Tag Archives: psychology

You’re not rehabilitated if you keep deceiving.

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Regular readers will know that I view scientific misconduct as a serious harm to both the body of scientific knowledge and the scientific community involved in building that knowledge. I also hold out hope that at least some of the scientists who commit scientific misconduct can be rehabilitated (and I’ve noted that other members of the scientific community behave in ways that suggest that they, too, believe that rehabilitation is possible).

But I think a non-negotiable prerequisite for rehabilitation is demonstrating that you really understand how what you did was wrong. This understanding needs to be more than simply recognizing that what you did was technically against the rules. Rather, you need to grasp the harms that your actions did, the harms that may continue as a result of those actions, the harms that may not be quickly or easily repaired. You need to <a href="http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/doing-good-science/2014/06/29/do-permanent-records-of-scientific-misconduct-findings-interfere-with-rehabilitation/"acknowledgethose harms, not minimize them or make excuses for your actions that caused the harms.

And, you need to stop behaving in the ways that caused the harms in the first place.

Among other things, this means that if you did significant harm to your scientific community, and to the students you were were supposed to be training, by making up “results” rather than actually doing experiments and making and reporting accurate results, you need to recognize that you have acted deceptively. To stop doing harm, you need to stop acting deceptively. Indeed, you may need to be significantly more transparent and forthcoming with details than others who have not transgressed as you have. Owing to your past bad acts, you may just have to meet a higher burden of proof going forward.

That you have retracted the publications in which you deceived, or lost a degree for which (it is strongly suspected) you deceived, or lost your university post, or served your hours of court-ordered community service does not reset you to the normal baseline of presumptive trust. “Paying your debt to society” does not in itself mean that anyone is obligated to believe that you are not still untrustworthy. If you break trust, you need to earn it back, not to demand it because you did your time.

You certainly can’t earn that trust back by engaging in deception to mount an argument that people should give you a break because you’ve served out your sentence.

These thoughts on how not to approach your own rehabilitation are prompted by the appearance of disgraced social scientist Diederik Stapel (discussed here, here, here, here, here, and here) in the comments at Retraction Watch on a post about Diederik Stapel and his short-lived gig as an adjunct instructor for a college course. Now, there’s no prima facie reason Diederik Stapel might not be able to make a productive contribution to a discussion about Diederik Stapel.

However, Diederik Stapel was posting his comments not as Diederik Stapel but as “Paul”.

I hope it is obvious why posting comments that are supportive of yourself while making it appear that this support is coming from someone else is deceptive. Moreover, the comments seem to suggest that Stapel is not really fully responsible for the frauds he committed.

“Paul” writes:

Help! Let’s not change anything. Science is a flawless institution. Yes. And only the past two days I read about medical scientists who tampered with data to please the firm that sponsored their work and about the start of a new investigation into the work of a psychologist who produced data “too good to be true.” Mistakes abound. On a daily basis. Sure, there is nothing to reform here. Science works just fine. I think it is time for the “Men in Black” to move in to start an outside-invesigation of science and academia. The Stapel case and other, similar cases teach us that scientists themselves are able to clean-up their act.

Later, he writes (sic throughout):

Stapel was punished, he did his community service (as he writes in his latest book), he is not on welfare, he is trying to make money with being a writer, a cab driver, a motivational speaker, but not very successfully, and .. it is totally unclear whether he gets paid for his teaching (no research) an extra-curricular hobby course (2 hours a week, not more, not less) and if he gets paid, how much.

Moreover and more importantly, we do not know WHAT he teaches exactly, we have not seen his syllabus. How can people write things like “this will only inspire kids to not get caught”, without knowing what the guy is teaching his students? Will he reach his students how to become fraudsters? Really? When you have read the two books he wrote after his demise, you cannot be conclude that this is very unlikely? Will he teach his students about all the other fakes and frauds and terrible things that happen in science? Perhaps. Is that bad? Perhaps. I think it is better to postpone our judgment about the CONTENT of all this as long as we do not know WHAT he is actually teaching. That would be a Popper-like, open-minded, rationalistic, democratic, scientific attitude. Suppose a terrible criminal comes up with a great insight, an interesting analysis, a new perspective, an amazing discovery, suppose (think Genet, think Gramsci, think Feyerabend).

Is it smart to look away from potentially interesting information, because the messenger of that information stinks?

Perhaps, God forbid, Stapel is able to teach his students valuable lessons and insights no one else is willing to teach them for a 2-hour-a-week temporary, adjunct position that probably doesn’t pay much and perhaps doesn’t pay at all. The man is a failure, yes, but he is one of the few people out there who admitted to his fraud, who helped the investigation into his fraud (no computer crashes…., no questionnaires that suddenly disappeared, no data files that were “lost while moving office”, see Sanna, Smeesters, and …. Foerster). Nowhere it is written that failures cannot be great teachers. Perhaps he points his students to other frauds, failures, and ridiculous mistakes in psychological science we do not know of yet. That would be cool (and not unlikely).

Is it possible? Is it possible that Stapel has something interesting to say, to teach, to comment on?

To my eye, these comments read as saying that Stapel has paid his debt to society and thus ought not to be subject to heightened scrutiny. They seem to assert that Stapel is reformable. They also suggest that the problem is not so much with Stapel as with the scientific enterprise. While there may be systemic features of science as currently practice that make cheating a greater temptation than it might be otherwise, suggesting that those features made Stapel commit fraud does not convey an understanding of Stapel’s individual responsibility to navigate those temptations. Putting those assertions and excuses in someone else’s mouth makes them look less self-serving than they actually are.

Hilariously, “Paul” also urges the Retraction Watch commenters expressing doubts about Stapel’s rehabilitation and moral character to contact Stapel using their real names, first here:

I guess that if people want to write Stapel a message, they can send him a personal email, using their real name. Not “Paul” or “JatdS” or “QAQ” or “nothingifnotcritical” or “KK” or “youknowbestofall” or “whatistheworldcoming to” or “givepeaceachance”.

then here:

if you want to talk to puppeteer, as a real person, using your real name, I recommend you write Stapel a personal email message. Not zwg or neuroskeptic or what arewehiding for.

Meanwhile, behind the scenes, the Retraction Watch editors accumulated clues that “Paul” was not an uninvolved party but rather Diederik Stapel portraying himself as an uninvolved party. After they contacted him to let him know that such behavior did not comport with their comment policy, Diederik Stapel posted under his real name:

Hello, my name is Diederik Stapel. I thought that in an internet environment where many people are writing about me (a real person) using nicknames it is okay to also write about me (a real person) using a nickname. ! have learned that apparently that was —in this particular case— a misjudgment. I think did not dare to use my real name (and I still wonder why). I feel that when it concerns person-to-person communication, the “in vivo” format is to be preferred over and above a blog where some people use their real name and some do not. In the future, I will use my real name. I have learned that and I understand that I –for one– am not somebody who can use a nickname where others can. Sincerely, Diederik Stapel.

He portrays this as a misunderstanding about how online communication works — other people are posting without using their real names, so I thought it was OK for me to do the same. However, to my eye it conveys that he also misunderstands how rebuilding trust works. Posting to support the person at the center of the discussion without first acknowledging that you are that person is deceptive. Arguing that that person ought to be granted more trust while dishonestly portraying yourself as someone other than that person is a really bad strategy. When you’re caught doing it, those arguments for more trust are undermined by the fact that they are themselves further instances of the deceptive behavior that broke trust in the first place.

I will allow as how Diederik Stapel may have some valuable lessons to teach of, though. One of these is how not to make a convincing case that you’ve reformed.

Some thoughts about human subjects research in the wake of Facebook’s massive experiment.

