Are most experimental subjects in behavioral science WEIRD?

Note: here is a follow up post.

My supervisor David Spurrett and I have a commentary on an important paper - "The weirdest people in the world?" (pdf) - in the most recent edition of Behavioral & Brain Sciences. The authors of the paper, Canadian psychologists Joseph Henrich, Steven Heine and Ara Norenzayan, argue that most experimental subjects in the behavioral sciences are WEIRD - Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic - and thus weird - not representative of most human beings. And this, if true, is a very serious problem indeed. Behavioral scientists (anthropologists, psychologists, behavioral economists and so on) are often interested in explaining the brains, minds and behavior of Homo sapiens as a species. (Some scientists, of course, are only interested in understanding specific cultures or what makes us different, but one important goal of the behavioral sciences has long been to explain universal human behavior). As evolutionary psychologists John Tooby and Leda Cosmides have put it, they "seek to characterize the universal, species-typical architecture of [the information-processing mechanisms that generate behavior]".

But... Henrich and his colleagues review a large body of literature that seems to show that, across several domains, Western undergraduates - the workhorses of the behavioral sciences - are extreme outliers. In other words, if they are correct, most of the data behavioral scientists have used to test hypothesis and to drive theorizing derives from subjects who are possibly the least suited for generalizing about the human race. Take as an example the Müller-Lyer illusion. In the diagram below, the lines labeled "a" and "b" are exactly equal in length, but many subjects perceive "b" as longer than "a".

This finding (which goes back all the way to 1889) has been used to make deductions about how the human visual system works. The Wikipedia article on the illusion, for example, states that one possible explanation for the effect is that "the visual system processes that judge depth and distance assume in general that the 'angles in' configuration corresponds to an object which is closer, and the 'angles out' configuration corresponds to an object which is far away". Plausible enough. Except that for some people - San foragers, for example - the illusion does not exist, and in many other non-WEIRD societies the effect size is significantly smaller. Henrich and his colleagues cite the work of Segall et. al. (1966), who worked out the magnitude of the illusion across 16 societies by varying the relative lengths of "a" and "b" and then asking subjects to indicate when they thought the lines were equal. The percentage by which "a" must be longer than "b" before the lines are adjudged equal - what they call the "point of subjective equality" (PSE) - varies substantially between subjects from different cultures - and, importantly, WEIRD-subjects are extreme outliers. The results are summarized in the following graph:

Both WEIRD adults and children (aged 5-11) require "a" to be 18%+ longer than "b" before they're perceived as equal, but for the San and South African miners, the illusion simply does not exist - their PSEs are not statistically distinguishable from 0. Why this difference arises is unknown, but Segall et. al. claim it is due to WEIRD people's visual systems developing differently because modern environments expose them to ("unnatural") shapes like 'carpeted corners', thus calibrating their visual systems in a way that favors the emergence of the illusion. Whatever the true explanation, however, it is clear that it is not permissible to use the existence of the illusion among WEIRD subjects to make inferences about the visual system. This is especially true since the San subjects were hunter-gatherers, just like all people for the vast majority of human evolutionary history. Given that species-typical features of the visual system would have evolved in this period, it is particularly telling that PSE seems to be positively correlated with the 'modernity' of the societies in question. (Warning: this is an "eyeball" observation; I haven't done a proper statistical analysis. Caveat emptor).

This is one example from an extremely long paper, but it conveys a flavor of the kind of evidence the authors present. (For much more, see "We agree it's WEIRD, but is it WEIRD enough?" over at Neuroanthropology). Having read the article very carefully, and despite some concerns, I think Henrich, Heine and Norenzayan are right: the Western undergraduate is often unrepresentative of humanity, and the behavioral science literature needs a lot of fixing as a result. (Most obviously, we need far more large, highly-powered, globally representative, prospectively designed, cross-cultural studies). Serious as this is, unfortunately, it gets worse... Since David and I worked extremely hard to present our argument clearly and concisely in our commentary (pdf - our piece starts on p. 44 of the pdf, paginated by BBS as p. 104), and I doubt I could improve on it, what follows is a slightly edited - simplified and somewhat de-academicized - version of the meat of our argument. (Note: each issue of BBS consists of a "target article" - in this case, Henrich et. al. - and 20 or so short peer-commentaries).

