The Church of Rationality: Psychology

Showing posts with label Psychology. Show all posts

19/06/2015

A Two-Step Model of Class-typical Behaviour

Let's start with the example: In the U.S., high-SES people used to smoke more than low-SES people until about 1965. Then the lines crossed, once, and they never crossed again. These days, there are many high-SES people that you don't have to tell about health risks: to them, smoking is prole. And who wants to be prole?

More generally, there are many behaviours that low-SES people show more frequently than low-SES people, and vice-versa. Why? Let me propose a two-step model. First, there is some initial reason why a certain behaviour is shown more often by low-SES people. Then, the behaviour becomes associated with being low SES. Then, the behaviour is reduced even more by high-SES people.

Smoking is, I think, a good example. Initially, high-SES people may have had access to better information, or have been better at processing the information, or had more self-control, or have put a higher value on health, or what have you, or all of the above. This created an initial smoking gap. This helped associate smoking with being prole. This, in turn, caused people who don't want to be seen as prole to smoke less.

In some cases, the reason for the initial reason could simply be chance.

The model implies that SES differences in smoking were easier to explain in terms of the psychological factors mentioned above (more self-control, etc.) in 1970 than today. Generalizing this is left as an exercise to the reader.

25/05/2015

How to Keep Your Man Happy

1. Have sex with him when he wants to.

2. Don't question his respectability.

It seems to me these are the two rules that are true for almost every man, and at the same time are specific to keeping your man happy, rather than keeping your spouse happy.

28/04/2014

Seth Roberts Is Dead

Today, from his siter Amy, via his blog, came the message that Seth Roberts has passed away. My condolences to his family and friends.

I never met him, only had a few exchanges with him on this and his blog. Generally, I felt he went to far in his criticism of standard approaches, and put too much weight on low-quality evidence. But, as long as I knew of his work - and I certainly include his blogging here - I valued him as an original, unusual, and stimulating thinker. I believe that once the great weight gain in affluent countries ca. 1970-present is better understood, his learning theory of the set point will be a large part of the explanation.

Here are posts in which I discuss Seths work (some of them quite critical):

Two of his posts made it onto my year-end "Best Blogposts of..." lists:

Here are quotes of his that I found worth keeping. Here is his paper on self-experimentation in Behavioral and Brain Sciences. Here is his paper "What Makes Food Fattening?" Blowhard, Esq. remembers. Ben Casnocha remembers. Andrew Gelman remembers.

24/04/2014

Intelligence Researchers: "Regression to the mean [...] is purely a statistical artifact"

Whoa Nelly! In a very interesting ask-a-researcher thread on Pschological Comments, researcher Michael A. Woodley drops the following, which surprised me a fair bit. The context is that there is intergenerational regression to the mean in intelligence. That is, very smart parents tend to have children who are less smart than they are; very dull parents tend to have children who are less dull than they are. Or so I thought - and not just I, I'm sure. Woodley disagrees. He quotes from a book by himself and Aurelio Jose Figueredo. Here's the central bit:

Furthermore in the case of parent-offspring correlations on g, oversampling parental scores with positive errors of measurement on IQ, as by selecting those identified as high-g individuals based on high observed IQ scores for special study, will produce regression to the mean when assessing the IQ of their offspring, even if the offspring were genetically identical to the parents, given the nature of this statistical artifact. This can be confirmed by retesting the parents themselves, which is rarely done, because one will then no doubt observe regression to the mean of the parental IQ scores in the parents themselves, presumably without having undergone any genetic recombination whatsoever. The proposition that offspring are necessarily closer to the mean of the general population in their actual latent g-factor (as opposed to their observed IQ scores) is therefore a fallacy, especially under conditions of assortative mating.

Quite a claim. Is this generally accepted, or perhaps Woodley & Figueredo's minority position? When they say that the claim "can be confirmed by retesting the parents themselves, which is rarely done", does this mean it has been done? Repeatedly?

This would explain a puzzle, though: If there were regression to the mean in a substantial sense, then it should not be over after a generation, which would mean that, by now, we should all be pretty much equally intelligent, right? With the above interpretation, that problem does not exist.