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You can read the study itself here, plus a very comprehensive discussion of reactions to the study here.

1. If you intend to publish your research in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, you are expected to have conducted that research with the appropriate ethical oversight. Indeed, the submission process usually involves explicitly affirming that you have done so (and providing documentation, in the case of human subjects research, of approval by the relevant Institutional Review Board(s) or of the IRB’s determination that the research was exempt from IRB oversight).

2. Your judgment, as a researcher, that your research will not expose your human subjects to especially big harms does not suffice to exempt that research from IRB oversight. The best way to establish that your research is exempt from IRB oversight is to submit your protocol to the IRB and have the IRB determine that it is exempt.

3. It’s not unreasonable for people to judge that violating their informed consent (say, by not letting them know that they are human subjects in a study where you are manipulating their environment and not giving them the opportunity to opt out of being part of your study) is itself a harm to them. When we value our autonomy, we tend to get cranky when others disregard it.

4. Researchers, IRBs, and the general public needn’t judge a study to be as bad as [fill in the name of a particularly horrific instance of human subjects research] to judge the conduct of the researchers in the study unethical. We can (and should) surely ask for more than “not as bad as the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment”.

5. IRB approval of a study means that the research has received ethical oversight, but it does not guarantee that the treatment of human subjects in the research will be ethical. IRBs can make questionable ethical judgments too.

6. It is unreasonable to suggest that you can generally substitute Terms of Service or End User License Agreements for informed consent documents, as the latter are supposed to be clear and understandable to your prospective human subjects, while the former are written in such a way that even lawyers have a hard time reading and understanding them. The TOS or EULA is clearly designed to protect the company, not the user. (Some of those users, by the way, are in their early teens, which means they probably ought to be regarded as members of a “vulnerable population” entitled to more protection, not less.)

7. Just because a company like Facebook may “routinely” engage in manipulations of a user’s environment doesn’t make that kind of manipulation automatically ethical when it is done for the purposes of research. Nor does it mean that that kind of manipulation is ethical when Facebook does it for its own purposes. As it happens, peer-reviewed scientific journals, funding agencies, and other social structures tend to hold scientists building knowledge with human subjects research to higher ethical standards than (say) corporations are held to when they interact with humans. This doesn’t necessarily means our ethical demands of scientific knowledge-builders are too high. Instead, it may mean that our ethical demands of corporations are too low.

A suggestion for those arguing about the causal explanation for fewer women in science and engineering fields.

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People are complex, as are the social structures they build (including but not limited to educational institutions, workplaces, and professional communities).

Accordingly, the appropriate causal stories to account for the behaviors and choices of humans, individually and collectively, are bound to be complex. It will hardly ever be the case that there is a single cause doing all the work.

However, there are times when people seem to lose the thread when they spin their causal stories. For example:

The point of focusing on innate psychological differences is not to draw attention away from anti-female discrimination. The research clearly shows that such discrimination exists—among other things, women seem to be paid less for equal work. Nor does it imply that the sexes have nothing in common. Quite frankly, the opposite is true. Nor does it imply that women—or men—are blameworthy for their attributes.

Rather, the point is that anti-female discrimination isn’t the only cause of the gender gap. As we learn more about sex differences, we’ve built better theories to explain the non-identical distribution of the sexes among the sciences. Science is always tentative, but the latest research suggests that discrimination has a weaker impact than people might think, and that innate sex differences explain quite a lot.

What I’m seeing here is a claim that amounts to “there would still be a gender gap in the sciences even if we eliminated anti-female discrimination” — in other words, that the causal powers of innate sex differences would be enough to create a gender gap.

To this claim, I would like to suggest:

1. that there is absolutely no reason not to work to eliminate anti-female discrimination; whether or not there are other causes that are harder to change, such discrimination seems like something we can change, and it has negative effects on those subject to it;

2. that is is an empirical question whether, in the absence of anti-female discrimination, there would still be a gender gap in the sciences; given the complexity of humans and their social structures, controlled studies in psychology are models of real life that abstract away lots of details*, and when the rubber hits the road in the real phenomena we are modeling, things may play out differently.

Let’s settle the question of how much anti-female discrimination matters by getting rid of it.

_____
* This is not a special problem for psychology. All controlled experiments are abstracting away details. That’s what controlling variables is all about.

The line between persuasion and manipulation.

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As this year’s ScienceOnline Together conference approaches, I’ve been thinking about the ethical dimensions of using empirical findings from psychological research to inform effective science communication (or really any communication). Melanie Tannenbaum will be co-facilitating a session about using such research findings to guide communication strategies, and this year’s session is nicely connected to a session Melanie led with Cara Santa Maria at last year’s conference called “Persuading the Unpersuadable: Communicating Science to Deniers, Cynics, and Trolls.”

In that session last year, the strategy of using empirical results from psychology to help achieve success in a communicative goal was fancifully described as deploying “Jedi mind tricks”. Achieving success in communication was cast in terms of getting your audience to accept your claims (or at least getting them not to reject your claims out of hand because they don’t trust you, or don’t trust the way you’re engaging with them, or whatever). But if you have the cognitive launch codes, as it were, you can short-circuit distrust, cultivate trust, help them end up where you want them to end up when you’re done communicating what you’re trying to communicate.

Jason Goldman pointed out to me that these “tricks” aren’t really that tricky — it’s not like you flash the Queen of Diamonds and suddenly the person you’re talking to votes for your ballot initiative or buys your product. As Jason put it to me via email, “From a practical perspective, we know that presenting reasons is usually ineffective, and so we wrap our reasons in narrative – because we know, from psychology research, that storytelling is an effective device for communication and behavior change.”

Still, using a “trick” to get your audience to end up where you want them to end up — even if that “trick” is simply empirical knowledge that you have and your audience doesn’t — sounds less like persuasion than manipulation. People aren’t generally happy about the prospect of being manipulated. Intuitively, manipulating someone else gets us into ethically dicey territory.

As a philosopher, I’m in a discipline whose ideal is that you persuade by presenting reasons for your interlocutor to examine, arguments whose logical structure can be assessed, premises whose truth (or at least likelihood) can be evaluated. I daresay scientists have something like the same ideal in mind when they present their findings or try to evaluate the scientific claims of others. In both cases, there’s the idea than we should be making a concerted effort not to let tempting cognitive shortcuts get in the way of reasoning well. We want to know about the tempting shortcuts (some of which are often catalogued as “informal fallacies”) so we can avoid falling into them. Generally, it’s considered sloppy argumentation (or worse) to try to tempt our audience with those shortcuts.

How much space is there between the tempting cognitive shortcuts we try to avoid in our own reasoning and the “Jedi mind tricks” offered to us to help us communicate, or persuade, or manipulate more effectively? If we’re taking advantage of cognitive shortcuts (or switches, or whatever the more accurate metaphor would be) to increase the chances that people will accept our factual claims, our recommendations, our credibility, etc., can we tell when we’ve crossed the line between persuasion and manipulation? Can we tell when it’s the cognitive switch that’s doing the work rather than the sharing of reasons?

It strikes me as even more ethically problematic if we’re using these Jedi mind tricks while concealing the fact that we’re using them from the audience we’re using them on. There’s a clear element of deception in doing that.

Now, possibly the Jedi mind tricks work equally well if we disclose to our audience that we’re using them and how they work. In that case, we might be able to use them to persuade without being deceptive — and it would be clear to our audience that we were availing ourselves of these tricks, and that our goal was to get them to end up in a particular place. It would be kind of weird, though, perhaps akin to going to see a magician knowing full well that she would be performing illusions and that your being fooled by those illusions is a likely outcome. (Wouldn’t this make us more distrustful in our communicative interactions, though? If you know about the switches and it’s still the case that they can be used against you, isn’t that the kind of thing that might make you want to block lots of communication before it can even happen?)