Henrich et al. underplay – to the point of missing – that how the behavioural sciences research community itself is constituted introduces biases. That the subject-pool of behavioural science is so shallow is indeed a serious problem, but so is the fact that the majority of behavioural researchers are themselves deeply WEIRD. People in Western countries have, on average, a remarkably homogeneous set of values compared to the full range of worldwide variability (Inglehart & Welzel 2005), and the data Henrich and his colleagues present suggest similarly population-level homogeneity in cognitive styles. Moreover, academics are more uniform than the populations from which they are drawn, so it is likely behavioral scientists are even WEIRDer than their most common subjects. Henrich and his colleagues review a bunch of studies and experiments that did not strike those who designed and conducted them as focused on outliers. Intelligent scientists acting in good faith conducted, peer-reviewed, and published this research, in many cases honestly believing that it threw light on human nature. This forcefully illustrates the power of the biases on the part of researchers themselves. It also suggests that, besides widening the pool of subjects, there are significant gains to be made by broadening the range of inputs to the scientific process, including in the conception, design, and evaluation of empirical and theoretical work. Given that diverse groups are demonstrably better at some kinds of problem solving, as things stand, the WEIRD-dominated literature is robbed of potentially worthwhile perspectives, critiques, and hypotheses that a truly global research community could provide. Clearly, simply increasing the number of behavioural sciences researchers will, in general, be beneficial. Our key contention, though, is that the marginal benefits of additional Western researchers are much smaller than the marginal benefits of more non-Western researchers, among other things, just because they are non-Western.

The non-Western world, in short, can contribute not only additional subjects to experiment upon – the main focus of the target article’s recommendations – but also additional researchers, with novel perspectives and ideas and who are less affected by WEIRD biases. (Naturally, these researchers will have biases of their own. Our claim is not that there is someone who consistently knows better; it is that diverse groups of investigators can avoid some kinds of error.) Clearly, these researchers will have to be educated, will likely be middle class, and, since science flourishes in politically open societies, they will tend be concentrated in liberal countries. Nevertheless, additional non-Western researchers, even if they are educated and relatively wealthy, could be a boon to the behavioural sciences.

A direct and powerful way to remedy both sources of bias – too many WEIRD subjects and too few non-WEIRD researchers – is to foster research capacity in the non-Western world. Non-WEIRD researchers tend to study non-WEIRD subjects, so increasing their number will deepen the subject pool and widen the range of inputs to the scientific process at the same time. Building research capacity, however, should not merely involve collaborations led by WEIRD researchers; it should aim to generate studies led and initiated by non-Western researchers. Committed and long-term inter-institutional collaboration between Western and non-Western universities focused on remedying the deficits in the behavioral sciences literature should include internships at Western universities for non-Western researchers, stints at non-Western universities for WEIRD researchers, and extensive student exchange programs (especially for graduate students). Unlike many existing scholarship and exchange programs in the sciences, a key point of the necessary programs should be for the learning to proceed in both directions.

----------------------------------
Henrich, J., Heine, S., & Norenzayan, A. (2010). The weirdest people in the world? Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 33 (2-3), 61-83 DOI: 10.1017/S0140525X0999152X

Meadon, M., & Spurrett, D. (2010). It's not just the subjects – there are too many WEIRD researchers Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 33 (2-3), 104-105 DOI: 10.1017/S0140525X10000208

Lazy Linking

"The Durban Boredom Festival"

• So a friend, my fiancée and I went to a local psychic fair recently. I was planning to write about it... but it was a horrid experience, so I never got round it it. Luckily, Angela (the aforementioned fiancée) has written a great account of what went down at the fair and trust me, short as it is, her post contains everything you'll possibly want to know about it. Overall conclusion: way too much incense, rampant woo, boring as hell, complete ripoff.

"The latest verdict on using brain imaging for lie detection"

• BPS Research Digest reports on using fMRI et. al. to spot lying. Short version: it doesn't work. (At least not yet).

