Persistent Astonishment

Diederik Stapel and the frequency of scientific shenanigans

2011-09-20T01:27:00.000-05:00

On August 27, two junior researchers working with the Dutch social psychologist Diederik Stapel at Tilburg University contacted a university administrator with suspicions that their senior colleague was using faked data. As one of the worst forms of academic shenanigans that fall under the broad umbrella of "academic misconduct", an allegation of data fabrication was quite serious. This is especially true because Diederik Stapel was in the early stages of a prolific scientific career; he served on the editorial board of six different academic journals and had received the 2007 "Early Career Award" from the International Society for Self and Identity (ISSI). He had also published many articles that received generous press attention, including one in Science that claimed that messy environments promote discrimination.

Nonetheless, a little over a week and one university investigation later, Stapel admitted to making up data and was sacked from Tilburg University.

The revelation that Stapel committed data fabrication has sent shockwaves through academic psychology. Beyond tarnishing Stapel's own work, the news also threatens to tarnish both the work of his colleagues and the journals with which Stapel was affiliated. This has led to some vociferous distancing from Stapel's colleagues and the disappearance of all mentions of Stapel (outside the news of his sacking) from both the Tilburg University website and the ISSI website, as shown below:

Selected Tilburg University professor editorial activities,
before and just after Stapel admitted to data fabrication.
"Before" image taken from Google cache on 9/19/2011

ISSI Early Career Award recipients before and just after Stapel admitted to data fabrication.
"Before" image taken from Google cache on 9/19/2011

Stapel's swift, precipitous diminution in internet presence illustrates the "contagion principle" of academic misconduct: when it is uncovered, it threatens not only the credibility of the scientist who committed it, but also the credibility of all those associated with it. Of course, the contagion principle is actually quite well-founded -- fundamentally, science rests on the trust of the public and the greater scientific community.

If Stapel were the only "bad apple" in a basket of otherwise delicious scientific fruit, the contagion principle might only apply in a limited way, to Stapel's immediate colleagues. Unfortunately, Stapel is not alone in his shenanigans. Just a year ago, the prominent psychology researcher Marc Hauser also admitted to misconduct, and was eventually forced to resign his post from Harvard. By themselves, even two cases might not spoil psychology's credibility, but because psychology is typically not taken as seriously as other sciences (perhaps with good reason), it simply does not enjoy a large margin for error.

This leads to an obvious (but no less important) question: how frequent is data fabrication (and other forms of misconduct) in psychology?

This is a difficult question to answer. The most cost-effective way to obtain an answer is through a random-sample survey, but surveys have the fundamental problem that research scientists are probably pretty damn unwilling to admit to that they have made up data, even under conditions of anonymity. Researchers can partially address this problem by comparing admission rates of personal misconduct to admission rates of witnessing the misconduct of others (though reports of witnessing misconduct might themselves be biased by factors such as professional jealousy). Unfortunately, no such survey of research psychologists has been conducted, so the best we can do for now is draw inferences from surveys conducted in other sciences.

Enter a paper in PLoS ONE by Daniele Fanelli. This paper aggregates the results from 18 anonymous academic misconduct surveys of randomly-sampled research scientists. It also compares the results of surveys that asked for admission of personal academic misconduct to the results of surveys that asked admission of witnessing the misconduct of others, allowing one to indirectly assess the extent to which surveys that ask about personal misconduct are tainted by reporting bias.

The Fanelli paper is full of interesting insights. The first that I'll highlight is from Figure 2, which shows the rate of personal admission of making up data (the worst form of misconduct) from the various surveys analyzed by the paper, as well as the overall mean estimate across the surveys. The overall estimated rate of admission might seem low (1.97%), but remember that this is the rate of admission for the most severe form of misconduct. The estimated rate of admission when other, less severe forms of misconduct were included was much higher (9.54%).

Figure 2 from Fanelli (2009). Admission rates for personally
committing data fabrication. Lines are 95% confidence intervals.

Compare the results regarding personal admission of data fabrication to the results regarding witnessing others commit data fabrication (below). Here the estimated rate is 14.12%; this jumped to 28.53% when other, less severe forms of misconduct were included in the estimate. Scary.

Figure 4 from Fanelli (2009). Admission rates for witnessing others
commit data fabrication. Lines are 95% confidence intervals.

What are the implications of these data for scientific psychology? First, a large psychological society needs to step up by conducting its own randomized survey of research psychologists. As I mentioned above, an academic misconduct survey of psychologists has yet to be conducted, which leaves both research psychologists and the public in the dark about the extent of the misconduct problem. Second, if the problem is widespread, research psychologists need to do a better job of policing themselves. If they don't, they will either be policed from outside -- or, more likely, they'll simply be unfunded.

Reference:

Fanelli, D. (2009). How Many Scientists Fabricate and Falsify Research? A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Survey Data. PLoS ONE 4(5): e5738. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0005738

The quest for (social) scientific truth

2011-08-05T23:17:00.005-05:00

Every now and then when I tell a stranger that I study scientific psychology, I get a reaction that is perhaps best summarized by this comic from xkcd:

Click for a larger image

Essentially, the reaction is that, as a social science, psychology isn't a "real" science like biology, chemistry, or physics. I encounter this reaction often enough, even among otherwise scientifically savvy people, that I am often tempted to do silly things like shout, punch things, or at the very least launch into an ill-advised rant.

Fortunately, I do none of these things. As I have discussed previously, the reaction that social sciences are pseudoscientific is rooted partly in the knee-jerk intuition that understanding people is easier than understanding "hard science" topics like physics and chemistry, and therefore that social scientific truths are less valuable than truths discovered in other sciences. Therefore, I consider it part of my duty as a social scientist to be a force of enlightenment, and consequently grit my teeth and explain as gracefully as possible that the defining features of science are rooted in method rather than content. Science is defined by an interplay between evidence and theory, not the particulars of the content studied.

Deep in my heart, though, I know that these reactions are rooted not only in human biases, but also in the very slow, non-cumulative character of the advance of the social sciences. The "harder" sciences are responsible for large numbers of inventions and increases in human comfort. The social sciences do not have as impressive a track record. For another source of evidence, consider the following figure, taken from a paper in PLoS One by Daniele Fanelli:

Figure 1 from Fanelli (2010)

The above figure shows, across a variety of disciplines, the proportion of papers claiming to have found support for the authors' predictions. Science being what it is, we should expect that regardless of the discipline, sometimes scientists get it wrong -- the results of their experiments do not support their original predictions. Disciplines that have a low proportion of papers reporting these sorts of experiments either have theories so powerful as to make experimental predictions a trivial exercise, or, perhaps more likely, have theories so flexible and imprecise that they are nigh infalsifiable. And, of course, the discipline with the highest proportion of papers claiming to support the original experimental predictions is psychology.

Consider a second figure, this one taken from John Ioannidis' provocatively named paper, "Why most published research findings are false":

Table 4 from Ioannidis (2005)

Ioannidis constructed a variety of models designed to show the probability that a research finding is true (what he calls the "positive predictive value", or PPV) under various research conditions. Through his model, Ioannidis identified three factors that decrease the probability that a research finding is true:

1. An inadequate number of observations (or, for the statistics nerds among my readers, inadequate statistical power, which Ioannidis labels 1 - β). Fewer observations decrease the chances of detecting true relationships that actually exist in a given study, and thus decrease your confidence that the reported relationships in a study are actually true.

2. A large number of tested relationships in a given study. As the number of tested relationships goes up, the ratio of true to false relationships in the study (which Ioannidis labels R) typically goes down. Thus, your confidence in a study's reported relationships should also go down.

3. A large number of factors, such as financial incentives, researcher ideology, flexible research designs, that increase researcher bias (which Ioannidis labels u). The presence of these factors straightforwardly decrease your confidence in a study's reported relationships.

Unfortunately, low power, a large number of tested relationships, and researcher bias are all characteristics that typify social science research. By my own (admittedly speculative) estimation, row 6 in Ioannidis' Table 4 best represents the typical psychology experiment: low power, a large number of tested relationships, and a moderate amount of researcher bias due to either a flexible research design and / or a researcher attempting to support his or her "pet theory". Ioannidis gives the results of that study a .12 probability of being true.

Given the above evidence, is the quest for social scientific truth entirely quixotic? Not necessarily. Social science (psychology among them) is a difficult enterprise. Difficulty, though, is not the same as impossibility. In the face of difficulty, it is absolutely incumbent on social scientists to conduct their research in ways that increase confidence in their findings. Ioannidis pointed out some of these factors -- large numbers of observations, a focus on a few variables, and strong research designs that are independent of researcher ideology and financial interests. As more social scientists design their studies in these ways, perhaps we can hold out hope that the social sciences will develop more of the cumulative character of the harder sciences.

References:

Fanelli, D. (2010). “Positive” results increase down the hierarchy of the sciences. PLoS ONE 5(4): e10068. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0010068.

Ioannidis, J. (2005). Why most published research findings are false. PLoS Med 2(8): e124. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124.

A glimpse into the abyss of psychology prelims

2011-08-04T19:15:00.001-05:00

Over the past month, I endured the crucible of the so-called "preliminary exams", or as they are more affectionately called, "prelims". These exams go by different names in different areas ("qualifying exams" or "quals", "comprehensive exams" or "comps"), but across institutions, the intent is the same: complete an exam (or more rarely, write a paper) to prove your mastery of a body of knowledge. Following prelims, graduate students are allowed to begin their dissertation research and, eventually, their PhD.

Needless to say, taking prelims is an intense and exhausting process. While the specifics vary from place to place, it usually involves studying for months, followed by a multi-day exam with a strict deadline. My own prelims consisted of a five-hour in-class test, followed by a six-day period in which I wrote four six-page essays. I studied for my own exams for around five months and, according to my prelims Google Notebook, I read some 75 papers and book chapters. By the end of prelims I felt like I was leaking social psychology out the ears.

For me, one of the frustrating aspects of prelims is that despite the long hours of study and the intense testing process, the papers you write are largely useless. They can't be published (though sometimes the ideas can make their way into other papers) and they don't give you practice with the practical aspects of academic life, such as obtaining grant money, submitting papers to journals, or navigating nasty departmental politics. So, it is with the vain hope that my experiences will be useful to someone that I am publishing what I think is my best prelims essay on this blog. It will give you, my readers, a taste of what a prelims essay is like, and perhaps it will even interest the more masochistic and nerdy among you. I can always hope.

Here is the prompt:

For almost three decades, social psychologists have argued that humans have surprisingly little insight into the underlying causes of their behavior. More recent research has gone so far as to argue that human will or volition is an “illusion”. Please provide an overview of the bases for these arguments and critically examine the empirical evidence used to support them. Link these basic assumptions of control versus automaticity to other phenomena in social psychology (e.g., stereotyping and prejudice, persuasion, etc.). Finally, give us your opinion on the notion of control and automaticity.

And here is my response:

The long arm of control:

Volition and the long-term regulation of behavior

One of the longest-standing debates in Western philosophy is that of the nature of free will. Although early psychologists limited themselves to speculation about it (James, 1884), advances in social-cognitive and neuroscientific methods have enabled psychologists to study the nature of free will more directly. These advances in method have generated a flurry of activity, and prominent researchers are divided over whether people possess volition (e.g., Ryan & Deci, 2006; Baumeister, Bratslavky, Muraven, & Tice, 1998) or whether volition is illusory (Wegner, 2002; Bargh & Chartrand, 1999).[1] I will argue that the division about the existence of volition stems in part from the failure to distinguish between the regulation of behavior in the moment from the regulation of one’s long-term behavior. I will then discuss the implications of this insight for dual-process theories in social cognition.