As a side note, I acknowledge that there might be some compelling extreme cases in which the goal of getting the audience to end up in a particular place — e.g., revealing to you the location of the ticking bomb — is so urgent that we’re prepared to swallow our qualms about manipulating the audience to get the job done. I don’t think that the normal stakes of our communications are like this, though. But there may be some cases where how high the stakes really are is one of the places we disagree. Jason suggests vaccine acceptance or refusal might be important enough that the Jedi mind tricks shouldn’t set off any ethical alarms. I’ll note that vaccine advocates using a just-the-empirical-facts approach to communication are often accused or suspected of having some undisclosed financial conflict of interest that is motivating them to try to get everyone vaccinated — that is, they’re not using the Jedi mind trick social psychologists think could help them persuade their target audience and yet that audience thinks they’re up to something sneaky. That’s a pretty weird situation.

Does our cognitive make-up as humans make it possible to get closer to exchanging and evaluating reasons rather than just pushing each other’s cognitive buttons? If so, can we achieve better communication without the Jedi mind tricks?

Maybe it would require some work to change the features of our communicative environment (or of the environment in which we learn how to reason about the world and how to communicate and otherwise interact with others) to help our minds more reliably work this way. Is there any empirical data on that? (If not, is this a research question psychologists are asking?)

Some of these questions tread dangerously close to the question of whether we humans can actually have free will — and that’s a big bucket of metaphysical worms that I’m not sure I want to dig into right now. I just want to know how to engage my fellow human beings as ethically as possible when we communicate.

These are some of the questions swirling around my head. Maybe next week at ScienceOnline some of them will be answered — although there’s a good chance some more questions will be added to the pile!

CD review: Baba Brinkman, “The Rap Guide to Evolution: Revised”

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Baba Brinkman, "The Rap Guide to Evolution: Revised"

Baba Brinkman
“The Rap Guide to Evolution: Revised”
Lit Fuse Records, 2011

This is an album that is, in its way, one long argument (in 14 tracks) that the theory of evolution is a useful lens through which to make sense of our world and our lives. In making this argument, Brinkman also plays with standard conventions within the rap genre, pointing to predecessors and influences (not only rappers but also the original Chuck D), calling out enemies, bragging about his rapping prowess, and centering himself as an illustrative example of the processes he’s describing. There is also a healthy dose of swearing (as befits the genre). The ordering of the tracks is clearly thematic, with a substantial stretch near the middle of the album focused on sexual selection. Most of the tracks hold up well enough that you could listen to the album on shuffle, but I recommend listening to the whole thing in order first to get the fullest impact.

The first track, “Natural Selection 2.0,” opens by taking aim at people who can’t or won’t wrap their heads around the explanatory power of Darwin’s theory of evolution. Brinkman specifically targets creationists and other “Darwin-haters” for scorn, but his focus is less on their bad arguments than on their resistance to evolutionary biology’s good ones.

Track 2, “Black-eyed Peas,” borrows a strategy from Origin of Species and connects natural selection with the principles of domestication. Here, Brinkman includes not just cattle and peaches and black-eyed peas, but also artists struggling for survival within the music industry (including Black-Eyed Peas), and the chorus features a Fugees sample that rewards listeners of a certain age for surviving as long as they have.

Track 3, the catchy as Hell “I’m A African 2.0,” flips an Afrocentric anthem into a celebration of the common origins of all humanity. The verses also gesture towards ways that archaeologists, anthropologists, and geneticists are scientists taking different angles, and producing different evidence, on the same natural processes.

In track 4, “Creationist Cousins 2.0,” Brinkman offers a description of dinner-table debates about evolutionary theory that is really a song about the strategy of engagement (with hypotheses, empirical data, and objections) central to scientific knowledge-building. It’s also a song that reflects Brinkman’s faith that rational argumentation from evidence we can agree upon should ultimately lead us to shared conclusions. The reality of dialogic exchanges (and of scientific knowledge-building) is more complicated, but it’s hard to fully do justice to any real practice you’re trying to describe in a four minute song.

Track 5, “Survival of the Fittest 2.0,” starts with a shout-out to a bunch of evolutionary psychologists and then takes up the question of how to understand violent behavior and what might be construed as “poor life choices” in the environment of American inner cities. Brinkman pushes the gangsta rap genre’s description of harsh living conditions further by examining whether thug life might embody rational reproductive and survival strategies, all the while pointing us toward the possibility of addressing the economic and social inequalities in the environment that make these behaviors adaptive.

Track 6, “Group Selection 2.0,” simultaneously calls out Social Darwinism as unscientific (“Just because something exists in a state of nature/Doesn’t give it a moral basis, that’s a false correlation”) and explores the value of altruistic behavior. Here, Brinkman explicitly voices openness to group selection as a real evolutionary mechanism (“Some people say group selectionism is false/But I say let the evidence call it”).

Track 7, “Worst Comes to Worst 2.0,” continues the exploration of how much environment matters to what kinds of traits or behaviors are adaptive or maladaptive. Brinkman notes that Homo sapiens are apex predators who have a choice about whether to maintain environments in which violence against other humans works as an adaptive strategy. Since violence isn’t something to which our genes condemn us, he holds open the possibility that we could remake our environment to favor human behavior as “peaceful as Galapagos finches”.

Track 8, “Dr. Tatiana,” is an ode to the multifarious ways in which members of the animal kingdom knock boots (and a shout-out to the author noted for documenting them), as well as the track on the album least likely to be approved as a prom theme (although the decorating committee could have a lot of fun with it). It makes a compelling musical environment for examining the environments and intraspecies competitions in which particular intriguing mating practices might make sense.

Track 9, “Sexual Selection 2.0,” considers the hypothesis that complex language in general, and Baba Brinkman’s aptitude for rhyming in particular, is something that might have evolved to help win the competition for mates. Brinkman’s hip hop flow is enticing, but in this song it exposes his adaptationist assumption that all the traits that have persisted in our population got there because they were selected for to help us evade predators, combat parasites, or get laid. What would Stephen Jay Gould say?

Track 10, “Hypnotize 2.0,” continues in the theme of sexual selection, exploring secondary sexual characteristics (including, perhaps, mad rhyming skills) as adaptive traits:

So now this whole rap thing seems awfully strange

Talkin’ ‘bout, “He got game, and he’s not real

And he’s got chains” but wait, that’s a peacock’s tail!

‘Cause you never hear them say they got it cheap on sale

Which means that bling is meant to represent

How much they really spent, and at the end of the day
That’s the definition of a “fitness display”


Like a bowerbird’s nest, which takes hours of work

And makes the females catch a powerful urge

Just like a style of verse or an amazing flow

But it takes dedication and it takes a toll

‘Cause the best displays are unfakeable

The lyrics here make the suggestion, not explored in depth, that mimetic posers in the population may complicate the matter of mate selection.

Track 11, “Used To Be The Man,” fits nicely in the neighborhood of hip hop songs expressing young men’s anxiety and nostalgia for a world where they feel more at home. The lyrics note that we may be dragging around traits (like impressive upper body strength) that are no longer so adaptive, especially in rapidly changing social environments. Here, Brinkman gives eloquent voice to pain without committing a fallacious appeal to nature.

Track 12, “Don’t Sleep With Mean People,” is an up-tempo exhortation to take positive action to improve the gene pool. Here, you might worry that Brinkman hasn’t first established meanness as a heritable trait. However, doubters that being a jerk has a genetic basis (of which I am one) may be persuaded by the infectious chorus that a social penalty for being a jerk could improve behavior, if not the human genome.

