Researchers Bram van den Bergh and Seigfried Dewitte asked heterosexual male participants to play the game in pairs.

Before they started the game, they were variously shown pictures of sexy women in bikinis, landscapes, older women, younger women, or given t-shirts or lingerie to handle.

When participants saw gratuitous pictures of bikini-clad girls (like the one on the right), lingerie and the like, they were more likely to accept unfair splits than in the other conditions.

Although the average difference in the lowest accepted offers between 'sexy' and 'unsexy' conditions was pretty small (only 0.39 euros), the researchers could be statistically confident that the difference was reliable.

One frequently repeated claim in the news stories is that men with higher levels of testosterone were particularly likely to be affected in this way.

This was never actually measured in the study, however. What was measured was the difference in length between the second and fourth finger (digit ratio) which is thought by some to indicate the amount of testosterone the person was exposed to as a developing child in the womb.

This is one subtlety that many news reports left out, as firstly, it's controversial as to whether digit ratio does relate to testosterone exposure in the womb, and secondly, it's not clear how this relates to current levels of testosterone at all. In fact, immediate levels of testosterone can fluctuate wildly.

Probably, the study is best thought of as an interesting but preliminary finding, as there are many questions that could be asked about the study design and experience of the participants that might have affected the results.

Petra Boynton has a good analysis of some of these, including why the story has proved so popular with the media.

The best write-up of the study's details I've found is from Nature, who do the study justice and point out that the results actually contradict the idea that sexy images makes men less rational. In the study, they actually made men more rational.

If you're being offered money in the ultimatum game, for each offer, the single most rational thing to do is accept money every time, no matter how low the offer is, because if you don't, you get nothing. You're given the choice between something and nothing - a no brainer.

In reality, people don't do this, a sense of fair play stops most people accepting paltry offers. Actually, this probably makes sense in everyday life (who wouldn't want to enforce fairness in society) but in terms of the experiment, it can be self-defeating.

The fact that men who saw sexy images were more likely to accept lower offers rather than reject them and get nothing at all, suggest that their short-term rationality was actually enhanced.

Perhaps it is no co-incidence that the bikini celebrated its 60th birthday this week. I shall be monitoring the economy carefully for any signs of change.

Link to write-up of study from Nature.
Link to analysis from Petra Boyton.
Link to abstract of original research paper.

—Vaughan.

April 13, 2006

Mixing Memory on the 'hostile media effect':

Cognitive science blog Mixing Memory highlights the hostile media effect whereby people assume a report of an event is biased towards an opposing view if it appears in the mass media.

This is despite the fact that when the same report is presented in another format (as an essay, for example) it is assumed to be neutral, or even supportive of the reader's view.

The effect is particularly apparent when the report concerns some sort of conflict and the viewer is already aligned to one side. Interestingly, it doesn't matter which side, the bias will be attributed to the opposition regardless. When neutral people view the report, bias is rarely reported.

Serious psychological study of perceived media bias began in the mid-1980s with studies by Vallone, Ross, and Lepper, and by Perloff. In both studies, pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian participants were presented with television news coverage of Israel's invasion of Lebanon and subsequent fighting. The pro-Israeli participants believed that the coverage was biased in favor of the Palestinians, and that it would make neutral observers feel less favorable towards their side, while the pro-Palestinians were convinced the coverage was biased in favor of the Israeli side, and that it would hurt their image in the eyes of neutral observers. This is despite the fact that when neutral observers did view the coverage, in Perloff's study, they failed to perceive any bias, and their opinions of the two sides stayed the same.

As always, there's more careful analysis and detailed references to the supporting research in the full post on Mixing Memory.

Link to 'Hostile Media Effects' on Mixing Memory.

—Vaughan.

April 11, 2006

Impulsive acts:

The New York Times has an article which examines the sometimes contradictory psychology of impulsivity.

Doing new things is often among lists which promise us 'ways to happiness' in magazines and books, and yet problems with impulse control have been cited as a major factor in everything from ADHD to drug and gambling addiction.

One problem for researchers is this type of impulsiveness is not present in every facet of life and can be quite difficult to pin-down experimentally.

One reason true impulsivity has been difficult to capture in the lab, said Dr. Martha Farrah, director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania, is precisely because "it is most manifest in these very high-stakes situations, when people are trying to get what they want, to stay focused, maybe trying to kick a drug habit." And that is when they break down.

Link to 'Living on Impulse'.

—Vaughan.

March 21, 2006

(un)emotional investment:

Here's a spin on the depressive realism story. Shiv et al (2005) found that substance abusers and those with brain damage affecting their emotions had enhanced performance on an investment task. According to the authors of the study, the normal controls were actually distracted from making optimum decisions by their emotional involvement in the task.

'The dark side of emotion in decision-making: When individuals with decreased emotional reactions make more advantageous decisions' Baba Shiv, George Loewenstein and Antoine Bechara. Cognitive Brain Research, 23(1), April 2005, Pages 85-92. summary here

Abstract:

Can dysfunction in neural systems subserving emotion lead, under certain circumstances, to more advantageous decisions? To answer this question, we investigated how individuals with substance dependence (ISD), patients with stable focal lesions in brain regions related to emotion (lesion patients), and normal participants (normal controls) made 20 rounds of investment decisions. Like lesion patients, ISD made more advantageous decisions and ultimately earned more money from their investments than the normal controls. When normal controls either won or lost money on an investment round, they adopted a conservative strategy and became more reluctant to invest on the subsequent round, suggesting that they were more affected than lesion patients and ISD by the outcomes of decisions made in the previous rounds.