Control, automaticity, and the components of volitional behavior

Because of the difficulties in measuring volition, researchers interested in volition have inferred its properties by observing broad differences in large classes of behavior. For example, people’s behavior differs in the extent to which environmental cues inevitably give rise to a particular behavioral response. Sometimes, people mindlessly respond to environmental cues (e.g., Langer, Blank, & Chanowitz, 1978), while at other times, people are relatively flexible in their responses (Wheeler & Fiske, 2005; Fleming, Darley, Hilton, & Kojetin, 1990). Another broad difference in classes of behavior is the extent to which behavior is intended. Although all behavior may ultimately serve some motive (Kenrick, Griskevicius, Neuberg, & Schaller, 2010; Maslow, 1943), some behavior serves an explicitly formulated prior goal (Ajzen, 1991), whereas other behavior is more reactive, a response to rapidly changing situational circumstances (Bargh, 1994). Behavior also differs in how effortful it is (Baumeister et al., 1998); in fact, researchers have recently found that some behavior rapidly uses energy in the form of blood glucose, whereas other behavior does not (Gailliot et al., 2007). Finally, behavior differs in whether it is accompanied by the perception of control, a perception that gives rise to distinct feelings of volition (Deci & Ryan, 2000; Wegner, 2002).

The above distinctions in behavior (inevitability versus flexibility in responses to environmental cues, intentional versus unintentional behavior, effortful versus effortless responding, and perceptions of control) often co-occur into two distinct clusters, leading theorists to dub flexible, intentional, effortful behavior that is experienced as volitional controlled and inevitable, unintentional, effortless behavior that is not experienced as volitional automatic. Moreover, many theorists have reasoned that categorically different processes (controlled processes versus automatic processes) must be responsible for the two types of behavior (Shiffrin & Schneider, 1977; Schneider & Shiffrin, 1977). These two processes are assumed to be mutually exclusive, in that behavior is either dominated by one process or the other. The distinction between automatic and controlled processes has proven popular and has given rise to a large number of so-called dual-process theories, which specify, within a certain domain, the conditions that give rise to controlled versus automatic behavior (see Chaiken & Trope, 1999). However, because dual-process theories have been formulated based on broad, co-occurring differences between classes of behavior, the specific roles and meanings of automatic and controlled processes have become unclear as researchers have provided evidence that effort and the perception of control do not always co-occur with flexible, intentional behavior.

The dissociation between effort and flexible, intentional behavior

The primary evidence that flexible, intentional behavior can be produced in the absence of effort stems from work on implementation intentions, which are simple, consciously-formed plans that specify a triggering situation and a response (i.e., if x, then y; Gollwitzer, 1999). Importantly, the effort in forming implementation intentions occurs before their execution; once formed, implementation intentions produce relatively effortless behavior once a person is placed in a relevant situational context. Implementation intentions can support behavioral responses despite conflicting prepotent responses, such as are present in the Stroop task (Gollwitzer & Schaal, 1998), and can successfully improve performance on tasks that supposedly preclude strategic responding, such as shooter tasks with response deadlines of 630 ms (Mendoza, Gollwitzer, & Amodio, 2010). However, the behavior produced by implementation intentions supports a specific goal (Gollwitzer, 1993), and remains flexible (Gollwitzer, Parks-Stamm, Jaudas, & Sheeran, 2007); implementation intentions that do not support a goal for which they are formulated do not inhibit performance (Gollwitzer et al., 2007). Thus, research on implementation intentions provides evidence of behavior that is flexible and intentional, but not effortful.

The dissociation between the experience of control and flexible, intentional behavior

The experience of control is associated with attention to one’s responses and the attribution that one is the cause of a certain outcome. Two lines of work suggest that these experiences are dissociated from flexible behavior in the service of an intention. First, work on “auto-motives” suggests that flexible, intentional behavior can occur even when people believe that they are not acting towards a particular goal (Bargh, 1990). In this work, goal-relevant knowledge is made accessible, which, as long as the goal has been made chronically accessible in the past, triggers goal pursuit in the absence of a conscious intention to pursue the goal (Bargh, Raymond, Pryor, & Strack, 1995). The effects of these goals on behavior are similar to the effects of goals that are consciously pursued; for example, participants who are primed with achievement-relevant information prior to performing a word search task find more words than participants who are given neutral primes, and find as many words as when the achievement goal is consciously pursued. Additionally, participants in goal-priming conditions tend to show other goal-directed effects – they persist in behavior directed towards the goal when they are interrupted and inhibit behavioral alternatives that compete for attention (Bargh et al., 2001).

A separate line of work suggests that people can experience the feeling of volition, even if the action causally attributed to the self was objectively caused by another person (Wegner, 2002; Wegner, 2003). In order for a person to attribute their actions to their own thoughts and therefore experience volition, a thought must occur just prior to the action, must be consistent with the action, and must be produced in the absence of other plausible causes (Wegner, 2002). Using these principles, Wegner and Wheatley (1999) have experimentally produced the illusion of volition for actions, such as movements of a computer mouse, that were objectively caused by a confederate. Together, the work of Wegner and Bargh suggests that the experience of volition, and therefore the perception that one’s actions are produced by oneself, can be dissociated from volitional behavior (for similar arguments, see Nisbett & Wilson, 1977).

Long- and short-term behavioral regulation

The above analysis suggests that, at least in the moment that a behavior occurs, neither the exertion of effort nor the experience of control are necessary to produce behavior that is flexible and intentional. Some theorists have interpreted this evidence to mean that volition does not exist (e.g., Bargh & Chartrand, 1999). However, a more nuanced view is that behavior stemming from automatic goal activation is still intentional, in that it promotes the achievement or avoidance of a given outcome. According to this interpretation, the effects of both implementation intentions and auto-motives occur due to the relevance of a given situation to one’s ongoing concerns; hence, apparently “automatic” behavior exhibited in these experiments occurs at least partially in the service of control. This argument provides a potential resolution to the volition debate; while some theorists take an immediate approach to the analysis of behavior, and thus come to the conclusion that behavior stems from mainly automatic sources (Bargh & Chartrand, 1999), others take a longer-term view, arguing that behavior stems from controlled plans (Ryan & Deci, 2006).

Another implication of the above analysis is that the mechanisms that promote long-term behavioral regulation are distinct from the mechanisms that promote in-the-moment behavioral regulation. Thus, feelings of volition and effort, while unnecessary for in-the-moment behavioral regulation, may be crucial determinants of the formulation of a long-term goal (Ajzen, 1991; Deci & Ryan, 2000; Bandura, 1986). Once a plan has been effortfully formulated, various processes, including the formulation of sub-plans (Carver & Scheier, 1998), and the perception that one’s behavior is at odds with one’s overarching goal (Devine, Monteith, Zuwerink, & Elliot, 1991), may be necessary to connect the larger goal to the ongoing maintenance of behavior. In the moment, mechanisms such as implementation intentions may, in a pseudo-controlled way, translate into the expression of flexible, intentional behavior (Gollwitzer, 1999). The distinction between short- and long-term regulation may also shed some light on why long-term plans sometimes fail and why short-term interventions often do not have long-term effects. Formulating a long-term plan does not guarantee that behavior will be successfully regulated in-the-moment; likewise, producing a change through relatively automatic processes does not guarantee that those changes will contribute to the long-term regulation of behavior (Devine, Forscher, Austen, & Cox, under review).
Implications for dual-process theories in social psychology
On the basis of the assumed distinction between behavior that is flexible, intentional, effortful, and accompanied by feelings of control versus inevitable, unintentional, effortless, and not accompanied by feelings of control, social psychological dual-process theories (e.g., Devine, 1989; Brewer, 1988; Fiske & Neuberg, 1990; Fazio & Towles-Schwen, 1999) have typically assumed that in the moment, either a controlled process or an automatic process dominates behavior. However, the fact that the above four dimensions of behavior do not necessarily neatly co-occur casts doubt on this assumption. Although some controlled behavior may possess all of the above characteristics, this analysis suggests a more differentiated notion of control that focuses on whether the behavior in question fits a person’s short-term or long-term goals. Likewise, the focus of dual-process theorists on a fine-grained analysis of behavior within a specific moment has been productive, but the above analysis suggests that dual-process theorists have paid insufficient attention to the ways in which one’s momentary behavior is connected to one’s long-term goals.

References

Ajzen, I. (1991). The theory of planned behavior. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 50, 179-211.

Bandura, A. (1986). The explanatory and predictive scope of self-efficacy theory. Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 4, 359-373.

Bargh, J. A., Gollwitzer, Peter M., Lee-Chai, A., Barndollar, K., & Trötschel, R. (2001). The automated will: Nonconscious activation and pursuit of behavioral goals. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81, 1014-1027.

Bargh, J. A. (1990). Auto-motives: Preconscious determinants of social interaction. Handbook of motivation and cognition: Foundations of social behavior (pp. 93-130). New York, NY: Guilford Press.

Bargh, J. A. (1994). The four horsemen of automaticity: Awareness, intention, efficiency, and control in social cognition. Handbook of social cognition (2nd ed.). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Bargh, J. A., & Ferguson, M. J. (2000). Beyond behaviorism: On the automaticity of higher mental processes. Psychological Bulletin, 126, 925-945.

Bargh, J. A., Raymond, P., Pryor, J. B., & Strack, F. (1995). Attractiveness of the underling: An automatic power → sex association and its consequences for sexual harassment and aggression. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 68, 768-781.

Baumeister, R. F., Bratslavsky, E., Muraven, M., & Tice, D. M. (1998). Ego depletion: Is the active self a limited resource? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74, 1252-1265.

Brewer, M. (1988). A dual process model of impression formation. Advances in social cognition (pp. 1-36). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

Carver, C., & Scheier, M. (1998). On the self-regulation of behavior. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

Chaiken, S., & Trope, Y. (1999). Dual-process theories in social psychology. New York: Guilford Press.

Deci, E., & Ryan, R. (2000). The “what” and “why” of goal pursuits: Human needs and the self-determination of behavior. Psychological Inquiry, 11, 227-268.

Devine, P. G. (1989). Stereotypes and prejudice: Their automatic and controlled components. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 56, 5-18.

Devine, P. G., Monteith, M. J., Zuwerink, J. R., & Elliot, A. J. (1991). Prejudice with and without compunction. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 60, 817-830.

Fazio, R., & Towles-Schwen, T. (1999). The MODE model of attitude-behavior processes. Dual process theories in social psychology (pp. 97-116). New York, NY: Guilford Press.

Fisk, S., & Neuberg, S. (1990). A continuum of impression formation, from category-based to individuating processes: Influences of information and motivation on attention and interpretation. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology (Vol. 23, pp. 1-74). Elsevier.

Fleming, J. H., Darley, J. M., Hilton, J. L., & Kojetin, B. A. (1990). Multiple audience problem: A strategic communication perspective on social perception. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 58, 593-609.

Gailliot, M. T., Baumeister, R. F., DeWall, C. N., Maner, J. K., Plant, E. A., Tice, D. M., Brewer, L. E., et al. (2007). Self-control relies on glucose as a limited energy source: Willpower is more than a metaphor. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 92, 325-336.

Gollwitzer, P. M. (1993). Goal achievement: The role of intentions. European Review of Social Psychology, 4, 141-185.

Gollwitzer, P. M., Parks-Stamm, E., Jaudas, A., & Sheeran, P. (2008). Flexible tenacity in goal pursuit. Handbook of motivation science (pp. 325-341). New York: Guilford Press.

Gollwitzer, Peter M. (1999). Implementation intentions: Strong effects of simple plans. American Psychologist, 54, 493-503.

Gollwitzer, Peter M., & Schaal, B. (1998). Metacognition in action: The importance of implementation intentions. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 2, 124-136.

Kenrick, D. T., Griskevicius, V., Neuberg, S. L., & Schaller, M. (2010). Renovating the pyramid of needs: Contemporary extensions built upon ancient foundations. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 5, 292-314.

Langer, E. J., Blank, A., & Chanowitz, B. (1978). The mindlessness of ostensibly thoughtful action: The role of “placebic” information in interpersonal interaction. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 36, 635-642.

Maslow, A. H. (1943). A theory of human motivation. Psychological Review, 50, 370-396.