Track 13, “Performance, Feedback, Revision 2.0,” suggests the ubiquity and usefulness of processes similar to natural selection in other parts of our lives. The album version (2.0) differs from the original (which you can find here) in instrumentation, precise lyrics, and and overall feel. Noticing this, a dozen tracks in to the album, made this listener consider whether the song functions like a genotype, with the particular performance of the song as the phenotypic expression in a particular environment.

In the last track of the album, “Darwin’s Acid 2.0,” Brinkman explores what the world of nature and of human experience looks like if you embrace the theory of evolution. The vision he weaves is of a world that is not grim or nihilistic, but intelligible and hopeful, where it is our responsibility to make good.

“The Rap Guide to Evolution: Revised” is — to me, anyway — a compelling rap album, with its balanced mix of tracks featuring flashy dextrous delivery, slower jams, and shout-along anthems. It’s worth noting, of course, that while I haven’t yet hit the post-menopausal granny demographic that Brinkman identifies (in “Sexual Selection 2.0”) as central to his existing fan base, my CD shelf is mostly stuck in the 20th Century, with Run DMC, Salt-N-Pepa, Beastie Boys, De La Soul, and Arrested Development — the band, not the show — as my rap touchstones. However, these tracks also find favor with my decidedly 21st Century offspring, whose appreciation of the scientific content and clever wordplay would not have been granted if they didn’t like the music. (Note to Mr. Brinkman: My daughters are now more likely to seek out a Baba Brinkman show than a gangsta rap show, but they will be restricting their efforts in propagating your lyrical dexterity — is that what the kids are calling it nowadays? — to Tumblr and the Twitterverse, at least while they’re living under my roof.)

While some (including The New Yorker) have compared Mr. Brinkman to Eminem in his vocal delivery, to my ear he is warmer and more melodic. As an unapologetic Richard Dawkins fanboy, he sometimes comes across like a hardcore adaptationist (rapping about bodies as mere machines for spreading our genes), but he also takes group selection seriously (as in track 6). Perhaps future work will give rise to a levels-of-selection rap battle between partisans of group selection, individual selection, and gene-level selection.

Baba Brinkman’s professed admiration for the work of evolutionary psychologists doesn’t manifest itself in this album in defenses of results based on blatantly bad methodology (at least as far as I can tell). “Creationist Cousins 2.0” does, however, include a swipe at a “gender feminist sister” — gender feminist being, of course, a label originated by a hater (and haters gonna hate). It’s not clear that any of this warrants an answer song, but if it did, I would be rooting for Kate Clancy, DNLee, and the appropriate counterpart of DJ Spinderella to deliver the response.

What’s notable in “The Rap Guide to Evolution: Revised” besides Baba Brinkman’s lyrical mastery is how exquisitely attentive he is to the importance of environment — not just its variability, but also the extent to which humans may be able to change our social, economic, and political environment to make traits we like bumping up against in the world more adaptive. Given that much visceral resistance to evolutionary theory seems grounded in a worry that it reduces humans to helpless cogs in a mechanism, or robots programmed to do the bidding of their genes, this reminder that environment can be every bit as much a moving part in the system as genes is a good one. The reality that could be that Brinkman offers here is fiercely optimistic:

In each of these cases, our intentional efforts
Can play the part of environmental pressures
I can say: “This is a space where a peaceful existence
Will never be threatened by needless aggression”
I can say: “This is an ecosystem where people listen
Where justice increases over egotism
This is a space where religions achieve co-existence
And racism decreases with each coalition”

As Darwin wrote, and Brinkman agrees, there is a grandeur in this view of life.

UPDATE:
Via Twitter, I’ve been reminded to point out that the album is a collaboration between Baba Brinkman and DJ and music producer Mr. Simmonds, “who is as responsible for the sound as [Baba Brinkman is] for the ideas”.

* * * * *
Baba Brinkman’s website

Videos of ancestral versions of the songs, produced with funding from the Wellcome Trust

Intuitions, scientific methodology, and the challenge of not getting fooled.

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At Context and Variation, Kate Clancy has posted some advice for researchers in evolutionary psychology who want to build reliable knowledge about the phenomena they’re trying to study. This advice, of course, is prompted in part by methodology that is not so good for scientific knowledge-building. Kate writes:

The biggest problem, to my mind, is that so often the conclusions of the bad sort of evolutionary psychology match the stereotypes and cultural expectations we already hold about the world: more feminine women are more beautiful, more masculine men more handsome; appearance is important to men while wealth is important to women; women are prone to flighty changes in political and partner preference depending on the phase of their menstrual cycles. Rather than clue people in to problems with research design or interpretation, this alignment with stereotype further confirms the study. Variation gets erased: in bad evolutionary psychology, there are only straight people, and everyone wants the same things in life. …

No one should ever love their idea so much that it becomes detached from reality.

It’s a lovely post about the challenges of good scientific methodology when studying human behavior (and why it matters to more than just scientists), so you should read the whole thing.

Kate’s post also puts me in mind of some broader issues about which scientists should remind themselves from time to time to keep themselves honest. I’m putting some of those on the table here.

Let’s start with a quotable quote from Richard Feynman:

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.

Scientists are trying to build reliable knowledge about the world from information that they know is necessarily incomplete. There are many ways to interpret the collections of empirical data we have on hand — indeed, many contradictory ways to interpret them. This means that lots of the possible interpretations will be wrong.

You don’t want to draw the wrong conclusion from the available data, not if you can possibly avoid it. Feynman’s “first principle” is noting that we need to be on guard against letting ourselves be fooled by wrong conclusions — and on guard against the peculiar ways that we are more vulnerable to being fooled.

This means we have to talk about our attachment to intuitions. All scientists have intuitions. They surely help in motivating questions to ask about the world and strategies for finding good answers to them. But intuitions, no matter how strong, are not the same as empirical evidence.

Making things more challenging, our strong intuitions can shape what we take to be the empirical evidence. They can play a role in which results we set aside because they “couldn’t be right,” in which features of a system we pay attention to and which we ignore, in which questions we bother to ask in the first place. If we don’t notice the operation of our intuitions, and the way they impact our view of the empirical evidence, we’re making it easier to get fooled. Indeed, if our intuitions are very strong, we’re essentially fooling ourselves.

As if this weren’t enough, we humans (and, by extension, human scientists) are not always great at recognizing when we are in the grips of our intuitions. It can feel like we’re examining a phenomenon to answer a question and that we’re refraining from making any assumptions to guide our enquiry, but chances are it’s not a feeling we should trust.

This is not to say that our intuitions are guaranteed safe haven from our noticing them. We can become aware of them and try to neutralize the extent to which they, rather than the empirical evidence, are driving the scientific story — but to do this, we tend to need help from people who have conflicting intuitions about the same bit of the world. This is a good methodological reason to take account of the assumptions and intuitions of others, especially when they conflict with our own.

What happens if there are intuitions about which we all agree — assumptions we are making (and may well be unaware that we’re making, because they seem so bleeding obvious) with which no one disagrees? I don’t know that there are any such universal human intuitions. It seems unlikely to me, but I can’t rule out the possibility. How would they bode for our efforts at scientific knowledge-building?

First, we would probably want to recognize that the universality of an intuition still wouldn’t make it into independent empirical evidence. Even if it had been the case, prior to Galileo, or Copernicus, or Aristarchus of Samos, that every human took it as utterly obvious that Earth is stationary, we recognize that this intuition could still be wrong. As it happened, it was an intuition that was questioned, though not without serious resistance.