Link: a related post at mindhacks.com

—tom.

March 14, 2006

Why can't we choose what makes us happy?:

This from Hsee, C. K. & Hastie, R. (2006). Decision and experience: Why don't we choose what makes us happy? Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 10(1), 31-37

Another common belief is that more choice options are always better. In reality, having more options can lead to worse experiences. For example, if employees are given a free trip to Paris, they are happy; if they are given a free trip to Hawaii, they are happy. But if they are given a choice between the two trips, they will be less happy, no matter which option they choose. Having the choice highlights the relative deficiencies in each option. People who choose Paris complain that ‘Paris does not have the ocean’, whereas people who choose Hawaii complain that ‘Hawaii does not have great museums’ .
(my emphasis)

The reference is:
Luce, M.K. et al. (2001) The impact of emotional tradeoff difficulty on decision behavior. In Conflict and Tradeoffs in Decision Making (Weber, E.U. and Baron, J., eds), pp. 86–109, Cambridge University Press

Seems opportunity cost isn't just something that bothers economists!

—tom.

March 05, 2006

the endowment effect & marketing:

The endowment effect is that we value more highly what we already have. It's a variation on the status quo bias that we talk about in Mind Hacks (Hack #74). This cognitive bias is of particular interest to economists, because it has implications for how eonomies work. If it is strongly in effect then people will trade less than is required to bring about the optimal resource allocation that free market's are theoretically capable of. The most famous demonstration of the endowment effect directly addresses the operation of the endowment effect in a market trading situation [1] - showing that even though preferences for a small arbitrary item (a coffee mug) are randomly distributed, if you give half of the group one and allow them to trade less trading happens than you would predict. In other words more people want to hold on to their mug now they've got one, than people without a mug want to get hold of one. The preferences of the group have been realigned according to initial resource distribution.

This is all relevant to marketing, as well as economics of course. You can see why car-salespeople are keen for you to take a test-drive before you purchase, or why shops are happy to offer a money-back-with-no-questions-asked option. You figure the money-back option into your cost-benefit calculation about whether to take something home, but once you've got it home your preferences realign - that item is now "yours", so you're far less likely to take it back to the shop, even if it doesn't turn out to be as good as you thought when you bought it.

Refs and Links:

[1] Kahneman, D., J.L. Knetsch and R.H. Thaler (1990). Experimental Tests of the Endowment Effect and the Coase Theorem. Journal of Political Economy. link
Wikipedia: The Endowment effect: : link
Experienced traders can overcome the endowment effect : Economist article
References at behaviouralfinance.net

[Cross-posted at idiolect.org.uk]

—tom.

February 28, 2006

the price is right regardless of the cost:

Zac at ortholog.com writes about an experimental test of buying irrationality using Ebay. Quoting:

Test auctions on eBay showed that most people prefer to pay a low price for an item and also pay postage (American: "shipping") than pay a higher price and get free postage, even when the former added up to more than the latter. A CD for $5+$6 postage is preferred to a CD for $10+freepost. It wasn't presented as that stark a choice: multiple auctions with different price-postage ratios revealed a net preference for low item price and a poor correlation between auction success and stated postage costs. Interesting but hardly surprising: the salience of the price is greater than the cost of shipping (the anchoring cognitive fallacy), and people in general are not as rational or systematic as they/we believe.
(Zac's links. read the full post here)

In Influence, Cialdini highlights scarcity as one of the six principle factors of persuasion. In an auction they combine particularly strongly: scarcity of time (the item is only on sale for a limited period), scarity of product (items are sold individually, not just as one-of-many 'off the shelf') and competition (from other buyers). Add to this heady mix the price/postage sleight of hand and it is no wonder you get choice irrationalities.

—tom.

February 27, 2006

Influence (by Robert Cialdini):

Influence by Robert Cialdini is an excellent, excellent, book. Not only does it present voluminous evidence on the social psychology of persuasion and compliance, but it does succinctly and engagingly, mixing academic references with historical vignettes and personal anecdotes. The book discuss how techniques of persuasion work, grouping them under six major headings, and for each heading the book provides a 'defence against' section detailing how to stop yourself being unduly influenced. The final, glorious, touch is that in order to write the book Cialdini - who is a professor of social psychology - engaged in a three-year project of going undercover to explore first-hand how techniques of persuasion are used in the real world: applying for a waiter's job to study how to increase customers' tipping, attending tupperware parties, going on training programmes with door-to-door salesmen...it makes the book a wonderful blend of thorough research and astutely observed practice.

The book has been extensively and excellently summarised here, at happening-here.blogspot.com, so I'm just going to pull out some particularly fun examples of persuasion techniques, particularly as the relate to advertising and marketing.

Notes on Cialdini, R.B. (2001). Influence: Science and Practice. Forth Edition. Allyn & Bacon

A key idea is that we all use various cognitive 'shortcuts' (heuristics) we use to decide on what to buy. Advertisers can take advantage of these short-cuts to skew our behaviour. For example, there is a price-as-an-indicator-of-quality heurstic which means, if we're not thinking carefully about a purchase decision, we might just use the assumption that “better things are more expensive”, so if we want a 'better' thing we will just look at the prices to work out which product is better.

