psychology

David Sloan Wilson has been posting a series on behavioral economics ("Economics and evolution as different paradigms"). This, broadly speaking, is based on the idea that humans are not rational actors, and the ways that we act irrationally actually matter to the subjects of traditional economics, like markets and

In Wilson's description, focusing on some recent books, it's a field that badly needs an infusion of evolution:

As a symptom of the problem, consider the number of times that the word "evolution" is used in the three aforementioned books. It's easy for me to check because I have them on my Kindle. The answer is zero, zero, and two respectively, with the two uses in Animal Spirits tangential. Somehow, these authors think they can identify the real Homo sapiens without consulting the genetic evolution of our species or cultural evolution as an ongoing process. With a handful of exceptions, this is representative of the field as a whole.

How is this possible? The subtitle of Animal Spirits provides the answer: Behavioral economists consult psychology, not evolution, in their quest to find the real Homo sapiens, and their psychological inquiry does not lead them to consult evolution in any meaningful sense. This is because most psychologists don't consult evolution in any meaningful sense.

I have seen a number of preprints from people trying to integrate evolutionary perspectives into behavioral economics. A problem is that they are very simplistic on the evolutionary side, in some of the same ways that evolutionary psychology can be. Humans are not rational actors, but neither are they identical to each other. If the model does not entail explanations for variability, then it's not going to explain many interesting phenomena.

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports on an "internal document" from the Marc Hauser investigation: "Document Sheds Light on Investigation at Harvard". The Chronicle story begins by detailing how discrepancies in coding monkey behavioral responses first came to light, but stops short of giving fuller insight into the investigation. This extract conveys some of the breadth of what was uncovered:

They then reviewed Mr. Hauser's coding and, according to the research assistant's statement, discovered that what he had written down bore little relation to what they had actually observed on the videotapes. He would, for instance, mark that a monkey had turned its head when the monkey didn't so much as flinch. It wasn't simply a case of differing interpretations, they believed: His data were just completely wrong.

As word of the problem with the experiment spread, several other lab members revealed they had had similar run-ins with Mr. Hauser, the former research assistant says. This wasn't the first time something like this had happened. There was, several researchers in the lab believed, a pattern in which Mr. Hauser reported false data and then insisted that it be used.

The article also extracts an e-mail from Hauser to his graduate students at the time of the incident. It's not shocking in its tone -- certainly no more than many of those leaked climate e-mails -- but it does show the kind of pressure he was imposing upon the graduate students working on his experiments.

(via Greg Laden)

Here are some links that have been piling up in my browser tabs this week:

NY Times: "Scientists Find a Shared Gene in Dogs With Compulsive Behavior"

Afarensis links the Google Books archive of Darwinism Illustrated by George Romanes (1892).

Julien Riel-Salvatore links a new paper on projectile point dynamics by the Mythbusters.

In the arXiv: "To Understand Congress, Just Watch the Sandpile"

It turns out that the way a particular resolution gains support can be accurately simulated by the avalanches that occur when grains of sand are dropped onto each other to form a pile.

Gene Expression: "Rice, alcohol and genes" reviews evidence for the origin of an adaptive ADH1B variant in China.

The Scholarly Kitchen: "Why Hasn’t Scientific Publishing Been Disrupted Already?"

The Dynamist links to a a 1927 film review of Metropolis by author H. G. Wells. He didn't like the movie:

Torches are Christian, we are asked to suppose; torches are human. Torches have hearts. But electric hand-lamps are wicked, mechanical, heartless things. The bad, bad inventor uses quite a big one.

The Wall Street Journal says that fashion trends are out. Unless you count steampunk. Maybe it's all microtrends now.

Jonah Lehrer reports on what happens when scientists see the unexpected:

According to Dunbar, even after scientists had generated their “error” multiple times — it was a consistent inconsistency — they might fail to follow it up. “Given the amount of unexpected data in science, it’s just not feasible to pursue everything,” Dunbar says. “People have to pick and choose what’s interesting and what’s not, but they often choose badly.” And so the result was tossed aside, filed in a quickly forgotten notebook. The scientists had discovered a new fact, but they called it a failure.

The description of Kevin Dunbar's work is interesting -- he's a "cognitive scientist" but the work is almost anthropology in the context of scientific labs.

When Dunbar reviewed the transcripts of the meeting, he found that the intellectual mix generated a distinct type of interaction in which the scientists were forced to rely on metaphors and analogies to express themselves. (That’s because, unlike the E. coli group, the second lab lacked a specialized language that everyone could understand.) These abstractions proved essential for problem-solving, as they encouraged the scientists to reconsider their assumptions. Having to explain the problem to someone else forced them to think, if only for a moment, like an intellectual on the margins, filled with self-skepticism.

As described in the story, the process of science is like a big noise filter, where theoretically unexpected results are systematically eliminated. I will note the positive aspect: when we find an unexpected result repeatedly, our confidence that it is signal and not noise is vastly higher. So all these attempts to squelch the unexpected create a mental environment in which we can sometimes recognize it.

Sometimes. But as Lehrer describes, humans are good at conforming their mental world to the expected. Strangest line: "the Aristotelian video with the aberrant balls."

New frontiers in human research subjects: PARC researcher Markus Jacobsson describes how to find anonymous research subjects via Amazon's "Mechanical Turk" service.