Developing a capacity to question the obvious, and also to recognize and articulate what it is we’re taking to be obvious in order that we might question it, seems like a crucial skill for scientists to cultivate.

But, as I think comes out quite clearly in Kate’s post, there are some intuitions we have that, even once we’ve recognized them, may be extremely difficult to subject to empirical test. This doesn’t mean that the questions connected in our heads to these intuitions are outside the realm of scientific inquiry, but it would be foolish not to notice that it’s likely to be extremely difficult to find good scientific answers to these questions. We need to be wary of the way our intuitions try to stack the evidential deck. We need to acknowledge that the very fact of our having strong intuitions doesn’t count as empirical evidence in favor of them. We need to come to grips with the possibility that our intuitions could be wrong — perhaps to the extent that we recognize that empirical results that seem to support our intuitions require extra scrutiny, just to be sure.

To do any less is to ask to be fooled, and that’s the outcome scientific knowledge-building is trying to avoid.

Wikipedia, the DSM, and Beavis.

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There are some nights that Wikipedia raises more questions for me than it answers.

The other evening, reminiscing about some of the background noise of my life (viz. “Beavis and Butt-head”) when I was in graduate school, I happened to look up Cornholio. After I got over my amusement that its first six letters were enough to put my desired search target second on the list of Wikipedia’s suggestions for what I might be looking for (right between cornhole and Cornholme, I read the entry and got something of a jolt at its diagnostic tone:

After consuming large amounts of sugar and/or caffeine, Beavis sometimes undergoes a radical personality change, or psychotic break. In one episode, “Holy Cornholio”, the transformation occurred after chewing and swallowing many pain killer pills. He will raise his forearms in a 90-degree angle next to his chest, pull his shirt over his head, and then begin to yell or scream erratically, producing a stream of gibberish and strange noises, his eyes wide. This is an alter-ego named ‘Cornholio,’ a normally dormant persona. Cornholio tends to wander aimlessly while reciting “I am the Great Cornholio! I need TP for my bunghole!” in an odd faux-Spanish accent. Sometimes Beavis will momentarily talk normally before resuming the persona of Cornholio. Once his Cornholio episode is over, Beavis usually has no memory of what happened.

Regular viewers of “Beavis and Butt-head” probably suspected that Beavis had problems, but I’m not sure we knew that he had a diagnosable problem. For that matter, I’m not sure we would have classified moments of Cornholio as falling outside the broad umbrella of Things Beavis Does to Make Things Difficult for Teachers.

But, the Wikipedia editors seem to have taken a shine to the DSM (or other relevant literature on psychiatric conditions), and to have confidence that the behavior Beavis displays here is properly classified as a psychotic break.

Here, given my familiarity with the details of the DSM (hardly any), I find myself asking some questions:

  • Was the show written with the intention that the Beavis-to-Cornholio transformation be seen as a psychotic break?
  • Is it possible to give a meaningful psychiatric diagnosis of a cartoon character?
  • Does a cartoon character need a substantial inner life of some sort for a psychiatric diagnosis of that cartoon character to make any sense?
  • If psychiatric diagnoses are based wholly on outward behavioral manifestations rather than on the inner stuff that might be driving that behavior (as may be the case if it’s really possible to apply diagnostic criteria to Beavis), is this a good reason for us to be cautious about the potential value of these definitions and diagnostic criteria?
  • Is there a psychology or psychiatry classroom somewhere that is using clips of the Beavis-to-Cornholio transformation in order to teach students what a psychotic break is?

I’m definitely uncomfortable that this fictional character has a psychiatric classification thrust upon him so easily — though at least, as a fictional character, he doesn’t have to deal with any actual stigma associated with such a psychiatric classification. And, I think perhaps my unease points to a worry I have (and that Katherine Sharpe also voices in her book Coming of Age on Zoloft) about the project of assembling checklists of easy-to-assess symptoms that seem detached from the harder-to-assess conditions in someone’s head, or in his environment, that are involved in causing the symptoms in the first place.

Possibly Wikipedia’s take on Beavis is simply an indication that the relevant Wikipedia editors like the DSM a lot more than I do (or that they intended their psychiatric framing of Beavis ironically — and if so, well played, editors!). But possibly it reflects a larger society that is much more willing than I am to put behaviors into boxes, regardless of the details (or even existence) of the inner life that accompanies that behavior.

I would welcome the opinions and insight of psychiatrists, psychologist, and others who run with that crowd on this matter.

Book review: Coming of Age on Zoloft.

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One of the interesting and inescapable features of our knowledge-building efforts is just how hard it can be to nail down objective facts. It is especially challenging to tell an objective story when the object of study is us. It’s true that we have privileged information of a particular sort (our own experience of what it is like to be us), but we simultaneously have the impediment of never being able fully to shed that experience. As well, our immediate experience is necessarily particular — none of us knows what it is like to be human in general, just what is is like to be the particular human each of us happens to be. Indeed, if you take Heraclitus seriously (he of the impossibility of stepping in the same river twice), you might not even know what it is like to be you so much as what it is like to be you so far.

All of this complicates the stories we might try to tell about how our minds are connected to our brains, what it means for those brains to be well, and what it is for us to be ourselves or not-ourselves, especially during stretches in our lives when the task that demands our attention might be figuring out who the hell we are in the first place.

Katherine Sharpe’s new book Coming of Age on Zoloft: how antidepressants cheered us up, let us down, and changed who we are, leads us into this territory while avoiding the excesses of either ponderous philosophical treatise or catchy but overly reductive cartoon neuroscience. Rather, Sharpe draws on dozens of interviews with people prescribed selective seratonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) for significant stretches from adolescence through early adulthood, and on her own experiences with antidepressants, to see how depression and antidepressants feature in the stories people tell about themselves. A major thread throughout the book is the question of how our pharmaceutical approach to mental health impacts the lives of diagnosed individuals (for better or worse), but also how it impacts our broader societal attitudes toward depression and toward the project of growing up. Sharpe writes:

When I first began to use Zoloft, my inability to pick apart my “real” thoughts and emotions from those imparted by the drug made me feel bereft. The trouble seemed to have everything to do with being young. I was conscious of needing to figure out my own interests and point myself in a direction in the world, and the fact of being on medication seemed frighteningly to compound the possibilities for error. How could I ever find my way in life if I didn’t even know which feelings were mine? (xvii)

Interleaved between personal accounts, Sharpe describes some of the larger forces whose confluence helps explain the growing ubiquity of SSRIs. One of these is the concerted effort during the revisions that updated the DSM-II to the DSM-III to abandon Freud-inflected frameworks for mental disorders which saw the causal origins of depression in relationships and replace them with checklists of symptoms (to be assessed in isolation from additional facts about what might be happening in the patient’s life) which might or might not be connected to hunches about causal origins of depression based on what scientists think they know about the actions on various neurotransmitters of drugs that seem to treat the symptoms on the checklist. Suddenly being depressed was an official diagnosis based on having particular symptoms that put you in that category — and in the bargain it was no longer approached as a possibly appropriate response to external circumstances. Sharpe also discusses the rise of direct-to-consumer advertising for drugs, which told us how to understand our feelings as symptoms and encouraged us to “talk to your doctor” about getting help from them, as well as the influence of managed care — and of funding priorities within the arena of psychiatric research — in making treatment with a pill the preferred treatment over time-consuming and “unpatentable talk-treatments.” (184)

Sharpe discusses interviewees’, and her own, experiences with talk therapy, and their experiences of trying to get off SSRIs (with varying degrees of medical supervision or premeditation) to find out whether one’s depression is an unrelenting chronic illness the having of which is a permanent fact about oneself, like having Type I diabetes, or whether it might be a transient state, something with which one needs help for a while before going back to normal. Or, if not normal, at least functional enough.