[Chivas Regal Scotch Whiskey] "had been a struggling brand until its managers decided to raise its price to a level far above its competitors. Sales skyrocketed, even though nothing was changed in the product itself (Aaker, 1991)" [1]

Or the coupons-give-you-a-bargain heuristic:

"A tire company found that mailed-out coupons which, because of a printing error, offered no savings top recipients produced just as much customers response as did error-free coupons that offered substantial savings" [2]

It's easy enough to think of other common examples - supermarkets which use three for the price of two offers, or put up signs saying things like "Two for £1". Next time you see one of these check the price for how much just one costs - it might stem your enthusiasm for the seeming bargain you thought you were being offered

Here's another trick, which takes advantage of another natural inclination - that of sticking by our word. Cialdini accuses toy producers of undersupplying stores with 'craze' toys just before Christmas - after a barrage of advertising parents promise their kids the toy but then can't get hold of one. They buy them a substitute at Christmas and then also have to buy the craze toy in January. He cites the example of the Cabbage Patch Kids, dolls which were heavily advertised one year in the mid-1980s, and undersupplied during the holiday season. $25 toys were selling at auction for $700. (A charge was later brought against company for advertising something that was unavailable). In 1988, a spokesperson for Hasbo, which made the Furby toy (which also sold out at Christmas), advised parents to say I'll try, but if I can't get it for you now, I'll get it for you later [3]

The same consistency principle lies behind the advice an encyclopaedia company gives during its sales-program: make the customs fill out the sales agreements themselves. Once they've 'owned' the action by doing it themselves they are far more likely to stick by it. ("There is something magical about writing things down" says Amway Corporation literature). Cialdini explains the popularity (with companies) of testimonial contests – those where you think of 50 words why the product is good and stand a chance of winning something. The contest is not for the company to get a single winning entry, but for them to induce all the entrants of the competition to enhance their commitment to the product by writing a testimonial. Influence has an extended discussion of this, and how the power of small, initial, public voluntary actions can be used to produce later compliance to much larger requests for action

"Commitment decisions, even erroneous ones, have a tendency to be self-perpetuating because they can 'grow their own legs'"
(page 97)

"You can use small commitments to manipulate a person's self-image; you can use them to turn citizens into "public servants", prospects into "customers", prisoners into "collaborators." And once you've got a man's self-image where you want it, he should comply naturally with a whole range of your requests that are consistent with this view of himself".
(page 74)

"...compliance professionals love commitments that produce inner change. First, that change is not just specific to the situation where it first occurred; it covers a whole range of related situations, too. Second, the effects of the change are lasting. So, once a man has been induced to take action that shifts his self-image to that of, let's say, a public spirited citizen [or a guru's disciple], he is likely to be public-spirited in a variety of other circumstances where his compliance may also be desired, and he is likely to continue his public-spirited behavior for as long as his new self-image holds."
(page 84)

Social proof (social influence) is another extremely strong heuristic: “if everyone else is doing it, I should do it to”

This too can be used unfairly - for example Evangelist Billy Graham has been known to 'seed' visits to towns in advance so that his arrival is met an outpouring of thousands of the faithful - apparently spontaneous, but actually highly organised. (p 101)

Positive association is also a powerful, and potentially automatic (see also) decision -shortcut

In one study, men who saw a new-car ad that included a seductive young woman model rated the car as faster, more appealing, more expensive-looking, and better designed than did men who viewed the same ad without the model. Yet when asked later, the men refused to believe that the presence of the young woman had influenced their judgments. [4]

The same kind of, automatic associations, lie behind findings that people leave larger tips if paying by credit card (credit cards associated with big spending, not always with paying back) and that "that when asked to contribute to charity (the United Way), college students were markedly more likely to give money if the room they were in contained MasterCard insignias than if it did not (87 percent verses 33 percent)." (p164). Funnily enough this didn't hold for people with troubled credit histories!

Cialdini is quite clear that we can't avoid using these short-cuts - after all they work most of the time - but we must come down hard on those who exploit them

“The pace of modern life demands that we frequently use shortcuts” (p. 234)
"We are likely to use these lone cues when we don't have the inclination, time, energy, or cognitive resources to undertake a complete analysis of the situation. When we are rushed, stressed, uncertain, indifferent, distracted or fatigue, we tend to focus less on the information available to us. When making decisions under these circumstances, we often revert to the rather primitive but necessary single-piece-of-good-evidence approach." (p235)

“The real treachery, and what we cannot tolerate, is any attempt to make a profit in a way that threatens the reliability of our shortcuts” (p. 239)

I don't know how realistic this kind of individual/consumer vigilance is as a strategy, but Cialdini seems to believe that the only alternative is to change the whole pace of modern life

The evidence suggests that the ever-accelerating pace and informational crush of modern life will make this particular form of unthinking compliance [shortcuts] more and more prevalent in the future (introduction, p. x.)

My default assumption used to be that the careless use of decision heuristics probably only applies to unimportant decisions. This took quite a severe knock from Cialdini's discussion on the social-contagion of suicide [5]. If people can be influenced by publicity about a suicide to kill themselves (and all the evidence is that they are - and social proof is one of Cialdini's six discussed shortcuts), then all of the decisions we make in life are open to be exploited by irrational factors under the control of others.

Refs below the fold

[1] p6, in Influence. Ref: Aaker, D.A. (1991). Managing Brand Equity. New York: Free Press

[2] p7, in Influence. Ref: Zimmator, J.J. (1983) Consumer Mindlessness: I believe it, but I don't see it. Proceedings of the Division of Consumer Psychology, APA Convention, Aanheim, CA.