Mendoza, S. A., Gollwitzer, P. M., & Amodio, D. M. (2010). Reducing the expression of implicit stereotypes: Reflexive control through implementation intentions. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 36, 512-523.

Nisbett, R. E., & Wilson, T. D. (1977). Telling more than we can know: Verbal reports on mental processes. Psychological Review, 84, 231-259.

Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2006). Self-regulation and the problem of human autonomy: Does psychology need choice, self-determination, and will? Journal of Personality, 74, 1557-1586.

Schneider, W., & Shiffrin, R. M. (1977). Controlled and automatic human information processing: I. Detection, search, and attention. Psychological Review, 84, 1-66.

Shiffrin, R. M., & Schneider, W. (1977). Controlled and automatic human information processing: II. Perceptual learning, automatic attending and a general theory. Psychological Review, 84, 127-190.

Wegner, D. (2002). The illusion of conscious will. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Wegner, D. M. (2003). The mind’s best trick: How we experience conscious will. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 7, 65-69.

Wegner, D. M., & Wheatley, T. (1999). Apparent mental causation: Sources of the experience of will. American Psychologist, 54, 480-492.

Wheeler, M. E., & Fiske, S. T. (2005). Controlling racial prejudice: Social-cognitive goals affect amygdala and stereotype activation. Psychological Science, 16, 56-63.

[1] Part of the volition debate stems from a definition of volition as a quality that makes one’s behavior uncaused by external forces (Bargh & Ferguson, 2000). However, because psychology assumes that one can at least probabilistically determine the causes of people’s behavior, this definition is not discussed further in this paper.

Six graphs answer questions about the PhD labor market

2011-05-13T16:24:00.001-05:00

In my experience, getting an honest, straightforward answer about the post-PhD labor market from most professors in graduate school is about as easy as extracting teeth from the mouth of a sparrow. Even when an answer is forthcoming, it is too often clouded by unrealistic expectations about the types of careers graduate students want and / or attempts to boost morale in order to increase research productivity.

Fortunately, no less an authority than the National Science Foundation has been conducting rigorous, nationally representative surveys on the US PhD labor market since 1993. On top of that, the NSF has made the results from its biannual surveys open to the public, both in the form of raw data and in the form of summary statistics. For a quantitative geek like me, the data are a little slice of heaven.

Thus, both to satisfy my own curiosity and for the benefit of other people who want hard data about PhD labor outcomes, I created the following six graphs with the goal of answering common questions about the STEM PhD labor market. I will structure my graphs around three questions in particular: (1) How successful are PhDs at finding the jobs they want? (2) Where do PhDs go for their jobs and what do they do on the job? (3) How well compensated are PhDs for the work they do?

The source data come the 2006 survey, which is the most recent dataset made available from the NSF. A total of 42,955 people were surveyed, or about 5.5% of the total 2006 population of PhDs. The response rate was 77.9%, which is typical for nationally representative surveys.

And now, on to the questions and graphs!!

Question 1: How successful are PhDs at getting the jobs they want?

Graph #1: The estimated unemployment rate and rate of people forced to involuntarily take jobs outside their field broken down by PhD category.

Click for a larger image

As you can see from the above graph, the unemployment rates and involuntary out-of-field (IOF) rates varied considerably by PhD category in 2006. Fortunately for STEM PhDs, the unemployment rates were all relatively low; considerably below the 4.6% for the labor force as a whole in August 2006. The IOF rates ranged slightly higher than the unemployment rates, peaking at 5.4% for the physical sciences. Fortunately for me and for my colleagues in psychology, the unemployment and IOF rates in psychology were actually quite low, at 1.3% and 1% each.

Graph #2: Percentage of employed PhDs at differing years since PhD by PhD category.

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The above graph is an interesting counterpoint to the unemployment and IOF graph in that it suggests that the very fields that have higher unemployment and IOF rates were also relatively “topheavy” – they were fields that had relatively high proportions of people who earned their PhDs a long time ago and relatively low proportions of newly-minted PhDs. In contrast, the fast-growing fields of computer science and health had proportions of newly minted PhDs that are quite high, at 26.8% and 27.9% each.

In sum, based on the data from 2006, the job prospects for STEM PhDs appear to be relatively bright. However, job prospects are best for fields like computer science and health that appear to be enjoying strong growth in the labor market.

Question #2: Where do PhDs go for their jobs and what do they do on the job?

Graph #3: Percentage of employed PhDs in various job sectors by PhD category.

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As shown in the above graph, STEM PhDs do a lot of different things once they are done with graduate school. Although a large proportion the PhDs surveyed were in either a 4-year academic institution (43.7% of those surveyed in 2006) or another academic institution like a 2-year college (3.4%), 47.1% were in a job outside academia. The high rates of non-academic jobs might come as a surprise to graduate students who, like me, are immersed in departmental cultures that are highly focused on academia.

Graph #4: Percentage of employed PhDs who reported working that the activity was one of two on which they spent the most time, broken down by PhD category.

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The above graph illustrates yet again that, based on the 2006 survey, PhDs do a lot of different things once they earn their PhD. With the exception of Psychology, research was the most frequently listed on-the-job activity across the disciplines; however, even in the most extreme of the research-focused disciplines, survey respondents listed other activities, such as management and administration, as taking a large portion of their time.

In sum, STEM PhDs go to many different employment sectors (both academic and non-academic) and, once there, engage in both research and non-research activities.

Question #3: How well compensated are PhDs for the work they do?

Graph #5: Median reported salary across three selected employment sectors (4-year university, private for-profit, self-employed), broken down by PhD category.

Click for a larger image

The overall median salary for all PhDs was $85,900 in 2006; as a basis of comparison, the median household income in 2006 was $48,201. However, according to the above graph, the compensation a PhD receives varies at least in part with the job sector the PhD enters. In particular, across all the STEM disciplines, taking an academic job is equivalent to accepting a (sometimes substantial) pay cut. The size of this pay cut varies somewhat with the particular PhD category, but across the various PhD categories, PhDs in 4-year universities earn 67% of the salaries of their peers in the private for-profit sector.

Graph #6: Median reported salary by job activity and PhD category.

Click for a larger image

The above graph reinforces the point that as a PhD, your compensation depends on the specifics of your job. In particular, PhDs who listed management and administration as one of the activities on which they spent the most time were better compensated than their peers across the disciplines. In contrast, PhDs who listed teaching as one of the activities on which they spent the most time consistently worse compensated than their peers across the disciplines.

In sum, based on the 2006 data, most PhDs in STEM disciplines are well-compensated, but the amount of compensation varies considerably with employment sector and the type of work the PhD does.

Hopefully the above graphs helped shed some light on the PhD labor market. The situation is not all bleak, particularly if one is willing to explore options outside the traditional academic research career. The trick seems to be figuring out how to translate the skills one earns over the course of the PhD into skills one can market to potential employers.

EDIT: Fixed a broken link.

Unraveling the "obviousness" bias in psychology

2011-01-10T08:20:00.011-06:00

In my last post, I argued that the pseudoscience of parapsychology (and in particular the publication of a paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology claiming to provide evidence of precognition) hurts the perception of psychology as a science. This may seem like an obvious argument to make; Bem's paper was published in the flagship journal of social psychology, so it is easy to make the logical jump that this article is representative of the kind of research most social psychologists do. Therefore, the reasoning goes, social psychology is not a real science at all; to quote one comment on the media coverage of the Bem article,

Psychology is such a joke. A demonstration of future events influencing present events would be one of the most important (if not *the* most important) findings in the history of mankind. Yet this demonstration doesn't end up in Science or Nature, but is published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology? And some wonder why psychology is still considered pseudoscience....

However, all sciences have their occasional crackpots (in physics, John Baez humorously proposed the Crackpot index to deal with the profusion of physics cranks on Usenet forums). Why should psychology be any more affected by pseudoscientific claims for precognition than physics is by pseudoscientific claims for perpetual motion?

According to a recent paper by Keil, Lockhart and Schlegel, there may be a very good reason that psychology as a field is affected more than physics. Keil and his colleagues argue that psychology findings are afflicted by what I'm calling an "obviousness bias" -- they are viewed as intrinically less difficult to figure out than the findings of other sciences.

Keil and his colleagues took questions from physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, and economics. These questions were pre-tested with adults to be equally difficult and span a wide range of topics (see below).

The questions used in Keil, Lockhart, and Schlegel (2010) study 1.

The authors then asked people of various age-groups, from kindergarten up through adulthood, to rate the questions on difficulty from 1 (very easy to understand) to 5 (very hard to understand). The key finding is that while kindergartners viewed the questions from the various sciences as equivalently difficult to understand, children from 2nd to 8th grade viewed psychology problems as much easier to understand than the other problems. This bias disappeared in adulthood (see graph below).

A graph from Keil, Lockhart, and Schlegel of the mean difficulty score assigned to the natural and social sciences across the various age groups.

Note that children have absolutely no basis on which to judge how easy it is to understand why cooked eggs go from liquid to solid or why it is hard to understand two people talking at once. Children have no experience on which to draw when judging the difficulty of these questions and therefore, presumably, rely on heuristics to answer these questions. Thus, the fact that younger children rated psychology questions as less difficult than natural science questions points to a heuristic that makes psychology facts seem more obvious than other sorts of facts.

The authors found an identical pattern of judgments of questions within the various sub-disciplines within psychology; children judged questions from "harder" sub-disciplines, such as neuroscience and cognitive psychology, as more difficult to understand than questions from "softer" sub-disciplines, such as social psychology and personality psychology. Moreover, when the authors asked adults how easy it would be to figure the questions out just by living and watching things, the adults showed the bias as well -- they rated the psychology questions as easier to figure out than the natural science questions.

While the authors do not explore directly whether the obviousness bias translates into psychological findings being taken less seriously than the findings from other disciplines, the authors do show that people assume they can figure out psychological findings on their own. This could very easily lead to a perception that less scientific rigor is required for research psychology than for other sciences -- after all, anyone can do psychology just by experiencing life. This means that anything that reflects on the integrity of psychology as a scientific discipline -- like pseudoscientific work on precognition -- is likely to be especially damaging for psychology.

Reference:

Keil, F. C., Lockhart, K. L., & Schlegel, E. (2010). A bump on a bump? Emerging intuitions concerning the relative difficulty of the sciences. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 139, 1 - 15.

"Evidence" for precognition hurts perception of psychology as a science

2011-01-09T10:34:00.008-06:00

Well, it's been a long time -- too long. Since my last post, this post got linked to by Cracked, which literally increased my visitors by to 10-fold. And slowly, by degrees, I have become convinced to start blogging again. So, let's get started, shall we? I'd like to talk about a paper in press at a top journal in psychology (the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology) that claims to have found evidence of ESP.

In this paper, Daryl Bem, a well-known and well-respected psychologist at Cornell University, conducted 9 time-reversed versions of classic social psychology experiments. For example, one common way of testing for associations between sets of concepts is through priming, in which an picture is flashed very quickly on a computer screen, after which the participant must categorize a second object. People are usually faster at categorizing the second object when the two objects share a relationship to each other; for example, when a picture of a rainbow (which most people agree is "good") is displayed before the participant must categorize the word "puppy" (which most people also agree is "good") as either good or bad.

In the time-reversed version of this experiment, Bem asked participants to categorize a word as good or bad before the picture prime was flashed on the screen. He found that participants were faster at categorizing the word when it was replaced by pictures of the same valence; in other words, when "good" words were replaced by "good" pictures and when "bad" words were replaced by "bad" pictures. In fact, the participants were faster by . . . 15 milliseconds.

Wait, really, that's all?

The forward and time-reversed versions of a classic priming experiment.

Most of Bem's effects are like this -- small both practically and statistically. The fact that these effects are so small makes me suspicious that Bem was cherry-picking his results. How many other failed experiments did he conduct before choosing these nine to present in a paper?

