Psychology and More

The New York Times Magazine has an excellent piece on Deiderik Stapel and his fraud (posted earlier here and here and here and here and here and here and here). It chronicles the days leading up to the accusation, his family and childhood. One interesting piece of local trivia: He briefly attended East Stroudsburg University to study acting.

Here is a link to the article at the NY Times Magazine: link

A great quote:

He insisted that he loved social psychology but had been frustrated by the messiness of experimental data, which rarely led to clear conclusions. His lifelong obsession with elegance and order, he said, led him to concoct sexy results that journals found attractive. “It was a quest for aesthetics, for beauty — instead of the truth,” he said.

and in the exposé of the first of his frauds…

In one experiment conducted with undergraduates recruited from his class, Stapel asked subjects to rate their individual attractiveness after they were flashed an image of either an attractive female face or a very unattractive one. The hypothesis was that subjects exposed to the attractive image would — through an automatic comparison — rate themselves as less attractive than subjects exposed to the other image.

The experiment — and others like it — didn’t give Stapel the desired results, he said. He had the choice of abandoning the work or redoing the experiment. But he had already spent a lot of time on the research and was convinced his hypothesis was valid. “I said — you know what, I am going to create the data set,” he told me.

Sitting at his kitchen table in Groningen, he began typing numbers into his laptop that would give him the outcome he wanted. …Stapel at first ended up getting a bigger difference between the two conditions than was ideal. He went back and tweaked the numbers again. It took a few hours of trial and error, spread out over a few days, to get the data just right.

He said he felt both terrible and relieved. The results were published in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2004. “I realized — hey, we can do this,” he told me.

I recently saw a TV ad for Prudential Securities for retirement savings. What made it stand out was that the actor in the commercial is none other than Harvard Social Psychologist Dan Gilbert.

Link to the ad.

In General Psychology, we are covering personality. One measure of personality is the Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). We watched Chris Ladd’s excellent film “i” (previously covered here) in class today which briefly mentioned the MBTI.

The Guardian (UK) has an interesting piece about the MBTI and its use in business and industry, and the fanatical following it has developed, despite its scientifically unsound development and its weak psychometrics.

There are many possible reasons why the MBTI is so entrenched in workplaces and promoted so enthusiastically. There’s the expense and training involved, mentioned above. It may be because everyone uses it, so people conclude it must be reliable, and thus its success becomes self perpetuating. Also, any personality type you get assigned is invariably positive. There is no combination of answers you could give on the MBTI which says ‘you’re an arsehole’.

Link to the article at the Guardian.

Here is a link to an interesting piece by Tom Stafford on the ever-excellent Mind Hacks blog about intelligence. In General Psychology and Introduction to Psychological Testing, we are/have been studying intelligence. Tom’s take on this is that the essence of intelligence – in humans, the ability to adaptively respond to our environment is gathering and interpreting feedback from the environment about our actions and the actions of others. Interesting stuff, especially the mechanical animals artist Tim Lewis constructs that seem to have some intelligence. It also bears on the measurement of intelligence and what that means.

Courtesy ABC

The blog Advances in the History of Psychology pointed me toward an Australian Broadcasting Corporation radio show covering the now-famous Robbers Cave experiments conducted by Muzafer Sherif and his colleagues. It includes fascinating audio from the experiments, interviews with adults who were the boys at the camps, interviews with one of the experimenters (OJ Harvey), etc. It raises some significant ethical issues, as well as some methodological issues. Highly recommended if you’re into social psychology.

Link to the ABC show web page to listen to it.

The British Psychological Society’s Research Digest blog covers a new meta-analysis of cognitive training programs, which finds no evidence for lasting effects on working memory or generalizable effects.

Link to the BPS blog post.

The Guardian (UK) has a hilarious article about how to find and pluck the heart strings of your nearest scientist. Here’s the link.

My favorite quotes:

“Scientists can be hard to locate. They rarely frequent sporting events, popular music concerts, fairgrounds, organised cockfights or wherever it is non-scientists choose to congregate. A typical scientist is usually found in the laboratory.”

“There are instances where you will encounter a scientist outside of the laboratory environment. They may be giving a lecture, or possibly standing in an exotic location looking wistful. In both of these instances, engaging in conversation is impractical, given the context. … If you’re lucky, you may encounter one in a pub or similar establishment. … if you see someone who is clearly under the influence of alcohol but still using words of 5 syllables or more, then they’re likely to be a scientist.”

“When attempting to talk to a scientist, be sure you don’t say anything that might be interpreted as a claim unless you are certain it has been peer-reviewed or subjected to rigorous statistical assessment.”

“Should the conversation falter or hit a lull, try asking the question “How is your grant application going?” This is likely to result in a very long rant about the problems, frustrations and possible illegitimate birth origins of those involved with the grant approval process.”

There is an obituary for industrial psychologist John Karlin in the NY Times. His research team at Bell Labs was responsible for how telephones were designed around the capabilities of humans.

It is not so much that Mr. Karlin trained midcentury Americans how to use the telephone. It is, rather, that by studying the psychological capabilities and limitations of ordinary people, he trained the telephone, then a rapidly proliferating but still fairly novel technology, to assume optimal form for use by midcentury Americans.

Link to the article.

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a good article on social priming—the effects on our behavior from subtle cues in our social environment. It reviews some of the key studies such as the famous elderly prime makes people walk more slowly finding. There is an appropriately strong focus on John Bargh, whose studies made the effect well known, as well as some of the individuals who have had trouble replicating his results. As it remains today, there is serious doubt about whether the effect is very robust. Instead, there might be some moderators that enhance or weaken the effect that are unknown. If there is anything good coming out of this, it may be that we start begin respecting the publication of failed replications. That will be good for the entire discipline.

Link to the article at the Chronicle.

Image courtesy Flickr user sunnydelishgirl. Licensed under Creative Commons

Today’s NY Times has an obituary for the author of the textbook I used for Abnormal Psychology, Susan Nolen-Hoeksema. I considered it one of the best of the abnormal psych books. Here’s a link to the obit. She was only 53.