I just hope he means to restrict his statements about the nonexistence of regression to the mean to the context at hand. The phenomenon is certainly real in other contexts - unless you want to redefine, for example, a particularly hot day in a certain city as just an expression of a city's underlying latent hotness measured with upward error, and the like.

23/04/2014

Why Is Quitting Smoking So Hard?

Quitting smoking is generally considered very hard. Anecdotally, most attempts seem to fail. Malcolm X is said to have said that quitting Heroin is not easy, but smoking is the real challenge.

I can't speak to the biochemistry of it all, but from a purely anecdotal-behavioral perspective, it is not obvious why quitting smoking should be particularly hard. I can see one big argument for why it should be easy and one for why it should be hard.

1. Should be easy. Beyond the addiction itself, there's little reason to smoke. It is not hard to see why people would consume alcohol or heroin: They're psychoactive, in ways that are often experienced as extremely pleasant. Strictly speaking, nicotine's psychoactive, too, but, really, that's negligible. So, in that sense, smoking is the stupidest addiction there is: You don't even get a high out of it. Why not stop altogether?

2. Should be hard. Being addicted to heroin or alcohol fucks up your life. You probably won't be able to hold down a job, and mess up your personal relationships as well. (Yes, there are high-functioning alcoholics. This is one of those cases in which the existence of the term tells you that it's been invented to describe an exception. Nobody would come up with the term "low-functioning alcoholics" because that's just, you know, regular alcoholics.) In contrast, the near-term consequences of smoking are minor (smell, yellow teeth, shortness of breath), while the biggie (lung cancer) is far into the future, and you, like everyone else, are a time discounter.

So, no major reasons to continue, but not that many reasons to stop either. Should be a wash in those terms, right? And yet quitting smoking is considered unusually hard. Let me suggest that this is a variant of the phenomenon "bad is stonger than good" (low quality pdf). That is, other drugs give you a better reason to continue (good), but they also give you a better reason to quit (bad). Bad gets a higher weight than Good, so if both are stronger, people feel less of a motivation to kick the low-bad, low-good addiction than the one that's high on both. Why go through all the trouble when you're not hurting yourself all that much?

21/04/2014

The Operation Called Verstehen

So Robin "Hurricane" Carter died. While he was an accomplished boxer, he is best known for Bob Dylan writing a song about him. When I read the news, I immediately reacted by listening to the song.*

It is a well-known phenomenon that, when musicians die, people start listening to their stuff, sometimes putting old records on top of the charts. This is usually interpreted as people sort of paying homage to the artists. But I wonder how much is simply a reminder effect: "Oh, yeah, back in school, my best friend Michael had the Thriller album, and I really liked it. But I lost the tape he made for me. I should go to Amazon and order the CD."

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*I found that Spotify also has two versions by an artist who calls himself "Dylan", but is not Bob - a "Dance Mix" and a "House Mix". Whether you ought to listen to them depends on how much of a taste for trash you got.

23/03/2014

The False Dichotomy Fallacy When There Are Only Two States of the World

The term false dichotomy fallacy (or fallacy of the false dichotomy) is typically used when a person concludes that your position is B because you commited to the view "not A", but there is at least one other position (C, D, E . . .) one can take. For example, when you say that a certain human trait is not 100% environmentally determined, people will often assume you think it is 100% genetically determined, despite the fact that there are a lot of numbers between 0 and 100. In so doing, they are committing the false dichotomy fallacy.

This fallacy, or a variant of it, can be committed even if there are only two possible states of the world. Suppose someone was about to toss a coin and declared: "This one will certainly come up heads." You might then say, "I wouldn't be so sure about that" and the person might reply, "Oh, so you think it will come up tails?" In this example it's obvious: You didn't mean that the other state of the world is certain to come to pass, you simply meant to express uncertainty, given that we cannot know the result of the coin toss.

While the example is a bit far from most real-life situations, variants of it seem to come up quite frequently. Generally, your expressing doubt that X is true is likely to be read as your asserting that X is not true. People tend to go about as though one had to take a confident position on as many issues as possible and assume others feel the same way. (In U.S. discourse, "opinionated" is usually meant as a compliment.*) This may be a sign that uttering opinions has little to do with truth-seeking an a lot with positioning oneself in social space by signaling what type of a person one is.