However, the experiments that he did choose were sufficiently rigorous to pass the peer review process of the flagship social psychology journal, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Even though the paper has not yet been officially published at JPSP, it has already generated a large controversy among psychologists, several failed replications, a rebuttal from a group of statisticians, a report in the New York Times, and more than 98 news articles in a quick search of Google News.

Of course, if you examine some of the comments of the news coverage of the article, the article has also generated a large volume of responses from psi skeptics who lambaste both Bem and psychological research in general.

So, what are the likely implications of Bem's article for psychology?

With absolutely no demonstrable evidence in physics for a causal mechanism through which psi can operate, I have little doubt that time will uncover either statistical or methodological shenanigans that can account for Bem's findings. The history of psi research is a veritable case study in how these problems occur.

However, what concerns me about Bem's article is the probable backlash from the general public against psychology. I'm talking about comments like this:

Psychology is such a joke. A demonstration of future events influencing present events would be one of the most important (if not *the* most important) findings in the history of mankind. Yet this demonstration doesn't end up in Science or Nature, but is published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology? And some wonder why psychology is still considered pseudoscience....

Parapsychology has clear history of scientific shenanigans, and yet the publication of parapsychological articles in major psychology journals encourages people to lump parapsychology with good, rigorous, reputable psychological research. In the midst of politically motivated attempts to drastically cut NSF funding for the social sciences, this kind of negative attention for psychology has never been more unwanted.

Add "tool use" to the list of reasons octopuses are awesome

2009-12-14T15:30:00.005-06:00

Check this out (courtesy of New Scientist):

Yet another reason I am preparing for the octopus apocalypse (octopocalypse?).

An explanation for the blogging hiatus

2009-12-10T22:51:00.003-06:00

I have been dealing over the past three months or so with an enormously stressful semester in graduate school, which included my Master's defense, an intense teaching assignment, and more sleepless nights than I'd care to remember. The stress of the semester is such that I have been forced to take a temporary hiatus from activities that are non-essential to my continued attendance in graduate school (including, sometimes, sleeping and eating).

However, with the semester almost over, I'm finding that I finally have enough time to catch my breath and put my life in more of a state of normalcy. Hopefully that means a return to a more regular pace of blog updates. I already have several ideas for new posts, so as long as I don't have to return to the world of 16 - 18 hour days, you should see a resurgence of updates on this blog.

SCIENCE!

The psychology of Abu Ghraib

2009-12-09T22:22:00.012-06:00

I'd like to start my post today by recalling an event that occurred 5 years ago at the US detention center in Abu Ghraib. As many of you might remember, in 2004, reports surfaced of physical, sexual, and psychological abuse of Iraqi prisoners at the prison. What was remarkable about this event was not necessarily the abuse in and of itself, but the subsequent controversy over its nomenclature. Although the abuse constituted torture under the UN Convention Against Torture, many within the US government objected to this characterisation. Observe Donald Rumsfeld's reaction, as quoted in the New York Times:

What has been charged so far is abuse, which I believe technically is different from torture. I'm not going to address the "torture" word.

It seems that, when committed against foreign citizens, abuse has less moral weight than when it is committed against American citizens, either by other American citizens or by foreign citizens.

A 2006 study by Bernhard, Fehr, and Fischbacher may help simulate this preferential punishment of maltreatment of in-group members. To model preferential punishment, Bernhard and her colleagues use third-party punishment, a simulated game that is compelling enough to become something of the game du jour in behavioral economics. A third party punishment game works as follows:

1. Three players are assigned to one of three roles: the allocator, the recipient, and the third party.

2. The players get starting points according to their assigned role. The allocator receives 100 points, the recipient receives 0 points, and the third party receives 50 points.

3. The allocator can give any amount (or none at all) of his or her 100 points to the recipient. The allocator is under no obligation to give anything to the recipient. So, if the allocator wishes, he or she can give absolutely nothing to the recipient. Conversely, if the allocator wishes, he or she can give all 100 points to the recipient.

4. The third party has the opportunity to assign "deduction points" to to allocator. Each deduction point assigned reduces the number of points possessed by the allocator by 3. So, if the third party doesn't like the amount of points the allocator gave the recipient, this is a way to express that displeasure by punishing the allocator. Note, however, that the third party is under no obligation to spend any deduction points whatsoever - if the third party likes, he or she can simply pass and keep all of the 50 initial points.

5. All three players exchange their points for money at a rate set by the experimenter.

Fehr and his colleagues have found that although punishing allocators reduces the final payoff of the third party, approximately 55% of all third parties punish allocations of less than 50 points, and the greater the deviation from 50 points, the greater the punishment.

Bernhard and colleagues decided to put a little twist on the third party punishment game by varying the group membership of the players involved. Specifically, Bernhard and colleagues asked members of two tribal groups from Papua New Guinea, the Ngenika and the Wolimbka, to play a third party punishment game. Each game was characterised by the following set-ups: either the third party, the allocator, or the recipient could be a member of the opposing group, or all the players could be members of the same group. Here's what the authors found:

When either the allocator was from a different tribe than the third party and the recipient or when all three players were from the same tribe, increasing deviations from a 50-50 split led to relatively large amounts of punishment. Conversely, when either the recipient or the third party was from a different tribe, increasing deviations from a 50-50 split led to relatively light punishment.

The differential amounts of punishment between games where all the players are from the same group and games where the recipient is from a different group might help simulate instances like Abu Ghraib, where morally repugnant actions receive less punishment than one might naively think appropriate. Although the Bernhard study doesn't explain why such acts occur, it's still an interesting first step towards such an explanation.

Reference:

Bernhard, H., Fehr, U., & Fischbacher, F.E. (2006). Parochial altruism in humans. Nature, 442, 912-915.

Facial structure predicts aggression, or the psychology of Vincent Crabbe

2009-08-19T21:35:00.001-05:00

We all have a pretty good idea of how to spot aggression. Chances are, the more someone looks like Joshua Diliberto in his self-portrait below, the more aggressive that person will be:

However, though anger is a fairly straightforward facial cue for aggression, a sequence of studies in the Proceedings of the Royal Society and Psychological Science by Justin Carre and his colleagues suggest that people also assess aggressive tendencies using less intuitive cues. Specifically, the wider your face is relative to its height, the more aggressive people think you'll be (and the more likely you are to actually be aggressive). In other words, Jack Black is one of the most aggressive people alive.

RAWWWRRR!!!

To demonstrate this somewhat counterintuitive finding, Carre and his colleauges took pictures of male and female participants and used digital software to assess the ratio between the width and height of the participants' faces. The participants then played a game in which they could press buttons that either increased their own total points, decreased an opponent's total points, or protected themselves from point decrease by an opponent. Because decreasing an opponent's points did not increase the participant's own point total, the number of times the participant pressed the button that decreased the opponent's total points served as a measure of aggression. Male (but not female) participants with shorter, wider faces had a greater tendency to decrease their opponents' point total.

Since Carre and his colleagues are from Ontario, and we all know that all Canadians without exception are completely obsessed with hockey, the researchers also sought to establish a relationship between facial structure and aggression among hockey players. They found that players with shorter, wider faces tended to have more penalty minutes per game than players with taller, narrower faces.

Could facial cues for aggression explain why hockey players are so freaking ugly?

However, even if facial structure correlates with aggression, there is no guarantee that people use facial structure cues when making judgments about others' propensities for aggression. To determine whether this is the case, Carre and his colleagues had people rate faces of varying width to height ratios for aggression. Participant's ratings correlated strongly with the ratio of the faces' width to height (r = .59) and with actual aggression (r = .42), and these results held even when the faces were flashed on the screen for only 39 ms. The authors suggest that the link between facial structure and aggression could result from overgeneralization of the lowered brow and raised lip that result from angry expressions; such expression could artificially make the face appear shorter and wider, and this cue could have been coopted to signal trait aggression in addition to anger.

Thus, we may have found the psychological basis for the "thuggish look" associated with some people with round faces. This may explain why some movie actors consistently get cast as meatheaded cronies. Sorry, Jamie Waylett - once a Crabbe, always a Crabbe.

References:

Carre, J. M., McCormick, C. M., & Mondloch, C. J. (Article in press). Facial structure is a reliable cue of aggressive behavior. Psychological Science.

Carre, J. M. & McCormick, C. M. (2008). In your face: Facial metrics predict aggressive behaviour in the laboratory and in varsity and professional hockey players. Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 275, 2651–2656.

A short introduction to Davian behavior

2009-08-10T23:20:00.013-05:00

Today I'd like to talk about something called Davian behavior. To understand what this eponym refers to, consider the following limeric:

There was an old miner named Dave
who kept a dead whore in his cave
You have to admit
He hadn't much wit
But look at the money he saved!

That's right. I'm talking about necrophilia. More specifically, animal necrophilia.

Davian behavior has undoubtedly been observed for some time, but it first sparked scientific interest in 1960, when Robert Dickerman observed a male common ground squirrel in flagrante delicto with the corpse of another squirrel. The corpse was in a typical "flexed" mating position, which Dickerman speculated had triggered a mating reflex in the randy male.

After this initial report, references to Davian behavior died off for a period (Ha! Get get? Get it?). However, in 1988, Philip Lehner reported an interesting and somewhat disturbing incident involving Mallard ducks. During this incident, five drakes (male Mallards) got jiggy with the corpse of a Mallard hen that had just been pecked to death by two geese. Apparently, avians males of all sorts are rather notorious for their surprisingly Catholic sexual tastes; one study (for which, unfortunately, I cannot find a direct link) by Martin Schein and Edgar Hale found that male turkeys were willing to mount simple model heads of female turkeys.

So . . . what's your sign?

Of course, Mallards appear to be particularly indiscriminate about their sexual partners. In a 1995 case at the Natuurmuseum Rotterdam, Kees Moeliker observed the first recorded case of avian homosexual necrophilia. Moeliker heard a loud thump against a glass window. When he went outside to investigate, he found one Mallard dead on the ground and the other vigorously enjoying the whole situation. Altogether, the enjoyment lasted 75 minutes and only ended through Moeliker's interruption. The incident won Moeliker an Ig Nobel prize for improbable research and spawned a yearly celebration: Dead Duck Day.

That duck sure has a strange way of honoring the dead.

However, the title of king for Davian behavior has to go to the lowly anuran (frogs and toads). As reported by the blog Tetrapod Zoology, during the mating season male anurans are well-known for gripping passing objects in a tight "breeding clasp". Aided by rough pads or spines under the forearms, these clasps may last days or even weeks. The anurans are also not known for being very discriminating, grabbing anurans from other species, or even more inappropriate objects, such as human hands. Or, as the following picture shows (and as I have alluded to in a previous post), dead salamanders.

What are you looking at?

This propensity to grab any old object in a tight copulatory grasp has gotten some species of anuran into trouble; as reported by Walter Meshaka, individual Cuban tree frogs and southern toads have been observed attempting to mate with females that have already been crushed by passing automobiles.

Of course, no post on animal necrophilia would be complete without a Youtube video or three. As you can see, there's plenty of anecdotal evidence for Davian behavior in animals besides anurans, Mallards, and ground squirrels. And before you even mention it, I'll leave the sexual quirks of humans for another time.

Why ants are awesome: Cooperation and zombification

2009-08-04T22:40:00.006-05:00

Be afraid. Be very afraid. Because ants have already taken over the world.

To get a sense of their global dominance, consider the following facts. Ants monopolize 75% of the total insect biomass and 15% of the total terrestrial animal biomass. Their colonies can become huge; one colony of Argentine ants (Linepithema humile) in California spans 560 miles, while another colony from the same species along the Mediterranean spans 3,700 miles. What's worse, ants from the super-colonies from America and Europe already act like members of an international mafioso; when continent-hopping ants of this species encounter each other on foreign soil, they cooperate instead of fighting.

Be very, very afraid.