"Offensive Play: How different are dogfighting and football?"

• Malcolm Gladwell's latest New Yorker piece in which he compares the morality of dogfighting - almost universally reviled - with that of American football. It turns out that, like with boxing, a football career often results in an Alzheimers-like condition called chronic traumatic encephalopathy. Amazingly, new resarch using accelerometers has revealed players regularly suffer hits to the head of up to 90gs. Not surprisingly this is a Bad Thing that does severe damage to the brain over the long run. Gladwell suggests this may make football morally comparable to dogfighting: the injuries and suffering of the players are an inherent and ineradicable feature of the game.
• As a big rugby fan I couldn't help wondering what the situation is like for my favorite Saturday diversion. Do rugby players also suffer as much damage? Obviously, only research could settle the issue (and some may already exist, I don't know). From the armchair, it's difficult to tell: on the one hand, there are many fewer hits to the head in rugby but, on the other, the players don't wear helmets or much protective gear. My (rather bland) guess, for the little that's worth, is that brain trauma is not as common in rugby as it is in football or boxing, but significantly more prevalent than in the general populace. I'm not going to stop watching though, that's for sure.

"Psychology: A Reality Check" (paywall, I think)

• A great Nature editorial calling for evidence-based clinical psychology in the United States. I'd say it's also much needed elsewhere, the training of psychologists is often criminally devoid of science or even critical thinking. 
• "Clinical psychology at least has its roots in experimentation, but it is drifting away from science. Concerns about cost–benefit issues are growing, especially in the United States. According to a damning report [pdf] published last week an alarmingly high proportion of practitioners consider scientific evidence to be less important than their personal — that is, subjective — clinical experience."
  
• "The irony is that, during the past 20 years, science has made great strides in directions that could support clinical psychology — in neuroimaging, for example, as well as molecular and behavioural genetics, and cognitive neuroscience. Numerous psychological interventions have been proved to be both effective and relatively cheap. Yet many psychologists continue to use unproven therapies that have no clear outcome measures — including, in extreme cases, such highly suspect regimens as 'dolphin-assisted therapy'."

"How We Lost Our Diversity"

• Interesting piece by the excellent Ann Gibbons about new research on the causes of human genetic homogeneity (relative to other primates).
• "Modern humans are a lot alike - at least at the genetic level - compared with other primates. If you compare any two people from far-flung corners of the globe, their genomes will be much more similar than those of any pair of chimpanzees, gorillas, or other apes from different populations. Now, evolutionary geneticists have shown that our ancestors lost much of their genetic diversity in two dramatic bottlenecks that sharply squeezed down the population of modern humans as they moved out of Africa between 60,000 and 50,000 years ago."
• See also: John Hawks' fairly critical analysis of the same study.

"Analogies to apes lead us on the wrong track"

• Razib Khan over at Gene Expression on how Ardi drives home the message that drawing analogies between humans and the other extant apes can be misleading. Six million years is a long time, and there's no reason to think our common ancestor with the chimps and bonobos was particularly chimp-like. Somewhat counterintuitively, the opposite might even be true.

"Dear Penn and Teller: Bullshit!"

• I've only recently remembered that I have Season 6 of Penn & Teller's Bullshit so I'm only watching it now. And like Massimo Pigliucci in the above post, I just hated their episode (6-06) on environmentalism. Libertarians so obviously have blinkers on when it comes to global warming that it positively amazes me that they're not more self-critical. It also reminds us all, of course, that being vigilant about our own biases is important.  

"Islam: A Shifting Focus"

• One of the most widespread misconceptions about Islam is that most of its faithful are Arabs. In actual fact, Asian Muslims vastly outnumber Muslims from other parts of the world, making up 61.9% of the global number of 1.57 billion believers.
• "A new survey of the world’s Muslim population, by the Pew Research Center based in Washington, DC, will help those who are keen to break that link [i.e. the perception that most Muslims are Arabs]. It estimates the total number of Muslims in the world at 1.57 billion, or about 23% of a global population of 6.8 billion. Almost two-thirds of Muslims live in Asia, with Indonesia providing the biggest contingent (203m), followed by Pakistan (174m) and India (160m)."
• "Perhaps more surprising will be the finding that the European country with the highest Muslim population is not France or Germany, but Russia, where 16.5m adherents of Islam make up nearly 12% of the total national population. Compared with other surveys, the report gives a lowish estimate for the number of Muslims in France (3.6m), as it does for the United States (2.5m); in both those countries, secular principles make it impossible to ask religious questions on a census."

