General Psychology – Psychology and More

We’re All a Little Biased, Even if We Don’t Know It

The NY Times has a good article that addresses a recent event in the Vice Presidential Debate. When Tim Kaine raised the issue of implicit bias in institutional racism, Mike Pence took serious offense to it as a condemnation of law enforcement officers.

Many people hear “implicit bias” as academic jargon for “racist.” But the reality is more complicated.

The issue of implicit bias is that all of us, law enforcement and non-law enforcement, white and black, absorb notions of racial power structures from the dominant culture and, without awareness, our behavior is affected by it.

To broach implicit bias isn’t to impugn someone’s values; it’s to recognize that our values compete on an unconscious level with all the stereotypes we absorb from the world around us. And even black police officers aren’t immune to internalizing them.

That’s why it’s implicit (non conscious) and not explicit (consciously aware) bias. The concept has been soundly demonstrated in psychological research.

implicit bias is just one of many psychological processes that shape how we interact with one another. We also tend to be better at remembering the faces of people in our own racial group, or to subconsciously favor people in our group.

This is one reason that when I grade written assignments, I always do it anonymously. I cannot trust that I do not have implicit biases on the basis of age, gender, race, etc. If I might (non-consciously) believe that a particular group might perform worse on an assignment, I need to guard against letting that influence affect the grade I assign a student. That is the benefit of learning about implicit bias: knowing that we are subject to influences outside our awareness and making every effort to guard against them.

Source: We’re All a Little Biased, Even if We Don’t Know It

The power of false memory

In General Psychology, we just finished talking about memory. There is a good article in the NY Times today demonstrating how eyewitnesses can very easily create false memories of events. Largely this process is enhanced by the strong emotions surrounding traumatic events. We tend to try filling in gaps in memories with our ideas of what “should” have happened, largely as a product of schemas.

Link to the article: Witness Accounts in Midtown Hammer Attack Show the Power of False Memory – The New York Times.

Reasoning and problem solving question

A recent reading quiz question in the area of problem solving confused a student. The student wrote:

Dr. Leighton,
Could you please explain to me why this is wrong? I was confused by the book, because it does say that you can have a “valid but incorrect conclusion” if the “premises use terms inconsistently or ambiguously”, which the term environmentalist is very broad and could be considered ambiguous in the question, so I am not really sure what the correct answer is.

This is a good question. Here is the question and answers from the quiz:

Mr. Smith is running for Congress. Alejandro does not know much about Mr. Smith, but he has heard that Mr. Smith is an environmentalist. Because Alejandro cares about the environment, he votes to send Mr. Smith to Washington. After the election, Alejandro finds that Mr. Smith does not act like an environmentalist, and he regrets having voted for him. Alejandro’s mistake was forgetting that:

Question	Mr. Smith is running for Congress. Alejandro does not know much about Mr. Smith, but he has heard that Mr. Smith is an environmentalist. Because Alejandro cares about the environment, he votes to send Mr. Smith to Washington. After the election, Alejandro finds that Mr. Smith does not act like an environmentalist, and he regrets having voted for him. Alejandro’s mistake was forgetting that:
Answers	A. a conclusion is true only if the premises are true B. a conclusion can be valid without being true C. premises with ambiguous terms lead to incorrect conclusions D. both B and C

The student thought both B and C should be correct. The correct answer is A. Why? Here’s what I wrote to the student:

This is a good question. Lets walk through the example.

Remember that a syllogism has a premise and conclusion. In this case, what’s the premise and conclusion?

I think the premise is that Mr. Smith is an environmentalist. I think the conclusion is that Mr. Smith will act like an environmentalist.

I don’t think that “environmentalist” here is ambiguous. What I think the issue is whether the premise is correct. So, what is the basis for the premise?

The basis for the premise is what Alejandro heard about Mr. Smith. That’s a pretty suspicious basis for the premise – so I think the weakest part of the example is whether what Alejandro heard about Mr. Smith is true.

The evidence that Mr. Smith does not act like an environmentalist indicates that the conclusion is incorrect, and thus the premise is not true. Thus, the conclusion is only valid if the premise is true.

Does that help?

Lets use another example.

Instead of “environmentalist” we substitute something more ambiguous: how about “can fly?” Then we can get something like:

Alejandro does not know much about Mr. Smith, but he has heard that Mr. Smith can fly. Because Alejandro thinks it would be awesome to have someone with superhuman powers in congress, he votes to send Mr. Smith to Washington. After the election, Alejandro finds that Mr. Smith doesn’t have feathers and has never been seen flying around the capitol, but instead is just an airplane pilot, and he regrets having voted for him.

Now we have a conclusion (Mr. Smith has superhuman powers) that is based on an ambiguous premise (Mr. Smith can fly).

Make sense?

False memory, Instagram, and Brian Williams

In our Honors General Psychology course, we studied memory a couple weeks ago. The students read a Scientific American article by Elizabeth Loftus about her research on misinformation effects in memory. They were also assigned to write a response paper, and many of them related stories of their own memory fabrications and distortions. Here are a few (anonymous) excerpts:

After thinking about the influence others can have on childhood memories I realized that I mostly remember the stories my family has told me about my childhood; I myself do not remember the events.