Ants have achieved such ascendancy in the environment through sociality on a staggering scale. Individual ants are specialized to the extent that the majority of individuals in any given colony are sterile, the reproductive functions being given over to the queen of a colony. On the face of it, such a strategy seems evolutionarily unsustainable, since each individual daughter worker seems to have a strong incentive to quit cooperating with her sisters and become a baby-making factory of her own. However, ant scientists (myrmecologists) have discovered a strange quirk of ant genetics: each daughter ant is more related to her sisters than her mother.

This occurs because ant sex is determined by the number of chromosomes any given ant receives. Ants formed by the union of a sperm and an egg (diploids) become females, while ants formed by eggs alone (haploids) become males. Because female ants have two chromosomes, half of which are contributed to producing a new ant, each daughter ant shares 50% of her genes with her mother. However, daughter ants always receive all of the single chromosome possessed by her father; this means that she shares 75% of her genes with her sisters. Thus, daughter ants have an incentive to keep their mother safely and continuously churning out fellow sister ants.

This peculiar system of sex determination has made possible a wide variety of cooperative behaviors, which has made ants the poster-child of the burgeoning field of sociobiology. Together, sociobiologists and myrmecologists (along with scientists in a number of other disciplines) have catalogued a dizzying array of interesting behaviors, including:

Agriculture. This, of course, is one of ants' most renowned cooperative behaviors, made famous in pretty much every nature documentary about the Amazon ever. Farming ants cultivate a variety of mutualistic funguses, which they feed and protect in exchange for being, well, ant food. One particular species of farmer ant, Atta colombica, has also been observed weeding and grooming its fungus gardens of parasitic fungi. The ants also cultivate a variety of bacteria that acts as a sort of antibiotic for the parasitic fungus. Sounds like a pretty sweet deal, as long as you don't mind being, well, ant food.

Fortunately, ant farmers still have yet to invent the plow.

Animal husbandry. This is another well-known ant ability. Although individual species of ants have evolved to herd a variety of animals, one of the most famous herding relationships is that forged with aphids. The aphid's typical diet, plant sap, is low in needed nitrogenous compounds, which means that aphids need to consume great quantities of sap to meet their nutritional requirements. The excess sap is excreted out the anus in the form of sugary "honeydew". Some species of ants have evolved to protect aphids in large farms in return for this sweet anus residue. In order to keep their aphid-cattle docile, the ants excrete tranquilizer from their feet. This also enables the ants to keep the aphids closer together than the aphids normally prefer. It also makes it easier for the ants to kill the aphids when they occasionally decide to eat them.

Mmmm, aphid anus-juice.

Slavery. This is an interesting one. Certain species of ants raid the colonies of other species for larvae. They then raise the larvae as their own, and through intricate chemical deception, fool the slave ants into working for a foreign colony. However, slave ants sometimes get their just desserts; some species have evolved a means of detecting the chemical deception and revolt on their former masters, killing large numbers of larvae before they succumb.

I'm Sparticus!

Have I convinced you of ant supremacy yet? Well, I haven't yet told you of the primary reason to fear the coming ant apocalypse: the existence of ant zombies.

Ant zombies?

Yes, ant zombies.

Apparently, the Ophiocordyceps unilateralis fungus specializes in hijacking ant bodies, then forcing the ants to climb to specific locations on the leaves of rainforest trees and causing the ants to develop a "death-grip" on the undersides of those leaves. The fungus then extrudes its tendrils through the ant head, eventually fully taking over the ant's body. When it comes time to reproduce, the fungus' spores spread out in a "killing field" that zombifies any unfortunate ants that come within 1 meter of the mature fungus.

Braaaaaaiiiiiins.

What I'm trying to tell you all in this post is that we have an animal that constitutes over 15% of the terrestrial animal biomass that is cooperative, has farming, agriculture, and slavery, and that has a ready avenue of zombification. I don't know about you, but when the coming zombie infestation sweeps the earth, I plan to be prepared with gifts of aphid brains and honey.

Consider yourselves warned.

Moral decision-making: The difference between Barack Obama and Joe the Plumber

2009-08-01T22:57:00.008-05:00

Barack Obama. Warren Buffet. Mark Zuckerberg. Carlos Slim.

What do the above people have in common? They're all a heck of a lot more powerful than your average Joe Shmoe (or, if you prefer to use more up-to-date terminology, Joe the Plumber). However, a recent study by Joris Lammers and Diederik Stapel in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology suggests that power might produce another, subtler difference between Carlos Slim and our favorite Republican wrench-monkey: the way in which they reason about moral decisions.

Lammers and Stapel reasoned that people with power have a vested interest in maintaining the current power structure. One way of doing this is through enforcing existing rules. Thus, powerful people (or even people who have been induced to think about power recently) should take a more rules-based approach to moral decisions. In contrast, people who have less power have an interest in overturning the current power structure by undermining the current rules. These people should therefore take a more consequence-based approach to moral decisions. For example, consider the following moral dilemma (from Lammers and Stapel, 2009):

A teacher maintains the following rule: If a child in class behaves badly the teacher punishes him or her. Heinz is one of the children. Heinz did not behave well today and has been fighting with other kids. The rule dictates therefore that he needs to be punished. The teacher, however, suspects that Heinz has been provoked by other kids. So, the teacher thinks about not punishing Heinz. On the other hand, not punishing Heinz may undermine the rules and create disorder. What should the teacher do?

Because enforcing the rule by punishing Heinz supports the current structure of power, powerful people or those who have recently thought about power should be more likely to take a rules-based approach by endorsing punishing Heinz. Because making an exception by not punishing Heinz undermines the current structure of power, people with less power or who have thought recently about submission should be more likely to take a consequence-based approach and endorse not punishing Heinz.

Lammers and Stapel found exactly the above pattern of results. The results held even when the moral dilemmas involved weighty, emotionally charged issues, such as the following (in honor of the crazy wackjob movement of the day, the Birthers, this is very freely adapted from Lammers and Stapel):

Barack Obama maintains the following rule: If an American behaves badly, he calls his homeboys in Kenya and starts a race war. Joe the Plumber is an American. Joe the Plumber did not behave well today and has been killing too many terrorists. The rule dictates therefore that Barack Obama needs to start a race war. Barack Obama, however, suspects that Joe the Plumber has been provoked by the terrorists. So, Barack Obama thinks about not starting a race war. On the other hand, not starting a race war may undermine the rules and create disorder. What should Barack Obama do?

Although Lammers and Stapel did not test exactly the above passage, dilemmas of similar emotional weight still resulted in an association of power with rules-based approaches and a lack of power with consequence-based approaches.

However, the above dilemmas are all framed in the third person, which means that they all concern other people besides the participant. If the relationship between power and rules-based decision making occurs because enforcing the rules supports the current power structure, the relationship should disappear when the third-person pronouns in the above dilemmas are replaced with first-person pronouns, as in the following:

Barack Obama maintains the following rule: If an American behaves badly, he calls his homeboys in Kenya and starts a race war. You are an American. You did not behave well today and were killing too many terrorists. The rule dictates therefore that Barack Obama needs to start a race war. Barack Obama, however, suspects that you have been provoked by the terrorists. So, Barack Obama thinks about not starting a race war. On the other hand, not starting a race war may undermine the rules and create disorder. What should Barack Obama do?

When people who had thought about power read a dilemmas like the one above that concerned themselves personally, they were no more likely to make a rules-based decision than people who had thought about submission.

The above research might provide some insight into the common disparity between presidents' campaign promises and post-election behavior; the new power has literally gone their heads. The research provides absolutely no insight, however, into the sort of power shown in the video below:

Reference:

Lammers, J. & Stapel, D. (2009). How power influences moral thinking. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 97, 279-289.

Oh, what a tangled web we weave - information every graduate student should know

2009-07-27T21:45:00.013-05:00

Occasionally when I discuss an article with my adviser, she asks me a question that completely mystifies me. "What journal was this article published in?" she'll ask. "Journal of Experimental Social Psychology," I'll reply. Then she nods knowingly as if incomparably important information has just been conveyed and continues talking.

I am left wondering throughout this entire experience just what information has exchanged hands here.

For non-graduate students, my problem might not be exactly clear. You see, no one ever sits us poor graduate students down to tell us "Psychological Science publishes unique and unusual studies that are likely to start new lines of research" or "Journal of Personality and Social Psychology is the most prestigious journal in social psychology" or "Journal of Urology publishes articles about kidneys". We often need to figure out all of this information by blind groping, like whole cohorts of nervous high school boys playing Seven Minutes in Heaven.

But wait a second. Journals are published by scientists. Or, to be more precise, journals are published by geeks and nerds. Surely someone out there has assembled some systematic information about which journals are important in which fields . . .

Indeed, many people have aggregated this information. In fact, they have aggregated competing sources of information, which has spawned a whole contentious field of journal influence measurement. Many measures of journal influence exist, the most well-known of which is probably the impact factor. This statistic is calculated by Thomson Corporation, which has now merged with Reuters. Thomson Reuters maintains an index of scientific journals. The impact factor of a given journal is roughly calculated using the index according to the following algorithm:

A = number of times articles published in a given journal were cited by indexed journals over the past two years
B = number of total citable items in index over the past two years
Impact factor = A / B

So, a journal that publishes articles that are cited roughly once per year will achieve an impact factor of 1. The above explanation is an oversimplification of the actual calculations, of course, but it conveys the basic idea behind the impact factor.

However, there are several problems with the impact factor. First of all, the two year window may be entirely too small - classic articles are often not recognized as such upon initial publication, and when they are, they can generate citations for years (especially when the author of said articles is one's adviser). Additionally, journals can game the system by publishing a large proportion of review articles, which do not report on new data but are useful to cite because they aggregate large portions of a given topic into one place.

The worst problem with the impact factor, however, is that Thomson Reuters treats the statistic as proprietary information. Those bastards.

Enter Eigenfactor.

Eigenfactor is a PageRank algorithm that operates somewhat like that of Google fame. Journals are weighted according to not only the sheer number of citations received, but also by who does the citing. Thus, journals cited by Nature can feel smug about joining the lofty ranks of the scientific elite.

However, there are two extremely cool things about Eigenfactor:

1. The information is completely open source
2. The visualizations are AMAZING!!!!

First, some nuts and bolts about important articles according to Eigenfactor (as of 2006):

Top 10 non-review science journals by Eigenfactor™ score (2006)	Top 10 social science journals by Eigenfactor™ score (2006)
1. Nature	1. American Economic Review
2. Science	2. Journal of Finance
3. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA	3. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
4. Journal of Biological Chemistry	4. Quarterly Journal of Economics
5. Physical Review Letters	5. Journal of Financial Economics
6. Journal of the American Chemical Society	6. Social Science & Medicine
7. Physical Review B	7. Journal of Political Economy
8. Applied Physics Letters	8. Psychological Science
9. New England Journal of Medicine	9. Journal of Economic Theory
10. Astrophysical Journal	10. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology

Nice to see my social psychology homeboys at JPSP cracking the ranks of the top 10 social science journals. Note that at the Eigenfactor website you can see the relative Eigenfactor scores of just about any journal ever (for reference, Nature has an Eigenfactor score of 1.9917, while the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology has an Eigenfactor score of .07281. In contrast to the JPSP, the Journal of Urology has an Eigenfactor score of .1169. Burn.)

Now for some really cool stuff. I give you A MAP OF SCIENCE!!!

Each dot represents a given field. The larger the dot, the more articles come from that field. The darker the dot, the more articles in the field cross-reference each other. Arrows indicate citation flow; darker and larger arrows indicate a greater number of citations.

Here's an enlarged version of the social science portion of the map:

That is some unbridled awesome right there (by the way, the originals may be found here). Although it's a little humbling to see that my home discipline of psychology is just a small dot in the giant web that is science, it's also a little comforting that psychology is integrated into a ginormous, ongoing conversation about EVERYTHING. It's almost enough to turn me into a realist. Almost.

In sum, while the Eigenfactor might not let me know exactly why my adviser gives me that knowing smirk when I mention the Psychological Bulletin, it can give graduate students a general sense of how well-respected a journal (or even an entire field!) is among the broader scientific community.

