Hey there, my name is Bryan Bishop. Here's to trying to keep up with yourself. RSS.
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Transapient Musings of an S6 Archailect
Metacognitive trivialities over smooth topologies and Julian knots of subgeometric spaces; a.k.a mastermind Singularitarian, node of the Larger Submind and Clone of the Ineffable Original.
Bryan Bishop
http://heybryan.org/
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Archives
Wed, 28 May 2008
13 Ways to Quickly Improve Your Decision-Making
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In his new book Professor Gary Marcus of New York University likens the mind to a 'kluge' - an engineering term meaning a clumsy or inelegant solution to a problem.
To combat the 'klugey' nature of our minds, Professor Marcus provides 13 quick techniques based on psychological research to help us combat its inherent flaws in decision-making.
1. Whenever possible, consider alternatives
Our brains are not good at evaluating evidence dispassionately. Force yourself to generate alternatives. Research has demonstrated the value of counter-factual thinking: thinking about the opposite helps us make better decisions.
2. Reframe the question
Our memories are highly contextual so the background to any issue we consider has a huge impact on how we view it. Politicians, advertisers and other influencers use framing extensively to persuade us of their point of view. You can fight back by reframing their propositions.
3. Correlation doesn't equal causation
An oldie but a goldie. There's a clear correlation between foot size and being richer, owning your own house and having a better education. On the other hand people with smaller feet are often still struggling with potty training. Guessed it yet? People with small feet are usually children, so of course they have less money, don't own their own houses and, haven't been to school yet. Correlation doesn't equal causation.
4. Never forget the sample size
When we think about someone and a few seconds later they call us, is that evidence of ESP? Consider the sample size. How many times have you thought about that person in the past year? How many times have they called you in the last year? What first seems like a freak occurrence soon starts to look inevitable. Sample sizes are easy to forget.
5. Anticipate your impulsivity
The best of intentions often break down in the face of vicious temptation. People find it difficult to predict just how far off course their emotions can pull them (e.g. the projection bias). Use any method you can to counter your impulsivity: cancel the credit card, join a Christmas Club, avoid the confectionary store. It's all about planning ahead.
6. Make contingency plans
Humans are better at concrete goals; abstract goals like 'read more' or 'lose weight' get lost in the mix. Substitute these with: 'read this book by next Tuesday' and 'don't buy any junk food on the weekly shop'.
7. Make important decisions when relaxed and rested
What, I need to explain this?
8. Weigh costs against benefits
Common advice but actually quite tricky to do. Research shows that our minds prefer to consider either costs or benefits; taking both into account takes considerable effort. Professor Marcus points out that one factor we often forget is the 'opportunity cost': when we do one thing, we can't be doing something else. When I watch TV the benefit might be relaxation and enjoyment but the cost is that I can't be reading that mind-improving book that's being lying around for weeks.
9. Imagine your decision will be spot-checked
When we think someone will check up on us we make more cognitive effort, leading to better decision-making. Even if no-one is checking up on you, imagine their reaction if they did: would you be proud of your decision?
10. Distance yourself
When making decisions we are influenced by whatever thoughts and emotions are swirling around in our heads at that moment. Help distance yourself by thinking about how this decision will affect you in the future. Big decisions are always better made after a night's sleep. Again, it's common advice but it can be surprisingly difficult to distance yourself.
11. Beware the vivid, personal and anecdotal
It's so easy for us to be swayed by vivid or personal stories that we may ignore more considered, scientific evidence. Remember that our minds are naturally fascinated and influenced by the sensational at the cost of quotidian. Look carefully at the information source - are you being manipulated?
12. All decisions are not equal
Some decisions are more important than others. Not all decisions warrant effortful deliberation: sometimes it's better just to choose and be done with it. The trick is knowing which is which - experience should provide strong clues.
13. Be rational!
Sounds vacuous, right? But Professor Marcus argues that research suggests just reminding ourselves to think rationally could help us make better decisions. Consciously trying to think rationally will also help activate all the other techniques described here. Our memories being what they are, this is no bad thing.
» Buy it now from Amazon.com.
» Kluge is released in the UK on the 5 June, you can pre-order from Amazon.co.uk.
posted at: 11:46 | path: /sci/psych | permanent link to this entry
Tue, 20 May 2008
Guide to Psychology Blogs - Update and Call for Links
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As ever I'm always on the lookout for accessible, fresh blogging in psychology and related fields. So if you'd like to suggest your own blog or someone else's work for inclusion then leave a comment below or drop me an email.
[Photo by DogFromSPACE]
posted at: 23:33 | path: /sci/psych | permanent link to this entry
The secret family life of a false memory
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Thanks to Aaron and Frontal Cortex for simultaneously alerting us to this fantastic animation that recounts a charming real life case of a false memory.