Carnival of Evolution 16

• A superb edition of the Carnival of Evolution - there are many worthwhile posts to check out. My pieces on foxes and on chameleons were featured. 

Gladwell's latest

Malcolm Gladwell has a new piece out in the New Yorker about overconfidence. He argues, in brief (and among other things), that when we become overconfident we blur the line between things we can control and things we cannot. A particularly interesting bit:

The psychologist Ellen Langer once had subjects engage in a betting game against either a self-assured, well-dressed opponent or a shy and badly dressed opponent (in Langer’s delightful phrasing, the “dapper” or the “schnook” condition), and she found that her subjects bet far more aggressively when they played against the schnook. They looked at their awkward opponent and thought, I’m better than he is. Yet the game was pure chance: all the players did was draw cards at random from a deck, and see who had the high hand. This is called the “illusion of control”: confidence spills over from areas where it may be warranted (“I’m savvier than that schnook”) to areas where it isn’t warranted at all (“and that means I’m going to draw higher cards”).

While this article certainly isn't among Gladwell's best work, it's still worth the read.

Related: Dan Ariely on how we are influenced more by confidence than by expertise. Disturbing thought, especially for scientists who are trained to be careful about their claims.

Wiseman blogs...

Richard Wiseman, "the Quirkologist" and the world's only professor of the public understanding of psychology, has finally started a blog... Go read!

(Via Skepchick).

Participate in an experiment...

My favorite psychologist Richard Wiseman has teamed up with New Scientist magazine to conduct an interesting looking mass psychology experiment. Participating is simple: you fill in a brief questionnaire and then email in a portrait photograph of yourself. Allegedly, the aim of the experiment is to investigate the relationship between personality and appearance and somehow merging the photos together will aid this endeavor. I, for one, don't buy this for a second: my guess is deception is afoot and that they'll simply throw away most of the answers to the questionnaire and then use the photographs to replicate the finding that average faces are usually judged to be more attractive than almost any individual's face. Whatever the case may be, participate, it'll be fun...

Oh, and I see Wiseman appears on this week's edition of The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe podcast. I haven't heard the interview yet, but I'm sure it'll be worth a listen.

Video: Pinker on the blank slate

Steven Pinker, evolutionary psychologist extraordinaire, has given several TEDTalks; the most recently released is a 2003 presentation on his most excellent book, The Blank Slate. The video is embedded below (or click here).

Books II

Every month or so I write mini-reviews of some the books I have read recently.

Perhaps reading multiple rave reviews set my expectations too high, but I wasn’t blown away Mistakes Were Made (but not by me) by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson. To be clear, the book is excellent and thought-provoking, but it’s not quite up there with the recent non-fiction classics (How the Mind Works, Guns, Germs and Steel and so on). Tavris and Aronson are both eminent social psychologists and their aim is to demonstrate just how much people are beset by cognitive illusions such as confirmation bias and cognitive dissonance. The book is at its best when the authors summarize the relevant social psychology demonstrating, for example, that memory is a ‘self-justifying historian’ and fallible in the extreme, that clinical judgments divorced from experimental evidence is a recipe for disaster, that the criminal justice system regularly convicts innocent people because it does not sufficiently account for human fallibility and so on. The book deteriorates towards the end because the authors stray too far from solid evidence: the final chapter (“Letting Go and Owning Up”), for example, is insipid because they don’t seem to have evidence for their thesis that knowing about biases and cognitive dissonance can reduce their effect. Further negatives: Tavris and Aronson continually use a decidedly unhelpful metaphor of “the pyramid” (don’t ask), their emphasis on cognitive dissonance over the other biases seems overdone, some of their examples are a bit pat, and there are some contradictions (they claim, for example, that Americans see mistakes as stupid, but then insist in the final chapter that people who admit making mistakes are honored). Despite these problems, Mistakes Were Made is a fantastic book; the only people who won’t find it enlightening are those already familiar (and comfortable) with the illusions and biases literature. (See also: Tavris’ interview on Point of Inquiry and her blog interview with Greta Christina).