The exploration in Coming of Age on Zoloft is beautifully attentive to the ways that “functional enough” depends on a person’s interaction with environment — with family and friends, with demands of school or work or unstructured days and weeks stretching before you — and on a person’s internal dialogue with oneself — about who you are, how you feel, what you feel driven to do, what feels too overwhelming to face. Sharpe offers an especially compelling glimpse at how the forces from the world and the voices from one’s head sometimes collide, producing what professionals on college campuses describe as a significant deterioration of the baseline of mental health for their incoming students:

One college president lamented that the “moments of woolgathering, dreaming, improvisation” that were seen as part and parcel of a liberal arts education a generation ago had become a hard sell for today’s brand of highly driven students. Experts agreed that undergraduates were in a bigger hurry than ever before, expected by teachers, parents, and themselves to produce more work, of higher quality, in the same finite amount of time. (253)

Such high expectations — and the broader message that productivity is a duty — set the bar high enough that failure may become an alarmingly likely outcome. (Indeed, Sharpe quotes a Manhattan psychiatrist who raises the possibility that some college students and recent graduates “are turning to pharmaceuticals to make something possible that’s not healthy or normal.” (269)) These elevated expectations seem also to be of a piece with the broader societal mindset that makes it easier to get health coverage for a medication-check appointment than for talk-therapy. Just do the cheapest, fastest thing that lets you function well enough to get back to work. Since knowing what you want or who you are is not of primary value, exploring, reflecting, or simply being is a waste of time.

Here, of course, what kind of psychological state is functional or dysfunctional surely has something to do with what our society values, with what it demand of us. To the extent that our society is made up of individual people, those values, those demands, may be inextricably linked with whether people generally have the time, the space, the encouragement, the freedom to find or choose their own values, to be the authors (to at least some degree) of their own lives.

Finding meaning — creating meaning — is, at least experientially, connected to so much more than the release or reuptake of chemicals in our brains. Yet, as Sharpe describes, our efforts to create meaning get tangled in questions about the influence of those chemicals, especially when SSRIs are part of the story.

I no longer simply grapple with who I can become and what kind of effort it will require. Now I also grapple with the question of whether I am losing something important — cheating somehow — if I use a psychopharmaceutical to reduce the amount of effort required, or to increase my stamina to keep trying … or to lower my standards enough that being where I am (rather than trying to be better along some dimension or another) is OK with me.

And, getting satisfying answers to these questions, or even strategies for approaching them, is made harder when it seems like our society is not terribly tolerant of the woolgatherers, the grumpy, the introverted, the sad. Our right to pursue happiness (where failure is an option) has been transformed to a duty to be happy. Meanwhile, the stigma of mental illness and of needing medication to treat is dances hand in hand with the stigma attached to not conforming perfectly to societal expectations and definitions of “normal”.

In the end, what can it mean to feel “normal” when I can never get first-hand knowledge of how it feels to be anyone else? Is the “normal” I’m reaching for some state from my past, or some future state I haven’t yet experienced? Will I know it when I get there? And I can I reliably evaluate my own moods, personality, or plans with the organ whose functioning is in question?

With engaging interviews and sometimes achingly beautiful self-reflection, Coming of Age on Zoloft leads us through the terrain of these questions, illuminates the ways our pharmaceutical approach to depression makes them more fraught, and ultimately suggests the possibility that grappling with them may always have been important for our human flourishing, even without SSRIs in our systems.

Lads’ mags, sexism, and research in psychology: an interview with Dr. Peter Hegarty (part 2).

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In this post, I continue my interview with Dr. Peter Hegarty, a social psychologist at the University of Surrey and one of the authors of ” ‘Lights on at the end of the party’: Are lads’ mags mainstreaming dangerous sexism?”, which was published in The British Journal of Psychology in December. My detailed discussion of that paper is here. The last post presented part 1 of our interview, in which Dr. Hegarty answered questions about the methodology of this particular research, as well as about some of the broader methodological differences between research in psychology and in sciences that are focused on objects of study other than humans.

Janet Stemwedel: It’s been pointed out that the university students that seem to be the most frequent subjects of psychological research are WEIRD (Western Educated Industrialized Rich Democratic). Is the WEIRDness of university students as subjects in this research something that should make us cautious about the strength of the conclusions we draw?  Or are university students actually a reasonably appropriate subject pool from the point of view of exploring how lads’ mags work?

Peter Hegarty: According to the historian Kurt Danziger in his book Constructing the Subject, students became an unmarked “normative” subject population for psychologists, at least in the United States, between the world wars. Since then, criticisms of over-reliance on student samples have been common (such as those of Quin McNemar in the 1940s, or David Sears in the 1980s). Within the history of this criticism, perhaps what is most distinct about the recent argument about WIERDness is that it draws on the developments in cultural psychology of the last 20 years or so. For this specific study, our rational for studying young people on a campus was not only convenience; they are also the target market for these magazines, by virtue of their age, and by virtue of possessing the disposable income to purchase them.

May I take the time to offer a slightly broader perspective on the problem of under- and over-representation of social groups in psychology? The issue is not simply one of who gets included, and who does not. This is because groups can be disempowered and science compromised by being erased (as the WIERD criticism presumes), and groups can be disempowered when they are consistently located within the psychologists’ gaze – as in Foucaultian disciplinary power. African-Americans are oversampled in the US literature on forensic psychology, but that literature is not anti-racist, it’s largely based on a “deficit” model of race (Carter & Forsythe, 2007). The issue is not simply one of inclusion or exclusion, but one of how inclusion happens, as sociologist Steven Epstein’s work on inclusive paradigms in medicine nicely shows.

In other experiments and content analyses, my colleagues and I have found that people spontaneously explain group differences by attending to lower power groups more of the time. In our own research we have observed this pattern in scientists publications and in explanations produced in the lab with regard to race, gender, and sexuality, for example (Hegarty & Buechel, 2006; Hegarty & Pratto, 2004). On the face of it, this might lead to greater stereotyping of the lower power “marked” group. Indeed, as Suzanne Bruckmueller’s work on linguistic framing subtly shows, once a group is positioned as “the effect to be explained” in an account of group differences, then people tend to infer that the group has less power (Bruckmüller & Abele, 2010). Our work suggests that to trouble the “normative” status that WIERD people occupy in our ontologies, that inclusion is necessary but not sufficient. It’s also important to reframe our questions about difference to think concretely about normative groups. In the case of our lads’ mags research, we were heartened that people were prompted to reframe questions about the widespread problem of violence against women away from the small category of convicted rapists, to ask broader questions about how such violence is normalized.

JS: A lot of scientists seem to have a love/hate relationship with mass media. They want the public to understand their research and why it’s interesting and important, but media coverage sometimes gets the details badly wrong, or obliterates the nuance.  And, given the subject matter of your research (which the average person might reasonably connect to his or her own concerns more easily than anything we might learn about the Higgs boson), it seems like misunderstandings of what the research means could get amplified pretty quickly.  What has your experience been as far as the media coverage of your research?  Are there particular kinds of issues you’d like the public to grasp better when they read or hear about this kind of research?

PH: Your question touches on the earlier point about the difference between the human and natural sciences. Our work is caught up in “looping effects” as people interpret it for themselves, but the Higgs boson doesn’t care if the folks in CERN discover it or not. (I think, I’m no expert on sub-atomic physics!) Although some research that I released last year on sexist language got good coverage in the media (Hegarty, Watson, Fletcher & McQueen, 2011), the speed and scale of the reaction to the Horvath et al. (2011) paper was a new experience for me, so I am learning about the media as I go.