Families are like incubators for false memories because each family has its favourite stories, anecdotes and foundational myths that get passed on, retold and molded in the retelling, like an intergeneration game of Chinese whispers.
I have many early memories that I simply don't know whether I genuinely remember, or I just think I do, because I've heard stories or seen the photos so many times.
I love listening to families talk about memories, because its fascinating to hear how recollections can vary, each highlighting a different aspect, as well as how they resolve conflicting accounts.
The animation shows exactly this process in action, showing us that remembering is more than just an individual process, it's often a group activity.
Link to This American Life animation on memory.
posted at: 23:23 | path: /sci/psych | permanent link to this entry
Why Familiarity Really Does Breed Contempt
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"Hell is other people." -- Jean-Paul Sartre
"I only drink to make other people seem interesting" -- George Jean Nathan
"Fish and visitors smell in three days." -- Benjamin Franklin
Given how irritating other people sometimes are, it's surprising how many of us are eternal optimists about forming new relationships. Indeed people seem primed to like others: the 'mere exposure effect' is a robust social psychological finding demonstrating that just being exposed to someone causes us to like them more.
If the 'mere exposure' effect holds for developing social relationships then, as we come to know more about others, we should come to like them more.A good example of the 'mere exposure' effect is a study by Moreland and Beach (1992) who introduced four fake students to a large college course. Each of the fake students - chosen to be of similar appearance - attended the course to varying degrees, some going to many classes, others to few; but none interacted with the other students.
At the end of the course the one student most people preferred, despite never having talked to her, was the one who had attended the most classes.
If the mere exposure effect holds for developing social relationships then, as we come to know more about others, we should come to like them more. It seems familiarity should breed liking. A recent study by Michael I. Norton from the Harvard Business School and colleagues certainly suggests that this is most people's intuitive understanding (Norton, Frost & Ariely, 2007).
Norton and colleagues first surveyed members of an online dating site, asking them whether they generally preferred someone they knew little about, or who they knew more about. 81% said they would prefer the person they knew more about. In a second survey of undergraduate students fully 88% said they would prefer someone they knew more about.
So much for people's expectations, let's see how they really behave.
Familiarity breeds contempt
In the next part of the study by Norton and colleagues participants were given a list of traits about another person and asked how much they would like that person. In fact the traits were generated to be broadly representative and people were shown either 4, 6, 8 or 10 of these traits at random. The results showed that, contrary to their expectations, the more information people had about others the less they liked them.
The more information people had about others the less they liked them.Norton and colleagues hypothesised that the reason for this finding was that the more people find out about others, the more likely it is a trait will be uncovered to which they take a dislike. The researchers tested this with participants from the online dating site. This time, though, instead of using a pre-generated list of traits, each participant was asked to create a list of traits that described themselves - these were then pooled. Predictably most people chose relatively positive traits.
These traits were then mixed up and randomly allocated in varying numbers and varying orders to participants as though they described a real person. Effectively, then, people were looking at a random list of relatively positive traits that the group itself had generated. Again, even with a list of mostly positive traits, people tended to like the 'person' described by the shorter lists of traits, further supporting the idea that we like people more who we know less about.
Once we perceive a dissimilarity, it's all downhill from there. Even traits we might have liked, or been neutral about before, now get the thumbs down.But what the researchers were interested in this time was the effect of similarity on whether we like others. This is because much previous research has shown that we tend to like other people who are similar to ourselves. The results showed that what was driving the connection between knowledge and dislike was a lack of similarity. Effectively the more traits participants knew about another 'person', the more likely they were to find dissimilarities with themselves, and so the more likely they were to dislike them.
It gets worse. In a fourth study using a similar approach to those above the researchers found that our dislike for others cascades. This means that if we see a dissimilar (and therefore unlikeable) trait early on in our relationship with another, this tends to negatively affect the way we perceive the rest of their traits. So, once we perceive a dissimilarity, it's all downhill from there. Even traits we might have liked, or been neutral about before, now get the thumbs down.
Real-world test
Finally, in a fifth study researchers decided to test the evidence from their controlled studies in the real world. This time members of a dating site were asked either about a potential partner they had met online or someone they were about to meet.
After getting participants to complete a survey they found that, as expected, people knew more about their dates after having met them than before. For the vast majority of people, though, liking for their dates decreased substantially after they had met them. On average, knowledge of their date increased from 5 out of 10 pre-date to 6 out of 10 post-date, while liking dropped from 7/10 to 5/10 and perceived similarity dropped from 6/10 to 5/10.
Of course this wasn't true for everyone - some met other people who they liked more afterwards - but for the majority more knowledge led to apparent dissimilarity which led to less liking.