Abusing Science: The Case Against Creationism by Philip Kitcher is an excellent little book that just blows the anti-evolutionists out of the water. Kitcher, a philosopher of science, wrote the book while he was a visiting scholar at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University in the company of Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Lewontin and others. At least one good thing and one bad thing resulted: the good thing was this book, which is a scholarly, scientifically well-informed, philosophically savvy and utterly convincing demolition of “scientific creationism”. The bad thing, to speculate somewhat, was Kitcher’s later horrendously misinformed tract against sociobiology, Vaulting Ambition. That is, I strongly suspect Kitcher was convinced by the radical science nutters (led by Gould) that sociobiology was dangerous pseudoscience. Speculation aside, Abusing Science is terrific – it may have been published in 1982, but it’s still relevant for the simple reason that creationism (even its latest incarnation as “Intelligent Design theory”) simply doesn’t change.

I really like Michael Shermer in several ways – I think he’s charming, smart and exceedingly eloquent (there is no better testament to his abilities than his TEDTalk on skepticism). However, I have to admit that I wasn’t all that impressed by Why Darwin Matters: The Case Against Intelligent Design. Firstly, some fairly minor quibbles: Shermer comes across conceited (naming a ‘law’ after himself, talking excessively about his achievements), he seems to be naïve about philosophy of science (in stark contrast to Kitcher) and, inexcusably, I spotted far too many logical fallacies. My real problem with the book, however, is that I thought it was unscholarly and its arguments were mostly unconvincing: I just don’t think Shermer did enough intellectual legwork. (The one exception is Shermer’s admirably clear treatment of the anthropic principle). Obviously, I already agree with his conclusions and I’m certainly not his target audience, but he does not marshal the best arguments for evolution and against intelligent design. That said, I think people who believe in intelligent design or creationism would benefit from Why Darwin Matters and I would recommend it for that audience, those already familiar with evolutionary biology can steer clear. (See also: Shermer’s interview on Point of Inquiry and his talk at the Cato Institute about the book. Note: he comes across far better in person than in the book).

I reviewed No Country For Old Men last time round, and my views of Cormac McCarthy’s latest novel, The Road, is very similar. The novel, very briefly, follows a father and his young son’s journey south as they struggle to survive several years after an unnamed disaster brought an end to civilization and made the cultivation of food impossible. It is a gripping, terrifying and epic tale, told in McCarthy’s inimitable, free-flowing prose. The Road, make no mistake, is a terrific novel and I expect McCarthy to win the Nobel Prize before long. Like with No Country For Old Men, however, I really didn’t like the ending. [Warning: plot spoilers follow]. As you’ll know if you’ve read the book, in the end the father dies of an illness and the boy is rescued by some mysterious man who had been tracking them. I smell a deus ex machina (in the original sense of an arbitrary and convenient plot device introduced to end a story satisfactorily). Every single other character the father and son encounter on their journey is horrible: there are thieves, murderers, cannibals, and blood cultists, among many others. Indeed, even the old man they help turns out to be an ungrateful wrench. Yet, suddenly, just when it is convenient, “the good guys” arrive out of nowhere to save the boy. I hate to sound callous, but McCarthy should have stayed true to his story, stuck to its bleak themes, and let the boy die. [Spoilers end]. That said, read the book, it’s superb. (See also McCarthy interview on Oprah).

