Category: psychology

How Little We Know: Big Gaps in Psychology and Economics

Seth Roberts7 Comments

Seth’s final paper “How Little We Know: Big Gaps in Psychology and Economics” is published in a special issue of the International Journal of Comparative Psychology (Vol 27, Issue 2, 2014). This issue is about behavioral variability and is dedicated to Seth. Abstract of the paper follows:

A rule about variability is reducing expectation of reward increases variation of the form of rewarded actions. This rule helps animals learn what to do at a food source, something that is rarely studied. Almost all instrumental learning experiments start later in the learning-how-to-forage process. They start after the animal has learned where to find food and how to find it. Because of the exclusions (no study of learning where, no study of learning how), we know almost nothing about these two sorts of learning. The study of himan learning by psychologists has a similar gap. Motivation to contact new material (curiousity) is not studied. Walking may increase curiosity, some evidence suggests. In economics, likewise, research is almost all about how people use economically valuable knowledge. The creation and spread of knowledge are rarely studied.

The family is grateful to Aaron Blaisdell Ph.D. who completed final edits to Seth’s final manuscript for publication.

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts4 Comments

Thanks to Aaron Blaisdell and Peter Lewis.

Signaling and Higher Education: Email With Bryan Caplan

Seth Roberts4 Comments

I recently emailed back and forth with Bryan Caplan about a signaling view of higher education, which Bryan elaborates in these slides. I wrote to him:

Having looked at your slides, I would say we pretty much agree. I think employers have little control over the content of college education and, as you say, use quality of college because it works better than IQ tests and the like — as you say.

Perhaps we also agree that just as British aristocrats have a lot less power now than they did 200 years ago — the message of Downton Abbey — so are American college professors slowly losing power. MOOCs are one example, blogs are another. Parents and professors are quite happy with the current system, students and employers are not, and they are gaining power. That is my theory, anyway.
I think a signaling explanation does a very good job of explaining why sense of humor matters so much, especially in mate choice. Sense of humor = Nature’s IQ test. Sense of humor signals problem solving ability, which really matters but is hard to measure directly. I used to think that we have two basic tasks in life, manipulating things and manipulating other people (long ago nobody was depressed, etc.) and they were really different.

Queen Late

Seth Roberts5 Comments

When a Chinese friend of mine was in first grade, she was habitually late for school. Usually about ten minutes. Her mom took her to school on a bike. One day she was 20 minutes late. The door was closed. My friend opened the door. “May I come in?” she asked the teacher. The teacher came to the door. She took my friend to the front of the class. “Here is Queen Late (迟到大王),” she said.

Everyone laughed, including my friend. She thought it was a funny thing to say, not mean. The name stuck. Many years later, she was called Queen Late by those who knew her in primary school. Her teacher was not a great wit. Other students at other schools were called the same thing. It was/is a standard joke.

Sometimes I think Chinese have, on average, a better sense of humor than Americans, but who really knows? A more interesting contrast is how lateness is handled. At UC Berkeley, about 20 years ago, I attended a large lecture class (Poli Sci 3, Comparative Politics) taught by Ken Jowitt, a political science professor. Jowitt was considered an excellent lecturer, which was why I was there, but he was also famous for being hard on students who came in late. When I was there, a student came in late. Jowitt interrupted what he was saying to point out the offender and said something derogatory. I don’t remember what Jowitt said but I do remember thinking — as someone who also taught large lecture classes where students came in late — that he was making a mountain, an unattractive mountain, out of a molehill. It didn’t occur to me to wonder how he could have dealt with the problem in a way that made everyone laugh.

 

 

Drawing a Line Where No Line Was Needed: GQ Editor Defends Hugo Boss

Seth Roberts12 Comments

The comedian Russell Brand, at a GQ awards show in London, “joked” — according to Brand, it was a joke — that the sponsor of the event, Hugo Boss, clothed the Nazis. Fine. More interesting to me was something that happened later. According to Brand, the following conversation took place:

GQ editor Dylan Jones What you did was very offensive to Hugo Boss.

Brand What Hugo Boss did was very offensive to the Jews.

Sure, Jones was upset. But nothing in his job description requires him to defend Hugo Boss. Especially in the least nuanced possible way. In contrast to Brand’s criticism of Boss, which makes Brand look good, Jones’s criticism of Brand, if it has any effect at all (probably not), makes Jones look foolish. He did not make his remark out of carefully-calibrated self-interest.