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*Until a few minutes ago, I thought that there was no term in German for the word "opinionated". Now I see that the dictionary I consulted gives two terms that are clearly negative, eigensinnig and starrsinnig.

07/02/2014

Around the Blogs, Vol. 106

1. The importance of being able to enjoy the mundane (Ben Casnocha)

2. "Nonshared environment" might best be conceived of as noise, not environment, says Kevin Mitchell.

3. External validity alert: Are patients in medical trials selected for large treatment effects? (Andrew Gelman/Paul Alper)

4. Chris Bertram makes a surprisingly good case for the argument "Squeezing the rich is good: even when it raises no money".

5. "Is there no racial bias precisely because it seems like there is?" Ole Rogeberg takes us into the mind of the microeconomist.

6. The fun of being criticized for doing the right thing, namely keeping the normative and the positive apart (Bryan Caplan)

7. An argument against men attending childbirth (Dennis Mangan) (via)

8. 50 great book covers from 2013, collected by Dan Wagstaff (via)

9. The low-hanging fruit of immigration: Bryan Caplan offers another metaphor.

10. The argument that extremely high cognitive talent is specific. (Bruce Charlton)

11. The argument for being an asshole (Scott Adams)

12. What's it like to hear voices that aren't there? (Christian Jarrett/L. Holt and A. Tickle)

13. Which works did sociologists cite most in 2013? (Neal Caren)

07/01/2014

The Best Blog Posts of 2013

It's about time, so here.

As usual, brackets are appended to each link to indicate whether the post is Long, Medium lenght or Short; High-Brow, Mid-Brow or Low-Brow, and Funny or Not.

For other years' lists, use the tag.

15. Offsetting Behaviour: "Social Costs and HPV", by Eric Crampton

14. Discover: "Why Race as a Biological Construct Matters", by Razib Khan (L; HB; N)

13. The Power of Goals: "Home Sweet Home", by Mark Taylor (L; MB; N)

12. Crooked Timber: "New Tools for Reproducible Research", by Kieran Healy (S; MB; F)

11. German Joys: "The Metamorphosis (US Summer Movie) Elevator Pitch", by Andrew Hammel (S; MB; F)

10. Code and Culture: "You Broke Peer Review. Yes, I Mean You", by Gabriel Rossman (L; MB; N)

9. EconLog: "The Homage Statism Pays to Liberty", by Bryan Caplan (M; MB; N)

8. Scatterplot: "Annals of Self-Refuting Tweets", by Jeremy Freese (S; MB; F)

7. Overcoming Bias: "Future Story Status", by Robin Hanson (M; HB; N)

6. Gulf Coast Blog: "Defamiliarization, Again for the First Time", by Will Wilkinson (L; MB; N)

5. Armed and Dangerous: "Preventing Visceral Racism", by Eric S. Raymond (L; MB; N)

4. Askblog: "It Is Sometimes Appropriate . . .", by Arnold Kling (M; HB; N)

3. EconLog: "Make Your Own Bubble in 10 Easy Steps", by Bryan Caplan (M; LB; N)

2. Armed and Dangerous: "Natural Rights and Wrongs?", by Eric S. Raymond (M; HB; N)

1. Falkenblog: "Great Minds Confabulate Like Small Minds", by Eric Falkenstein (L; HB; N)

Thanks and congrats to all above.

02/01/2014

Why Should You Talk to Your Friends?

Most people would agree that (i) one of the reasons people have conversations is to exchange information, (ii) there are other reasons. An interesting question in this respect is to what extent voluntary, private conversations serve the purpose of exchanging information. It seems to me that even portions of conversation that appear to be about the exchange of information are not, actually. I am saying this because of experience. Sometimes I have been asked stuff that I couldn't answer right away, or couldn't answer in a way I would have deemed appropriate, and offered to follow up on this later on. Once I was asked my opinion about a topic (I don't remember what it was) and answered that my view was quite complex and I probably wouldn't be able to appropriately express it spontaneoulsy, but, fortunately, I had written a blog post about it in which everything was laid down in a well-structured manner and would be happy to send a link. That didn't go down well. If you would like to adjust your estimate of what percentage of private conversation is for exchanging information downwards, you should try something similar sometimes.