Trick or Treatment? Alternative Medicine on Trial by Simon Singh and Edzard Ernst is an outstanding, indeed exemplary, treatment of medical pseudoscience and quackery. Singh, a science journalist, and Ernst, the world’s first professor of alternative medicine, examine four common alternative modalities: acupuncture, homeopathy, chiropractic and herbal medicine. In each case, they relate the treatment’s history, discuss its principles and methods, summarize the relevant clinical evidence and then make an overall assessment. Their conclusions will not surprise skeptics: with the exception of the herb St. John’s Wort (for depression), there is no evidence that any of the above-mentioned modalities have an effect beyond placebo, and some (chiropractic particularly) carry non-trivial risks.
Importantly, Singh and Ernst start the book with a chapter entitled “How Do You Determine the Truth?” which explains the scientific method and, vitally, its rationale, using historical medical advances (James Lind’s cure for scurvy and Florence Nightingale’s innovations, particularly). That first chapter alone is worth the price of the book: it is a perspicacious, detailed, persuasive, and unusually interesting defense of evidence-based medicine. Further virtues: the book is easy to follow but not superficial, the prose is lively and engaging, the explanations and illustrations are clear throughout and, probably most importantly, they get the science exactly right. Pretty much the only negative thing I have to say is that the introduction contains a bit too much foot-stomping and puffery about the authors’ neutrality, love of truth and rigor – a bit of humility is in order. My bottom-line: read this book, buy copies for your quackery-loving friends and family and spread the word. (See also: Singh's interview on The Skeptics Guide to the Universe).

Martin Gardner may have written the first edition of Fads & Fallacies in the Name of Science in 1952 bit it is still relevant and certainly still worth reading. The first thing that stands out about this book is just how dedicated and scholarly Gardner was: he pioneered modern scientific skepticism so he could not rely much on previous work. As a result, he was forced to do an enormous amount of original research – he had to wade through countless obscure pseudoscientific tomes and then rely on his own judgment for a conclusion. Remarkably, despite taking positions on over twenty pseudosciences (sadly, many of which are still current), Gardner got it entirely right in almost all of the details. Moreover, his style is extremely appealing because he avoids hectoring and the temptation to nitpick, being content, on the contrary, to let silliness speak for itself. Finally, Gardner's book is particularly valuable to skeptics because it provides a sense of perspective and proportion: many of our current problems (like celebrities endorsing pseudoscience) is not new, and might have been worse in the past. Fads & Fallacies, in short, is a classic that richly deserves a continued readership.

Lawrence Keeley’s War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage is an enormously important book that has not received nearly as much attention as it deserves. (By the way, I’ve blogged about an aspect of this book before). Keeley, an archeologist who specializes in Neolithic Europe, argues we have “artificially ‘pacified the past’ and shared a pervasive bias against the possibility of prehistoric warfare” (p. vii). His thesis, in other words, is that prehistoric warfare was at least as violent as modern warfare, and probably much more so. Keeley marshals masses of evidence in support of this conclusion, including excavated fortifications, mass graves, skeletons of unequivocal murder victims, in addition to an argument from ethnographic analogy. The latter argument is especially interesting: to establish the plausibility of prehistoric warfare, he reviews the evidence that current non-state societies are far from peaceful. The evidence here, incidentally, is absolutely overwhelming: over 40% of all people in tribal societies die violent deaths, compared to less than 1% for the U.S. and Europe in the 20th century including both World Wars. Had the world experienced violent death-rates in the 20th century comparable to those of non-state societies, billions of people would have died, instead of hundreds of million. Some negatives: Keeley’s prose is a touch purple in places, he extrapolates a bit too far once or twice (taking findings about trade in non-state societies to make recommendations for state policy), he denigrates Western military strategy too much and I think he caricatures Hobbes’ position. Overall, though, the book is fantastic: it is scholarly, interesting and entirely convincing. A particularly nice quote to give you a feel for the book:

The burned villages, the arrowheads embedded in bones, the death tolls, and the mutilated corpses speak more truthfully, more passionately on this dismal subject than all the recorded verbiage of the living, which is riddled with cant, sophistry, and flights of fancy. The dead voices heard here tell us that war has an ugly sameness; it is always a compound of crimes no matter what kind of society is involved or when in time it occurs. After exploring war before civilization in search of something less terrible than the wars we know, we merely arrive where we started with an all-too-familiar catalog of deaths, rapes, pillages, destruction and terror (p. 173-174).