Jones’s comment interests me because now and then something in my head pushes me to do two things I know are unwise:

1. Tell someone else what to do when there is no reason to think they want my advice.

2. Simplify a complicated situation.

Jones did both things. I try to resist — try to say nothing — but am not always successful. Maybe Desire #1 is why professors are fond of teaching what they call “critical thinking” — it allows them to indulge Desire #1. On the face of it, appreciative thinking — especially nuanced appreciation — seems at least as important, but I have never heard a professor say he teaches that.

Deirdre McCloskey and Me

Seth Roberts2 Comments

In an appreciation of Ronald Coase, I came across an article by Deirdre McCloskey, the economist. It reminded me of our back and forth emails in 2007 about her and Lynn Conway’s treatment of Michael Bailey, who had written a book they hated. I reread the emails and found them still interesting, especially McCloskey’s claim that she and Conway have/had no special power. Is there a variant of sophistry that refers to self-deception? You can read the whole correspondence, McCloskey’s version, which omits my final email, or my version (“McCloskey and Me: A Back-and-Forth”, plus plenty of context — my article starts on p. 117 of the 139 pp).

Thank god she and Conway failed to end Bailey’s career. The Man Who Would Be Queen (pdf) — about male homosexuals and cross-dressers — remains the best psychology book I have ever read. Last year I assigned my Tsinghua students to read a third of it (any third they wanted). One student said it was so good she read the whole thing.

Rewarding Criticism Put Nicely Produced Long-Lasting Change

Seth Roberts2 Comments

Eliezer Yudkowsky, I’m told, used to be a not-nice critic. The problem was his delivery: “blunt, harsh, not sufficiently tempered by praise for praiseworthy things” (Alicorn Finley). However, this changed about a year ago, when Anna Salamon and Alicorn Finley decided to try to train him to be nicer. Alicorn describes it like this:

Me, Eliezer, Anna, and Michael Blume were all sitting in my and Michael’s room (where we lived two houses ago) working on, I think it was, a rationality kata [= way of doing things], and we were producing examples and critiquing each other. Eliezer sometimes critiqued in a motivation-draining way, so we started offering him M&Ms when he put things more nicely. (We also claimed M&Ms when we accomplished small increments of what we were working on.)

Eliezer added:

Some updates on that story. M&M’s didn’t work when I tried to reward myself with them later, and I suspect several key points:

1) The smiles/approval from the (highly respected) friends feeding me the M&Ms probably counted for more than the taste sensation.

2) Being overweight, M&Ms on their own would be associated with shame/guilt/horror/wishing I never had to eat again etc.

3) Others have also reported food rewards not working. One person says that food rewards worked for them after they ensured that they were hungry and could only eat via food rewards.

4) I suspect that the basic reinforcement pattern will only work for me if I reward above-average performance or improvement in performance (positive slope) rather than trying to reward constant performance, because only this makes me feel that the reward is really ‘deserved’.

Also:

  • Andrew Critch advises that ‘step zero’ in this process is to make sure that you have good internal agreement on wanting the change before rewarding movements in the direction of the change
  • The Center for Applied Rationality (CFAR) has some experience learning to teach this.
  • CFAR has excellent workshops but not much published/online material. A good mainstream book is Don’t Shoot the Dog by Karen Pryor.

I like this example because the change was long-lasting and important.

Suicidal Gestures at Princeton: A Staggering Increase

Seth Roberts16 Comments

A friend of mine knows a former (retired) head of psychological services at Princeton University. She told him that in the 1970s, there were one or two suicidal gestures per year. Recently, however, there have been one or two per day.

Something is terribly, horribly wrong. Maybe the increase is due to something at Princeton. For example, maybe new dorms are more isolating than the old dorms they replaced. Or maybe the increase has nothing to do with Princeton. For example, maybe the increase is due to antidepressants, much more common now than in the 1970s.

Whatever the cause, tt would help all Princeton students, present and future, and probably millions of others, if the problem were made public so that anyone, not just a vanishingly small number of people, could try to solve it. It isn’t even clear that anyone is trying to explain/understand/learn from the increase.

Princeton almost surely has records that show the increase. If, as is likely, Princeton administrators never allow the increase to be documented, it will be a tragedy. It is an extraordinary and unprecedented clue about what causes suicidal gestures. Nothing in all mental health epidemiology has found a change by factor of a hundred or more — much less a mysterious huge change.