Hope springs eternal
Considering the results of this study it's a wonder we bother trying to make friends after the first few disappointments. The fact that we do is probably a result of an unrealistic level of optimism about how much we will expect to like others. This is confirmed by the study's finding that the vast majority of people expect that more knowledge about others will lead to liking.
Jean-Paul Sartre was right - on average - other people really are hell.And occasionally we do actually meet people who turn out to be similar to us, who end up as our close friends or even partners. It's these relationship hits that we tend to remember when meeting someone new rather than all the times we were disappointed.
As this study shows, on the vast majority of occasions the less we know about someone the more we are inclined to like them. It's like the fake student in Moreland and Beach's study, ambiguity allows us to imagine that other people share our world-view, our personality traits or our sense of humour. Unfortunately as soon as we start to find out more about them, we're likely to find out how different they are to ourselves and, as a result, to dislike them.
Jean-Paul Sartre was right, on average: other people really are hell. That is, most other people are hell. There are, of course, a few people we each hold dear, people who do not begin to smell after three days; but these people are the glorious exceptions, so hold on to them tight.
[Image credit: roboppy]
References
Moreland, R. L., & Beach, S. (1992). Exposure effects in the classroom: The development of affinity among students. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 28, 255-276.
Norton, M. I., Frost, J. H., & Ariely, D. (2007). Less Is More: The Lure of Ambiguity, or Why Familiarity Breeds Contempt. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 92(1), 97-105.
posted at: 23:22 | path: /sci/psych | permanent link to this entry
Fri, 11 Apr 2008
At the Heart of Attraction Lies Confusion: Choice Blindness
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You turn around too fast, bump into someone, almost spilling your drink. 'Wow,' you think as you recover, 'Now, that's what I'm talking about!'.
And...cut.
Unfortunately I have to bring you out of this little scene to ask a question. Do you think you'd be able to accurately describe why you find this person attractive? Indeed how good are we in general at pinpointing what it was about others that attracts us?
Although it's a fascinating question, little is known. But if you've been following this series on the hidden workings of the mind you'll already have a clue to the answer. Indeed, it's these studies reviewed by Nisbett and Wilson (1977) that inspired Johansson, Hall, Sikstrom and Olsson (2005) to set up a neat little investigation aimed at the heart of attraction.
Choosing between two women
The procedure for this experiment was very simple. The experimenter showed willing participants (about half men, half women) pairs of female faces on playing-card-sized photos, one in each hand. Participants pointed to whichever of the two faces they found most attractive. The experimenter then passed the card to the participants and asked them to describe exactly why they found that face attractive.
But wait, this is a psychology experiment, so there's a twist in the tail.
Sometimes, when the experimenter passed the card to participants, there was a little sleight of hand involved. This resulted in the participant staring at the female face they didn't choose.
So, now some people were being asked to justify a decision that, in reality, they hadn't made. Or most of them were - 13% spotted the trick and their data wasn't analysed as their heightened suspicion might have affected their reports.
The experimenters, therefore, got two sets of reports:
- The first set from participants who were handed the photo they originally chose, who then explained why they preferred it.
- The other set from participants who were handed one they didn't choose, who then had to explain why they preferred that one.
Guess the outcome
Before you read the results, have a think about what you might expect. Surely if we were handed the photo with a face we didn't choose, and didn't notice it wasn't the same face, our enthusiasm would at least be dampened.
Perhaps the information would be processed unconsciously leading to a subtle difference in how we report our inner thoughts. For example, we might be more uncertain or more vague about why we preferred this face. After all we didn't prefer this face!
The experimenters worked under the same assumption and used these three criteria to assess any differences between the two groups:
- Emotionality: how emotionally engaged participants were with their reports.
- Specificity: how specific participants were with their reports.
- Certainty: how sure they were about the choice they made.
Results
Analysing participants' reports, they couldn't find any difference between the two groups. Both the participants looking at the photo they chose and those looking at the one they didn't both seemed sure of their reasons, used equal specificity, and equal emotionality. It seemed there was no clue in participants' verbal reports of the old switcheroo.
Petter Johansson and colleagues give this phenomena a snappy new name: choice blindness. This, then, is the idea that under certain circumstances we are actually oblivious to the choice we have made.
This 'blindness' was also seen in participants' actual reports of why they preferred one face over the other. Sometimes there was a bleed-through from one face to the other. For example one person said they preferred the woman because she was smiling. In fact it was their original choice, and not the one they were holding who had a slight smile on her face.
Other times participants appeared to have made up the reason why they preferred one over the other. One person said they preferred a woman wearing earrings. In fact only the woman they were shown was wearing earrings, not the original woman they chose.
A little philosophy of science
For a scientist, this experiment leaves a slightly bad taste in the mouth. This is because it relies on drawing a conclusion from an absence; an absence of a difference between the two groups. Scientists frown on this sort of thing because showing that something exists is possible, but showing it doesn't is impossible. Hence, the endless debates over psychic phenomena.