[3] p58 in Influence

[4] p164 in Influence. Ref: Smith GH and Engel R, 1968, Influence of a Female Model on Perceived Characteristics of an Automobile, Proceedings from the 76th APA Annual Convention, 681-682.

[5] See also in Gladwell's The Tipping Point

—tom.

February 09, 2006

when choice is demotivating:

Here's a way to make people buy more of your stuff - give them fewer options. Douglas Coupland called the bewilderment induced by there being too many choices 'option paralysis' ('Generation X', 1991). Now social psychologists have caught on ('When choice is demotivating', 2000, [1]). Offer shoppers a choice of 24 jams and they are less likely to buy a jar than if offered a choice of 6 jams. Offer students a choice of 6 essays, rather than 30 essays, for extra-credit and more will take up the opportunity if there is less choice of essay titles - and, what is more, they write better essays. Students given a similar choice of free chocolates (a restricted choice compared to an extensive choice) made quicker choices (not too suprising) and were happier with the choices they did make once they had made them.

ref

[1] Iyengar, S. S., & Lepper, M. R. 2000. When choice is demotivating: Can one desire too much of a good thing? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 79, 995-1006.

—tom.

February 08, 2006

advertising influences familiarity induces preference:

We probably like to think that we're too smart to be seduced by such "branding," but we aren't. If you ask test participants in a study to explain their preferences in music or art, they'll come up with some account based on the qualities of the pieces themselves. Yet several studies have demonstrated that "familiarity breeds liking." If you play snippets of music for people or show them slides of paintings and vary the number of times they hear or see the music and art, on the whole people will rate the familiar things more positively than the unfamiliar ones. The people doing the ratings don't know that they like one bit of music more than another because its more familiar. Nonetheless, when products are essentially equivalent, people go with what's familiar, even if it's only familiar because they know its name from advertising

Barry Schwartz. 'The Paradox of Choice' (2004)

I think the essential point is correct, but there is a sort of sneaking condescension here: All of you people (the 'test participants') only like the things you like because you're familiar with them, not because of any rational or emotional affection for them (that's just 'some account'). What's more - we (the psychologists) have done experiments which show (admittedly only in some circumstances) that familiarity leads to liking; and from this we're prepared to generalise to all other circumstances you're involved in. I parody, but I'm sure you see what I mean.

The fact that we tend to like the familiar isn't too surprising. There's even a good evolutionary reason for preferring what worked before - if it didn't kill you last time, why risk doing something else this time? The single most useful thing you can measure to predict what someone will do in the future is not what they want to do, nor is it what they say they'll probably do, nor what their friends and family will do, but simply what they did last time - such is the power of habit (For more on this see Hack #74 in Mind Hacks).

But the interesting thing about advertising and branding is the process of it making something familiar to us and us taking this as an indication of preference. In other words, we don't properly take into account that the brand is not familiar to us for any good reason.

Psychologically it's not too surprising that this should happen. The study [1] which revived the subliminal perception field involved this mere exposure effect. Participants were shown meaningless shapes for time-spans below the perceptual threshold and subsequently they preferred those shapes to other not previously displayed shapes - even though they had not consciously perceived either set of shapes before.

However, is there any evidence that this kind of familiarity effect can be shown to compete with, or even over-ride, actual good reasons for liking or disliking a brand? Perhaps people are happy to use a fairly arbitrary guideline (familiarity) for unimportant decisions, or decisions where the choices are all pretty good, but when more is at stake familiarity is relegated down the table of influencing factors?

Ref

[1] Kunst-Wilson WR, Zajonc RB (1980). Affective discrimination of stimuli that cannot be recognized. Science, 207(4430):557-8.

—tom.

December 31, 2005

an appropriate error:

Anna Airoldi, the translator of Mind Hacks into Italian has noticed a fantastic error in the published book. She writes

(170) 1st paragraph of "How it works"; I'm not entirely sure this is a real typo, considering the topic discussed in the paragraph, but "conservations" shouldn't just be "conversations"?

She's absolutely right - it should be 'conversations' not 'conservations'. But although it is an error, in this case it is an appropriate error, because it appears in Hack #52 'Robust Processing Using Parallelism' which discusses how we can read errorful or ambiguous sentences using multiple interacting levels of information to construct meaning. Normally this is a good thing, but it appears that in this particular instance the meaning was so obvious that our normally diligent editing process didn't spot the mistake (my mistake in origin, incidentally)!

—tom.

October 10, 2005

Ask philosophers about the mind:

Ask Philosophers is a site where anyone can pose a question to be answered by some of the leading lights in world philosophy, including specialists in the philosophy of mind.

Scientists are often disappointingly dismissive of philosophy, usually without a good understanding of the breadth and depth of the modern discipline.

Philosophers are increasingly taking the role of 'theoretical scientists' - by understanding the scientific data in great detail and applying the tools of conceptual analysis to make sure current theories are conceptually water tight (or highlighting areas where they are not).

This is particularly important in the cognitive and clinical sciences because many philosophical problems are encountered on a day-to-day basis.

For example, the mind-body problem - that tries to understand the relationship between physical biological processes and thought - comes into stark relief when a clinician encounters a patient with brain injury.

Similarly, the age-old philosophical problems of understanding belief and knowledge become particularly important when the medical community have to define what it is to have a delusion - something that is usually considered a form of 'damaged' belief.

In the Ask Philosophers philosophy of mind section there are already some fantastic questions and answers online.