Personally, I think any little bit of information that helps me better understand the tangled web of scientific publishing is extremely helpful. Cool visualizations help, too. Also, kidneys.

Curiosity enhances memory: Why I know so much about echidna sex

2009-07-23T21:33:00.008-05:00

I wanted to talk today about a subject that's near and dear to my heart - curiosity. Curiosity is often compared to the basic drives of hunger and thirst; one's appetite for knowledge can be whetted, such that a small nugget of knowledge can result in large increases in one's intellectual appetite, and large increases in knowledge can bring one's intellectual appetite to the point of satiety (particularly when the object of one's curiosity is echidna sex or phallic mushrooms). Additionally, according to Gary Larson, too much unsatisfied curiosity can be lethal:

Although curiosity is often compared to other, more basic drives, Min Jeong Kang and her colleagues have taken the comparison seriously. In an upcoming article in Psychological Science, they argue that curiosity results from a discrepancy between the amount of information that is desired about a topic and the amount actually possessed. Consequently, curiosity can actually increase with initial learning, as the first bit of knowledge leads to new questions regarding the subject matter (e.g., "Just how many mushrooms out there look so phallic?!"). Additionally, curiosity should enhance memory for new information, and this new information should serve as an intrinsically rewarding stimulus.

To investigate this hypothesis, Kang and her colleagues used a basic paradigm wherein they asked people trivia questions designed to elicit differing levels of curiosity (e.g., "What kind of bear is best?"* vs. "Which primate has the largest penis relative to its body size?"**). They then asked the participants to mentally guess the answer to each of the trivia questions and rate both how curious they were about the right answer and how confident they were that their answer was correct. The participants then viewed the question again and the correct answer to the question. Over the course of three experiments, Kang and her colleagues had participants complete this basic procedure in an fMRI scanner, assessed willingness to exchange scarce resources (time and tokens) for answers to the trivia questions, and assessed memory for trivia answers by having participants come back to the lab for a surprise quiz of trivia answers.

Kang and her colleagues found that participants were most curious when their confidence ratings were in the middle of the confidence scale. This curiosity correlated with enhanced activity in the caudate region of the brain, which has been linked to anticipated reward. This pattern is consistent with the view of curiosity as a sort of hunger for knowledge, where a small amount of information whets the appetite for the later reward of more information. Additionally, the researchers found that increased levels of curiosity were associated with increasing willingness to spend scarce resources in exchange for trivia answers. Increasing amounts of curiosity were also associated with enhanced memory two weeks after the experiment - participants were most accurate about the trivia questions about which they were most curious.

Needless to say, it's freaking awesome to see curiosity treated in a systematic, scientific way. Now if only there was a scientific explanation for the sort of gnawing, ever-present craving for knowledge that I have for just about everything.

Reference:

Kang, et al. (Article in press). The Wick in the Candle of Learning: Epistemic Curiosity Activates Reward Circuitry and Enhances Memory. Psychological Science.

*Black bear.

**Humans.

Alcohol impairs meta-consciousness . . . wait, what?

2009-07-20T20:52:00.011-05:00

As some of us know only too well, alcohol can have a rather detrimental effect on peoples' state of mind. Consider the following video (courtesy of The Simpsons):

Clearly Barney is not in the best state of mind after drinking his (non-alcoholic) beer. However, a recent study in Psychological Science by Michael Sayette and his colleagues suggests that alcohol also affects consciousness on a meta-level; it affects both the likelihood that a person will zone out and the likelihood that a person will be aware of zoning out in the first place.

To demonstrate these meta-consciousness effects, Sayette and his colleagues gave participants a lovely mixture of cranberry juice with either Smirnoff or flattened Schweppes tonic water. To further provoke an altered state of consciousness, all the participants then read 34 pages of War and Peace. During their reading, participants pressed a key every time they felt themselves zoning out. Additionally, to measure awareness of zoning out, a random probe asked participants whether they were zoning out at that moment.

The ultimate in mind-altering substances

Participants who drank alcohol did not press the zone-out button any more than participants who drank Schweppes. However, drunk participants were about twice as likely to be caught mind-wandering than sober participants, indicating an impaired awareness of their mid-wandering. This might explain some of the more bizarre instances of drunken behavior out there.

It also affords me the opportunity to post hilarious Fail Blog signs.

Wait, what were we talking about again?

Reference:

Sayette, M., Reichle, E., & Schooler, J. (2009). Lost in the sauce: The effects of alcohol on mind wandering. Psychological Science, 20, 747-752.

Why octopuses are awesome: A tribute to our future octopodian overlords

2009-07-19T16:19:00.010-05:00

Today I wanted to write a post about an animal that I continue to find endlessly fascinating - the octopus. Octopuses* are an anomaly among animals in that although they are mere short-lived invertebrates (most live 1 or 2 years), they are extremely intelligent, exhibiting curiosity about their environment and having a tendency to play. For example, Kuba and his colleagues found that when given buoyant objects, such as an opaque plastic bottle or a red-and-white Lego block, an hour every day for eight days in a row, octopuses would begin to play with the objects. Some octopuses pulled the objects towards the bottom of the aquarium, while others would jet water against them, playing an underwater version of catch.

Octopuses also display playful behavior under less controlled conditions. For example, Louis the octopus at the Blue Quay Aquarium in Newquay, Cornwall was given a Mr. Potato Head for Christmas. Evidently, he has become quite attached to it:

Louis turned the Mr. Potato Head into a personal food stash, stuffing fish and other goodies inside it for later. He also attacks any aquarium workers who try to take the toy away. Personally, I would let him have it.

Octopuses' intelligence and tendency to play can make them trouble-makers at many aquariums. Take this incident in February, 2009 at the Santa Monica Pier Aquarium. The aquarium's bored octopus disassembled a water recycling valve during the night, causing hundreds of gallons of sea water to spew all over the aquarium floor. The incident cost the aquarium at least $15000 in damages. At least the octopus was amused.

Or take this incident in October, 2008 at the Sea Star Aquarium in Coburg, Germany. Otto the octopus had already developed a reputation for mischief, having learned to entertain himself by juggling rocks and hermit crabs and occasionally smashing the glass of his tank in the process. However, Otto decided to set his sights a little higher, specifically at the overhanging 2000-watt spotlight above his tank. Otto squirted water at this light, causing a short-circuit that deprived power to the entire aquarium and endangered the denizens that required temperature maintenance at a specific level.

Beyond having an ability and propensity to cause mischief, octopuses also have incredible flexibility and dexterity. Because the only hard portion of their body is their beak, even large specimens can fit into surprisingly small spaces.

Octopus Escape - The best bloopers are a click away

Add to this flexibility an incredible ability to change both the color and texture of their skin. For example, all the octopuses in the following picture are the same octopus.

Some species of octopuses use this ability to great effect; one species, the Mimic Octopus, mimics other animals to deceive both predators and prey.

Given their intelligence and their wide array of abilities, it's surprising octopuses haven't yet banded together to conquer the planet in one mass of octopodian fury. Then again, they've already started to do away with some of their major oceanic competition:

I don't know about you, but I'm going to start making sacrifices to our future eight-legged overlords to be on the safe side.

Reference:

Kuba, et al. (2003). Looking at play in octopus vulgaris. Berliner Paläobiol. Abh., 3, 163-169.

*Contrary to popular belief, octopus is not a Latinate noun, but rather a Greek one. Therefore, the plural form should be octopuses or octopodes, not octopi. Even if octopus was a Latinate noun, the correct plural would be octopes. I was surprised too.

Edit: Courtesy of a helpful reader:

On searching the origin of the word even further, I found that "octopus" is a made-up word from the 15th or 16th century to classify the animal known in Latin as a "polypus". So it's not really truly Greek or Roman, and how you pluralize it is a matter of common usage rather than proper grammar.
AND (to be even more picky)
The Latinate plural would not be "octopes" unless the singular were "octopis". As a Latin scholar (I took 7 years of Latin), I can tell you that a proper Latin plural of a word ending in "us" ends in "i".

So, I suppose when you get down to it, you can choose your own pluralization. However, as I mention in my comment, in terms of sounding cool, octopodes > all.

Hunting and gathering enhances memory, or my new prelims study method revealed

2009-07-17T22:10:00.009-05:00

A recent article in the journal Psychological Science suggests that the human memory system may be tuned to encode and recall concepts that were relevant to survival during our ancestral past. Thus, just as Trogdor has a particularly keen memory for burnination, peasants, and cottages, humans should have good memories for concepts relating to our own ancestral methods of gathering food, namely hunting and gathering.

TROGDOR!!!!!!!!!!!!!

To test this hypothesis, researcher James Nairne and his colleagues asked participants to visualize one of four scenarios. Two of the possible scenarios were fitness relevant (gathering food for one's tribe and hunting for one's tribe) while the other two were fitness irrelevant (participating in a scavenger hunt and participating in a hunting competition). The participants were then given a series of nouns which they rated for their relevance to their target scenario.

After a short distraction, the participants were given a surprise free recall task in which they listed all the nouns they could remember from earlier in the experiment. Participants who were asked to visualize fitness-relevant scenarios recalled more words, suggesting that human memory is prepared to remember concepts relevant to survival in our ancestral past.

However, the experimenters did have one hypothesis that was not supported by the data. Initially, the experimenters predicted that men and women would exhibit gender differences in recalled nouns, with men recalling more nouns during hunting scenarios and women recalling more nouns in gathering scenarios. Of course, no such difference existed, but the mere fact that the hypothesis made it into print at all illustrates a common problem in male-dominated academia, particularly in evolutionary psychology - the "locker-room" mentality that often accompanies bad evolutionary theorizing. This sort of mentality often leads to theories that may be aptly represented with the following pictures:

Housewife forages for food in her native environment

Man does vry impor-tant work of hunting for meat at his Bat-desk

I suppose we can simply count ourselves lucky that the authors of this study restricted themselves to predicting that women would have enhanced memory for gathering, rather than enhanced memory for cooking, cleaning, and blowjobs.

Reference:

Nairne, et al. (2009). Adaptive memory: Fitness relevance and the hunter-gatherer mind. Psychological Science, 20, 740-746.

Fighting bigotry, one lemonade at a time

2009-07-16T22:13:00.007-05:00

Much to the delight of child entrepreneurs everywhere, a new article by Matthew Gailliot and his colleagues in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology suggests that individuals who have recently increased their blood glucose levels by drinking lemonade are better able to control expressions of stereotypes and prejudice.

In their experiment, Gailliot and his colleagues gave participants lemonade sweetened with either sugar or calorie-free Splenda. The participants then described a typical day in the life of the gay man Sammy. The participants who had drunk lemonade sweetened with sugar used fewer stereotypes (e.g., "After a long day of lumberjacking, Sammy usually goes bear wrestling") in their description than participants whose lemonade had been sweetened with Splenda (e.g., "After a long day of hairdressing, Sammy usually goes antiquing"). High prejudice participants who drank sugary lemonade also made fewer derogatory comments about gay people in their essays than those who drank Splenda-y lemonade.

This research is extremely exciting for both sugarcane growers and gay rights organizations everywhere. The research suggest that if only, for example, the National Organization for Marriage drank a bit more lemonade, they would go from this:

To this:

No word yet on whether sugar provided the extra oomph to get gay marriage legalized in New England and Iowa.

Reference:

Gaillot, M. T., Peruche, B. M., Plant, E. A., & Baumeister, R. F. Stereotypes and Prejudice in the blood: Sucrose drinks reduce prejudice and stereotyping. Journal of Experimental and Social Psychology, 45, 288-290.

Swearing dulls pain, or why I'm not starting a swear jar

2009-07-13T23:15:00.007-05:00

As the following video suggests (albeit in a somewhat anecdotal way), pretty much every celebrity ever swears (NSFW - really).