Impossible experiments

The fantastic BPS Research Digest posed an interesting question to bunch of psychologists a while back: "What's the most important psychology experiment that's Never been done?" Now (the considerably less fantastic) Psychology Today has done something similar: they asked their resident bloggers to dream up the experiment they would most like to do if ethics or logistics didn't stand in the way. A couple of the answers were a bit, well, unimaginative (especially from the philosophers - tellingly, they proposed Baconian, not Galilean experiments). I'll echo Vaughn and say I most liked Bella DePaulo's proposal:

I'd like to take couples who are living together and randomly assign half of them to marry and the others to stay unmarried. Then we could really know something about the implications of co-habitation vs. marriage. More outrageously, take people who are not in a serious romantic relationship, and assign half of them, at random, to marry. Single people are randomly assigned to a spouse who is chosen at random, or to a spouse who fits their description of their perfect partner, or to stay single. Who do you think would end up the happiest a decade later? Same for divorce. If married parents are already at each other's throats, is it better for the children if they divorce, or stay together? Randomly assign half of them to divorce, and half to stay together; then we'll see. Now take married couples who say they are happy and are not considering divorce. Randomly assign half of them to divorce! Now who will be happier ten years hence?

From my recent post about the Stockholm Syndrome it should be clear what my answer to this question would be...

(Hat tip: Mind Hacks).

Skepticism and your lying brain

I blogged about Wang and Aamodt's 'public service announcement' to the effect that "your brain lies to you" the other day. Steven Novella, the über-skeptic, blogged about the same article and interestingly related it to scientific skepticism. Novella argues, among other things, that it is important to try to counteract source amnesia and that we must take care not to entrench myths when debunking them:

In terms of skeptical activism, knowledge of this aspect of human memory can help skeptics frame their message. We do not, for example, want to mention a myth that is not already generally known for the purpose of refuting it. We also need to be conscious of how we state things. Rather than saying that the claim that people use 10% of their brain is a myth, we should say first that people use 100% of their brain - first establish the framework of the positive true statement.

Also we need to emphasize teaching the tools of how to think, rather than just telling people what to think. Along these lines we need to teach people how we know what we know in science, not just the current findings of science. If you teach the process of arriving at a conclusion, that automatically gives them a framework to help remember information correctly and also gives them the ability to reproduce the argument and re-arrive at the correct conclusion - rather than just having to remember it correctly by rote.

Public service announcement: Your brain lies to you

Samuel Wang and Sandra Aamodt (authors of Welcome to Your Brain: Why You Lose Your Car Keys but Never Forget How to Drive and Other Puzzles of Everyday Life) have a fairly interesting and useful piece in the NYT entitled "Your Brain Lies to You". None of this will be new to those familiar with the heuristics and biases research literature, but the article is certainly useful as a 'public service announcement': it's important to popularize the finding that we are fallible, liable to lapses of memory and subject to all sorts of biases. A representative paragraph from the article:

The brain does not simply gather and stockpile information as a computer’s hard drive does. Facts are stored first in the hippocampus, a structure deep in the brain about the size and shape of a fat man’s curled pinkie finger. But the information does not rest there. Every time we recall it, our brain writes it down again, and during this re-storage, it is also reprocessed. In time, the fact is gradually transferred to the cerebral cortex and is separated from the context in which it was originally learned. For example, you know that the capital of California is Sacramento, but you probably don’t remember how you learned it.

(See also: Wang and Aamodt's blog and their talk at Google).

PsyBlog on Mind-Myths

The most excellent PsyBlog has just finished a series of ten articles on Mind-Myths: those persistent fables about our minds that many of "the folk" subscribe to. My favorite myth busting pieces: we don't use only 10% of our brain, the placebo effect cannot affect cancer and hemispheric specialization in the brain is much more complex and you might think.

I highly recommend PsyBlog by the way, it's certainly one of the best psychology blogs on the web. Check it out!

Lazy linking: Some popular pieces

There has been a flood of really interesting popular articles relevant to this blog in the last couple of weeks. Here are a few of them...