So, what is the purpose of having private conversations? Reasons given sometimes include stuff such as affirming group identity, exchanging jokes (laughing is fun, as is having one's jokes laughed at), getting into the other person's knickers, and so forth. All of these are real, but it seems that the main reason for having conversations with people you like is having conversations with people you like, which is pleasurable in itself. It's like listening to music. The purpose of which is not gaining information about sounds.

A related thought: You could do the following. Write down the five or ten points that you think best define the way you view the world. Then have someone you consider a good friend guess what you wrote. I am not saying you should do this. I haven't and I won't. Happy new year.

09/12/2013

Three Answers to the Question, "What Is Intelligence?"

The Quip: “Intelligence is what you need when you don’t know what to do”. Carl Bereiter coined this elegant phrase. [...]

The Explanation: “Intelligence is a very general mental capability that, among other things, involves the ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas, learn quickly and learn from experience. It is not merely book learning, a narrow academic skill, or test-taking smarts. Rather, it reflects a broader and deeper capability for comprehending our surroundings — ‘catching on,’ ‘making sense’ of things, or ‘figuring out’ what to do.” Linda Gottfredson and 52 leading psychometricians agree with this explanation. [...]

The formula: g+group+specific skill+error, where g accounts for about 50% of the variance. [...]

That is from James Thompson's blog Psychological Comments, which I've added to my roll. It has what it says on the label with a focus on - you've guessed it - intelligence. I'm particularly grateful to him for providing me with a label for an error (popular with sociologists and the general public) that has long been getting on my nerves. The error is automatically interpreting correlations between socioeconomic status (not my favourite concept in the first place) and some outcome as an effect of the former on the latter, without even considering the possibility that there may be psychological constructs that influence both SES and the outcome (e.g., see my discussion here). He calls it the sociologist's fallacy. Not that imaginative, really, is it? Man, I really should have thought of that myself.

Anyway, the blog's recommended.

01/12/2013

Screamers Gone Awry: The Availability Heuristic Meets Selection on the Dependent Variable

I've just finished Soccernomics by journalist Simon Kuper and sports economist Stefan Szymanski. Skipping the matter of the title, I can say that the authors oversell plausible ideas and the results of multivariate regressions, seem to believe in best practice analysis, have already been shown wrong by developments that happened after the book was finished, and yet, I read its 400 pages in three days (which is very quick by my standards). It's so entertaining! But let's not give the authors too much credit. After all, what could go wrong when you pack football and econometrics into one book? It's almost as irresistible a combination as topless darts.*

An interesting factoid from the book is that only about two percent of shots from outside the eighteen-yard-box result in goals. The players are trying to score one of those spectacular "screamers" that they remember from televised matches, Kuper and Szymanski guess, and hence fall prey to the availability heuristic. But perhaps it's not simply that players remember spectacular goals better than failed attempts. Watching many live matches takes a lot of time, and matches to watch cluster on certain days, so much of football coverage is watched in the form of summary highlights of five to ten minutes. Perhaps that's especially true of professional footballers who will often themselves be at work when there are live matches to watch on the telly. And the highlights don't show all the attempts from outside the box, but they certainly show all that result in goals. In contrast, attempts from inside the box (I'm guessing) are shown at a much higher rate. Selection on the dependent variable. To be precise, that's even differential selection on the dependent variable.

On top of that, when live matches are watched, the teams that are on will often be way above average, including at converting long-distance attempts. Selection on the dependent variable again. Hence, some professional watches Gareth Bale hammer the ball into the top corner on Wednesday night and tries the same next Saturday, only to watch it sailing into the stands.

What coaches should do: Show their players a truly random sample of shots from outside the area. Ten minutes once a week should help.