So we have to be cautious about this experiment. Just because there is no difference in the verbal reports between the two groups, a difference could still exist at either an unconscious or even a conscious level.
Electricity in the air
Nevertheless, I think this experiment does speak to a pervasive human experience. That is, the inability to describe what is attractive about another person. That's probably why we end up using such vague words like 'energy', 'magnetism' or 'electricity'. Perhaps we genuinely don't know.
- The Hidden Workings of Our Minds
- Our Secret Attitude Changes
- Why Problem Solving Itself is a Puzzle, Even to Poincare and Picasso
- What We Don't Know About Shopping, Reading, Watching TV and Judging People
- When We Are Fools to Ourselves
- » At the Heart of Attraction Lies Confusion: Choice Blindness
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References
Johansson, P., Hall, L., Sikstrom, S., & Olsson, A. (2005). Failure to Detect Mismatches Between Intention and Outcome in a Simple Decision Task. Science, 310(5745), 116-119.
posted at: 23:33 | path: /sci/psych | permanent link to this entry
Learn to Profile People [Psychology]
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Machiavellian psychology suggests that if you profile people around you, you'll be less inclined to be involved in personal conflicts. How do you achieve this? First, you need to be receptive to the act of reading people and focus your energy on the task. Once you've reached this awareness, understand what you are looking for and master the act of listening. Keep the conversation flowing by asking questions. Make sure to be cognizant of any slang, exaggerations, sarcasm, self-criticism, or gossip, as these characteristics can define the person you are profiling. Pay attention to body language and whether acts are consistent with what is being said. Watch out for mistakes, because if repeated often, the excuses are no longer valid.
The statements and actions of people can help you better understand who they are: their emotional style, their self-esteem, their negative or positive directions, their goals, and if they're able to adapt easily to their surroundings. You may not be able to read everything—after all, this is not a mind-reading exercise—but you'll certainly have some greater insights into the person you're studying.
posted at: 23:33 | path: /sci/psych | permanent link to this entry
I've just started reading Ben Shephard's stunning book A War of Nerves: Soldiers and Psychiatrists that tracks the history of military psychiatry through the 20th century.
Even if you're not interested in the military per se, the wars of the last 100 years have been incredibly important in shaping our whole understanding of mental breakdown, mind-body concepts and clinical treatment.
For example, the effects of trauma stemming from World War I were so shockingly obvious and happened in such large numbers that the medical establishment could no longer deny the role of the mind in both the theories and practice of treating 'nervous disorders'.
In effect, it made psychology not only acceptable, but necessary, to a previously sceptical medical establishment that were largely focused on an 'organs and nerves' view of human life.
One of the big concerns during World War I was 'shell shock', a confusing and eventually abandoned label that was typically used to describe any number of physical problems (such as paralysis, blindness, uncontrollable shaking) that arose from combat stress.
The original name came from early theories that suggested these symptoms arose from the effect of 'shock waves' on the nervous system.
However, it became clear that only a small percentage of cases actually resulted from actual brain injury (interestingly, a recent article in the American Journal of Psychiatry notes parallels between 'shell shock' and concerns over the effects of Improvised Explosive Devices or IEDs in Iraq).
It turns out, many of the symptoms were triggered or exacerbated by unbearable stress and were shaped by beliefs and expectations.
This was clearly demonstrated when a 'gas shock' syndrome emerged during World War I when gas attacks became more frequent.
Like 'shell shock', it arose from a combination of extreme stress and was shaped by expectation and fear (the descriptions of death by mustard gas are truly horrifying) even when no gas injury could be detected.
An eye witness recalled that: "When men trained to believe that a light sniff of gas meant death, and with nerves highly strung by being shelled for long periods and with the presence of not a few who really had been gassed, it is no wonder that a gas alarm went beyond all bounds. It was remarked as a joke that if someone yelled 'gas', everyone in France would put on a mask. Two or three alarms a night was common. Gas shock was as common as shell shock."
The military managed (and still manage) these forms of combat stress reactions by rest (stress and fatigue play a great part) but also by managing expectations.
Soldiers are typically treated briefly and near the front line, with the expectation they'll rejoin their unit. In effect, instilling the belief that the effects are unfortunate but transient. As a result, they usually are.
Shephard's book is full of fascinating facts, quotes and insights on every page as he's used some incredibly in-depth historical research to bring not only the scientific and medical issues alive, but also the culture and attitudes of the time.
He's interwoven military records and scientific research with press commentary and personal letters to make the book really quite moving in places.
I'm sure I'll be posting more gems as I read more.
Link to book details.
Link to abstract of 'Shell shock and mild traumatic brain injury: a historical review.'
posted at: 23:33 | path: /sci/psych | permanent link to this entry