One person asks if a person who is given medication to make her forget a potentially terrifying surgical experience was ever actually afraid, another asks about whether it is possible to think about the thought you are thinking.

Anyone can pitch a question, so if you have any burning queries, philosophy's finest are waiting for your challenge.

Link to Ask Philosophers Mind section.

—Vaughan.

August 01, 2005

Confusing symbols and reality:

The latest Scientific American discusses the development of symbolic thinking in children, in an article by child psychologist Judy DeLoache.

Professor DeLoache was intrigued as to why young children sometimes try and pick up or use items in pictures, or fail to make sense of miniature objects - an error she calls 'symbol confusion':

Pictures are not the only source of symbol confusion for very young children. For many years, my colleagues and students and I watched toddlers come into the lab and try to sit down on the tiny chair from the scale model - much to the astonishment of all present. At home, Uttal and Rosengren had also observed their own daughters trying to lie down in a doll's bed or get into a miniature toy car. Intrigued by these remarkable behaviors that were not mentioned in any of the scientific literature we examined, we decided to study them.

DeLoache thinks that 'scale errors' involve a failure of dual representation: children cannot maintain the distinction between a symbol and what it refers to.

To help children solve this problem, the researchers told the children they had a 'shrinking machine', that replaced toys with miniature versions.

When children were told that the toy had been shrunk, they no longer needed to represent it as a symbol of another object, they simply assumed it was the same object, and no longer made 'symbol confusion' errors.

This work has had important legal implications, as young children giving evidence in cases of abuse are often given dolls - symbolic representations of themselves - and asked to describe or point out what happened.

Knowing at what age children are likely to make best use of this technique might be essential in obtaining reliable evidence.

Link to Scientific American article 'Mindful of Symbols'.

—Vaughan.

July 26, 2005

Execution rests on IQ test:

The BBC are reporting that convicted murderer Daryl Atkins may be executed by the state of Virginia, based on a recent IQ test where he scored 74, four points above the legal definition of retardation, which had previously excluded him from the death penalty.

When first tested in 1998, his IQ measured 59, well below the 70 points cut-off level. The cut-off of 70 is significant, owing to design of the IQ test.

Intelligence shows a specific sort of distribution in the population, and follows a common pattern, known as a normal distribution.

Rather than design a test with arbitrary figures, modern IQ tests have been created with specific statistical properties to make them easier to interpret: the average IQ is 100, and the standard deviation (the average variation from the average) is 15. Click here to see a graph of this in a pop-up window.

The cut-off of 70 is two standard-deviations below the average. It is known that 95% of the population will score within two standard deviations on either side of the average. This makes the legal definition of retardation, at least in Virginia, as having an IQ score in the bottom 2.5% of the population.

There is no easy explanation as to why someone's IQ score might rise during a 7-year period. Prosecutors are arguing that he 'pulled-punches' on the original test, the defence argue that his interaction with lawyers has raised his IQ - although many factors, such as distraction, the skill and reliability of the tester, and familiarity with the tests can affect the score.

Interestingly, the prosecution are arguing that his IQ is actually 76, 2 points higher than the defence claim. Why quibble over two points?

Possibly because of another statistical property of IQ. It has a standard error of measurement (the average error in assessing the presumed true score) of 5 points.

Even taking into account a standard error of measurement of 5 points, a score of 76 would definitely be above the level of retardation - making Atkins eligible for the death penalty, whereas a score of 74 is still ambiguous.

Interestingly, it was a supreme court decision, based on Atkins case, that first made it illegal to execute convicts considered legally retarded.

Statistical properties aside, the whole concept of IQ itself is still controversial among some psychologists, and was most notably criticised in Stephen Jay Gould's book The Mismeasure of Man.

Link to BBC News story.
Link to story from Daily Telegraph.

—Vaughan.

July 21, 2005

Understanding 'Aha!':

To this day, psychologists understand little about ‘insight’ – that Eureka moment when a long-sought answer suddenly jumps to mind. These “Aha!” experiences range from the trivial – suddenly solving a crossword clue, to the profound – like Kary Mullis’s Nobel-Prize-winning invention of the polymerase chain reaction, the basis of which occurred to him while driving home one day.

According to Edward Bowden and colleagues writing in the latest issue of Trends in Cognitive Sciences, insight is achieved via the right-hemisphere (cf. Hack #69 ) which “engages in relatively coarse semantic coding, and is therefore more likely to maintain diffuse activation of alternative meanings, distant associations and solution-relevant concepts”. Unfortunately, by its nature this diffuse activation is often weak and beyond conscious reach of the struggling thinker.

In support of this they’ve shown, for example, that when people are presented with the solution to a problem they couldn’t solve, they’re quicker at reading this solution aloud when it’s presented to their left visual field (right hemisphere) than to their right visual field (left hemisphere). This suggests the right hemisphere had been closer to reaching the solution than the left. Moreover, brain scans of solutions reached by insight revealed more activity in the anterior superior temporal sulcus of the right hemisphere, than did solutions not reached by insight. So, perhaps you should do tomorrow’s Suduko while looking out of the left corner of your eyes!

Bowden’s team believe research in this area has been hampered by psychologists always asking people to try and solve so-called ‘insight problems’ (see (a) at end of post) that can supposedly only be solved through insight. But Bowden’s team say these so-called insight problems can be solved piecemeal fashion (i.e. without insight) and are often too long and difficult to be used in brain-imaging research. They believe insight research will benefit from using lots more examples of a shorter, easier kind of problem (see (b)), more suited to brain imaging and EEG research, and by asking participants to say whether they solved them by insight or by working them through.