When I was four years old, my older sister willed me to remember eating pizza and disliking it. Though I did not remember this event at first, I came to believe it after repeated suggestion. From personal experience, once a false memory is in place, it feels extremely real and convincing. For the next seven years, I would not eat pizza, which is one of my favorite foods.

if my parents retell a story of them buying a new car multiple times, even though I was not present for the purchase, I start visualizing the trip to the car lot, and those visualizations become more real to me. The more I think about the trip, the more details I fill in, and the more real it seems. This type of situation has occurred many times in my life. Having lived through this odd occurrence myself, I am able to easily believe the data collected by Dr. Loftus.

A couple of recent opinion pieces in the New York Times help illustrate these points well. In “Shutterbug Parents and Overexposed Lives,” novelist Teddy Wayne explores whether snapshot photos easily taken with mobile devices are beginning to supplant memory for the experiences themselves. In contrast with previous generations, where film and developing was relatively expensive, we cheaply and easily document the minutia of everyday life via photos and videos in the cloud, Instagram, Facebook, and Youtube. Then the memories surrounding those snapshots and clips slip away.

He cites some research showing this:

Linda Henkel, a professor of psychology at Fairfield University, wrote a 2014 study in the journal Psychological Science in which subjects were given digital cameras and led around an art museum on a guided tour. They were told to photograph certain objects and merely observe others. The participants remembered fewer details about the objects if they had photographed them, as they effectively outsourced their memory to the camera.

“In general, we remember the photographs,” Dr. Henkel said in an interview. “It’s like the family stories we tell. There’s the original experience, and then the story everyone tells every Thanksgiving. The story becomes exaggerated, a schema of the original event. The physical photo doesn’t change over time, but the photo becomes the memory.”

He also points to the recent news story about TV news anchor Brian Williams, who has been accused of lying about his experiences covering the war in Iraq, and suspended from his job for 6 months. His story transformed over the years from being behind a helicopter that was shot down to being in the helicopter that was shot down. Tara Parker-Pope writes a blog post about the possibility (I will say “likelihood”) that it is not so much intentional lie but unintentional memory distortions. She quotes Elizabeth Loftus:

“You’ve got all these people saying the guy’s a liar and convicting him of deliberate deception without considering an alternative hypothesis — that he developed a false memory,” said Elizabeth Loftus, a leading memory researcher and a professor of law and cognitive science at the University of California, Irvine. “It’s a teaching moment, and a chance to really try to get information out there about the malleable nature of memory.”

As you will tell by some of the almost 1200 (!) comments to the blog, many people do not believe in the fallibility of memory. Perhaps they are convinced of their own memories as being infallible. I hope none of my students will fall into that camp after our reading and discussions.

Link to Teddy Wayne’s article “Shutterbug Parents and Overexposed Lives”

Link to Tara Parker-Pope’s article “Was Brian Williams a Victim of False Memory?”

The benefits of heuristics and impulse decisions

The NY Times has a very good article illustrating the benefits of heuristic decision making processes over algorithmic ones. In this case, the author is talking about how long he spends making purchasing decisions. This is very familiar to me.

the time I spend overanalyzing prices will cost me way more money, in the form of opportunity costs and cognitive drain, than I could ever hope to save.

We generally believe that the best decisions come from examining all options and making a decision based on all available evidence. But, this evidence gathering comes at a cost: in this case, the personal resources (financial and otherwise) that are spent making the decision.

We need to accept that we can’t always make the best decisions, but we can make good ones. Generally, good decisions will make the most of our resources and free us to move on to other important things.

In cognitive complexity theory, one of the things we drive home is the idea that the situation might determine the maximum amount of complex thinking we can apply to a problem. For example, consider how the US might respond to another massive terrorist attack (or attack from another nation). When deciding whether to go to war or not, we can use more complexity if making a decision in the weeks or months before we are under attack, but in the case of a surprise attack, that kind of complex thinking could take lots of time and resources, two things we are desperately short of in the midst of an attack. In that case, taking the time and resources necessary to consider all the options (high complexity) might result in a slow response and the likelihood of more attacks, versus using heuristics and considering fewer options (lower complexity) which might allow a rapid response to avert another attack.

Link to the article: Getting Over Cold Feet: The Case for Impulse Buying – NYTimes.com.

Jennifer Eberhardt on her research and its implications for police violence against blacks

The NY Times has a good interview with social psychologist Jennifer Eberhardt on her research and how it illustrates some underlying principles that might have been at work in the recent cases of excessive police violence directed at African Americans. The take-home message is that only through awareness of our unconscious biases can we hope to overcome the tendency to treat groups differently.

One thing I do is work with police departments. We do workshops where we present these studies and show what implicit bias is, and how it’s different from old-fashioned racism. I don’t think this alone can change behavior. But it can help people become aware of the unconscious ways race operates. If you combine that with other things, there is hope.

Link to the NY Times article: A MacArthur Grant Winner Tries to Unearth Biases to Aid Criminal Justice – NYTimes.com.

Getting involved in research as an undergrad

SPSP (Society for Personality and Social Psychology) published a brief primer on getting involved in research as an undergraduate. It’s worth checking out:

Link to the article at SPSP.org.

The MBTI

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.