However, this statement applies not only to celebrities, but to pretty much everybody. In fact, swearing can be said to be a human universal; although some speakers may demur about the maledicta within their language, all languages have negatively charged words that are inappropriate to say in some social contexts.

Why we swear, however, remains less clear. However, according to a post in the blog Neurophilosophy, an upcoming study in the journal NeuroReport may have found one unexpected reason for why people consistently invoke their deities upon accidently greasing their hands with scalding-hot cooking oil; swearing may actually dull peoples' sensitivity to pain.

In the experiment, participants submerged a hand in cold water to induce pain. They then recited either a swear word or a neutral word until discomfort forced them to remove their hand from the water. When the participants recited a swear word, they submerged their hand for a longer period of time, reported less pain during submersion, and experienced an increased heart rate relative to when they recited a neutral word.

I find this result extremely interesting since, besides the fact that it seems like a thinly veiled injunction to swear, I have recently finished Steven Pinker's book The Stuff of Thought. This book discusses all sorts of quirky psycholinguistics, such as that of methaphor and innuendo. However, my favorite chapter discusses the psycholinguistics of swearing. In this chapter, Pinker argues that swearing originates when pain or frustration triggers something called the Rage Circuit, which is the portion of the brain underlying the sudden aggressive response of Fido when he realizes that you are taking him to the vet. The Rage Circuit triggers the portions of the brain responsible for negative emotions, which in humans activate representations of negatively charged concepts, like excretion, disease, blasphemy, and exploitive sex. Thus, instead of Fido's aggressive shriek, the result is a loud imprecation. Given the fact that taboo language is processed relatively automatically (which is why, for example, it's so hard to name the color of the adjacent words, as in Steven Pinker's famous demonstration), such an imprecation should let everyone nearby know that you mean business.

So, when all is said and done, I hope I've given you one more reason to let loose when you next scald yourself cooking up that delicious stir fry.

References:

Stephens, R. et al (2009). Swearing as a response to pain. NeuroReport, 120, 1056-1060. DOI: 10.1097/WNR.0b013e32832e64b1.

Pinker, S. (2007). The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature. Penguin Books: London.

Justification for materialism? Money dulls feelings of social rejection and pain

2009-07-11T09:15:00.007-05:00

As Paul McCartney famously sang, "Money can't buy [you] love." According to a recent article in Psychological Science, however, it may be able to dull feelings of social rejection and pain.

To demonstrate this vaguely materialistic hypothesis, researchers Xinyue Zhou and her colleagues conducted a series of experiments showing that not only do social rejection and pain increase one's desire for money, but that the relationship goes in the opposite direction; thoughts of money protect against both the distress felt due to social rejection and feelings of physical pain.

To demonstrate the first relationship, that social rejection and pain increase one's desire for money, Zhou and her colleagues either led participants to believe that they had been rejected for a cooperative task or asked participants to complete word fragments related to pain (for example, headache, sore, or, in my case, Master's Thesis). They then asked the participants to both draw the size of common denomenations of coins and to indicate their willingness to forego each of seven pleasant things for $10 million (for example, chocolate, sunshine, or for me, successfully completed Ph.D). Participants who had either been socially rejected or induced to think about pain indicated that they were more willing to forego pleasant things and drew coins that were oversized. If these coins weren't literally as large as the following, they were similarly sized in spirit.

Demonstrating that thoughts of money protect against social rejection and pain was slightly more complicated. For both experiments, the researchers first had participants complete a "finger dexterity task", in which they counted either 80 $100 bills or 80 pieces of paper. For the social rejection experiment, participants then played a game of something called Cyberball. The actual program may be downloaded from this website, but essentially this game is a virtual game of toss between three players. The game mimics social rejection by having two players toss the ball exclusively to each other instead of the third player. Participants who had counted money reported less distress in response to this experience than participants who had counted paper.

Not satisfied with this demonstration of sheer awesome, the experimenters then went on to show that counting money also protects against pain due to immersion of two fingers in 50 degree Centigrade water using similar methodology to the previous experiment. Finally, Zhou and her colleagues showed that thoughts of losing money have an opposite effect; they enhance both distress due to social rejection and feelings of physical pain.

The logic behind all of these experiments is that money is a social resource par excellence; it can be used to freely manipulate the social world to achieve one's social goals. Thus, social rejection should enhance desire for money, since money instills self-confidence that buffers against others' disapproval. For similar reasons, money blunts the impact of feeling social rejection in the first place, while thoughts of losing money enhance this impact. The reason that the same logic applies to pain is that a variety of studies have shown that the feeling of distress due to social rejection and feelings of physical pain rely on similar underlying mechanisms.

Thus, Paul McCartney may not have been entirely correct when he claimed that money can't buy you love. At the very least, money might protect you from the plight of Martin Solveig in the video below:

Martin Solveig - Rejection
Uploaded by tempsdavance. - Watch more music videos, in HD!

Additionally, as chimps have discovered, money, or other mediums of exchange, can buy you some things (while sex might not be love, it's close enough for some people). It may be revealing that after releasing his song, even Paul McCartney admitted, "It should have been 'Can Buy Me Love' " Thus, while materialists might not be entirely correct about all of their claims, they might have a point that understanding money is extremely important for understanding human nature.

Reference:

Zhou, X., Vohs, K. D., & Baumeister, R. F. (2009). The Symbolic Power of Money: Reminders of Money Alter Social Distress and Physical Pain. Psychological Science, 20, 700-706.

Fairness, marmosets, and the oldest profession

2009-07-09T21:40:00.015-05:00

My girlfriend and I were walking back from a coffee shop today when we decided to stop by the Wisconsin National Primate Research Center (the WNPRC) to see the marmosets housed near the entrance. Apparently, the WNPRC is one of the biggest primate research centers in the country, hosting research on everything from monkey sex to Killer Ig-Like Receptor haplotypes (I'm not exactly sure what those are, but they sound awesome!). However, the building itself is rather nondescript, so I had never actually stopped to see what was there.

What I discovered is that marmosets are freaking adorable.

Seriously. Look at that face.

While this post is mostly designed as a vehicle to post shameless amounts of adorable, I thought I might discuss a bit of the awesome primate research that's happening right now, particularly with respect to the subject of fairness.

Although humans exhibit cooperation on a scale unprecedented in the remainder of the animal kingdom, other animals exhibit smaller-scale cooperation. For example, chimps exhibit food-sharing behavior, with some female chimps apparently giving sex in exchange (evidence that prostitution really is the oldest profession?). Therefore, there is reason to suspect that other human social traits that enhance cooperation, such as a sense of fairness, may be found among in a less developed form among our closest evolutionary kin.

As researcher Frans de Waal summarizes in the summer 2006 issue of the journal Social Research, this is indeed the case. De Waal and his colleagues have found that capuchin monkeys will not only reward others with food for receiving help on a cooperative task, they will protest upon being treated unequally. When two capuchins in full sight of each other are given the opportunity to trade stones for cucumbers, they will both happily do so. However, if, after several successful exchanges of stones for cucumbers, one capuchin is given the preferred reward of a grape instead of a cucumber, the other will suddenly refuse to accept the cucumber or to participate in the exchange at all. Apparently, Republican complaints comparing welfare checks to free handouts may have an evolutionary basis.

And now, MORE ADORABLE!!!

Reference:

De Waal, F. (2006). Joint ventures require joint payoffs: Fairness among primates. Social Research, 73, 349-364.

The why and what of this blog

2009-07-08T11:16:00.005-05:00

Blogger's turning 10, and in its honor, Google is asking people to publish posts telling the why and what about their blog. Although I'm literally just beginning to post on Persistent Astonishment, I figured I needed to create a post about why I'm writing this blog and what it's all about anyway, and Blogger's 10th birthday is a decent excuse to do so.

First, about me. Quite simply, I love science. I love the wonder I feel when I discover another aspect to how the world works. I love science to such an extent that if at all possible, I would go gay for it. Failing that, I have done the next best thing - I do science as a Psychology graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

I have found, however, that doing science is hard. Original, testable ideas are in short supply, and actually designing the appropriate experiment to test an idea can be a long, arduous process. Thus, I have created this blog to remind myself of why I got into science in the first place - the sheer wonder and astonishment I feel when I learn something new.

I am using this blog to both capture and share that precious feeling of wonder I have about science. The blog's name, Persistent Astonishment, encapsulates my feelings about science; science is a process that takes persistence and determination to pursue, but the fruits of that persistence are often simply astonishing. In this blog, I want to talk about any science that provokes feelings of wonder from me. Since I have a bit of an irreverent sense of humor, I also want to discuss science that is lurid or just plain silly. Although I am training to be a social psychologist, I am a generalist at heart, so I will not restrict myself to fields within psychology.

I hope you will join me and discover why I think science is simply AWESOME.

Herpetologist's Phallus immortalized

2009-07-07T10:14:00.018-05:00

According to a post in the Scientific American blog 60-Second Science, herpetologist Robert Drewes has achieved every man's dream: he has been immortalized for his small, distinctively shaped . . . mushroom. As reported in the new issue of the journal Mycologia, the mushroom, dubbed Phallus drewesii, is a novel species of stinkhorn discovered by members of Drewes' research expedition on their latest trek through Africa.

Phallus drewesii

The mushroom is the second-smallest of its genus.

The most interesting part of this whole story is that stinkhorn mushrooms are apparently well-known for their unusual shapes. Here are a few examples taken from various places around the intarwebs:

Phallus hadriani

Phallus impudicus

Phallus ravenelii

Phallus indusiatus

I could go on, but I think you get the point.

My only question is, what (or who) exactly do you need to do to be forever remembered for your Phallus?!

Update: Since I wrote this post, I have found an excellent (and by that I mean decidedly phallic) specimen of Phallus hadriani hanging out in a yard near my apartment. Take a look:

Identity fusion, or how the Khmer Rouge are like solar eclipses

2009-07-04T23:57:00.015-05:00

I just finished reading an article in the latest issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology investigating a phenomenon that the authors William Swann and his colleagues call identity fusion. And before you even ask, it's not what you think.

Swann and his colleagues define identity fusion as a group identification phenomenon in which "the self-other barrier is blurred and the group comes to be regarded as functionally equivalent with the personal self." This isn't a matter of simply feeling particularly close to one's group, nor is it a matter of matching closely some group prototype; for fused individuals, one's group identity literally is one's personal identity, and vice versa.

To get a sense of what it means for one's group identity to be "functionally equivalent" to one's personal identity, let me show you how Swann and his colleagues measured identity fusion:

Swann and her colleagues had participants choose the circle that best represented how they perceived their relationship with the group. In a preliminary study designed to validate the measure, around 40% of 200 Spanish undergraduate students selected the E option in this measure, indicating that they felt "fully fused" with Spain.

Being "fully fused" means more than having a social identity that resembles the 1995 solar eclipse. Fused individuals reported increased willingness to fight and die for their group than non-fused individuals. Additionally, fused individuals responded to threats to both their social and their personal identity by reporting this extra boost in pugilism. This suggests a possible explanation for why some individuals, like the 9/11 suicide bombers or Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge, are willing to commit acts of violent extremism on behalf of their respective in-groups. Perhaps these individuals perceive their groups as being equivalent to their personal identities.

Of course, there is an aspect to identity fusion that is entirely unexplored by Swann and his colleagues - the ultimate explanation for why identity fusion exists at all. I would conjecture that identity fusion represents a good example of a meme - a self-replicating unit of culture, similar to a gene - that perpetuates itself at the expense of its host. An example of another such meme used by Richard Dawkins when he originally proposed the concept of memes in The Selfish Gene is the meme for celibacy. I'll let him explain:

[T]he habit of celibacy is presumably not inherited genetically. A gene for celibacy is doomed to failure in the gene pool, except under very special circumstances such as we find in the social insects. But still, a meme for celibacy can be successful in the meme pool. For example, suppose the success of a meme depends critically on how much time people spend in actively transmitting it to other people. Any time spent in doing other things than attempting to transmit the meme may be regarded as time wasted from the meme's point of view. The meme for celibacy is transmitted by priests to young boys who have not yet decided what they want to do with their lives. The medium of transmission is human influence of various kinds, the spoken and written word, personal example and so on. Suppose, for the sake of argument, it happened to be the case that marriage weakened the power of a priest to influence his flock, say because it occupied a large proportion of his time and attention. This has, indeed, been advanced as an official reason for the enforcement of celibacy among priests. If this were the case, it could follow that the meme for celibacy could have greater survival value than the meme for marriage. Of course, exactly the opposite would be true for a gene for celibacy. If a priest is a survival machine for memes, celibacy is a useful attribute to build into him. Celibacy is just a minor partner in a large complex of mutually-assisting religious memes.