One question they pose for future research is: “Is the ‘Aha!’ of self-discovery qualitatively different from the ‘U-Duh!’ of having the solution presented to you?”.

(a) If you have black socks and brown socks in a drawer, mixed in a ratio of 4 to 5, how many socks will you have to take out to make sure that you have a pair of the same colour?

(b) Each of the three words in (i) and (ii) below can form a compound word or two-word phrase with a solution word. (i) Falling, actor, dust; (ii) Manners, round, tennis.

From: Bowden, E.M., Jung-Beeman, M., Fleck, J. & Kounios, J. (2005). New approaches to demystifying insight. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 9, 322-328.

—christian.

June 16, 2005

The cognitive basis of good and evil:

Michael Shermer, who writes the Skeptic column for Scientific American, and who is normally right on the mark has this to say about the concepts of Good and Evil:

'The myth of good and evil is grounded in Christian theology and the belief that such forces exist independently of their carriers,'

You can read the full article - byline 'It is too simple to blame evil people for horrifying acts of terror' - here. I don't want to disagree with Shermer's conclusions, but just nit-pick on this specific point. In effect, I think i totally disagree with the above statement - let's call it the 'Cultural Invention of Evil Theory'. Rather, and readers of Mind Hacks might have guessed, I believe seeing Good and Evil in the world is the result of a basis cognitive process which we we all share.

The myth of good and evil arises from a psychological bias we all have, and which in the social psychology biz is called the 'the fundamental attribution error'. This is simply that when looking at other people's behaviour we tend to over-emphasise inherent characteristics (eg "he didn't do the washing up because he's lazy"), while when looking at our own we tend to over-emphasise situational variables ("i didn't do the washing up because i had to go to work and do lots of marking"). Why this exists is probably because although it is often wrong, it is an adaptive way to think about the causal world. When trying to understand your own behaviour it is easiest to look at the things that vary (ie the situation) and try and control that, but when looking at other people's behaviour the major variable is which other person you are looking at. It doesn't make it right, but it is just easier to see other people as Good, or Evil, or Lazy, or Clever than it is to take full account of the complexity of both their situation and their personality.

Surely that is sufficient reason to explain the persistence of notions of good and evil, and also helps avoid the problem of how non-Christian cultures come also to use the concepts. The cultural background just flavours a universal, a universal which arises from the information-mechanics of our cognitive apparatus.

—tom.

April 28, 2005

BBC Frontiers on the psychology of risk:

BBC Radio 4's science show Frontiers goes for a cognitive science two-in-a-row as it follows-up last week's programme on neuroprosethics with an analysis of the psychology of risk-taking, sensation seeking and risk-based reasoning.

Psychologist Marvin Zuckerman tackles evolutionary explanations for individual differences in risk-taking, and discusses the personality attributes and biological influences of sensation seeking people.

The programme also interviews people who are typically defined as high sensation seekers about their motivations and experiences, such as author and adventure climber Mick Fowler.

Link to Frontiers web page on 'Risk and Risk Taking'.
Link to realaudio archive of programme.

—Vaughan.

February 18, 2005

'A Genius Explains':

There was an interesting piece in last weekend's Guardian (A Genius Explains) about a high-functioning autistic who is also a savant (i.e. he's got amazingly intellectual abilities - he can recall pi to 22,514 decimal places for example). Autistic savants are more common than non-autistic savants, but usually they aren't able to quite so lucidly explain how they manage to do the things they do.

The article left me curious, and a little jealous ("It's mental imagery", he said "It's like maths without having to think.") and makes me feel like we're in for some interesting times ahead as research into savantism, synthesia, developmental cognitive neuroscience and mental imagery converges.

—tom.

February 16, 2005

Abstract structure need not be based on language:

Grammar-impaired patients with problems in parsing sentences can parse sums. This weighs against the argument that language underpins our capacity for abstract thought: these individuals have problems with telling "dog bites man" from "man bites dog" but no similar problems with 112-45 vs 45-112.

Aphasia and other language problems stemming from brain damage can indeed lead to calculation problems, but this study suggests that they are not necessarily intertwined. As the authors put it, the performance of their subjects is "incompatible with a claim that mathematical expressions are translated into a language format to gain access to syntactic mechanisms specialized for language."

The same issue is also discussed in a recent Trends in Cognitive Science article by Rochel Gelman and Brian Butterworth. They survey the claims made about the need for counting words to do counting, and arithmetic facts to be stored verbally, and find them wanting. The imaging data does not give a decisive picture, as is often the case, but it is certainly true that numerosity appears to depend in large part on areas in the parietal lobe (top-back of the head) which are some way from language areas.

Another claim is that numerical concepts can only develop if language is there to support it, like a virtual scaffolding. This is one aspect of the strong Whorfian claim - that language shapes thought. Number words are acquired in much the same way that we learn to distinguish 'dog' from 'dogs', and then form a shorthand that is expanded into our full abilities. However when you examine tribes with limited number vocabularies (no greater than the value 3 with consistency) you find that they can succeed in tasks that involve values as great as eighty , presented non-verbally. Research into one tribe, the Munduruku, had a deal-closing finding: adults and children from the tribe performed comparably on the tasks, whether they were monolingual or bilingual with Portuguese - a language with the full range of number words. The groups even performed comparably with a French control groups. If number vocabulary is supposed to be crucial for numerosity, one would expect it to, well, actually help in number tasks.