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*Best sentence from the link: "When L!VE TV was Millwall FC's shirt sponsor, they originally wanted to advertise this show on the shirts, but club bosses nixed that idea because they were worried it might encourage fans to throw darts." The sentence is funnier if you know a bit of context. A fine link, that one. It does not, however, mention my favourite episode "Topless Darts on the Titanic" ("Oh, no! An iceberg! Let's hope it melts before we hit it!").

29/11/2013

Around the Blogs, Vol. 103

Bit late today, but here's some recent posts that may be worth your time.

1. Andrew Gelman knows how randomization works in animal studies. (Post starts off with disturbing image)

2. Gabriel Rossman has tips on how to be a better journal reviewer, with a focus on decreasing turnaround times. Fabio Rojas links and summarizes.

3. Christian Jarrett summarizes a new paper by Brian D. Earp, Jim A. C. Everett, Elizabeth N. Madva, and J. Kiley Hamlin, who cannot replicate the "Macbeth effect", i.e., the finding that feelings of disgust increase the desire for physical cleaning.

22/11/2013

Pebbles, Vol. 45

1. Disagreement about the effects of violent video games on aggression (Michael Venables)

2. Vielleicht wäre die angemessene Antwort: "Überweisen Sie mir doch 500 Euro, ohne dass ich etwas für Sie tue." (Harald Martenstein)

3. How science is not like faith (Jerry Coyne)

4. Apparently, the case against "too much choice" is not solid (contains link to meta-analysis) (Matt Ridley).

5. "Since the end of 2007, police in the UK have run a secret network of fully-furnished fake apartments and townhouses, solely for the purpose of capturing local burglary suspects" (Geoff Manaugh).

6. Short research article: Evidence against the hypothesis that red sports clothing causes winning (Thomas V. Pollet and Leonard S. Peperkoorn). If I read that correctly, though, assignment is not random.

7. 15 types of movie posters (Houke de Kwant). Arguably, this is a rational business strategy. If you have a way of signaling "This is an action movie with lots of explosions", that's what you should do. After all, posters are marketing devices first.

8. Health advertising: The Corman strategy; the "cute hypocrite" strategy.

9. Another good illustration of how hard it is to do social science research; nominal question: is stop and frisk effective? (Benjamin Wallace-Wells)

10. "10 highly embarrassing photos of visitors freaking out in an Ontario haunted house" (National Post)

11. Syntax is hard: A tublr dedicated to data visualizations gone beautifully wrong (via)

12. Correlates of polygamy in Africa (James Fenske) (via)

13. "12 Unusually Placed Sports Venues"

14. "We suggest that a psychoanalytic approach based on conflict/compromise model put forward by Freud, then articulated by Brenner, and unconscious group functioning models integrated with Keynes’s psychologically minded views can provide a framework towards explaining the recent housing bubble" (Şule Özler). You read the paper so I don't have to.

15/11/2013

Around the Blogs, Vol. 102

1. The experiment Milgram chose not to publish (Tom Bartlett/Gina Perry) (via)

2. Disagreement on the bellicosity of stateless societies (Larry Arnhart)

3. Velvet glove, iron fist, or: How government force works. (Bryan Caplan)

4. The "forced rider problem" and disutility from "public goods" (Eric Crampton). Useful concept!

5. The view that TV shapes people's thinking by not mentioning aspects of topics (Steve Sailer/NOTA)

6. Why people dislike photos of themselves: Mirrors meet the mere exposure effect (Robert T. Gonzales). But don't miss the link in the last paragraph.

7. 26 great words from the OED (Carolyn Kellogg/Ammon Shea)

8. Differences in preferences for competitiveness as an explanation of the male-female wage gap (John List and Uri Gneezy)

9. "This must be the strangest publicity still ever taken." (Sherbrooke)

10. Three by Tim Harford: Why pro-free-market arguments don't work well for finance; banks are relying less on leverage; how to use e-mail efficiently at work.

11. Paging Quetelet: Why song lenghts are not normally distributed (Gabriel Rossman) (via)

12. People respond to incentives, giving to the poor edition (Eric Crampton/Jillian Keenan)

13. Feelings of extreme bliss produced by targeted brain stimulation (Christian Jarrett/Fabienne Picard, Didier Scavarda, and Fabrice Bartolomei). Gimme, gimme, gimme!