There is no hard and fast boundary between “the media” and “the public” who are ‘influenced’ by that media anymore; I’m not sure there ever was one. The somewhat ‘viral’ reaction to this work on the social networking sites such as twitter was visibly self-correcting in ways that don’t fit with social scientists’ theories that blame the media for beguiling the public. Some journalists misunderstood the procedures of Experiment 1 in our study, and it was misdescribed in some media sources. But on Twitter, folk were re-directing those who were reproducing that factual error to the Surrey website. Overall, watching the Twitter feeds reminded me most of the experience of giving a class of students an article to discuss and watching a very useful conversation emerge about what the studies had hypothesized, what they had found, how much you might conclude from the results, and what the policy implications might be. I am somewhat more optimistic about the affordances of social media for education as a result of this experience.

JS: Given the connection between your research questions in this research and actual features of our world that might matter to us quite a lot (like how young men view and interact with the women with whom they share a world), it seems like ultimately we might want to *use* what we learn from the research to make things better, rather than just saying, “Huh, that’s interesting.”  What are the challenges to moving from description to prescription here?  Are there other “moving parts” of our social world you think we need to understand better to respond effectively to what we learn from studies like these?

Related to what I’ve said above, I would like people to see the research as a “red flag” about the range and character of media that young people now read, and which are considered “normal.” There are now numerous anecdotes on the web of people who have been prompted by this research to look at a lads’ mag for the first time – and been surprised or shocked by what they see. We are also in contact with some sex educators about how this work might be used to educate men for a world in which this range of media exists. Precisely because we think this research might have relevance for a broad range of people who care about the fact that people should have pleasure, intimacy, and sex without violence, bullying and hatred,

We have suggested that it should prompt investment in sex education rather than censorship. In so doing, we are adopting an ‘incrementalist’ approach to people’s intelligence about sex and sexual literacy. Carol Dweck’s work shows that children and young people who believe their intelligence to be a fixed ‘entity’ do not fare as well academically as those who believe their intelligence might be something ‘incremental’ that can be changed through effort. Censorship approaches seem to us to be based on fear, and to assume a rather fixed limit to the possibilities of public discourse about sex. We do not make those assumptions, but we fear that they can become self-fulfilling prophecies.

JS: How do you keep your prescriptive hunches from creeping into the descriptive project you’re trying to do with your research?

I’m not sure that it is possible or desirable to exclude subjectivity from science; your last question obliged me to move from description to prescription. It is sometimes striking how much many scientists want to be ‘above politics’ and influence policy, to advocate and remain value-neutral, to change the world, but not to intervene etc. My thinking on this matter borrows more from Sandra Harding’s view of ‘strong objectivity,’ and particularly her idea that the science we get is affected by the range of people included in its production and the forms of social relationships in which they participate. I also think that Stephen Shapin’s book A Social History of Truth is a useful albeit distal explanation of why the question of subjectivity in science is often seen as an affront to honour and the opposite of reasoned dispassionate discussion. In the UK, there is now an obligation on scientists to engage non-academic publics by reporting’ impact summaries to the government as part of national exercises for documenting research excellence. However, this policy can overlook the importance of two-way dialogue between academic and non-academic audiences about how we create different kinds of knowledge for different kinds of purposes. For those reasons, I’m grateful for the opportunity to participate in a more dialogical forum about science and ethics like this one.

Bibliography

Bruckmüller, S., & Abele, A. (2010). Comparison focus in intergroup comparisons: Who we compare to whom influences who we see as powerful and agentic. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 36, 1424-1435.

Carter, R.T., & Forsythe, J.M. (2007). Examining race and culture in psychology journals: The case of forensic psychology. Professional Psychology: Theory and Practice, 38, 133-142.

Danziger, K. (1990). Constructing the Subject: Historical Origins of Psychological Research. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Dweck, C. (2000). Self-theories: Their Role in Motivation, Personality and Development. Psychology Press.

Epstein, S. (2007). Inclusion: The Politics of Difference in Medical Research. Chicago: Univeristy of Chicago Press.

Foucault, M. (1978). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York, Random House.

Hacking, I. (1995). The looping effects of human kinds. In Dan Sperber, David Premack and Ann James Premack (Eds.), Causal Cognition: A Multi-Disciplinary Debate (pp. 351-383). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Harding, S. (1987). The Science Question in Feminism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Hegarty, P., & Buechel C. (2006). Androcentric reporting of gender differences in APA journals: 1965-2004. Review of General Psychology, 10, 377-389.

Hegarty, P, & Pratto F. (2004) The differences that norms make: Empiricism, social constructionism, and the interpretation of group differences. Sex Roles, 50, 445-453.

Hegarty P.J., Watson, N., Fletcher L, & McQueen, G. (2011) When gentlemen are first and ladies are last: Effects of gender stereotypes on the order of romantic partners’ names. British Journal of Social Psychology, 50, 21-35.

Horvath, M.A.H., Hegarty, P., Tyler, S. & Mansfield, S. (2011).“Lights on at the end of the party”: Are Lads Mags’ Mainstreaming Dangerous Sexism? British Journal of Psychology. Available from http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.2044-8295.2011.02086.x/abstract

McNemar, Q. (1940). Sampling in psychological research. Psychological Bulletin, 37, 331-365.

Sears, D. O. (1986). College sophomores in the laboratory: Influences of a narrow data base on social psychology’s view of human nature. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 51, 515-530.

Shapin, S. (1994). A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Lads’ mags, sexism, and research in psychology: an interview with Dr. Peter Hegarty (part 1).

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Back in December, there was a study that appeared in The British Journal of Psychology that got a fair amount of buzz. The paper (Horvath, M.A.H., Hegarty, P., Tyler, S. & Mansfield, S., ” ‘Lights on at the end of the party’: Are lads’ mags mainstreaming dangerous sexism?” British Journal of Psychology. DOI:10.1111/j.2044-8295.2011.02086.x) looked the influence that magazines aimed at young men (“lads’ mags”) might have on how the young people who read them perceive their social reality. Among other things, the researchers found that the subjects in the study found the descriptions of women given by convicted sex offenders and lads’ mags are well nigh indistinguishable, and that when a quote was identified as from a lads’ mag (no matter what its actual source), subjects were more likely to say that they identified with the view it expressed than if the same quote was identified as coming from a rapist.

I wrote about the details of this research in a post on my other blog.

One of the authors of the study, Dr. Peter Hegarty, is someone I know a little from graduate school (as we were in an anthropology of science seminar together one term). He was gracious enough to agree to an interview about this research, and to answer some of my broader questions (as a physical scientist turned philosopher) about what doing good science looks like to a psychologist. Owing to its length, I’m presenting the interview in two posts, this one and one that will follow it tomorrow.

Janet Stemwedel: Is there something specific that prompted this piece of research — a particular event, or the Nth repetition of a piece of “common wisdom” that made it seem like it was time to interrogate it?  Or is this research best understood as part of a broader project (perhaps of identifying pieces of our social world that shape our beliefs and attitudes)?

Peter Hegarty: We came to this research for different reasons. Miranda [Horvath] had been working more consistently on the role of lads’ mags in popular culture than I had been (see Coy & Horvath, 2011). Prompted by another students’ interests, I had published a very short piece earlier this year on the question of representations of ‘heteroflexible’ women in lads’ mags (Hegarty & Buechel, 2011). The two studies reported in Horvath, Hegarty, Tyler & Mansfield (2011) were conducted as Suzannah Tyler and Sophie Mansfield’s M.Sc. Dissertations in Forensic Psychology, a course provided jointly by the University of Surrey and Broadmoor Hospital. Miranda and I took the lead on writing up the research after Miranda moved to Middlesex University in 2010.