Finally, it seems the idea of 'recursive infinity' - that is, you can keep adding one indefinitely to get larger and larger numbers - comes naturally to us, even when it does not figure in our established systems. A New Guinean group who used body-parts as a fixed counting system quickly adapted the system to a generative counting rule (ie being able to count higher and higher, up 'levels' of magnitude) when times changed and money became introduced to the system. It implies that these key concepts come naturally to us, rather than being imposed as linguistic concepts.

The study I led with, underaken by Rosemary Varley and colleagues, isn't the first to suggest that language deficits need not cause maths deficits - the TiCS survey outlines such work from way back in the 1920s. And dyscalculia is now well-recognised as its own dissociable disorder. The strength of the study is how it systematically matches the demands of the math and language tasks to make a compelling case that the difference in performance must be due to different underlying mechanisms. And it comes, as part of the burgeoning Renaissance in our understanding of numerosity, to query whether language need be the syne qua non of our species, and continue to feed the language-thought debate.

The BBC have an account of the Varley et al paper. Link
Abstract Link
TiCS survey abstract Link

Henschen, S.E. (1920) Klinische und Anatomische Beitrage zu
Pathologie des Gehirns, Nordiska Bokhandeln

Saxe, G.B. (1981) The changing form of numerical reasoning among
the Oksapmin. Indigenous Mathematics Working Paper. No 14,
UNESCO Education

Pica, P. et al. (2004) Exact and approximate arithmetic in an
Amazonian indigene group. Science 306, 499–503

—Alex.

February 01, 2005

Chimps fair or foul:

I went to a conference a few years ago at the LSE; if you look at the speakers you'll see why. Although it proved to be patchier than I'd hoped, I was captivated by Frans de Waal's contribution, outlining some wonderful research on the social behaviour of apes. One highlight, which is now finally coming to publication, was the finding that chimpanzees judge reward not just on its instrumental value, but whether it is even-handed or otherwise. They reject a moderate reward if they see an unfamiliar ape get a better one. Good to know that apes throw their toys out of the pram as well.

The explanatory gloss on this is that apes have a 'sense of fair play'. Another angle that comes to mind is that preferential reward may be seen as the forming of a dominance hierarchy, and the smart ape should make it clear that it's not going to acquiesce -a nuclear threat to dissuade a minor loss.

Possibly this is merely talking at different levels of causation - the monkeys may have such a sense due to the need to hold their own in a fluctuating dominance hierarchy. It's also very possible that my thought doesn't fit with chimpanzee social structure at all. Regardless, it keeps the mind sharp to explore the gloss at least as much as the nuts and bolts of a study. Simian Cold War, or chimp village cricket: can you find a better tack?

—Alex.

Link to this post | Comments (5)

January 04, 2005

The High Street persuaders:

The online version of the Telegraph has an article on how psychology is used in shops to persuade us to part with our hard earned cash and lists some common tricks and techniques.

"The most important rule as a shopper is to keep your wits about you," Karl says. "If you enter a retailer's property, in one sense, you lay yourself open to any tricks or techniques that they might want to spring on you. The best armoury you can have is to keep your eyes open and your ear to the ground and see what's going on."

Link to article (via metafilter.com).

—Vaughan.

December 07, 2004

Don't think, sleep!:

Sometimes it isn't how much sleep you got that's important, but how much sleep you think you got.

Our own perception of how much we slept during a night can be startlingly inaccurate. Dr Allison Harvey (now of UC Berkley) took insomniacs and measured how much they actually slept during the night. Despite the insomniacs reporting that they had only slept for two or three hours, they had in fact been asleep for an average of 7 hours - only 35 minutes less than a control group who didn't have any problems sleeping.

This shows that insomniacs (and probably the rest of us) are very bad at judging the time it takes us to get to sleep, and the time we actually are asleep. It also suggests that worrying about sleep, and our beliefs about how we've slept, have a big role in the negative affects of what (we believe) is a sleepless night.

To test this Dr Harvey attached monitoring sensors to insomniacs which gave them a read-out in the morning of how much they had slept the night before. Except that the read-out was a lie and always told the participants in the experiments that they had slept 'okay' regardless of how badly they had slept. (In the seminar where I heard Dr Harvey discuss this research she told us that originally they tried giving false-feedback saying that the insomniacs had slept 'excellently' each night, but they just didn't believe it so the researchers settled for just 'okay').

And what happened? When asked about how they felt, about their mood and alertness, those people who were lied to and told (by a scientific measurement, no less) that they had got a normal night's sleep felt better for it!

So, it seems, one of the surprising disadvantages of trying to get enough sleep is that you can be hypersensitive to those times you don't get enough - and that the hypersensitivity alone can depress and distract you.

Another entirely separate study shows neatly the role of anxiety in insomnia. A placebo effect is where something works because we believe it will work, not because of any intrinsic quality the thing itself has (there's lots more on placebos in the book). Placebos are known to be potentially very strong - for example in one study of placebo painkillers a significant proportion of people found the placebo to have as strong an effect on their pain as morphine.