14. Why wages don't fall during recessions (Bryan Caplan/Truman Bewley)

15. How to make voters better informed (Bryan Caplan)

16. Another bonkers graphic presented by Kaiser Fung.

17. The impact on wages of: height; smoking; testosterone (Economic Logician/Petri Böckerman and Jari Vainiomäki/Julie Hotchkiss and Melinda Pitts/Anne Gielen, Jessica Holmes and Caitlin Myers).

14/11/2013

New Paper: At Least One Method for Estimating the Effect of Genes Yields Misleading Results

Until recently, behavioural geneticists had to use twin samples to estimate the heritability of traits. The standard method estimates heritability - the contribution of genes - by exploiting the fact that identical twins are more genetically alike than nonidentical twins, who are more alike than unrelated people. A drawback of this method is that twin samples are hard to find. Recently, a method has become available that circumvents this problem; it's called genome-wide complex trait analysis (GCTA). The basic idea is to use differences in the actual genetic makeup of people to calculate heritability. It should not be confused with the genome-wide association technique, which "hunts" for specific "genes for" some outcome (the "gene for depression" or what have you).

A recent paper by Maciej Trzaskowski, Philip S. Dale and Robert Plomin (abstract; via) compares heritability estimates on the basis of standard and GCTA techniques. Results for the dependent variables show that GCTA estimates are considerably smaller than standard estimates for height, weight and intelligence. The real shocker are the results for "behaviour problems" (such as depression or hyperactivity), though. While the standard analyses suggest considerable heritability, most GCTA estimates are zero or close to zero. Here's the result for self-report measures, with standard results on the left and GCTA results on the right:

Results for parent and teacher reports are broadly similar.

What's it all mean? Well, the authors include a long discussion section in their paper, but, frankly, much of it is above my head due to my very limited knowledge of genetics and associated research methods. The most important take-home message, though, is that at least one of the common methods for estimating the contribution of genes to human outcomes yields misleading results. This is very important, and it is to be hoped that the paper gets lots of exposure. I've done my part.

08/11/2013

When Can You Trust (Expert) Intuition?

I read Malcolm Gladwell's Blink when it came out. It's a deeply dissatisfying book. He starts out more or less proposing that intuition, or at least expert intuition, is this kind of superpower, then he starts slipping in anecdotes about how quick decision making fails instead of succeeding, which naturally makes you wait for Gladwell to give you the rule or rules which let you distinguish between the two situations, and then the book's finished. As Steve Sailer paraphrased the message: "Go with your gut reactions, but only when they are right." You're left with a bunch of anecdotes.

I'm currently reading Daniel Kahnemann's Thinking, Fast and Slow, which is - how to put it? - a better book than Blink. In one chapter, he summarizes the results of antagonistic collaboration on the topic of the trustworthiness of expert intuition with a researcher called Gary Klein (Klein trusted expert intuition, Kahnemann didn't). They found that experts need the following to develop trustworthy intuitions (p. 240):

an environment that is sufficiently regular to be predictable
an opportunity to learn these regularities through prolonged practice

That may sound a bit obvious (once you know about it), but has a number of interesting implications.

One, this explains why you cannot predict growth or crime rates: the environment's just too darn irregular. Or when the next large-scale terrorist attack on U.S. soil is to be expected: perhaps they will turn out to be highly regular, but if so, there's been no opportunity to learn that.

Two, these are exactly the conditions under which systematic prediction (say, using a regression model) also works. That is, there seem to be no cases when intuition works, but deliberation cannot. Intuition may be quicker, but it's not some magic pipeline into otherwise inaccessible truths.

Three, this gives you a rule for when to trust your own intuitions. You are probably an expert in something, such as your wife's facial expressions. If they have a stable relationship to your wife's psychological states and you've had ample opportunity to learn about that relationship, your intuitions about what they mean are probably trustworthy. On the other hand, your intuitions about what your newly-acquired lover's facial expressions mean may be off the mark.