psychology

Vaughan Bell has a nice piece in the Guardian on folk psychology -- how ordinary people tend to think about their own thinking: "Our brains, and how they're not as simple as we think". This is a very important concept in the study of the evolution of human cognition, because how we think about our brains today may have little to do with the reasons why they changed over time.

For example, a great deal of psychology research has shown that we tend not to have a good insight into why we make certain choices. In one of the many studies in the area, Lars Hall and colleagues gave people a survey about their moral beliefs but used sleight of hand to change the choices they had originally made. When asked to justify the beliefs they hadn't endorsed, more than two-thirds of people didn't notice the switch and happily gave reasons for why they supported the opposite of their original position. Folk psychology tells us that we can accurately explain our actions and, consequently, many people think that these well-validated psychological effects never apply to them or simply don't exist. Suggesting that someone may not fully know their own actions and that their post-event justifications might be improvised simply won't wash in everyday conversation.

This is a phenomenon where psychology affects how we do scientific reasoning. I was doing this with my graduate students this morning -- taking the opposite pattern of data and explaining it as a function of the same evolutionary hypothesis. It's all too easy to justify post hoc a pattern by explaining it in terms of well-understood assumptions.

I ran into Deevy Bishop's review of a recent book by Noam Chomsky and James McGilvray, titled The Science of Language: Interviews with James McGilvray.

As someone who works on child language disorders, I have tried many times to read Chomsky in order to appreciate the insights that he is so often credited with. I regret to say that, over the years, I have come to the conclusion that, far from enhancing our understanding of language acquisition, his ideas have led to stagnation, as linguists have gone through increasingly uncomfortable contortions to relate facts about children’s language to his theories. The problem is that the theories are derived from a consideration of adult language, and take no account of the process of development. There is a fundamental problem with an essential premise about what is learned that has led to years of confusion and sterile theorizing.

Bishop's post led me to a review of the book by Language Log writer Geoffrey Pullum, "The Science of Language: Interviews with James McGilvray". The review is bad:

It continues thus, jargon jostling with loose conjecture and dogmatic assertions. Chomsky avers that words never refer to anything in the world; that "the entire discussion of the last century or so" about relations between physics and chemistry "was crazy"; that Darwin was wrong and evolution by natural selection (like Skinnerian behaviourism) cannot work; that there was no "serious research" on morality before 2000; that the practice of debating "is a tribute to human irrationality"; etc.

It gives rise to a spectacular train wreck of a comment thread, with a heated exchange between Pullum and McGilvray.

I'm starting my Biology of Mind course tomorrow, and so once again I'll be posting more neuroscience and psychology-related material than usual. Chomsky is quite a lot like Freud -- he has written an immense corpus, developed an idiosyncratic model of the mind, and is surrounded by a coterie of true believers. He has been the most prominent objector to the idea that language evolved as an adaptation in ancient humans. Understanding this view helps to focus attention on how we use adaptive models in biology and how they can apply to behavior.

And how model-builders can shift some assumptions to adapt to changing scientific data.

Yes, it is a star!

Ed Yong has a long article in Nature about the recurrent problems with non-replication of "Replication studies: Bad copy". The piece begins with the flap over Daryl Bem's work on ESP, in which journals refused to publish non-replications by other researchers. The sad part is that many other areas of psychology follow the same protocol as work on paranormal psychology: Publish highly massaged positive results, don't encourage anyone to replicate.

One reason for the excess in positive results for psychology is an emphasis on “slightly freak-show-ish” results, says Chris Chambers, an experimental psychologist at Cardiff University, UK. “High-impact journals often regard psychology as a sort of parlour-trick area,” he says. Results need to be exciting, eye-catching, even implausible. Simmons says that the blame lies partly in the review process. “When we review papers, we're often making authors prove that their findings are novel or interesting,” he says. “We're not often making them prove that their findings are true.”

Instead of actual replication, researchers sometimes pursue "conceptual replication": showing that similar experimental designs also yield positive results:

But to other psychologists, reliance on conceptual replication is problematic. “You can't replicate a concept,” says Chambers. “It's so subjective. It's anybody's guess as to how similar something needs to be to count as a conceptual replication.” The practice also produces a “logical double-standard”, he says. For example, if a heavy clipboard unconsciously influences people's judgements, that could be taken to conceptually replicate the slow-walking effect. But if the weight of the clipboard had no influence, no one would argue that priming had been conceptually falsified. With its ability to verify but not falsify, conceptual replication allows weak results to support one another. “It is the scientific embodiment of confirmation bias,” says Brian Nosek, a social psychologist from the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. “Psychology would suffer if it wasn't practised but it doesn't replace direct replication. To show that 'A' is true, you don't do 'B'. You do 'A' again.”

Someone quoted in the article compares this situation to a house of cards. I agree. You are building one assumption upon another. The disturbing part is that the discipline accepts that some researchers just have a "knack" for making a particular experimental design work, and other researchers may have trouble recreating the exact conditions. That very attitude enables fraud, as we have seen repeatedly during the last few years. In science, if no one else can make the experiment work, it didn't happen.

The entire article is worth reading and wide discussion.

The New York Times has a long profile of developmental psychologist Elizabeth Spielke, whose work with babies has opened a window on early cognition ("Insights from the youngest minds"). The article is wide-ranging and worth sharing. I thought I'd make an note of Spielke's version of the "cathedral" model in which distinct cognitive functions are combined by executive consciousness into synthetic abilities. She denotes language as the functional glue holding the brain's abilities together:

Dr. Spelke is also seeking to understand how the core domains of the human mind interact to yield our uniquely restless and creative intelligence — able to master calculus, probe the cosmos and play a Bach toccata as no bonobo or New Caledonian crow can. Even though “our core systems are fundamental yet limited,” as she put it, “we manage to get beyond them.”

Dr. Spelke has proposed that human language is the secret ingredient, the cognitive catalyst that allows our numeric, architectonic and social modules to join forces, swap ideas and take us to far horizons. “What’s special about language is its productive combinatorial power,” she said. “We can use it to combine anything with anything.”

She's in a position to test that by looking at prelinguistic children. I think there's much truth in the idea, but some functional integration must take place in any conscious organism, even without language. Language allows a complexity of expression, but complexity does not necessarily mean integration.