Anyway, what would we expect if we gave someone a pill and told them that it was a strong stimulant - something like eight cups of espresso - just before they went to bed? Well if they were normal we'd expect them to take longer to get to sleep, and that's what happens. But if they're an insomniac then they get to sleep quicker than they do normally. Why? Because, the theory goes, the insomniac is preventing from getting to sleep by their anxiety about getting to sleep (there's lots of other work on this, including research by Dr Harvey). When they are given the fake eight-shots-of-espresso pill they are still anxious, but now they can put it down to the pill - "I'm awake, but hey - of course I'm awake, I had that pill" - now, because they're not worrying about it, they fall off to sleep. Genius!

All this says, to me, that the best thing to do about not being able to sleep - or about not having had enough sleep - is to not worry about it, especially if the hours you have available to spend unconscious are out of your control. Often self-awareness is a good thing, but when it comes to sleep, both before and after, a little less self-awareness can do a lot of good.

(I should apologies for the lack of references in this post. I heard the material about inaccuracy of sleep perception in a seminar Dr Harvey gave at the University of Sheffield in 2003, and haven't been able to find my notes, or any published details of the study. My apologies for any errors that have crept in. People wishing to follow this up could start with this paper [1] which shows that students with insomnia improved after they were shown the discrepancy between their perception and a more objective measure of how much they sleep. The placebo study I read in a textbook and unfortunately can't remember where. You can buy one of the gadgets researchers use to measure sleep here and you can read The Onion's advice on fighting insomnia here).

refs

1. Tang, N.K.Y. & Harvey, A.G. (2004). Correcting distorted perception of sleep in insomnia: a novel behavioural experiment? Behaviour Research and Therapy, 42, 27-39.

—tom.

December 03, 2004

Choice Irrationalities:

There was a great Analysis programme on radio 4 last night: The Economy on the Couch which was about behavioural economics, neuroeconomics (whatever that is) and ways in which we fail to act like the rational agents that standard economic theory supposes us to be

One irrationality- a human frailty for fairness- is revealed by a thing called the Ultimatum Game. The Ultimatum Game works like this. I am offered some money, say £100, on the condition that I share it with you. I get to decide the split, and you get to say if you accept it or not. If you accept, we get the money in the proportions I determined, if you reject my split then neither of us gets anything. So what would you do if I offered £1 to you, leaving me with the other ninety-nine?

One view of economic 'rationality' is that you have a choice between nothing (if you reject) and £1 (if you accept) so the rational choice is to accept. Of course hardly anyone does do this. Most people won't accept offers lower than a £30-£40 limit. Our sense of fair play gets in the way of rational choice.

Or what is one kind of rational choice. Like a lot things in the human judgement literature, one person's irrationality can look like a rational choice from another point of view. Here, if I accept a measly £1 it seems like I'm setting myself up for a run of bum-deals. If I reject the offer, losing out on a pounds myself but also punishing the guy who cut the cake so unfairly, I'm laying the ground for him or her to make me a better offer next time. Not so irrational, eh?

Here's another choice irrationality which isn't so amenable to the 'different kind of rationality' analysis, but which is also clear as to why it happens at all. (This wasn't in the R4 programme, but it's my favourite example at the moment):

You are offered a choice between $2 for certain, and a gamble where you get a 7 out of 36 chance of winning $9. 29 chances out of 36 you get nothing. What would you choose the gamble? If you do the maths, the expected pay off of the gamble is $1.75 (7/36 x 9), so you probably shouldn't.

When Paul Slovic and colleagues [1] gave this choice to a sample of people just 33% went for the gamble.

Now consider this: as before you have a choice between $2 for certain and a gamble. The gamble still has a 7/36 chance of winning you $9, but there is 26/36 chance you will have to pay out $0.05. Now the expected pay-off of the gamble is slightly worse ($1.71) but, strangely, around 60% people offered this choice took the gamble.

How come? Slovic argues that this is an example of 'evaluability' making the second gamble feel more attractive. Offered a 7/36 chance of winning $9 we don't compute the exact expected value, but rather do rough and ready reckoning. Does 7/36 feel like good odds? Is $9 a lot of money? It feels like the gamble probably isn't worth it.

What the 5 cents does is make the $9 easy to emotionally evaluate. Is $9 a lot of money? Hell, yes, compared to 5 cents! So you probably take the gamble, even though it has a lower expected value than $2 for certain, and a lower expected value than the mostly-rejected $9 only gamble.

Moral from this? Well, for me, it says that we can't rely on any information presented without context to be persuasive. Would you pay $10 for a scientific dictionary with 10,000 entries? Maybe. Who knows? What if you knew that all the other scientific dictionaries are $10 but only have 5,000 entries? Suddenly it becomes obvious. More generally this relates to the importance of correctly framing arguments (about which more later, and there's some stuff in the book too).

Human reasoning is chock-a-block of 'irrationalities', domains in which our limited cognitive resources and our animal ancestry compel us into making irrational choices (even bearing in mind my earlier caveat about defining irrationality). Classic economic theory ignores these foibles entirely and assumes that each economic actor makes rational choices, maximising their expected value in every situation.

Behavioural economics puts the lie to this model, but doesn't give us any good replacements - a collection of qualifications and observations which can be applied case-by-case, but no systematic replacement for the grand theory of the rational actor. Proponents of the classical model always knew it was psychologically unrealistic, but it's simplicity bought a lot of progress despite that. All models are false, but some are useful, as they say.

Ref

1. Slovic, P., Finucane, M., Peters, E., & MacGregor, D. G. (2002). The Affect Heuristic. In T. Gilovich, D. Griffin & D. Kahneman (Eds.), Heuristics and biases: The Psychology of Intuitive Judgement (pp. 397-420). New York: Cambridge University Press.

—tom.