Mechanical Turk is a virtual marketplace that pays people to perform tasks that software can't easily automate. People earn a few pennies for each minute of tasks like "Summarize a website in one sentence" or "Find a travel-related online video" (two examples that happen to be available as I'm writing). You can see how paying a dime for anonymous users to find travel videos would be cheaper than tasking a full-time employee to catalog YouTube entries, and might discover many sources that an in-house employee would miss.

Some psychologists have found an unexpected source of research subjects in the Mechanical Turk. It's a whole lot cheaper to pay anonymous users for small online tasks than to find subjects and pay them to come into a lab for an afternoon. Of course, psychologists face the IRB barrier:

Many Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) treat MTurk studies as exempt from review since prospective subjects have accepted its terms of use and anonymity. However, you can't be certain that subjects are not from particularly "vulnerable" groups (e.g., minors) as defined by the Belmont Report. This is a common problem with network-based human subjects research, of course, and not specific to MTurk.

The article goes on to describe some fascinating experimental tricks psychologists use to get (relatively) honest answers out of paid research subjects. One target of research is vulnerability to pfishing attacks:

You can also perform much more invasive studies where you actually attempt to defraud them, only to see what portion of users fall for it. But this has to be done with extreme care — or you'll become a criminal! Your IRB will offer you plenty of advice if you decide to try an experiment of this type – be sure to read up on some ways in which it has been successfully done before submitting your application.

I'm glad I'm not in that line of work. Still, I found it hard to look away, and it seems like a "new frontier" in terms of rapidly profiling and developing experiments. Genetics isn't the only field with ethics being changed by technology and online networks.

(via Slashdot)

I found an interesting essay by Lera Boroditsky on Edge, titled, "How does our language shape the way we think?" She describes cross-cultural psychology experiments that test the ways that perception is affected by language differences.

Even basic aspects of time perception can be affected by language. For example, English speakers prefer to talk about duration in terms of length (e.g., "That was a short talk," "The meeting didn't take long"), while Spanish and Greek speakers prefer to talk about time in terms of amount, relying more on words like "much" "big", and "little" rather than "short" and "long" Our research into such basic cognitive abilities as estimating duration shows that speakers of different languages differ in ways predicted by the patterns of metaphors in their language. (For example, when asked to estimate duration, English speakers are more likely to be confused by distance information, estimating that a line of greater length remains on the test screen for a longer period of time, whereas Greek speakers are more likely to be confused by amount, estimating that a container that is fuller remains longer on the screen.)

I'd like to have seen more historical background -- the name Benjamin Lee Whorf isn't mentioned, for example -- and some more critical commentary on the negative evidence. But the positive examples are each interesting and help to show the subtle quality of the effects that today's psychologists mean when they talk about language influencing perception.

The Atlantic has a feature story, "What makes us happy?", about the Harvard Study of Adult Development -- a 72-year-old study of originally-normal Harvard undergraduates.

But as Vaillant points out, longitudinal studies, like wines, improve with age. And as the Grant Study men entered middle age—they spent their 40s in the 1960s—many achieved dramatic success. Four members of the sample ran for the U.S. Senate. One served in a presidential Cabinet, and one was president. There was a best-selling novelist (not, Vaillant has revealed, Norman Mailer, Harvard class of ’43). But hidden amid the shimmering successes were darker hues. As early as 1948, 20 members of the group displayed severe psychiatric difficulties. By age 50, almost a third of the men had at one time or another met Vaillant’s criteria for mental illness. Underneath the tweed jackets of these Harvard elites beat troubled hearts. Arlie Bock didn’t get it. “They were normal when I picked them,” he told Vaillant in the 1960s. “It must have been the psychiatrists who screwed them up.”

It's an odd story -- a longitudinal survey based on Freudian principles. JFK was one of the study's subjects. And probably the most enduring lesson, "Maturation makes liars of us all."

The Economist runs a little article about Sir Arthur Evans and Knossos:

Evans boldly argued that the Minoans, as he called the early islanders, shunned warfare, conveniently forgetting about the ruined watchtowers and fortification walls he had already identified elsewhere in Crete. In public lectures and a stream of articles after the first world war he presented a vision of a lost island paradise. Disillusioned artists and intellectuals were entranced by the idea of Minoans living close to nature, playfully leaping over bulls and worshipping a benign mother goddess.

Among those who swallowed the Knossos myth were Sigmund Freud, James Joyce and Pablo Picasso, though none of them visited the site.

The occasion is the publication of a new book by Cathy Gere, titled, Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism. It looks very interesting, so I ordered a copy. I'll report back when I've read it!

A long time ago, I got into a very heated argument with somebody about whether animals feel pleasure. I don't think we disagreed really in the particulars -- looking back, I would guess it was more a question where I accepted "pleasure" as a synonym for "feels good" and the other person had different ideas.

I didn't appreciate at the time that this was a well-known and old issue in biology, or that Darwin had written about the problem. So when I saw this article by Robin Nixon on current research into the psychology of emotion in animals, I thought I'd point to it. A short excerpt:

Kent Berridge, a biopsychologist at the University of Michigan, compared the brain activity and facial expressions of animals to that of a more readable creature: human infants. When given something pleasurable to taste, both rats and humans make almost identical mouth shapes and sucking motions. Their brain reactions also mirror one another. If we believe the infant "enjoys" the sweet taste based on her pleasant expression, it follows that the rat likely enjoys it too.

I think that will still be unsatisfying for people who think that "higher" emotions like pleasure really combine more basic feelings with higher cognitive functions like self-awareness and rationality. On the other hand, I'm not sure that we can really cover all humans under that kind of definition -- babies being a good example.