The increase is an unintended consequence of something else, but what? Because it is so large, there must be something extremely important that most people, or at least Princeton administrators, don’t understand about mental health. The answer might involve seeing faces at night. I found that seeing faces in the morning produced an enormous boost in mood and that faces at night had the opposite effect. I cannot say, however, why seeing faces at night would have increased so much from the 1970s to now.

More about Give and Take by Adam Grant

Seth Roberts3 Comments

Yesterday I commented about Give and Take by Adam Grant, a professor at Wharton who teaches organizational psychology.

When Grant was a graduate student (at the University of Michigan), he was asked to help people at the university’s fund-raising call center raise more money. They call alumni, asking for money. The person who ran the center had tried the usual motivational tactics, such as offering bonuses. They hadn’t worked.

Grant noticed that most of the money being raised went for scholarships. He tried various ways of making the call center employees aware that the money they raised helped students directly. The most effective way turned out to be a 5-minute meeting with a scholarship recipient. This had a staggering effect:

The average caller doubled in calls per hour and minutes on the phone per week . . . Revenue quintipled: callers averaged $412 [per week] before meeting the scholarship recipient and more than $2000 afterward.

A huge effect — and a useful huge effect. And one that is not even hinted at in countless introductory psychology books. Notice that physical conditions of the job and the “physical” payoff (the salary) didn’t change. All that changed was employees’s mental models of their job.

I conclude that people are far more motivated by a desire to help others than you would ever guess from reading psychology textbooks — and, even more, from reading economics textbooks. Grant says nothing about this, at least in the book, but I’d guess that the employees were considerably happier at their jobs as well. You might think that there has been so much research on job design that there were no big effects left to be discovered. You’d be wrong.

Give and Take by Adam Grant

Seth Roberts10 Comments

The publisher sent me a copy of Give and Take by Adam Grant after I sent several emails asking for a review copy. I expected it to be the best book about psychology in many years and it is.

The book’s main theme is the non-obvious advantages of being a “giver” (someone who helps others without concern about payback). Grant teaches at Wharton, whose students apparently enter Wharton believing (or are taught there?) that this is a poor strategy. With dozens of studies and stories, Grant argues that the truth is more complicated — that a giver, properly focussed, does better than others. Whether this reflects cause and effect (Grant seems to say it does) I have no idea. Perhaps “givers” are psychologically unusually sophisticated in many ways, not just a relaxed attitude toward payback, and that is why some of them do very well.

I was more impressed with two other things where cause and effect is clearer. One is a story about communication style. It is the best story in a book full of good stories. About ten years ago, Grant was asked to teach senior military officers how to motivate their troops. His first class was a four-hour lecture to Air Force colonels in their forties and fifties. Grant was 24. The feedback forms, filled out by the students after the class, reflected the age — and presumably wisdom — discrepancy. One comment was: “More quality information in audience than on podium.”

Grant taught the class again, to another group of Air Force colonels. Instead of talking about his credentials at the start of the class, he began like this:

I know what some of you are thinking right now: What can I possibly learn from a professor who’s twelve years old?

Everyone laughed. Grant does not say what he said next — how he answered the question. He went on to give the same lecture he had given before. The difference in feedback was “night and day”. Here is one of the comments: “Spoke with personal experience. He was the right age! High energy; clearly successful already.”

This is great. A non-obvious, seemingly small change produces a huge outcome difference. Grant clearly understands something enormously important about communication that isn’t not found in other psychology books, such as introductory textbooks. It isn’t easy to interpret (why exactly did Grant’s new opening have its effect?) nor study experimentally — but that’s fine. In Give and Take, Grant follows this story with research about what is called “the pratfall effect”: Under some circumstances making a blunder (such as spilling a cup of coffee) makes a speaker more likeable. But Grant’s opening (“what can I learn…”) isn’t a blunder. Grant calls it an “expression of vulnerability”, a category broad enough to include pratfalls — fair enough.

What can we learn from Grant’s story? Above all, that something mysterious and powerful happens or might happen at the beginning of a talk and that ordinary feedback forms are sensitive enough to detect it. What Grant did was highly specific to the situation (young speaker, older military officers) so you can’t copy it. To use it you really have to grasp the general rule. Which remains to be determined.

Tomorrow I will blog about another impressive part of the book.