Pride of place must go to Dr. Mark Colvin's short, sharp critique of homeopathy. Colvin argues convincingly that South Africa (and Africa generally) should only use medicine that has been shown to be effective. He concludes: "Internationally there is a growing recognition that approaches that claim to have beneficial health effects must be substantiated scientifically. Maybe we should follow suit and seriously review the contribution that homeopathy and other forms of complementary medicine have, or do not have, towards improving human health."

Scientific American's fantastic psychology/neuroscience/cognitive science blog Mind Matters published a good piece on embodied cognition. The author, Art Glenberg, begins by attacking the "mind as computer" analogy, summarizes some recent research and then speculates about the possibility of using the findings of embodied cognition research to help improve pedagogy. While I'm somewhat skeptical of the more extreme claims made by embodied cognition enthusiasts, Glenberg's article is interesting and worthwhile.

Then there is Jim Holt's genuinely fantastic New Yorker article on "the numbers guy", Stanislas Dehaene. Dehaene, a cognitive neuroscientist at the Collège de France, is one of the leading lights in the field of numerical cognition, the study of the cognitive and neurological bases of the number sense. The article is long and detailed but definitely worth it.

The Times ran a light-hearted but interesting article on "finger expert" John Manning. Manning, a psychologist at the University of Central Lanchester, has established pretty convincingly that sporting ability, sexual orientation and a number of other variables correlate strongly with 2nd to 4th digit finger ratio. The finger ratio, in turn, is determined by prenatal exposure to sex hormones such as testosterone. (To be clear, the hypothesis is that prenatal hormonal exposure determines both sporting ability, etc. and finger ratios. The ratio, in other words, is a proxy, it's not directly causal).

Finally, Time Magazine tackled expert performance in its article "The Science of Experience". The bottom line of the literature the article summarizes is that experience alone does not result in expertize; it is the combination of "deliberative practice" ("dedicated, slogging, generally solitary exertion") and regularly obtaining accurate feedback that yields expert performance. (Please ignore the silly speculation about Obama and Clinton, I have no idea why the journalist found it necessary to ruin a perfectly good science article with such cant.)

Video: Dan Gilbert on Happiness

Social psychologist Daniel Gilbert is a well known researcher in the burgeoning field of happiness studies ('positive psychology') and author of the award-winning Stumbling on Happiness. In the fantastic TEDTalk embedded below (or click here to go directly to the video) Gilbert summarizes a number of interesting findings, specifically how cognitive biases such as impact bias affect common sense notions of what makes us happy.

Video: The Stanford prison experiment

One of my favorite quotes in social psychology is from Stanley Milgram's seminal Obedience to Authority (1974): "The social psychology of this century reveals a major lesson: often it is not so much the kind of person a man is as the kind of situation in which he finds himself that determines how he will act." Two classic experiments illustrate this view perfectly: Milgram's own obedience studies and Philip Zimbardo's Stanford prison experiment. The following video contains (inter alia) extremely interesting - and poignant - reflections on this view by an ex-guard and an ex-prisoner in Zimbardo's experiment. (Click here to go directly to the video).



Links

• Official website of the Stanford Prison Experiment
• Zimbardo interviewed on All in the Mind
• Psyblog's excellent entry on the Milgram obedience studies
  

Bibliography

Milgram, S. (1974) Obedience to Authority (New York: Harper & Row).

Video: Richard Wiseman

Richard Wiseman, the holder of the world's only professorship in the public understanding of psychology, is this week's guest on CFI's fantastic podcast Point of Inquiry. He has produced some seriously cool videos demonstrating various psychological effects, several of which have gone viral on YouTube. I've selected my two favorites and embedded them below, there's a full listing of available videos on Wiseman's YouTube channel.

The first video, embedded below (or click here to go directly to the video at YouTube), is called "colour changing card trick" and is stupendously good. I don't want to spoil it for you by giving too much away, but you'll feel blind afterwards - I certainly did!



The second video, also embedded below (or click here to go directly to the video at YouTube), is called "The Prediction" and is equally fantastic - it would have freaked me out if I still believed in free-will.