The meme for identity fusion acts, in a limited way, akin to the meme for celibacy in that in some circumstances, it encourages individuals to remove their genes from the gene pool. Of course, individuals that heroically sacrifice themselves for the good of the group might be particularly successful at influencing others and perpetuating the memes they espouse, promoting the perpetuation of the identity fusion meme. Thus, Swann and his colleagues might have unintentionally caught a mental parasite in the act of coopting its host to its own nefarious ends.

And with that food for thought, I will end this post with this comic (ok, so maybe it's only tangentially related to identity fusion, but I wanted to include it anyway):

References:

Swann, B., et al. (2009). Identity Fusion: The Interplay of Personal and Social Identities in Extreme Group Behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 96, 995-1011.

Dawkins, Richard. (1976). The Selfish Gene. New York, New York: Oxford University Press. p. 15.

Storytelling for SCIENCE

2009-07-01T22:44:00.008-05:00

While catching up on the latest issue of Atlantic, I stumbled upon this article about a massive longitudinal study about what makes us happy. Expecting an article full of the sorts of juicy statistics that make me spontaneously burst into song, I eagerly began reading.

The article was not what I expected.

The study described in the article, the Harvard Study of Adult Development, is the longest running longitudinal study of adult development ever conducted. The study has followed 268 Harvard graduates over a period of 68 years, with the goal of discovering the factors involved in normal adult development. However, for a true data connoisseur like me, what was fascinating about this study was the type of data collected.

The data ranged from Rorschach inkblots to a sort of bodily phenology to the evaluations of social workers and Freudian psychoanalysts. It seems that the research milieu of the 1940s, when the study was originally began, left an indelible mark on the sort of data collected over the 68 years of the study's current lifespan. Thus, although the study does include its fair share of statistics, the emphasis of the study is instead on storytelling.

For a self-proclaimed lover of juicy statistics, a story-based methodology was at first a little hard for me to swallow. How could we know whether the conclusions of the study were generalizable? What should we take from a collection of stories?

But, as the Atlantic article makes clear, I was missing the point.

Take the following excerpt from a description of one of the study's participants:

An attractive, amiable boy from a working-class background, you struck the study staff as happy, stable, and sociable. “My general impression is that this boy will be normal and well-adjusted—rather dynamic and positive,” the psychiatrist reported.

After college, you got an advanced degree and began to climb the rungs in your profession. You married a terrific girl, and you two played piano together for fun. You eventually had five kids. Asked about your work in education, you said, “What I am doing is not work; it is fun. I know what real work is like.” Asked at age 25 whether you had “any personal problems or emotional conflicts (including sexual),” you answered, “No … As Plato or some of your psychiatrists might say, I am at present just ‘riding the wave.’” You come across in your files as smart, sensible, and hard-working. “This man has always kept a pleasant face turned toward the world,” Dr. Heath noted after a visit from you in 1949. From your questionnaire that year, he got “a hint … that everything has not been satisfactory” at your job. But you had no complaints. After interviewing you at your 25th reunion, Dr. Vaillant described you as a “solid guy.”

Two years later, at 49, you were running a major institution. The strain showed immediately. Asked for a brief job description, you wrote: “RESPONSIBLE (BLAMED) FOR EVERYTHING.” You added, “No matter what I do … I am wrong … We are just ducks in a shooting gallery. Any duck will do.” On top of your job troubles, your mother had a stroke, and your wife developed cancer. Three years after you started the job, you resigned before you could be fired. You were 52, and you never worked again. (You kept afloat with income from stock in a company you’d done work for, and a pension.)

Seven years later, Dr. Vaillant spoke with you: “He continued to obsess … about his resignation,” he wrote. Four years later, you returned to the subject “in an obsessional way.” Four years later still: “It seemed as if all time had stopped” for you when you resigned. “At times I wondered if there was anybody home,” Dr. Vaillant wrote. Your first wife had died, and you treated your second wife “like a familiar old shoe,” he said.

But you called yourself happy. When you were 74, the questionnaire asked: “Have you ever felt so down in the dumps that nothing could cheer you up?” and gave the options “All of the time, some of the time, none of the time.” You circled “None of the time.” “Have you felt calm and peaceful?” You circled “All of the time.” Two years later, the study asked: “Many people hope to become wiser as they grow older. Would you give an example of a bit of wisdom you acquired and how you came by it?” You wrote that, after having polio and diphtheria in childhood, “I never gave up hope that I could compete again. Never expect you will fail. Don’t cry, if you do.

It's simply impossible to get this rich an understanding of a person's life without the careful editing and selective embellishment enabled by storytelling. While the Harvard study might not produce results that one could easily generalize to a larger population, it does provide a handy scaffold on which to hang the results of other, more statistically-driven studies. In other words, while other studies might provide the hard data, qualitative studies provide another commodity that is just as valuable - meaning.

Thoughts such as these got me to thinking about the larger role of storytelling in scientific research. A good scientific article tells a story about the data it presents. First, it sets out the conflict - the question the study is trying to answer or the problem it is trying to solve. Next, the article establishes the main characters of the study, which are the main constructs and operational variables of the study. These main characters participate in the drama of the method used in the study, culminating in the climax of results and statistical analysis (there has to be a good reason besides this guy why an alternative name for ANOVA is F-test). The denouement of the discussion section wraps up the loose ends of the study and sets the stage for future drama in the broader tapestry of scientific research.

The best science popularizers also tell stories about the arguments they present. Steven Pinker, Richard Dawkins, Jared Diamond - these scientists all have something in common beyond awesome hair, and that is their ability to tell a good story. Take this passage about the evolution of the word spam from Stephen Pinker's The Stuff of Thought:

Spam is not, as some people believe, an acronym for Short, Pointless, and Annoying Messages. the word is related to the name of the lunceon meat sold by Hormel since 1937, a portmanteau from SPiced hAM. But how did it come to refer to e-mailed invitations to enlarge the male member and share the ill-gotted gains of deposed African despots? Many people assume that the route was metaphor. Like the lunceon meat, the e-mail is cheap, plentiful, and unwanted, and in one variant of this folk etymology, spamming is what happens when you dump Spam in a fan. Though these intuitions may have helped make the word contagious, its origin is very different. It was inspired by a sketch from Monty Pyython's Flying Circus in which a couple enter a cafe and ask the waitress (a Python in drag) what is available. She answers:

[Stephen Pinker quoted the entire sketch, but he didn't have the benefit of the magical intarwebs!!]

You are probably thinking, "This sketch must be stopped - it's too silly." But it did change the English language. The mindless repetition of the word spam inspired late-1980s hackers to use it as a verb for flooding newsgroups with identical messages, and a decade later it spread from their subculture to the populace at large.

As you can see, much of what makes Steven Pinker's writing compelling is his ability to spin a good yarn.

Of course, there's much more to good science writing, both in popular and academic contexts, than simply telling a good story. However, it seems that storytelling is an incredibly effective way of providing a mental scaffold for understanding an idea.

I have a lot more to say about science writing, but as this post is already getting rather lengthy, I'll leave it at that for now.

References:

Schenk, J. (2009). What makes us happy? Atlantic, retrieved 7/1/2009 from http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200906/happiness.

Pinker, S. (2007). The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature. Penguin Books: London.

Shocking animal sex!

2009-06-30T23:03:00.000-05:00

While browsing the awesome website ScienceBlogs, I stumbled upon this post in the blog Not Exactly Rocket Science regarding the convoluted, and slightly disturbing, sex lives of the short-beaked echidna. Apparently, male echidnae like their women the way I like my sushi - cold and unresponsive. I'll let the blog's author Ed Yong do most of the talking:

[Researchers Gemma Morrow and Stewart Nicol] found echidnas having sex on 26 occasions over the last two years. In 11 of these sessions, the female was accompanied by more than one male and one three occasions, she was with no less than four! Over a third of the females were torpid - slow to react to things going on around them, and with body temperatures of 10 to 29 degrees Celsius. The males, on the other hand, were always active and had the normal echidna body temperature of 32C. When the duo swabbed the genitals of some of the hibernating females, they found that the majority were full of sperm, some of it fresh and often from the same male.

Of course, all this talk of male echidnae mating with comatose female echidnae immediately made my girlfriend exclaim, "Wait, you've been watching echidna roofie porn?!" It didn't help that I was watching this video:

The researchers hypothesize that one of the reasons for this less than romantic sexual behavior is the intense sexual competition among male echidnae. Male echidnae have large ranges on a small island, and the available time to mate with females is rather short. This results in intense competition for mating opportunities, which makes copulating with semi-comatose females relatively attractive. The researchers also suggest female echindae may use the randy behavior of the males to their advantage; if a female finds herself impregnated at an inconvenient time during her torpor, she can choose to re-enter hibernation in the hopes of being re-impregnated by a different male.

All this talk of echidna sex reminded me of another post by one of the awesome people over at ScienceBlogs, this one showing pictures of shocking interracial sex. (Don't worry, the post is safe for work. No, really.) Apparently, male common Eurasian frogs are horny enough to attempt to penetrate pretty much everything - including dead salamanders.

Don't ask me why I was so fascinated by the salacious details of different animals' sex lives tonight - I guess it was just one of those days.

Living abroad may enhance creativity, or why white people might not be wasting all their money after all

2009-06-30T20:48:00.003-05:00

A recent article in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology claims to have found evidence for the fact that living abroad may enhance peoples' creativity. Of course, I found such a claim immediately compelling, having blown my own $15,000 on an expensive semester-long trip to Beijing. However, being a good scientist (or at least an aspiring one), I had to investigate said claim personally.

Of course, there is already plenty of anecdotal evidence for the fact that studying abroad enhances creativity. Many famous artists, including Pablo Picasso and Paul Gauguin famously did much of their work abroad, and several authors, including Vladimir Nabokov, Ernest Hemingway, and Joseph Conrad wrote much of their best work while abroad (Joseph Conrad, whose real name is apparently Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, wasn't even a native English speaker, and yet he wrote one of the best works of English prose of all time. Makes me think that I should be writing this in Chinese. On second thought, maybe I'll just imagine real hard and see if it makes a difference).

On a smaller scale, stereotypically many college students (particularly liberal white college students) claim to have "life-changing" and "eye-opening" experiences while studying abroad. My own experience certainly forced me to consider my world in a different light. Maybe there's actually something to the claim that studying abroad enhances creativity.

In a series of five experiments, the study's authors William Maddux and Adam Galinsky found that experiences living abroad (but not traveling abroad) correlated with performance on a variety of creativity tasks, including my favorite, drawing aliens:

There's just something intrinsically satisfying about seeing part of a results section in a scientific journal entitled "Overall creativity of aliens".

To further support their argument, the authors also found that priming peoples' experiences of living abroad enhanced their creativity. That still isn't enough evidence to dispell the criticism that people are more creative might be more likely to study abroad, rather than studying abroad causing enhanced creativity, but it's interesting, nonetheless.

In sum, this study gives white people everywhere hope that the extra $20,000 they spent in college was not all in vain.

And now, I leave you with MORE ALIENS!!!

Reference:

Maddux, W. & Galinsky, A. (2009). Cultural Borders and Mental Barriers: The Relationship Between Living Abroad and Creativity. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 96, 1047-1061.