JS: When this study was reported in the news, as the Twitters were lighting up with discussion about this research, some expressed concern that the point of the research was to identify lads’ mags as particularly bad (compared to other types of media), or as actually contributing to rapes.  Working from the information in the press release (because the research paper wasn’t quite out yet), there seemed to be some unclarity about precisely what inferences were being drawn from the results and (on the basis of what inferences people thought you *might* be drawing) about whether the research included appropriate controls — for example, quotes about women from The Guardian, or from ordinary-men-who-are-not-rapists.  Can you set us straight on what the research was trying to find out and on what inferences it does or does not support?  And, in light of the hypotheses you were actually testing, can you discuss the issue of experimental controls?

PH: Our research was focused on lads’ mags –- rather than other media –- because content analysis research had shown that those magazines were routinely sexist, operated in an advice-giving mode, and often dismissed their social influence. This is not the case –- as far as I know — with regard to The Guardian. So there was a rationale to focus on lads’ mags that was not based on prior research. We hoped to test our hypothesis that lads’ mags might be normalizing hostile sexism. This idea hung on two matters; is there an overlap in the discourse of lads’ mags and something that most people would accept as hostile sexism? Does that content appear more acceptable to young men when it appears to come from a lads’ mag? The two studies mapped onto these goals. In one, we found that young women and men couldn’t detect the source of a quote as coming from a convicted rapist’s interview or a lads’ mag. In another, young men identified more with quotes that they believed to have come from lads’ mags rather than convicted rapists.

JS: While we’re on the subject of controls, it strikes me that good experimental design in psychological research is probably different in some interesting ways from good experimental design in, say, chemistry.  What are some misconceptions those of us who have more familiarity with the so-called “hard sciences” have about social science research?  What kind of experimental rigor can you achieve without abandoning questions about actual humans-in-the-world?

PH: You are right that these sciences might have different ontologies, because psychology is a human science. There are a variety of perspectives on this, with scholars such as Ian Hacking arguing for a separate ontology of the human sciences and more postmodern authors such as Bruno Latour arguing against distinctions between humans and things. Generally, I would be loath do describe differences between the sciences in terms of the metaphor of “hardness,” because the term is loaded with implicature. First, psychology is a potentially reflexive science about people, conducted by people and is characterized by what the philosopher Ian Hacking calls “looping effects;” people’s thoughts, feelings and behaviours are themselves influenced by psychological theories about them. Second, measurement in psychology is more often dependent on normalization and relative judgment (as in an IQ test, or a 7-point Likert item on a questionnaire, for example). Third, there is a lot of validity to the Foucaultian argument that the “psy- disciplines” have often been used in the service of the state, to divide people into categories of “normal” and “abnormal” people, so that different people might be treated very differently without offending egalitarian ideologies. Much of clinical psychology and testing takes this form.

Critics of psychology often stop there. By so doing, they overlook the rich tradition within psychology of generating knowledge that troubles forms of normalization, by suggesting that the distinction between the “normal” and the “abnormal” is not as firm as common sense suggests. Studies in this tradition might include Evelyn Hooker’s (1957) demonstration – from that dark era when homosexuality was considered a mental illness – that there are no differences in the responses of gay and straight men to personality tests. One might also include David Rosenhan’s (1973) study in which ordinary people managed to deceive psychiatrists that they were schizophrenic. A third example might be stereotype threat research (e.g., by Claude Steele and Joshua Aronson, 1995), which shows that the underperformance of African Americans on some standardized tests reflects not genuine ability, but a situational constraint introduced by testing conditions. Like these studies, we would hope ours would trouble’s people’s sense of what they take for granted about differences between people. In particular we hope that people will reconsider what they think they know about “extreme” sexism – that leads to incarceration – and “normal” sexism, that is now typical for young men to consume. I would urge academic critics of psychology – particularly those that focus on its complicity with Foucaultian disciplinary power, and the power of the state more generally – to develop more critiques that can account for such empirical work.

For the last half a century, “rigor” in empirical psychology has been organized by the language of validity and reliability of measurement (Cronbach & Meehl, 1955). Psychologists also tend to be Popperians, who construct “falsifiable” theories and use Fischerian inferential statistics to construct experiments that afford the possibility of falsification. However, inferential norms are changing in the discipline for three reasons. First, the rise of neuroscience has lead to a more inductive form of inference in which mapping and localization plays a greater role in scientific explanation. Second, social psychologists are increasingly engaging with structural equation modelling and offering confirmatory models of social processes. Third, there is “statistical reform” in psychology, away from the ritual of statistical significance testing toward making variability more transparent through the reporting of confidence intervals, effect sizes, and exact significance values. See Spellman (2012) for one very recent discussion of what’s happening within the genre of scientific writing in psychology around retaining rigor and realism in psychological science.

JS: One thing that struck me in reading the paper was that instruments have been developed to measure levels of sexism.  Are these measures well-accepted within the community of research psychologists?  (I am guessing that if the public even knew about them, they would be pretty controversial in some quarters … maybe the very quarters whose denizens would get high scores on these measures!)

We used two well-established measures; the ambivalent sexism inventory and the AMMSA, and one measure of endorsement of lads’ mags that we developed ourselves for the study. We describe some of the previous findings of other researchers who have used these scales to examine individual differences in responses to vignettes about sexual violence in the article. We feel more confident of the measure we developed ourselves because it was highly correlated with all other measures of sexism and because it was highly correlated with men’s identification with quotes from rapists and from lads’ mags. In other words, we followed the logic of psychologists such as Lee Cronbach, Paul Meehl and Donald Campbell for establishing and developing the “construct validity” of the empirical scales.

* * * * *

Tomorrow, in the second part of my interview with Peter Hegarty, we discuss the WEIRD-ness of college students as subjects for psychological research, how to go from description to prescription, and what it’s like for scientists to talk about their research with the media in the age of Twitter. Stay tuned!

Bibliography

Cronbach, L. J., & Meehl, P. E. (1955). Construct validity in psychological tests. Psychological Bulletin, 52, 281-302.

Coy, M., & Horvath, M.A.H. (2011).‘Lads mags’, young men’s attitudes towards women and acceptance of myths about sexual aggression. Feminism & Psychology, 21, 144-150.

Foucault, M. (1978). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York, Random House.

Hacking, I. (1995). The looping effects of human kinds. In Dan Sperber, David Premack and Ann James Premack (Eds.), Causal Cognition: A Multi-Disciplinary Debate (pp. 351-383). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Hegarty, P., & Buechel C (2011) ‘”What Blokes Want Lesbians to be”: On FHM and the socialization of pro-lesbian attitudes among heterosexual-identified men’. Sage Publications Feminism & Psychology, 21, 240-247.

Hooker, E. (1957). The adjustment of the male overt homosexual. Journal of Projective Techniques, 21, 18-31.

Horvath, M.A.H., Hegarty, P., Tyler, S. & Mansfield, S. (2011).“Lights on at the end of the party”: Are Lads Mags’ Mainstreaming Dangerous Sexism? British Journal of Psychology. Available from http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.2044-8295.2011.02086.x/abstract

Latour, B. (1993). We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Rosenhan, D.L. (1973). On being sane in insane places. Science, 179, 250-258.

Spellman, B.A. (2012). Introduction to the special section: Data, data everywhere. . . especially in my file drawer. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 7, 58-59.

Steele, C., & Aronson, J. (1995). Stereotype threat and the intellectual test performance of African Americans.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 69, 797-811.